The GPL is based on using copyright as a shield against those who would use copyright as a weapon. The underlying situation is one that is often reflected in the physical world and often noted in literature: the knife cuts both ways.
The Creative Commons licenses could eventually have an even greater impact on the world than the GPL although the latter's impacts have only begun to be felt.
Interesting this topic would come up. I just stumbled across an ad for an FTA porn channel. It's only in Europe and Asia, but since I live in the latter, I thought it looked intriguing. Apparently it uses the small dishes being in the KU band and you can buy a card to use with a DishNetwork set top box or they say you can encode your own blank card. Maybe next time I'm in the States I'll grab a DishNetwork systeom off E-bay and bring it back here to see how it goes.
Interesting that this is in Europe and Asia, but not the US. Mmm hmm.
I'm not one of the guys and I'm fairly certain that not even a very small minority of the people in the world are one of the guys who are on the Microsoft gravy train.
The assumption that most of Microsoft's billions in financial reserves are going towards paying the salaries of hard working coders is naive in the extreme.
As has been pointed out, that money is going primarily into funding attempts at new monopolies like the X-Box project where hundreds of millions a month are exhausted, much of it in mind numbing marketing blitzes.
A ten billion dollar fine sounds quite reasonable to me given their own figures of a fifty billion legal war chest.
Personally, I find NPR's use of DRM vile. I used to actually pledge to the campaigns, but when they went with closed on-line formats I felt that the phrase "community radio" no longer made sense. If NPR is community radio then they should cooperate with, use and distribute community software.
But in the mean time I've become accustomed to using online news sources and RSS and I don't really see the need for NPR anymore. I did enjoy a number of the shows though. But now that I live in location where I can't get it on the radio, I just life without. I'd probably become a regular listener again if they switched to open digitial formats. They can always sell the archives AND use open formats. To me, that would seem to be in the spirit of community supported media.
I'm not sure if it's still true or if it was ever true, but about ten years ago I was told that there are over thirty thousand licensed laywers in San Diego County alone. I do know for certain that my brother in-law is a lawyer and he doesn't get much work. He just took on a client that owned a bar who is paying him in bottles of booze and not many at that.
If you want tons of tracker files in all formats I would recommend the Hornet FTP archive. I think there are upwards of twenty thousand and you can download them all in a day or so with a decent connection.
The catch with these files is editing them into categories. They're just tossed together by date and they vary widely in genre and quality. I've been going through and sorting/rating them and then distributing my personal favorites to friends.
Many probably recall the guy who put his I-tunes track on E-bay and will remember that it was cancelled because of an E-Bay policy, not an I-tunes policy.
This is a very important issue here because it blurs the line between Right of First Sale and Fair Use. While it's unlikely that right of First Sale can be sidestepped, how is it going to be possible to convince people who eventually will want to swap their legally purchased products from getting a bit of their money back in a legitimate re-sale. This is a great re-sale market from the buyers perspective because you can be sure the quality is top notch even after many sales. You just have to trust that people won't keep a copy in an open format when they make the sale. I'd say the whole premise is weak.
And yes, I do know that there are people of the opinion that Right of First Sale cannot apply in digital distribution, but if you look at the arguments that have been presented, the weak link is usually the part where they try to define copy and mangle the technical facts of how digital media is played in various digitial devices. There is no blanket defintion of copy that can cover all cases unless you use a naive definition of terms like RAM. That may convince non-technical people, but under closer scrutiny I've never seen a solid definition that worked across serval commonly available digital music players.
Isn't teaching people how to defend themselves using free open source software better than talking about the best way to start up a posse?
With just IPTables and SpamCop configured properly most of these security problems disappear.
Well Hitler has a point here. I've been involved in publishing educational multimedia for about ten years now and anybody who pretends that Macromedia does not completely own the educational development tools field is apparently not aware of the kinds of multimedia teaching materials being used in classrooms today.
It's not that there are no cool open source educational resources, but it's more about a fundamental distinction between the motivatations of open and closed source developers.
For educational multimedia, it's just a basic fact that you want the educators themselves to produce the content. At first glance this sounds like it would make it ripe for open source, but the details compilicate things a bit.
Since you want the content specialists to do their own multimedia development, you want tools that are ultra-easy to use. That means the tools developers have to go way overboard simplifying their toolkits and doing lots of handholding. the handholding part has to be taken to extremes and you need motivation to handle the most moronic repetitive questions with tender loving care. This is not a traditional strength of open source although it is slowly changing. For instance, who would have thought the Linux Documentation Project would have come so far so quickly.
Back in the day, I use to go to the Macromedia corporate news groups and harangue them to produce Linux run-times for Authorware and Director and then when Wine came out I found that these two most common educational Win32 run-times could work under Linux I realized that battle had already been won in a sense.
