Actually, that's what it has always been. Do you think Thomas Jefferson was a common man? Hardly. The US has always had an aristocracy, and always will. It is based on money, not name or title, and therefore can change. Get the cash and you too can join the ruling class. That is what used to separate it from England.
The constant erosion of liberty is a direct result of the way representative governments clash with human needs. Those in power wish to stay in power. Not out of some need to be an evil dictator, but to shape the country into their vision of what should be. To do so, they must maintain their power. All politicians (and CEOs, for that matter) know that they will garner credit and face blame for waht happens during their tenure whether or not they had any influence. That's why every administration want's to tighten their grip and expand their power - to prevent the catastrophe that would get them fired. They've all managed to lose sight of the fact that they are stripping from most of us the very things that make us a free people.
It should be noted that the people who make these laws are generally (a) not subject to them (practically speaking) or (b) have already lost those freedoms as a part of the job they do. If you make $200k or more a year, with full benefits, it would seem silly to argue over $20 for a CD vs downloading it - and the people who take that $20 will make sure the facts lean their way. If you're a congressman, your financial dealings are pretty much on the table, and your private life is scrutinized by the medis (and your opponent) as a matter of course. You're not losing the right to privacy, because you have to act as if it doesn't exist on a daily basis. To the rest of us, $20 is a lot for 1 good song and 7 fillers, and we still expect our phone conversations to be private.
I don't see any real changes in the next 10, or 100, years. I'm sure my children, and their grandchildren, will be arguing the same thing when they are my age. Not that this doens't mean that I'm taking this lying down - I vote in every election, and I vote for whomever I think will cause the least damage. In this type of democracy, that's really what it's about. You can't make it better than the basics we started with, you just have to ensure that the people in power don't screw it up.
I'll give you the scalability argument - that's a hard one to reconcile (which is why I conveniently ignored it;-)
In the meantime there's the issue of some MySpace users effectively turning their pages into unlicensed radio stations, and that makes some copyright owners mad. I
Yes, it's the few "bad apples" problem...again. As always, I wish we had the NRA on the consumers side in this one.
Just a minor correction; though your statement to reduce unemployment (as hard as it sounds, but killing people (or having them killed) reduces your workforce...) is technically correct, it's the making of munitions and necessities and the logistic support of large deployments which reduces unemployment (and strengthens the economy, though on borrowed dollars).
It's not the running that's expensive - it's getting lazy americans off their couches and into the voting booth after throughly understanding the issues. And you have to get at least 70-80 million of them to do that nation wide.
Sort of like indie films or music - you can make it on a shoestring, but (a) can you get more than 50 of the top 100 tunes on billboard in any given week by non-RIAA distributors or 6 of the 10 top grossing films in any given year by independent studios? Can you do this ten years in a row? Can you do it without a huge marketing effort?
You're pushing against enormous momentum, and - more importantly - wealthy, activist organizations (the 2 parties) for whom the current system is in their best interest. Working to change the system is a good start. You've got two years. First, find 600 people who are intellegent, well spoken, good looking, and willing to quit their jobs and work 14 hour days for the next two years. Then I recommend talking to 10 every single month - new, unique people each month - explaining the issues, and convincing them that out of 300,000,000 people, their vote matters. If every US slashdotter did this, we could get to all of the US population, and if we were successful in half our conversations (a major sucess, btw) we could make a difference.
In the last 100 years, has anyone ever been sued over clipping out pictures from magazines and pasting them into their scrapbooks, then showing them off to friends? That's really what myspace is, isn't it? Or have I missed some part of Myspace where the majority are carefully crafting elaborate display spaces and using them for significant profit*? Copyright is intended to be a commercial restriction, though I'm sure every content provider organization would like to make it otherwise.
I know I could probably squeak by on $165k/yr plus benefits (which are decent, btw). The killer is coming up with at least $25M - that would be the minimum it would take to even have a crack at a seat.
So what exactly is the conservative stance on digital privacy and fair use?
As far as I've seen, both parties seem to be tripping over themselves trying to legislate more and more restrictions. Democrats should be telling the content providers to "fuck off" and give th power to the people. Republicans should be getting the god damned government out of my living room and letting me do whatever I damned well please with my shit.
Personally, I think it's all Benjamin Franklin's fault. If it weren't for guys in suits stuffing wads of paper with his face on it into every congressman's pocket, we might get something pro-citizen passed in Washington.
