You're on the right track here, but the logical extension is that the DRM is unnecessary - what keeps people buying is the better and more consistent experience of buying from a place like the iTMS (and perhaps a mild warm fuzzy of doing things the legal way, and/or paying the companies and people involved). It's not the stick of DRM, but the carrot of a well-designed service.
As you say, the ability to conveniently obtain the music you want has driven your MP3 download count to nothing. Removing the DRM from the bought tracks would only strengthen that impulse, as well as extend it to people like me who won't buy unless there is no DRM (though I also won't be buying until the price is at least halved - the current rate remains exorbitant, even compared to CD prices where I live, and downloading shared music is legal here).
My guess is that the person doesn't exist at all, and instead was created by someone from Intego. The correspondence Macworld received is fictional. This would be in keeping with Intego's manner of operation in the past. They didn't necessarily create the Trojan and inject it into Limewire, but they'd certainly want to make it known as quickly as possible.
Like most companies selling security software for personal computers, they're basically in the business of marketing snake oil, and that means the creation of FUD. It's a new concept in the Mac world, but age-old for Windows.
From the Intego site:
Intego VirusBarrier X eradicates this Trojan horse, using its virus definitions dated May 11, 2004, and Intego remains diligent to ensure that VirusBarrier X will also eradicate any future viruses that may try to exploit this same technique.
WTF is that supposed to mean? And what is "infection" in the context of a Trojan horse?
In my 25 year experience, the primary use of personal computers is piracy. Most software distribution is unlicenced, and as computers have become capable of handling images, music and video in turn, the unfettered distribution of those media has become the foremost use of computers, in terms of CPU time, bandwidth, storage space, and most importantly human hours spent.
In fact I will go much farther and say that so-called piracy has built the computer industry. Those faster machines, better video cards, mass storage devices of all types, and improved network connections are all driven by the desire to improve the movement of mostly-unlicenced mostly-copyrighted material.
I draw no moral or legal conclusion from this, but I am entirely certain that the computer industry would not exist, or would be a pale, 10MHz shadow of itself, without the widespread, efficient unlicenced copying of material that has been its one defining characteristic pretty much since Bill Gates first objected to it (and ironically, his company has been the biggest beneficiary in the form of its unbelievable market share).
People in the media industry who object to "piracy" are hypocritical, deluded, or possibly both. They depend on it, always have, and always will. Piracy doesn't afflict the market; piracy is the market. If more companies realised that, they could probably save a lot on advertising...
Better still: a slobbery article in Wired vastly overstating the importance of tech journalists. Journalism is mostly logrolling, but this sort of thing is right at the top of the incest dogpile (hmm, if it's phrased that way maybe John Ashcroft will decide he has to do something about it).
That said, being obvious, mundane and not terribly insightful is kind of the point of a column like Mossberg's. He's simply a clearing house for new crap - the person you send it to with an outlook pretty much equivalent to his readers'. They can't try out all the new kit individually, so someone was elected as guinea pig. And from that perspective he really doesn't have much "power" at all, because he has to write pretty much what his audience would have written, or they won't read him. Nothing limits the scope of what one can say like popularity.
What I don't get is why anyone would think calling someone a cunt was in any way pejorative. I mean, they're great. Unless you're a gay male perhaps. I don't give enough of a crap about video game developers to know or care whether Minter is, though. Or their opinions.
Actually, most of our pejoratives make no sense and aren't really pejorative at all. Scum is an essential component of most ecosystems. Fucker describes, well, most every human being througout history except some religious nuts. Lots of people I know are bastards and are perfectly nice (including my mother, in fact). I also know lots of nice bitches, though some of them do tend to drool on me. As do cocksuckers, who are certainly some of my favourite people past and present. And I scarcely need mention why a dick is a perfectly good thing to have.
Even shit has a purpose in the world. We need a nice original pejorative with no other connotation. Which, of course, would kind of defeat the purpose. But I still can't imagine why anyone would dislike cunts. Maybe Minter's just not getting any? That would explain the uptight obsession with things that just don't matter.
Decent interpretation, but one caveat: they're not scientific facts, but merely empirical facts. "Scientific" implies more than mere objective reportability (and especially, more specific constraints on what you can assume).
Most people do conflate the two, however. I get quite tired of hearing about "scientifically proven" facts when there's no scientific method in use, and likewise get tired of people who assume Science can describe all, when it has very definite limits, which are important to its own functioning.