Now the battleground, as I see it, is getting the classrooms, or more specifically the district network managers, to dump the Windows servers and the anti-Linux network "security" policies to create an nvironment where Linux desktops can replace Windows.
The apps aren't a problem. There's a lot of FUD about how Wine doesn't work. But FUD is precisely what it is and the only way to combat it is to speak up and tell people it's not true. There is no urgent need to replace the existing Macromedia development tools because those run-times use a very restricted version of the Windows API that works fine under Wine.
Someday, there will be genuine open source replacements that allow you to eliminate with Win32 run-times altogether, but there's no need to wait till then.
Those are very interesting points and they go along with the interesting comment made, I guess by Timothy, that said
"From the watch-people-blame-the-free-market dept."
I think the problem is that people use terms like "free-market" or "competition" as though they were magic spells that could solve all problems and have some mystical, sublime and transcedental meaning. Being for or against "free-markets" is totally irrelvant.
This a case of a logical problem created by the sloppy use of language to patch over complex ideas with simple catch phrases.
There is no such thing as a "free-market." There never was such a thing and there never will be. So baiting people about attacking this mythical beast is nothing more than a kind of bizarre political statement akin to saying --I'm on the right. Such spatial metaphors are next to meaningless without a very specific context.
So, this AC post is right on the money. American capitalism has always been regulated and deregulated to varying degrees. There is no one-hundred percent and it is quite possible that the RIAA could be exempted. It is also quite possible that the NET Act could be ammended to make all digital P2P fair use.
They're both possible and neither would have much influence on the cult icon referred to as the "free-market."
The article seemed to repeat the term grid computing over and over and make it quite clear that they were using the term to refer to something similar to a blade server hardware setup.
I think it's mostly a communication issue caused by people in marketing trying to make a little idea seem big when it's really just an incremental change that addresses the fact that most PCs are networked today.
If I were to guess what CSS is really about, it sounds like mostly it is just making the BIOS like a web page and giving it its own little TCP/IP stack which probably isn't such a big deal when you note that they specifically pointed out that it would not be useable under Linux and not exclusive to Microsoft.
I find the idea of a more customizeable BIOS appealing. I always change the colors in mine. Hey, that's what being a nerd is all about.
Re:Can't beat a handbuilt house
on
Pre-Fab Homes?
·
· Score: 1
Precisely. About ten years ago when I was finishing grad school, I spent a summer managing contracts and working as an assistant carpenter in the process of building a custom house for my father.
We hired a carpenter with many years of experience and he was fully qualified, knew all the other tradesmen on the site and all of the inspectors on a first name basis. So, this was a real pro by the standards of the profession. But that's the clincher right there, the standards of the building trades are as low as they get.
Accompanying him through the process, it was so obvious that the guy was not all that special. He spent hours pondering the plans and drawing pictures on the plywood. We'd waste days pondering the next step and most of the time he was obviously too stoned to make decisions. I didn't care about that as we were having fun and he had a maximum bid and we never got too far behind schedule, but it was amazing to see how much he relied on trial and error and just as much error as trial.
In the end, we created a masterful custom house that everyone loves in about six months and well within the budget so nothing really went wrong. But being so close to the process made me realize that it's not really all that difficult if you just sit down and go to wrok on it.
I'm in the process of planning a steel house at this point and I'm going to do absolutely everything myself except perhaps the drywall. I strongly believe that the housing industry has just as much FUD as the computer industry.
A prefab? Is that like a Dell?
Hmm, better get that with XP installed, you know I've heard that other OS is only for experts.
It sounds like what you really mean is you've bought the US corporate mantra about bandwidth must cost. Actually it doesn't have to cost much at all per/mb in an all IP infrastrucuture. US telecoms have no motivation to go there. They would prefer to buy expensive non IP solutions and come up with the most absurd reasons to justify what is really an attempt to keep competitors out.
As for redundancy. Why would you suggest that it's difficult or expensive to build a redundant fast ethernet network?
And I'm really impressed with these sour grapes comments about what would anybody need that much bandwidth for. A lot of creativity going on here to explain why the US is falling behind without touching on the key point that free markets are only good at allocating scarce resources, they choke on abundance and we are entering an age of abundance. So. . .
No, it won't be obsolete quickly by any means. The reason is similar to why Pentium systems above 200Mhz don't go obsolete, they're sufficient for audio and video which makes them entertainment devices rather than strictly computing devices. People often keep televisions and radios for decades.
100Mbps is fast enough to stream not just full bitrate Mp3s, but decent quality video as well. So, it might not be the fastest forever, but it won't be obsolete for a long time.