The NRA generally covers threats to the 2nd amendment* before they become law.
*which I support, though I feel is no longer of any practical use as it was envisioned, and love to play the parsing game with the actual text just to piss people off.
Combine this phone with an $8/mo pricetag, and I smell the perfect emergency phone. I wonder if you could get enough juice out of a solar cell to keep this thing charged on standby? (prbably not - if you could get 20 days on an 800mah battery, that'd be 1.7ma drain. 8cm2 of pe cell at 12% efficiency would only charge at 1.1ma if you had it pointed properly [insert math disclaimer here]. oh well.)
On the contrary: Mac users are treated like criminals, they just don't know it. Microsoft wants you to wear the orange overalls and walk with your eyes facing the ground. Apple want's you to take the blue pill.
Neither are exactly consumer friendly. Luckily for Apple, they're control over the hardware make the hacking scene very small. Nobody makes a fuss because there are very few who even care. That and the fact that Apple doesn't really depend on software for revenue (not like MS does, at least).
Apple has managed to a bad thing properly: they've locked down the software (bad), but they've made it transparent to the end user (good). The check is still there, every time you boot up, but you never have to fool with it.
but both of them are running only the necessary services
And that's why they boot quickly. I have a lot of shit on mine (XP), most of it just waiting for a particular device to go live (one of the HP daemons takes 50MB of space...on idle). Between bluetooth desktop items, pda, phone, docking station, several tcp/ip computers, two networks, synchronization, etc., I'm a good three minutes to get to a useful state. I usually hit the power button in the morning then go make coffee. Since I have a laptop, it gets docked/undocked twice a day, and I don't have the luxury of suspending or hibernating. If I try it, everthing falls to pieces. It's amazing how many unstable drivers/hardware interfaces there can be on a single unit. I'd reinstall from scratch, but I've got too many parts to reinstall, and the incompatibilities would just come back anyway.
Ubuntu wasn't too bad, but try to bring up a machine while a 4 year old is waiting and 45 seconds is actually a pretty long time. The most disappointing was the last educational knoppix live cd that took close to 7 minutes on a modern PC, and required user intervention about half way through. No kid has that kind of patience.
Actually, it's copy protection written into the firmware. By locking down the hardware side, and making their software incompatible with anything else, they've DRM'd the software while making you feel fresh all day. But we all know what that smell is covering up.
People don't crave windows because it's beautiful, they crave it because it runs their software .
Aside from nicking the discs from the office (do people still do that in todays IT-managed world?) for home use, the bulk of the apps on the net are for win machines. Maybe I should clairfy - the bulk of the precompiled apps are for win machines. [insert virus joke here].
Make all my stuff run on another platform, and I'm in.
I've not seen a Mac boot in the last 6 years (maybe longer), but it's not looking good for either XP or Linux. Both require you go get dinner while the system boots (oh, sure, the XP screen comes up pretty quickly, but you can't actually do anything for the next two minutes - how many people even remember the benchmark for bootup that timed power-on to win screen?)
Unless you decide to go the AllOfMp3 route, you can't get a lossless (or even a 320kb MP3) digital version of the works. I rip all my discs to FLAC, then use MediaMonkey to transcode to 192kb for my portable. I've been fooled once by the lossy MP3pro fad (and had to re-rip all 300 CDs). I listen on decent headphones when I want to really kick back and enjoy the music. That means Sony MDR-V6 cans or Shure Ec3s - not the most expensive in the world, but damned good for listening. I might not be able to tell the difference between 256kb Lame encoded vs FLAC, but with FLAC I know that if I decide I want a [insert snazzy new format here] portable player, the recode can be done without an extra degradation step, all automatically while I sleep.
CDs are the only way to get a lossless or high-quality lossy copy in the digital realm. Tell Levi I want a fully tagged and annotated set of FLAC rips on the new CDs. They usually only put 40 minutes of music on those discs anyway - more than enough room to drop a lossless copy in the data track.
How about the soundtrack to the movie in FLAC or 320kb mp3. There's usually more than 300MB of space left on most of the commercial dual-layer movies I've bought.
They're not targetting the destitute for CDs. Jack Valenti put it best, specking of the "working stiffs":
"...They make $75,000 to $100,000 a year. That's not much to live on. I don't have to tell you that."
But you're right - if their target audience is the $150k+ households, they're going after a pretty damned small world market. No wonder they're having financial troubles.
