Live off of it. You can have your car paid for, your PC financed, ventures to the moon funded... all by being an ad-slut. Some stickers, slogans et al and suddenly you're rolling in bucks. I find it amazing how low companies will bend over in order to advertize. And it's not like people READ these ads either... I guess all that money wants to be free.
It's an interesting contrast to getting screwed out of every last penny by those same companies, in order to fund their latest eTarded billboarding spree or defacement of the moon.
...who almost certainly has an interesting perspective on security, the internet, their own culture, and a good list of tools of the trade - which any admin/user worth a brain should be interested in checking out, but the average slashdot luser is too old/elite/just a troll to "get it".
I don't think computers should "evolve" past any kind of input. It's restrictive and counterproductive. If anything, lemme use my eye-mouse and keyboard and give voice commands at the same time while doing the watusi in VR shoes... designers need to take into account the poor bandwidth between humans and computers, and find a way to crank that up. Keyboarding's a great skill, but a little paralellism would make a world of difference.
The whole idea that files don't need some unique means of reference is completely retarded. Dude's herd of cattle/popcans/garbage analogy wasn't any less stupid than cyberlifestreammicr... aaugh!
The point is that your files contain unique information. They're not interchangable like cows or coke cans. They're not unique in some kind of physical space (unless you want to "name" your files by hard-drive co-ords!) because there isn't any... when it comes down to it, a particular collection of information you've put together needs to be identified from other similar works and no matter what tricks you use, it will be SOME kind of unique identification. If you don't want to "name your files", let the computer do it, then try remembering which 32-byte UUID of hundreds is your term paper. "Uh... I think it had a lot of eights. And started with A...."
This is "news for nerds", not "news for sellouts". Since even my shoes run Linux, and I'll assume I'm not too far from average, an "all Linux expo" isn't too noteworthy.
I think the deal is that software provided for free by the author should not present a financial liability - this isn't as important in the major-GPL-apps department as for the home-hobby applications. E.g. a shareware author getting bent over a barrel because his home-finances spreadsheet is being (mis)used by a small corporation and corrupts the payroll data. Stupid people will do stupid things with software, and screw themselves with it no matter how good the program is. Then they'll get mad and sue. Since the US courts enjoy busying themselves with frivolous suits, you can't imply a warranty and expect the courts to go your way in cases of total user negligence or malicious misuse.
Hold on there! Route your download through all the intervening servers? I don't think so.
At any time, say that a moderately popular spot has 5 downloads and 5 uploads in simultaneous progress... that's the max transfer-traffic if you're peer to peer, and you can improve it by aborting transfers if your bandwidth dies. I'd hate to have all sorts of transfers that I'm not even interested in running on my machine, just so the network can operate.
In the future, a more-private modification would be to have your machine designate (non-busy) "friends" that recieve parts of the file and transfer it to you without knowing what it is. If a friend can't identify what's being shipped, and a server doesn't know where the transfer was going, things seem like they would be pretty secure. A simple "don't pick me as a friend" response would also allow for load control.
Nope! The "optimal" solution is to tie all your matches, and let brownian motion take you where it may... which isn't a _winning_ strategy. And, really, everything's as good as random versus random - you don't lose for just throwing rock, and you don't lose out for writing an algorithm.
So instead, you try to do something that's theoretically guessable, but more reliably can guess the opponent's plays... that way you can exploit the weak and get points. Hopefully you do the best job of it.
Re:This Must Be More Complex Than It Sounds . . .
on
Rock-Paper-Scissors
·
· Score: 1
Please, at least give it a mental test-drive. How do you beat someone in roshambo? It's all about psychology. The problem with the random agent (that you outlined) is indeed that it always (give or take) ties... you'll never get anywhere like that.
To win, you HAVE to try guessing out a strategy that takes your opponent into account (thus assuring wins), and not be outwitted yourself (thus avoiding losses)... unless play-to-lose is a viable strategy... was it? The beauty of this competition is that the code to illustrate all of these techniques is really short, clear (mostly) and easy to write. It's a perfect hobbyist's coding challenge.