Issues like proxies started coming up in child porn cases from the earliest says of Internet crime and it helps to understand how that has been played out to better understand the limits of computer crimes prosecutions.
Because some people in commercial child pornography rings were, in fact, quite sophisticated about security, porsecutors had to develop strong cases that involved much more than monitoring net traffic. They had to monitor phone calls, watch bank transactions and finally go in and actually seize physical media. Even then there was no guarantee they could make the charges stick.
So, this isn't really news that it's not easy to prosuecute computer crimes without more than just a bit of alleged data. The fact that this was already long ago established is what made the RIAA's plan so bizarre. The only hope was to completely shock the public into quitting P2P in one fell swoop. They have already failed.
As soon as it begins trickling out in the media that the defendants who didn't pay up are walking away left and right the card will have been played and P2P will easily be twice as popular as it was without changing any laws at all.
Re:this all sounds great... but it's not a market
on
The Open Code Market
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
That's a good point and the intimately related, if less eloquently stated, question is whether ideas really should be sold as property at all.
I've been on both sides of the fence and technically I still am, but I'm a lot closer to being all the way on the FSF side these days.
For years I've worked in educational multimedia publishing and I've seen the market go all to hell, but I'm still in because I did so much work in the past that there's no such thing as being out. New work in the same vein is a like second nature so I still do it although the profits are god awful slim.
Obviously that stuff is all very Microsoft and very much based on images of magic secrets and such and everybody is selling bit of information they can possibly package. It's such bullshit. It's just a big orgy of trying to screw people.
But seeing thast despite being so "competitive" there's still next to no money in it, so I've been developing a forums web site all based on open source and I'm so much happier with the latter. The whole point of this forum isn't to make momey, it's to develop a knowledge base.
Now you can say bring up the "how do you pay the bills when working for free" issue and this has come up plenty already. But the point is that the money sucks either way. By just dropping the whole issue and getting on with using a free and open forum to focus on a new and specific skill set, you can get onto making products that you can sell instead of selling data.
To me this has become the bottom line. You shouldn't sell data. I do it myself, but I'm coming to the conclusion that it's simply the wrong approach. If the information you're selling can be used to make a product then why not sell that product. If the information you're selling doesn't make a product, then why should it cost?
As for services like education. I seriously think those are things that governments should be able to support through taxes. We don't need a free market in educational software materials. We already have one and it is so fucked up.
And I happen to know first hand that the sales of materials for ETS test prep are way way down in just the last year. Several new programs have already been cancelled. The DHS is clearly a case of cutting off your nose to spite your face.
As for personal privacy, I assume that was already gone long before the DHS so it's not the biggest issue as I see it. But the big issue that I do see is that we're seeing the biggest drop in overseas college admissions since WWII. The surveys for this year showed that the students specifically stated either real or perceived problems with the DHS for their decision not to study in the US.
Well, for the xenophobes this is great, but for the rest of the US this is not good news at all. Despite the compaints about foreigners filling our colleges, those kids were formerly paying through the nose for all sorts of services. It's not like overseas students pay the same tuition as citizens. They definitely pay their way and then some and that's not to count their consmption while they're in the States. Many of them are very well funded and watching that revenue stream dry up is not a good thing. This is not to even begin to mention the free research assistance that they provide.
It's not that they're disapearing either, they're heading for the UK em masse. So, it's not about the war per se, it's about the DHS itself. Changing those trends back to the US could take years even if the DHS was dismantled today.
Why I would step into this cesspool of a thread, I don't know.
But, I think this post raises a fascinating point about what constitutues a culture and a race. Culture is often considered to be associated with language which would probably still make China far more multicultural then the US since even the rural people tend to be bilingual in spoken tongues. The characters, which are functionally somewhat akin to a huge alphabet, don't change, but the spoken tongues vary literally from province to province and are mutually unintelligible wihtout a doubt and for good historical reasons.
So, if we use language as a basis for culture, we can indeed say that China is much more multicultural than the US and have a factual basis for this assertion.
But race as a reference to a group of genetically similar or dissimilar populations is an even more interesting way to define "culture" becasue if you look at it carefully you find that even the notion of race itself is defined differently in different cultures. So, of course, to an American looking at China, there's not question that there is a wider range of racial representation in the US than China because they're using the American definition of race. But if you were to take, for instance, a medical view of race, you might look at bone marrow compatibilities. Apparently it's true that one distinction between, for instance, blacks and whites in America is their high liklihood of inability to exchange bone marrow.
However, if you look in China, you will find that there are over seventeen types of incompatible bone marrow that you could technically argue are racially unique blood lines.