So, when the 20 second clip of you digging for gold hits the airwaves two days before the election in which you are currently ahead by two or three points, will you consider this to be a "good thing"?
How about when you walk by another crime being committed, and are flagged as a possible suspect in collusion? If there are ten faces in the frame and all get incarcerated for safety's sake until the evidence is sorted out that's good, right? And if that only takes a week, it's not like you have anything else to do, like go to work. Bail won't be an issue, as you can simply be denied bail until the details are sorted out. Of course, that might take longer than that week we talked about, becuase there's 50x more people in custody that have to be sorted through to check on all those littering cititions.
I'll tell you what - make this an opt-in program, with everyone else automatically blurred out on the source recording. You and all your friends can opt in, and then get back to me in, say, 20 years and let me know how it's going.
I'm just saying to all the "everyone should do this" people that they shouldn't expect a "normal" company to be able to do this. Google has grossed $15B in the last four years. It's worth, on paper, $120B. $105B of that money is "future potential".
Guess that's the rule here, though - never open the curtain on the chosen few. So, in penance I offer the following:
Microsoft Sucks! Apple Rules! Down with SCO! Mmmmm, I feel better already.
If you really want distribution, play with the big boys. Either find an indie label to help, or try to go it alone, but get your tunes on the majors services.
If you really just want your music to be listened to, put up 64kb versions of your tunes on a static web page, and sell CDs (yes, the real ones) with a paypal cart. If you want to be nice, include high quality (256-320kb), pre-tagged MP3s on the CD on a data track. I suppose you could set up a downloadable MP3 for purchase individually, but since you're going to pay $0.50 for the transaction fee, there's not much profit left on a $0.39 track;-)
Don't bother trying to lock down the content - the folks who really like your music will probably buy the disc anyway. A downloadable zip of the album would be a nice bonus for that "instant gratification", though. (I suppose that could be the primary product, too, given the backend work)
Slashdot Mirror
I hear there's going to be shortages of soylent green next Tuesday. I hope I can get near the front of the line.
That is what the US government is devolving into
Actually, that's what it has always been. Do you think Thomas Jefferson was a common man? Hardly. The US has always had an aristocracy, and always will. It is based on money, not name or title, and therefore can change. Get the cash and you too can join the ruling class. That is what used to separate it from England.
The constant erosion of liberty is a direct result of the way representative governments clash with human needs. Those in power wish to stay in power. Not out of some need to be an evil dictator, but to shape the country into their vision of what should be. To do so, they must maintain their power. All politicians (and CEOs, for that matter) know that they will garner credit and face blame for waht happens during their tenure whether or not they had any influence. That's why every administration want's to tighten their grip and expand their power - to prevent the catastrophe that would get them fired. They've all managed to lose sight of the fact that they are stripping from most of us the very things that make us a free people.
It should be noted that the people who make these laws are generally (a) not subject to them (practically speaking) or (b) have already lost those freedoms as a part of the job they do. If you make $200k or more a year, with full benefits, it would seem silly to argue over $20 for a CD vs downloading it - and the people who take that $20 will make sure the facts lean their way. If you're a congressman, your financial dealings are pretty much on the table, and your private life is scrutinized by the medis (and your opponent) as a matter of course. You're not losing the right to privacy, because you have to act as if it doesn't exist on a daily basis. To the rest of us, $20 is a lot for 1 good song and 7 fillers, and we still expect our phone conversations to be private.
I don't see any real changes in the next 10, or 100, years. I'm sure my children, and their grandchildren, will be arguing the same thing when they are my age. Not that this doens't mean that I'm taking this lying down - I vote in every election, and I vote for whomever I think will cause the least damage. In this type of democracy, that's really what it's about. You can't make it better than the basics we started with, you just have to ensure that the people in power don't screw it up.
I'll give you the scalability argument - that's a hard one to reconcile (which is why I conveniently ignored it ;-)
In the meantime there's the issue of some MySpace users effectively turning their pages into unlicensed radio stations, and that makes some copyright owners mad. I
Yes, it's the few "bad apples" problem...again. As always, I wish we had the NRA on the consumers side in this one.
Just a minor correction; though your statement to reduce unemployment (as hard as it sounds, but killing people (or having them killed) reduces your workforce...) is technically correct, it's the making of munitions and necessities and the logistic support of large deployments which reduces unemployment (and strengthens the economy, though on borrowed dollars).
I agree with your point, though.