When will the graphics-and-CG thing finally die?
on
Review: 'Titan A.E.'
·
· Score: 2
I get to watch a lot of Titan AE ads... for whatever reason, local stations just ate them up and spit them out now two or three at a time.
At first: Ooh. Nice CG. Nice animation. After Some (Commercial A.S.): There's something wrong here. I don't like the trailer at all! Now: Oh yeah - everyone and their sister has tried CG+art, and it has ALWAYS BLOWN!
Yes, since the Battletech cartoon, I've rabidly hated idiotic notions that you can do CG for a bunch of things in a cartoon, and just freehand the rest... no matter how beautiful the elements are, I've yet to see some crack at this where there isn't a jarring difference in the move from graphics to paint and back. Stylistically, nothing good from one media translates into the other - paint has really expressive qualities to it that vanish in the hands of most of these CG hacks, while the CG stuff uses every sort of lighting model and scaling and effect to turn heads... "ooh! CG!". Instead of any attempt to nicely mesh with the painted animation, the CG tries to distinguish itself as much as possible, and as a result you get all these changes of context where your attention loses scope and has to be re-initialized. The people doing this film need to use better defines and globals instead of passing static scoping in the paint and computer animation modules of the project.
Now, Jurassic Park - that was a winner. The CG integration was great, because they _had_ to make it look real, or else they would have lost millions of bucks. The dinosaurs had the most distinctly non-CG (rotate, translate, repeat) motion, and weren't firing off patently CG effects every time they showed up on screen. They used CG to make them look more (not less) real! Hopefully it will happen again, maybe even to support a cartoon, instead of wrestling with it for the spotlight.
Isn't Amazon.com's "one-click" patent American? Now, there's a big. At first I didn't pay much attention to these stupid-patent articles... then I realized that the USPO is kinda the world PO.
Then I was PO, because as a Canadian I don't have "home turf" equality if I ever have to attack a stupid patent in court. And my money's worth nothing. Goddamn.
I feel pretty dirty using Napster... they're really trying to play two games:
Game 1 - civil disobedience: Help distribute [illegal] copies of overpriced stuff. People aren't supposed to be doing this and they know it. They're basically a warez-only search engine.
Game 2 - corporate existence: PRoprietary protocols, EULAs, trademarks, copyrighted material, court dates w/ the Offspring (who are trying to help out, fer fsck's sakes!) and libel suits.
This is hypocracy, pure and simple. Napster's existence as some legal entity is invalid, it exists expressly for aiding and abetting lawbreakers - by and large trivial lawbreakers, but lawbreakers none the less. On those grounds, I do hope they lose... they're providing serious assistance to a class of criminals, and I don't want to see the assistance of criminality for profit become so corporatized. We would be left with the hypocritical situation of being enticed to do things that are still punishable by law. Laws should reflect practice (IMO) or practice reflect law.
The more I think about it the more this comes down to "get rid of Napster" vs "seriously bend existing law". I hope the laws change, but if they don't, I hope Napster goes down hard.
/* It should be clear by now that the majority of adults do not consider copying a recorded work of music to be "wrong." This is reflected in the way the Napster scene doesn't feel like the warez scene. Dilbert's mom would refuse to be part of a warez channel on ethical grounds, but she's on Napster every day of the week. */
I'll take Dilbert's mom as a moral guide as strongly as the next geek, but she's made a category mistake here. Warez and MP3z are _exactly_ the same deal, except a couple orders of magnitude in bandwidth. The difference is that Napster nicely encapsulated that *part* of the warez scene and now you can make one commonly available D/L and get your songz through a cute little UI. You don't need contacts, or to be 31337; they've taken the "scene" out of MP3s.
"Scene" is probably the one thing that keeps warez from being the exact same problem - people have to put up with porn banners and talking to haxors and everything to get their warez, and they think to themselves "this isn't my scene". They leave. If someone wrote Gamester or whatever where it was all about warez-sharing, you'd see Dilbert's mom on it, because it's away from that whole scene-ism. You're not a geek if you're just pointing and clicking to get your warez from a nice sterile environment... even jocks could do that without status-qualms.