So, the definition of multicultural is not as clear cut as it seems. There's a context to every instance of language use that is ignored in casual conversation, but comes into play when talking about enormous notions like "cultlure" that is ignored at peril when you're using the phrase in American English and assuming your reader shares your background. Given that context, it's not surprising that your results appear to prove your point. However, appearances can be deceiving when dealing with the BIG issues.
There have been a number of attempts to use ground based lasers to send smal objects into space without the additional burden of the fuel payload. But with a system like this in place it's not too hard to imagine designs of vessles that could harness the energy for flight.
I realize that the one-click deal became a big money focus, but I recall that the site was about all kinds of prior art and many of them were more interesting than that one issue. I still don't quite understand why it wasn't kept going. It seems the bandwidth and hosting costs are minimal these days and it's a good cause. I would assume that just on ad revenue alone it would be a sustainable site. Their FAQ was excellent. I was going to write a book on patents at one point and after reading thier FAQ I felt what I had to say was redundant.
I very highly recommend the BQ History of Patents FAQ by the way for anyone who hasn't read it yet. It's still available at archive.org and I still refer to it regularly when I forget some of the terms. The part about Xerox is something that clearly a lot of younger people don't understand when they talk about the glories of unrestrained capitalism as the source of their beloved PCs.
If I recall, the original story about the defective discs was from Europe. At the time I was concerned and I found a bundle that had been sitting by a window in a clear case for several years. Kinda fell back there and I forogt about them. They even appeared to have some damage around the edges from the sunlight. But surprisingly I was able to read every one of them and they were dirt cheap gererics from years ago.
Since then I've gone through randomly looking for bad disks through the years and I've found a couple that were screwed up, but very few.
At the time of the first story I was wondering if they might not perhaps have been hoping to stir up some DVD-R sales. I was contemplating getting one to back up all my CDs just in case I found they were deteriorating, but so far they seem fine and I think I'll wait to see if those dual layer media ever become affordable next year.
I wasn't really sure what you were implying to tell you the truth, but I thought the important part of my post wasn't the first part in response to your post but the latter part about the discrepancy between media capacity and the dollar a song standard that is being put forth.
Doesn't it seem striking that at a dollar a song a consumer grade storage system today in the here-and-now could hold over a hundred thousand dollars worth of music on a one thousand dollar PC. And that's using hard drives. With optical media we're talking a few hundred dollars in blank media costs at most to hold a hundred thousand dollars in so-called intellectual property.
So, maybe I missed your point, but when I read your post it made me stop and think about the implications and it led me in another direction entirely. I still don't quite get the distinction between binary data on one type of plastic disc with a certain kind of dye and another representation of the same data significantly compressed on another plastic disc coated with a different dye that holds more data per disc and uses a different wavelength to read. Technially they're quite similar but the economics are a world apart or at least two orders of magnitude. A penny a song is probably appropriate in persepctive of the media changes if there should be any charge at all which there certainly should not be.
Not in your lifetime? Are you terminally ill? You can build a TB RAID for less than a grand right now. Even encoding at 320kbps which IS CD quality you'll get 4 to 1 compression. So, 150Megs per CD.
To keep it simple, let's say you built a 1.5TB RAID. Well, I'll help you along. A hundred megs times ten is a Gig. A thousand Gigs is a Terrabyte. So, you can get 10,000 full quality CDs in a box that costs less than two grand in today's market. And that's using off the shelf components that are even built into motherboards if you were to use one of the many boards with Via's latest SouthBridge. This isn't tomorrow's technology, it's today. This is consumer grade technology. You can't see this replacing CDs in your lifetime?
If you bought those CDs at the "bargain" ten bucks a piece it would cost almost as much as a house.
The fact is, within the next few years optical media will be so cheap and high density that nobody will thing twice about having a few terrabytes of data lying around. Look, even with 4.7Gig recordable DVDs, you only need two hundred for a TB. But we're told that double sided media is coming out next year and then Blu Ray after that.
The media game ended long ago when the original CD format came out and we moved on to lasers. The captains of industry were asleep at the wheel or just kinda staring out into space all coked out thinking about the next blow job from the secretary pool. These last minute gasps are amusing --I especially like to think of Steve Jobs being sold a cross marketing deal with McDonalds-- but obviously way shy of the mark. The new deal is a dollar a song, but how does that jibe with the reality of optical media and hard drives that can contain hundreds of thousands of dollars in value at those prices selling for a few tens of dollars? There's clearly a lot of magic pixie dust in the air.
Okay, I guess I better go read through their terms of service a bit more carefully. You're saying I can get a number in the States and just take it with me and the network won't know the difference?
If you're still following this thread I'd be interested to know.