It's not the running that's expensive - it's getting lazy americans off their couches and into the voting booth after throughly understanding the issues. And you have to get at least 70-80 million of them to do that nation wide.
Sort of like indie films or music - you can make it on a shoestring, but (a) can you get more than 50 of the top 100 tunes on billboard in any given week by non-RIAA distributors or 6 of the 10 top grossing films in any given year by independent studios? Can you do this ten years in a row? Can you do it without a huge marketing effort?
You're pushing against enormous momentum, and - more importantly - wealthy, activist organizations (the 2 parties) for whom the current system is in their best interest. Working to change the system is a good start. You've got two years. First, find 600 people who are intellegent, well spoken, good looking, and willing to quit their jobs and work 14 hour days for the next two years. Then I recommend talking to 10 every single month - new, unique people each month - explaining the issues, and convincing them that out of 300,000,000 people, their vote matters. If every US slashdotter did this, we could get to all of the US population, and if we were successful in half our conversations (a major sucess, btw) we could make a difference.
In the last 100 years, has anyone ever been sued over clipping out pictures from magazines and pasting them into their scrapbooks, then showing them off to friends? That's really what myspace is, isn't it? Or have I missed some part of Myspace where the majority are carefully crafting elaborate display spaces and using them for significant profit*? Copyright is intended to be a commercial restriction, though I'm sure every content provider organization would like to make it otherwise.
*as apposed to using them as a hobby
I know I could probably squeak by on $165k/yr plus benefits (which are decent, btw). The killer is coming up with at least $25M - that would be the minimum it would take to even have a crack at a seat.
So what exactly is the conservative stance on digital privacy and fair use?
As far as I've seen, both parties seem to be tripping over themselves trying to legislate more and more restrictions. Democrats should be telling the content providers to "fuck off" and give th power to the people. Republicans should be getting the god damned government out of my living room and letting me do whatever I damned well please with my shit.
Personally, I think it's all Benjamin Franklin's fault. If it weren't for guys in suits stuffing wads of paper with his face on it into every congressman's pocket, we might get something pro-citizen passed in Washington.
The NRA generally covers threats to the 2nd amendment* before they become law.
*which I support, though I feel is no longer of any practical use as it was envisioned, and love to play the parsing game with the actual text just to piss people off.
Combine this phone with an $8/mo pricetag, and I smell the perfect emergency phone. I wonder if you could get enough juice out of a solar cell to keep this thing charged on standby? (prbably not - if you could get 20 days on an 800mah battery, that'd be 1.7ma drain. 8cm2 of pe cell at 12% efficiency would only charge at 1.1ma if you had it pointed properly [insert math disclaimer here]. oh well.)
On the contrary: Mac users are treated like criminals, they just don't know it. Microsoft wants you to wear the orange overalls and walk with your eyes facing the ground. Apple want's you to take the blue pill.
Neither are exactly consumer friendly. Luckily for Apple, they're control over the hardware make the hacking scene very small. Nobody makes a fuss because there are very few who even care. That and the fact that Apple doesn't really depend on software for revenue (not like MS does, at least).
Apple has managed to a bad thing properly: they've locked down the software (bad), but they've made it transparent to the end user (good). The check is still there, every time you boot up, but you never have to fool with it.
but both of them are running only the necessary services
And that's why they boot quickly. I have a lot of shit on mine (XP), most of it just waiting for a particular device to go live (one of the HP daemons takes 50MB of space...on idle). Between bluetooth desktop items, pda, phone, docking station, several tcp/ip computers, two networks, synchronization, etc., I'm a good three minutes to get to a useful state. I usually hit the power button in the morning then go make coffee. Since I have a laptop, it gets docked/undocked twice a day, and I don't have the luxury of suspending or hibernating. If I try it, everthing falls to pieces. It's amazing how many unstable drivers/hardware interfaces there can be on a single unit. I'd reinstall from scratch, but I've got too many parts to reinstall, and the incompatibilities would just come back anyway.
Ubuntu wasn't too bad, but try to bring up a machine while a 4 year old is waiting and 45 seconds is actually a pretty long time. The most disappointing was the last educational knoppix live cd that took close to 7 minutes on a modern PC, and required user intervention about half way through. No kid has that kind of patience.
Actually, it's copy protection written into the firmware. By locking down the hardware side, and making their software incompatible with anything else, they've DRM'd the software while making you feel fresh all day. But we all know what that smell is covering up.