And for a lesson on what to do about MP3, the RIAA should look at the games industry. Those guys aren't starving to death, and warez have been commonplace (well, to me) since the 80s.
If the problem of this decryption was NP (stands for non-polynomial solution time) then nobody could write a program to do it. Or more to the point, because a program does the decryption, the problem can't be nonpolynomial.
Re: NP-Hard specifically - I'm probably wrong, but "Hard" means that the problem isn't provably nonpolynimial or not, it just seems to be. Some problems are proven nonpolynomial... I think they're just called NP. We know a computer can't do them.
But $9.95 per view? That's insane. For $2 more, I could see it on the big screen, on a comfy chair, with hyper-mega-megabass that my neighbours won't let me get away with and dot-dot-dot. I wouldn't waste my bandwidth, money or time on something like that - unless I was really intent, I'd look for a warez version instead. And maybe I'm wierd but seeing movies is hardly one of those quasi-biological functions like watching Iron Chef or playing playstation.
The movie's worth maybe the price of a rental, what's that... $3? Monitor's a little nicer resolution than TV, and sound's about equal. I don't see how it compares to a "going out to the movies" experience rather than a "rent a movie" experience.
Another thing marketers might want to think about is that you make money on the internet with volume, not price - you don't have to recoup much in terms of distribution or packaging or whatnot, and low (as in "what a deal") prices make it worth the time not spent cracking or searching for the warez.
I've long held the view that the real problem (for industry) with Gnutella and company is that you can't shut it down - in the same way you can't shut down the internet as a whole, since it's built on the same principles.
If industry doesn't have a good go with distributing movies at $9.95 a shot over Gnutella, it will be much more akin to an rich, annoying child getting rolled in the schoolyard. It doesn't prove schoolyards are bad, there's just some tension between the students. I think a judge would probably toss a suit against Gnutella and Freenet out on its ass - it's "bad people", not bad technology.
As far as I understand it, the theory is that open-source software is better to have than closed source software. I'll assume that idiots don't buy software in this utopian scenario.
1. you can modify it to suit your needs, or get someone who will. 2. you know what's in it, or hire someone to figure it out, so you don't get anything that's bad for you.
Moreover, these advantages will manifest in market favouritism towards open source projects.
If you were to rip off and close-source and sell a GPL-type product, you wouldn't make much of an impact. These two things would kneecap you if the GPL and the copyright it's based on didn't exist. This is an optimistic take on it, again.
1. Your software would just get distributed all over the place, making it free to anyone who wants it and has a spare half-hour to spend on the web. 2. You would score some distrust and a general lack of use, because people running serious projects would want to customize and ensure security. If anyone did use it, they'd reverse engineer it - and be able to fork over source to whoever was interested.
The Matrix was available about a week early, though without a soundtrack (BTW who's seen the ASCII version?)... had I seen it, I still would have gone to the theater anyways, because it beats the hell out of squinting at a 15-inch monitor. It's pretty hard to rig up a home theater that compares with the real deal, and I'm not going to lay down the money to try.
Theaters and merchandise are the real cash cows of the industry. The judge should tell them to suck it up.
Band shirts & paraphenalia, CDs (I'm one of the throwbacks that would buy them), plus concert tickets (where bands actually make the money) are all valid earners for bands even with everyone and their sister having every song ever released. They may be even more profitable, with the huge listener-base that a good band could accumulate.
It would mean more tours for listeners (good) and bands (maybe bad), and better stage performances - the bands could get some pretty major draw by playing unique material at every show, staying ahead of (and increading) their MP3s available on the net. Bands would absolutely have to increase their "value-addition" to content in order to get draws at shows, but at the same time, this is real value that's created (unique & transitory experiences), rather than artificial scarcity e.g. the record label's offerings (limited numbers of expensive CDs). I'm not saying everyone wins with fame and riches and all, but it s possible to make a living as a musician in the MP3 era.
It needs to be said that Washington's Progressive Policy (PPI) think tank propose a unique "way out" of the Napster problem: no anonymity! It's simple! EVERY new service will simply be programmed in with personal info as required fields... whatever could the problem have been? WHAT A JOKE! Good God, it makes me laugh.