Basically because of the time difference between the US and Taiwan calling isn't all that practical for non price reasons, but I'd still be interested to know.
Slashdot Mirror
The GPL is based on using copyright as a shield against those who would use copyright as a weapon. The underlying situation is one that is often reflected in the physical world and often noted in literature: the knife cuts both ways.
The Creative Commons licenses could eventually have an even greater impact on the world than the GPL although the latter's impacts have only begun to be felt.
Interesting this topic would come up. I just stumbled across an ad for an FTA porn channel. It's only in Europe and Asia, but since I live in the latter, I thought it looked intriguing. Apparently it uses the small dishes being in the KU band and you can buy a card to use with a DishNetwork set top box or they say you can encode your own blank card. Maybe next time I'm in the States I'll grab a DishNetwork systeom off E-bay and bring it back here to see how it goes.
Interesting that this is in Europe and Asia, but not the US. Mmm hmm.
I'm not one of the guys and I'm fairly certain that not even a very small minority of the people in the world are one of the guys who are on the Microsoft gravy train.
The assumption that most of Microsoft's billions in financial reserves are going towards paying the salaries of hard working coders is naive in the extreme.
As has been pointed out, that money is going primarily into funding attempts at new monopolies like the X-Box project where hundreds of millions a month are exhausted, much of it in mind numbing marketing blitzes.
A ten billion dollar fine sounds quite reasonable to me given their own figures of a fifty billion legal war chest.
Personally, I find NPR's use of DRM vile. I used to actually pledge to the campaigns, but when they went with closed on-line formats I felt that the phrase "community radio" no longer made sense. If NPR is community radio then they should cooperate with, use and distribute community software.
But in the mean time I've become accustomed to using online news sources and RSS and I don't really see the need for NPR anymore. I did enjoy a number of the shows though. But now that I live in location where I can't get it on the radio, I just life without. I'd probably become a regular listener again if they switched to open digitial formats. They can always sell the archives AND use open formats. To me, that would seem to be in the spirit of community supported media.
I'm not sure if it's still true or if it was ever true, but about ten years ago I was told that there are over thirty thousand licensed laywers in San Diego County alone. I do know for certain that my brother in-law is a lawyer and he doesn't get much work. He just took on a client that owned a bar who is paying him in bottles of booze and not many at that.
If you want tons of tracker files in all formats I would recommend the Hornet FTP archive. I think there are upwards of twenty thousand and you can download them all in a day or so with a decent connection.
The catch with these files is editing them into categories. They're just tossed together by date and they vary widely in genre and quality. I've been going through and sorting/rating them and then distributing my personal favorites to friends.
Many probably recall the guy who put his I-tunes track on E-bay and will remember that it was cancelled because of an E-Bay policy, not an I-tunes policy.
This is a very important issue here because it blurs the line between Right of First Sale and Fair Use. While it's unlikely that right of First Sale can be sidestepped, how is it going to be possible to convince people who eventually will want to swap their legally purchased products from getting a bit of their money back in a legitimate re-sale. This is a great re-sale market from the buyers perspective because you can be sure the quality is top notch even after many sales. You just have to trust that people won't keep a copy in an open format when they make the sale. I'd say the whole premise is weak.
And yes, I do know that there are people of the opinion that Right of First Sale cannot apply in digital distribution, but if you look at the arguments that have been presented, the weak link is usually the part where they try to define copy and mangle the technical facts of how digital media is played in various digitial devices. There is no blanket defintion of copy that can cover all cases unless you use a naive definition of terms like RAM. That may convince non-technical people, but under closer scrutiny I've never seen a solid definition that worked across serval commonly available digital music players.
Isn't teaching people how to defend themselves using free open source software better than talking about the best way to start up a posse?
With just IPTables and SpamCop configured properly most of these security problems disappear.
Well Hitler has a point here. I've been involved in publishing educational multimedia for about ten years now and anybody who pretends that Macromedia does not completely own the educational development tools field is apparently not aware of the kinds of multimedia teaching materials being used in classrooms today.
It's not that there are no cool open source educational resources, but it's more about a fundamental distinction between the motivatations of open and closed source developers.
For educational multimedia, it's just a basic fact that you want the educators themselves to produce the content. At first glance this sounds like it would make it ripe for open source, but the details compilicate things a bit.
Since you want the content specialists to do their own multimedia development, you want tools that are ultra-easy to use. That means the tools developers have to go way overboard simplifying their toolkits and doing lots of handholding. the handholding part has to be taken to extremes and you need motivation to handle the most moronic repetitive questions with tender loving care. This is not a traditional strength of open source although it is slowly changing. For instance, who would have thought the Linux Documentation Project would have come so far so quickly.