People don't crave windows because it's beautiful, they crave it because it runs their software .
Aside from nicking the discs from the office (do people still do that in todays IT-managed world?) for home use, the bulk of the apps on the net are for win machines. Maybe I should clairfy - the bulk of the precompiled apps are for win machines. [insert virus joke here].
Make all my stuff run on another platform, and I'm in.
I've not seen a Mac boot in the last 6 years (maybe longer), but it's not looking good for either XP or Linux. Both require you go get dinner while the system boots (oh, sure, the XP screen comes up pretty quickly, but you can't actually do anything for the next two minutes - how many people even remember the benchmark for bootup that timed power-on to win screen?)
Rats and sinking ships come to mind!
It's about time someone pointed this out.
Unless you decide to go the AllOfMp3 route, you can't get a lossless (or even a 320kb MP3) digital version of the works. I rip all my discs to FLAC, then use MediaMonkey to transcode to 192kb for my portable. I've been fooled once by the lossy MP3pro fad (and had to re-rip all 300 CDs). I listen on decent headphones when I want to really kick back and enjoy the music. That means Sony MDR-V6 cans or Shure Ec3s - not the most expensive in the world, but damned good for listening. I might not be able to tell the difference between 256kb Lame encoded vs FLAC, but with FLAC I know that if I decide I want a [insert snazzy new format here] portable player, the recode can be done without an extra degradation step, all automatically while I sleep.
CDs are the only way to get a lossless or high-quality lossy copy in the digital realm. Tell Levi I want a fully tagged and annotated set of FLAC rips on the new CDs. They usually only put 40 minutes of music on those discs anyway - more than enough room to drop a lossless copy in the data track.
How about the soundtrack to the movie in FLAC or 320kb mp3. There's usually more than 300MB of space left on most of the commercial dual-layer movies I've bought.
millions of people that make below $40,000 a year
They're not targetting the destitute for CDs. Jack Valenti put it best, specking of the "working stiffs":
"...They make $75,000 to $100,000 a year. That's not much to live on. I don't have to tell you that."
But you're right - if their target audience is the $150k+ households, they're going after a pretty damned small world market. No wonder they're having financial troubles.
Yup, that's excatly where I saw this one going. Something along the lines of:
How can a guy named Ethan Allen possibly be comfortable knowing his boss has a history of throwing furniture around?
The first rule of Usenet: you do not talk about usenet.
Crossman used to make very nice coutermeasures for such problems.
Why is this such a bad thing ?
So, when the 20 second clip of you digging for gold hits the airwaves two days before the election in which you are currently ahead by two or three points, will you consider this to be a "good thing"?
How about when you walk by another crime being committed, and are flagged as a possible suspect in collusion? If there are ten faces in the frame and all get incarcerated for safety's sake until the evidence is sorted out that's good, right? And if that only takes a week, it's not like you have anything else to do, like go to work. Bail won't be an issue, as you can simply be denied bail until the details are sorted out. Of course, that might take longer than that week we talked about, becuase there's 50x more people in custody that have to be sorted through to check on all those littering cititions.
I'll tell you what - make this an opt-in program, with everyone else automatically blurred out on the source recording. You and all your friends can opt in, and then get back to me in, say, 20 years and let me know how it's going.
This is a good thing. No arguments.
I'm just saying to all the "everyone should do this" people that they shouldn't expect a "normal" company to be able to do this. Google has grossed $15B in the last four years. It's worth, on paper, $120B. $105B of that money is "future potential".
Guess that's the rule here, though - never open the curtain on the chosen few. So, in penance I offer the following:
Microsoft Sucks! Apple Rules! Down with SCO!
Mmmmm, I feel better already.
If you really want distribution, play with the big boys. Either find an indie label to help, or try to go it alone, but get your tunes on the majors services.
;-)
If you really just want your music to be listened to, put up 64kb versions of your tunes on a static web page, and sell CDs (yes, the real ones) with a paypal cart. If you want to be nice, include high quality (256-320kb), pre-tagged MP3s on the CD on a data track. I suppose you could set up a downloadable MP3 for purchase individually, but since you're going to pay $0.50 for the transaction fee, there's not much profit left on a $0.39 track
Don't bother trying to lock down the content - the folks who really like your music will probably buy the disc anyway. A downloadable zip of the album would be a nice bonus for that "instant gratification", though. (I suppose that could be the primary product, too, given the backend work)