"Oh... people want to trade files anonymously, can, and will... oops. Slipped our minds." - PPI spokesman in future interview about totally ineffective policy.
I usually get my MP3s (I have a modest techno colloection) from the downloadable stuff at MP3.com or other web-only services. Today I wanted to check out some other tracks by a band whose album I want to buy. I d/l Napster and log on... I even get a name I like. But after getting the stuff I want, I deleted the software and swore to install something like OpenNap or Gnutella next time.
Once I logged in, I was forced to read and comply with this huge and standard disclaimer of liability and that I'm not commiting copyright infringement (which I'm there expressly to do) and so on. As much as it might pay to be on the up-and-up legally, screw Napster and screw toeing this insane "no, really, we're a company" line. Other services (notably ones that don't have to keep up some kind of corporate "we're not committing civil disobedience" drivel) offer the same goods without banning users or telling you that they're against the one thing that makes their service of any value to the average user.
Proppz to Napster to opening the door for distributed, anonymous filesharing services, but I'm glad there are alternatives that don't start with a "screw the MP3 revolution" splash screen or get bent over a legal barrel.
I'm all down with that. My kid's not even 6mo. and "he's" got a hell of a collection going. "His" faves are the '20s stuff, Knights & Samurai, and the underground-buzzsaw-people. They all make awesome figures when you're playing D&D and suddenly realize that a map would be cool.
Don't knock the Macarena guys too hard. They'd been huge in Mexico for years and years before over lots of albums. Old, wrinkly people don't usually try to get together for a one-hit-wonder music career. They have more integrity.
Copyright's a broken idea
on
Napster Wars
·
· Score: 1
Copyright's basically an unenforcable law, especially with the internet making distribution so easy and whatever warez you want so easy to find. It's a bad idea whose time to die is come, and that's just what's happening. Hopefully people will settle down with a more reasonable system based on the kind of thing that intellectual property is and the way the internet works, but the odds are that someone's just going to come up with a new way of screwing people for money.
Until the law and the industry show a little justice, it's our right to be disobedient.
Slashdot Mirror
Live off of it. You can have your car paid for, your PC financed, ventures to the moon funded... all by being an ad-slut. Some stickers, slogans et al and suddenly you're rolling in bucks. I find it amazing how low companies will bend over in order to advertize. And it's not like people READ these ads either... I guess all that money wants to be free.
It's an interesting contrast to getting screwed out of every last penny by those same companies, in order to fund their latest eTarded billboarding spree or defacement of the moon.
...who almost certainly has an interesting perspective on security, the internet, their own culture, and a good list of tools of the trade - which any admin/user worth a brain should be interested in checking out, but the average slashdot luser is too old/elite/just a troll to "get it".
I don't think computers should "evolve" past any kind of input. It's restrictive and counterproductive. If anything, lemme use my eye-mouse and keyboard and give voice commands at the same time while doing the watusi in VR shoes... designers need to take into account the poor bandwidth between humans and computers, and find a way to crank that up. Keyboarding's a great skill, but a little paralellism would make a world of difference.
The whole idea that files don't need some unique means of reference is completely retarded. Dude's herd of cattle/popcans/garbage analogy wasn't any less stupid than cyberlifestreammicr... aaugh!
The point is that your files contain unique information. They're not interchangable like cows or coke cans. They're not unique in some kind of physical space (unless you want to "name" your files by hard-drive co-ords!) because there isn't any... when it comes down to it, a particular collection of information you've put together needs to be identified from other similar works and no matter what tricks you use, it will be SOME kind of unique identification. If you don't want to "name your files", let the computer do it, then try remembering which 32-byte UUID of hundreds is your term paper. "Uh... I think it had a lot of eights. And started with A...."
This is "news for nerds", not "news for sellouts". Since even my shoes run Linux, and I'll assume I'm not too far from average, an "all Linux expo" isn't too noteworthy.
Hope this didn't post twice...