Back in the day, I use to go to the Macromedia corporate news groups and harangue them to produce Linux run-times for Authorware and Director and then when Wine came out I found that these two most common educational Win32 run-times could work under Linux I realized that battle had already been won in a sense.
Now the battleground, as I see it, is getting the classrooms, or more specifically the district network managers, to dump the Windows servers and the anti-Linux network "security" policies to create an nvironment where Linux desktops can replace Windows.
The apps aren't a problem. There's a lot of FUD about how Wine doesn't work. But FUD is precisely what it is and the only way to combat it is to speak up and tell people it's not true. There is no urgent need to replace the existing Macromedia development tools because those run-times use a very restricted version of the Windows API that works fine under Wine.
Someday, there will be genuine open source replacements that allow you to eliminate with Win32 run-times altogether, but there's no need to wait till then.
Those are very interesting points and they go along with the interesting comment made, I guess by Timothy, that said
"From the watch-people-blame-the-free-market dept."
I think the problem is that people use terms like "free-market" or "competition" as though they were magic spells that could solve all problems and have some mystical, sublime and transcedental meaning. Being for or against "free-markets" is totally irrelvant.
This a case of a logical problem created by the sloppy use of language to patch over complex ideas with simple catch phrases.
There is no such thing as a "free-market." There never was such a thing and there never will be. So baiting people about attacking this mythical beast is nothing more than a kind of bizarre political statement akin to saying --I'm on the right. Such spatial metaphors are next to meaningless without a very specific context.
So, this AC post is right on the money. American capitalism has always been regulated and deregulated to varying degrees. There is no one-hundred percent and it is quite possible that the RIAA could be exempted. It is also quite possible that the NET Act could be ammended to make all digital P2P fair use.
They're both possible and neither would have much influence on the cult icon referred to as the "free-market."
The article seemed to repeat the term grid computing over and over and make it quite clear that they were using the term to refer to something similar to a blade server hardware setup.
I think it's mostly a communication issue caused by people in marketing trying to make a little idea seem big when it's really just an incremental change that addresses the fact that most PCs are networked today.
If I were to guess what CSS is really about, it sounds like mostly it is just making the BIOS like a web page and giving it its own little TCP/IP stack which probably isn't such a big deal when you note that they specifically pointed out that it would not be useable under Linux and not exclusive to Microsoft.
I find the idea of a more customizeable BIOS appealing. I always change the colors in mine. Hey, that's what being a nerd is all about.
Precisely. About ten years ago when I was finishing grad school, I spent a summer managing contracts and working as an assistant carpenter in the process of building a custom house for my father.
We hired a carpenter with many years of experience and he was fully qualified, knew all the other tradesmen on the site and all of the inspectors on a first name basis. So, this was a real pro by the standards of the profession. But that's the clincher right there, the standards of the building trades are as low as they get.
Accompanying him through the process, it was so obvious that the guy was not all that special. He spent hours pondering the plans and drawing pictures on the plywood. We'd waste days pondering the next step and most of the time he was obviously too stoned to make decisions. I didn't care about that as we were having fun and he had a maximum bid and we never got too far behind schedule, but it was amazing to see how much he relied on trial and error and just as much error as trial.
In the end, we created a masterful custom house that everyone loves in about six months and well within the budget so nothing really went wrong. But being so close to the process made me realize that it's not really all that difficult if you just sit down and go to wrok on it.
I'm in the process of planning a steel house at this point and I'm going to do absolutely everything myself except perhaps the drywall. I strongly believe that the housing industry has just as much FUD as the computer industry.
A prefab? Is that like a Dell?
Hmm, better get that with XP installed, you know I've heard that other OS is only for experts.
It sounds like what you really mean is you've bought the US corporate mantra about bandwidth must cost. Actually it doesn't have to cost much at all per/mb in an all IP infrastrucuture. US telecoms have no motivation to go there. They would prefer to buy expensive non IP solutions and come up with the most absurd reasons to justify what is really an attempt to keep competitors out.
As for redundancy. Why would you suggest that it's difficult or expensive to build a redundant fast ethernet network?
And I'm really impressed with these sour grapes comments about what would anybody need that much bandwidth for. A lot of creativity going on here to explain why the US is falling behind without touching on the key point that free markets are only good at allocating scarce resources, they choke on abundance and we are entering an age of abundance. So. . .
No, it won't be obsolete quickly by any means. The reason is similar to why Pentium systems above 200Mhz don't go obsolete, they're sufficient for audio and video which makes them entertainment devices rather than strictly computing devices. People often keep televisions and radios for decades.
100Mbps is fast enough to stream not just full bitrate Mp3s, but decent quality video as well. So, it might not be the fastest forever, but it won't be obsolete for a long time.
Issues like proxies started coming up in child porn cases from the earliest says of Internet crime and it helps to understand how that has been played out to better understand the limits of computer crimes prosecutions.
Because some people in commercial child pornography rings were, in fact, quite sophisticated about security, porsecutors had to develop strong cases that involved much more than monitoring net traffic. They had to monitor phone calls, watch bank transactions and finally go in and actually seize physical media. Even then there was no guarantee they could make the charges stick.
So, this isn't really news that it's not easy to prosuecute computer crimes without more than just a bit of alleged data. The fact that this was already long ago established is what made the RIAA's plan so bizarre. The only hope was to completely shock the public into quitting P2P in one fell swoop. They have already failed.
As soon as it begins trickling out in the media that the defendants who didn't pay up are walking away left and right the card will have been played and P2P will easily be twice as popular as it was without changing any laws at all.
That's a good point and the intimately related, if less eloquently stated, question is whether ideas really should be sold as property at all.
I've been on both sides of the fence and technically I still am, but I'm a lot closer to being all the way on the FSF side these days.
For years I've worked in educational multimedia publishing and I've seen the market go all to hell, but I'm still in because I did so much work in the past that there's no such thing as being out. New work in the same vein is a like second nature so I still do it although the profits are god awful slim.
Obviously that stuff is all very Microsoft and very much based on images of magic secrets and such and everybody is selling bit of information they can possibly package. It's such bullshit. It's just a big orgy of trying to screw people.
But seeing thast despite being so "competitive" there's still next to no money in it, so I've been developing a forums web site all based on open source and I'm so much happier with the latter. The whole point of this forum isn't to make momey, it's to develop a knowledge base.
Now you can say bring up the "how do you pay the bills when working for free" issue and this has come up plenty already. But the point is that the money sucks either way. By just dropping the whole issue and getting on with using a free and open forum to focus on a new and specific skill set, you can get onto making products that you can sell instead of selling data.
To me this has become the bottom line. You shouldn't sell data. I do it myself, but I'm coming to the conclusion that it's simply the wrong approach. If the information you're selling can be used to make a product then why not sell that product. If the information you're selling doesn't make a product, then why should it cost?
As for services like education. I seriously think those are things that governments should be able to support through taxes. We don't need a free market in educational software materials. We already have one and it is so fucked up.
And I happen to know first hand that the sales of materials for ETS test prep are way way down in just the last year. Several new programs have already been cancelled. The DHS is clearly a case of cutting off your nose to spite your face.
As for personal privacy, I assume that was already gone long before the DHS so it's not the biggest issue as I see it. But the big issue that I do see is that we're seeing the biggest drop in overseas college admissions since WWII. The surveys for this year showed that the students specifically stated either real or perceived problems with the DHS for their decision not to study in the US.
Well, for the xenophobes this is great, but for the rest of the US this is not good news at all. Despite the compaints about foreigners filling our colleges, those kids were formerly paying through the nose for all sorts of services. It's not like overseas students pay the same tuition as citizens. They definitely pay their way and then some and that's not to count their consmption while they're in the States. Many of them are very well funded and watching that revenue stream dry up is not a good thing. This is not to even begin to mention the free research assistance that they provide.
It's not that they're disapearing either, they're heading for the UK em masse. So, it's not about the war per se, it's about the DHS itself. Changing those trends back to the US could take years even if the DHS was dismantled today.
Why I would step into this cesspool of a thread, I don't know.
But, I think this post raises a fascinating point about what constitutues a culture and a race. Culture is often considered to be associated with language which would probably still make China far more multicultural then the US since even the rural people tend to be bilingual in spoken tongues. The characters, which are functionally somewhat akin to a huge alphabet, don't change, but the spoken tongues vary literally from province to province and are mutually unintelligible wihtout a doubt and for good historical reasons.
So, if we use language as a basis for culture, we can indeed say that China is much more multicultural than the US and have a factual basis for this assertion.
But race as a reference to a group of genetically similar or dissimilar populations is an even more interesting way to define "culture" becasue if you look at it carefully you find that even the notion of race itself is defined differently in different cultures. So, of course, to an American looking at China, there's not question that there is a wider range of racial representation in the US than China because they're using the American definition of race. But if you were to take, for instance, a medical view of race, you might look at bone marrow compatibilities. Apparently it's true that one distinction between, for instance, blacks and whites in America is their high liklihood of inability to exchange bone marrow.
However, if you look in China, you will find that there are over seventeen types of incompatible bone marrow that you could technically argue are racially unique blood lines.