I think the deal is that software provided for free by the author should not present a financial liability - this isn't as important in the major-GPL-apps department as for the home-hobby applications. E.g. a shareware author getting bent over a barrel because his home-finances spreadsheet is being (mis)used by a small corporation and corrupts the payroll data. Stupid people will do stupid things with software, and screw themselves with it no matter how good the program is. Then they'll get mad and sue. Since the US courts enjoy busying themselves with frivolous suits, you can't imply a warranty and expect the courts to go your way in cases of total user negligence or malicious misuse.
Hold on there! Route your download through all the intervening servers? I don't think so.
At any time, say that a moderately popular spot has 5 downloads and 5 uploads in simultaneous progress... that's the max transfer-traffic if you're peer to peer, and you can improve it by aborting transfers if your bandwidth dies. I'd hate to have all sorts of transfers that I'm not even interested in running on my machine, just so the network can operate.
In the future, a more-private modification would be to have your machine designate (non-busy) "friends" that recieve parts of the file and transfer it to you without knowing what it is. If a friend can't identify what's being shipped, and a server doesn't know where the transfer was going, things seem like they would be pretty secure. A simple "don't pick me as a friend" response would also allow for load control.
Nope! The "optimal" solution is to tie all your matches, and let brownian motion take you where it may... which isn't a _winning_ strategy. And, really, everything's as good as random versus random - you don't lose for just throwing rock, and you don't lose out for writing an algorithm.
So instead, you try to do something that's theoretically guessable, but more reliably can guess the opponent's plays... that way you can exploit the weak and get points. Hopefully you do the best job of it.
Please, at least give it a mental test-drive. How do you beat someone in roshambo? It's all about psychology. The problem with the random agent (that you outlined) is indeed that it always (give or take) ties... you'll never get anywhere like that.
To win, you HAVE to try guessing out a strategy that takes your opponent into account (thus assuring wins), and not be outwitted yourself (thus avoiding losses)... unless play-to-lose is a viable strategy... was it? The beauty of this competition is that the code to illustrate all of these techniques is really short, clear (mostly) and easy to write. It's a perfect hobbyist's coding challenge.
I get to watch a lot of Titan AE ads... for whatever reason, local stations just ate them up and spit them out now two or three at a time.
At first: Ooh. Nice CG. Nice animation.
After Some (Commercial A.S.): There's something wrong here. I don't like the trailer at all!
Now: Oh yeah - everyone and their sister has tried CG+art, and it has ALWAYS BLOWN!
Yes, since the Battletech cartoon, I've rabidly hated idiotic notions that you can do CG for a bunch of things in a cartoon, and just freehand the rest... no matter how beautiful the elements are, I've yet to see some crack at this where there isn't a jarring difference in the move from graphics to paint and back. Stylistically, nothing good from one media translates into the other - paint has really expressive qualities to it that vanish in the hands of most of these CG hacks, while the CG stuff uses every sort of lighting model and scaling and effect to turn heads... "ooh! CG!". Instead of any attempt to nicely mesh with the painted animation, the CG tries to distinguish itself as much as possible, and as a result you get all these changes of context where your attention loses scope and has to be re-initialized. The people doing this film need to use better defines and globals instead of passing static scoping in the paint and computer animation modules of the project.
Now, Jurassic Park - that was a winner. The CG integration was great, because they _had_ to make it look real, or else they would have lost millions of bucks. The dinosaurs had the most distinctly non-CG (rotate, translate, repeat) motion, and weren't firing off patently CG effects every time they showed up on screen. They used CG to make them look more (not less) real! Hopefully it will happen again, maybe even to support a cartoon, instead of wrestling with it for the spotlight.
Isn't Amazon.com's "one-click" patent American? Now, there's a big. At first I didn't pay much attention to these stupid-patent articles... then I realized that the USPO is kinda the world PO.
Then I was PO, because as a Canadian I don't have "home turf" equality if I ever have to attack a stupid patent in court. And my money's worth nothing. Goddamn.
I feel pretty dirty using Napster... they're really trying to play two games:
Game 1 - civil disobedience:
Help distribute [illegal] copies of overpriced stuff. People aren't supposed to be doing this and they know it. They're basically a warez-only search engine.
Game 2 - corporate existence:
PRoprietary protocols, EULAs, trademarks, copyrighted material, court dates w/ the Offspring (who are trying to help out, fer fsck's sakes!) and libel suits.
This is hypocracy, pure and simple. Napster's existence as some legal entity is invalid, it exists expressly for aiding and abetting lawbreakers - by and large trivial lawbreakers, but lawbreakers none the less. On those grounds, I do hope they lose... they're providing serious assistance to a class of criminals, and I don't want to see the assistance of criminality for profit become so corporatized. We would be left with the hypocritical situation of being enticed to do things that are still punishable by law. Laws should reflect practice (IMO) or practice reflect law.
The more I think about it the more this comes down to "get rid of Napster" vs "seriously bend existing law". I hope the laws change, but if they don't, I hope Napster goes down hard.
/*
It should be clear by now that the majority of adults do not consider copying a recorded work of music to be "wrong." This is reflected in the way the Napster scene doesn't feel like the warez scene. Dilbert's mom would refuse to be part of a warez channel on ethical grounds, but she's on Napster every day of the week.
*/
I'll take Dilbert's mom as a moral guide as strongly as the next geek, but she's made a category mistake here. Warez and MP3z are _exactly_ the same deal, except a couple orders of magnitude in bandwidth. The difference is that Napster nicely encapsulated that *part* of the warez scene and now you can make one commonly available D/L and get your songz through a cute little UI. You don't need contacts, or to be 31337; they've taken the "scene" out of MP3s.
"Scene" is probably the one thing that keeps warez from being the exact same problem - people have to put up with porn banners and talking to haxors and everything to get their warez, and they think to themselves "this isn't my scene". They leave. If someone wrote Gamester or whatever where it was all about warez-sharing, you'd see Dilbert's mom on it, because it's away from that whole scene-ism. You're not a geek if you're just pointing and clicking to get your warez from a nice sterile environment... even jocks could do that without status-qualms.
And for a lesson on what to do about MP3, the RIAA should look at the games industry. Those guys aren't starving to death, and warez have been commonplace (well, to me) since the 80s.
If the problem of this decryption was NP (stands for non-polynomial solution time) then nobody could write a program to do it. Or more to the point, because a program does the decryption, the problem can't be nonpolynomial.
Re: NP-Hard specifically - I'm probably wrong, but "Hard" means that the problem isn't provably nonpolynimial or not, it just seems to be. Some problems are proven nonpolynomial... I think they're just called NP. We know a computer can't do them.
But $9.95 per view? That's insane. For $2 more, I could see it on the big screen, on a comfy chair, with hyper-mega-megabass that my neighbours won't let me get away with and dot-dot-dot. I wouldn't waste my bandwidth, money or time on something like that - unless I was really intent, I'd look for a warez version instead. And maybe I'm wierd but seeing movies is hardly one of those quasi-biological functions like watching Iron Chef or playing playstation.
The movie's worth maybe the price of a rental, what's that... $3? Monitor's a little nicer resolution than TV, and sound's about equal. I don't see how it compares to a "going out to the movies" experience rather than a "rent a movie" experience.
Another thing marketers might want to think about is that you make money on the internet with volume, not price - you don't have to recoup much in terms of distribution or packaging or whatnot, and low (as in "what a deal") prices make it worth the time not spent cracking or searching for the warez.
I've long held the view that the real problem (for industry) with Gnutella and company is that you can't shut it down - in the same way you can't shut down the internet as a whole, since it's built on the same principles.
If industry doesn't have a good go with distributing movies at $9.95 a shot over Gnutella, it will be much more akin to an rich, annoying child getting rolled in the schoolyard. It doesn't prove schoolyards are bad, there's just some tension between the students. I think a judge would probably toss a suit against Gnutella and Freenet out on its ass - it's "bad people", not bad technology.
As far as I understand it, the theory is that open-source software is better to have than closed source software. I'll assume that idiots don't buy software in this utopian scenario.
1. you can modify it to suit your needs, or get someone who will.
2. you know what's in it, or hire someone to figure it out, so you don't get anything that's bad for you.