So, the definition of multicultural is not as clear cut as it seems. There's a context to every instance of language use that is ignored in casual conversation, but comes into play when talking about enormous notions like "cultlure" that is ignored at peril when you're using the phrase in American English and assuming your reader shares your background. Given that context, it's not surprising that your results appear to prove your point. However, appearances can be deceiving when dealing with the BIG issues.
There have been a number of attempts to use ground based lasers to send smal objects into space without the additional burden of the fuel payload. But with a system like this in place it's not too hard to imagine designs of vessles that could harness the energy for flight.
I realize that the one-click deal became a big money focus, but I recall that the site was about all kinds of prior art and many of them were more interesting than that one issue. I still don't quite understand why it wasn't kept going. It seems the bandwidth and hosting costs are minimal these days and it's a good cause. I would assume that just on ad revenue alone it would be a sustainable site. Their FAQ was excellent. I was going to write a book on patents at one point and after reading thier FAQ I felt what I had to say was redundant.
I very highly recommend the BQ History of Patents FAQ by the way for anyone who hasn't read it yet. It's still available at archive.org and I still refer to it regularly when I forget some of the terms. The part about Xerox is something that clearly a lot of younger people don't understand when they talk about the glories of unrestrained capitalism as the source of their beloved PCs.
If I recall, the original story about the defective discs was from Europe. At the time I was concerned and I found a bundle that had been sitting by a window in a clear case for several years. Kinda fell back there and I forogt about them. They even appeared to have some damage around the edges from the sunlight. But surprisingly I was able to read every one of them and they were dirt cheap gererics from years ago.
Since then I've gone through randomly looking for bad disks through the years and I've found a couple that were screwed up, but very few.
At the time of the first story I was wondering if they might not perhaps have been hoping to stir up some DVD-R sales. I was contemplating getting one to back up all my CDs just in case I found they were deteriorating, but so far they seem fine and I think I'll wait to see if those dual layer media ever become affordable next year.
I wasn't really sure what you were implying to tell you the truth, but I thought the important part of my post wasn't the first part in response to your post but the latter part about the discrepancy between media capacity and the dollar a song standard that is being put forth.
Doesn't it seem striking that at a dollar a song a consumer grade storage system today in the here-and-now could hold over a hundred thousand dollars worth of music on a one thousand dollar PC. And that's using hard drives. With optical media we're talking a few hundred dollars in blank media costs at most to hold a hundred thousand dollars in so-called intellectual property.
So, maybe I missed your point, but when I read your post it made me stop and think about the implications and it led me in another direction entirely. I still don't quite get the distinction between binary data on one type of plastic disc with a certain kind of dye and another representation of the same data significantly compressed on another plastic disc coated with a different dye that holds more data per disc and uses a different wavelength to read. Technially they're quite similar but the economics are a world apart or at least two orders of magnitude. A penny a song is probably appropriate in persepctive of the media changes if there should be any charge at all which there certainly should not be.
Not in your lifetime? Are you terminally ill? You can build a TB RAID for less than a grand right now. Even encoding at 320kbps which IS CD quality you'll get 4 to 1 compression. So, 150Megs per CD.
To keep it simple, let's say you built a 1.5TB RAID. Well, I'll help you along. A hundred megs times ten is a Gig. A thousand Gigs is a Terrabyte. So, you can get 10,000 full quality CDs in a box that costs less than two grand in today's market. And that's using off the shelf components that are even built into motherboards if you were to use one of the many boards with Via's latest SouthBridge. This isn't tomorrow's technology, it's today. This is consumer grade technology. You can't see this replacing CDs in your lifetime?
If you bought those CDs at the "bargain" ten bucks a piece it would cost almost as much as a house.
The fact is, within the next few years optical media will be so cheap and high density that nobody will thing twice about having a few terrabytes of data lying around. Look, even with 4.7Gig recordable DVDs, you only need two hundred for a TB. But we're told that double sided media is coming out next year and then Blu Ray after that.
The media game ended long ago when the original CD format came out and we moved on to lasers. The captains of industry were asleep at the wheel or just kinda staring out into space all coked out thinking about the next blow job from the secretary pool. These last minute gasps are amusing --I especially like to think of Steve Jobs being sold a cross marketing deal with McDonalds-- but obviously way shy of the mark. The new deal is a dollar a song, but how does that jibe with the reality of optical media and hard drives that can contain hundreds of thousands of dollars in value at those prices selling for a few tens of dollars? There's clearly a lot of magic pixie dust in the air.
Okay, I guess I better go read through their terms of service a bit more carefully. You're saying I can get a number in the States and just take it with me and the network won't know the difference?
If you're still following this thread I'd be interested to know.
Basically because of the time difference between the US and Taiwan calling isn't all that practical for non price reasons, but I'd still be interested to know.