Moreover, these advantages will manifest in market favouritism towards open source projects.
If you were to rip off and close-source and sell a GPL-type product, you wouldn't make much of an impact. These two things would kneecap you if the GPL and the copyright it's based on didn't exist. This is an optimistic take on it, again.
1. Your software would just get distributed all over the place, making it free to anyone who wants it and has a spare half-hour to spend on the web.
2. You would score some distrust and a general lack of use, because people running serious projects would want to customize and ensure security. If anyone did use it, they'd reverse engineer it - and be able to fork over source to whoever was interested.
The Matrix was available about a week early, though without a soundtrack (BTW who's seen the ASCII version?) ... had I seen it, I still would have gone to the theater anyways, because it beats the hell out of squinting at a 15-inch monitor. It's pretty hard to rig up a home theater that compares with the real deal, and I'm not going to lay down the money to try.
Theaters and merchandise are the real cash cows of the industry. The judge should tell them to suck it up.
Band shirts & paraphenalia, CDs (I'm one of the throwbacks that would buy them), plus concert tickets (where bands actually make the money) are all valid earners for bands even with everyone and their sister having every song ever released. They may be even more profitable, with the huge listener-base that a good band could accumulate.
It would mean more tours for listeners (good) and bands (maybe bad), and better stage performances - the bands could get some pretty major draw by playing unique material at every show, staying ahead of (and increading) their MP3s available on the net. Bands would absolutely have to increase their "value-addition" to content in order to get draws at shows, but at the same time, this is real value that's created (unique & transitory experiences), rather than artificial scarcity e.g. the record label's offerings (limited numbers of expensive CDs). I'm not saying everyone wins with fame and riches and all, but it
s possible to make a living as a musician in the MP3 era.
It needs to be said that Washington's Progressive Policy (PPI) think tank propose a unique "way out" of the Napster problem: no anonymity! It's simple! EVERY new service will simply be programmed in with personal info as required fields... whatever could the problem have been? WHAT A JOKE! Good God, it makes me laugh.
"Oh... people want to trade files anonymously, can, and will... oops. Slipped our minds." - PPI spokesman in future interview about totally ineffective policy.
I usually get my MP3s (I have a modest techno colloection) from the downloadable stuff at MP3.com or other web-only services. Today I wanted to check out some other tracks by a band whose album I want to buy. I d/l Napster and log on... I even get a name I like. But after getting the stuff I want, I deleted the software and swore to install something like OpenNap or Gnutella next time.
Once I logged in, I was forced to read and comply with this huge and standard disclaimer of liability and that I'm not commiting copyright infringement (which I'm there expressly to do) and so on. As much as it might pay to be on the up-and-up legally, screw Napster and screw toeing this insane "no, really, we're a company" line. Other services (notably ones that don't have to keep up some kind of corporate "we're not committing civil disobedience" drivel) offer the same goods without banning users or telling you that they're against the one thing that makes their service of any value to the average user.
Proppz to Napster to opening the door for distributed, anonymous filesharing services, but I'm glad there are alternatives that don't start with a "screw the MP3 revolution" splash screen or get bent over a legal barrel.
I'm all down with that. My kid's not even 6mo. and "he's" got a hell of a collection going. "His" faves are the '20s stuff, Knights & Samurai, and the underground-buzzsaw-people. They all make awesome figures when you're playing D&D and suddenly realize that a map would be cool.
And I hear it's built of giant lego blocks they bulk-ordered for themselves.
Don't knock the Macarena guys too hard. They'd been huge in Mexico for years and years before over lots of albums. Old, wrinkly people don't usually try to get together for a one-hit-wonder music career. They have more integrity.
Copyright's basically an unenforcable law, especially with the internet making distribution so easy and whatever warez you want so easy to find. It's a bad idea whose time to die is come, and that's just what's happening. Hopefully people will settle down with a more reasonable system based on the kind of thing that intellectual property is and the way the internet works, but the odds are that someone's just going to come up with a new way of screwing people for money.
Until the law and the industry show a little justice, it's our right to be disobedient.