I see the term "safe harbor" a lot in American law. What is it actually supposed to mean, what is it's provenance, and where is it applied? So far it seems a very vague and generic catch-all, but it obviously has some specific meaning to the courts, and seems particularly meaningful in the context of the DMCA.
You certainly did pay for your TV and radio content today. Through the nose in fact. In the process you also lined the pockets of a bunch of advertising middlemen who oughta have been sent off on a Golgafrinchan luxury liner eons ago. And the best part is that if you stopped watching inane TV shows and listening to droning disk jockeys and rancid pop on the radio entirely, you'd still get to pay for it every single day, conveniently bundled with most of the products and services you buy.
Ad-sponsored media isn't free. It's very, very expensive. You just don't have much choice about whether you pay for it.
I can't listen to it on portable MP3 players other than iPod.
And this, of course, is the only reason Apple is bullying Sarovar with baseless legal threats.
A lot of people seem to think it's about walking a fine line with the music industry - that they won't cooperate with Apple and the iTMS if Apple doesn't defend the DRM (and thus Apple is really working for consumers). Maybe the RIAA would react that way, though it's doubtful at this point given the iTMS's profitability to them (not to Apple). But that's not Apple's real concern.
Apple wants control over the iTMS so it can sell iPods and retain its market position in online music sales. In its current view, that means no other players should be able to play iTMS tracks. This is the reason for the threats. Check out some recentlinks.
If the Playfair code exists, another rival music player vendor can incorporate it into their own music player download app (for instance). They could seamlessly support iTMS tracks to their own player, just by supporting straight AAC and stripping Fairplay. I think this is Apple's biggest fear (never mind that the DMCA and like laws would make that illegal in the US and probably the EU). It's not about the RIAA, it's about Rio.
They're probably pretty scared right now. The DMCA takedown against Sourceforge was obvious, but they have no legal basis for these claims in India - it's pure old-fashioned extortion and copyright chill. They must know that, but then you'd think they'd have known that Fairplay would be quickly broken too.
Apple makes great products and if they were content to do that and remain a successful niche player they'd continue to do well. But this kind of bullying turns my stomach; it makes me want to trade in the iBook I'm typing this on for an x86 Linux box, and it puts me off buying the iPod I'd eventually have succumbed to. It damn sure means I'll never spend a cent at the iTMS. I'm not deluded enough to think that means they're shooting themselves in the foot (most people will never hear of these threats or give a damn if they do), but it loses them goodwill in the user community, and that kind of erosion is what's hurting them the most.
The irony is that while Playfair may not be good for their vision of the iPod and iTMS, it is good for Mac sales. So-called piracy has always driven the computer industry, in part because it generally represents the same sort of ease-of-use that Apple is known for.
If you RTFA, you find that the pictures may in fact have been taken with that intention:
As we looked at Todd's extensive sequence of images, we realized we could turn them into a movie. A similar thought may have occurred to Todd himself, for a number of his contemporaries were already making the first forays into chronophotography -- the recording of sequential motion and the forerunner of cinematography. Indeed, Pierre Jules Janssen invented his famous photographic revolver to capture the 1874 transit of Venus.
But intent notwithstanding, the point really is that it's chronophotography. A set of consecutive images isn't a movie, but a set of images with time series data is. This is why the format this movie is in is called "QuickTime" (after "QuickDraw").
By taking the images and carefully recording the time at which each was taken, Todd made a movie. It could have been played back right then in flip-book fashion, and odds are it was - let alone with a zoetrope-style revolver.
Most people probably knew the "four quadrants of knowledge" thing, but didn't know they knew (DK). That is, they have enough to put it together, but have probably never put it into words before. Intuitive knowledge is one way of putting it. The bulk of most people's knowledge probably falls into this category, which is fine - language is often overrated as a conduit of knowledge (not that it's not incredibly useful and important, but other means exist and are constantly used).
I don't actually believe particularly firmly in that model, though, because I don't agree with the D-K dichotomy that underlies it. It's your usual classical Greek quadrant, which means it springs from a dual dichotomy, or in this case a dual-aspect single one. Dichotomy (or even one-dimensional spectra) is not the only way to look at things, but it is a dangerously compelling model - that is, when people have been presented with a dichotomy, they typically become unable to consider without it. And the defence of a dichotomy is usually a tautology - I mean it's obvious, isn't it, you either know something or you don't?;)
Still useful and interesting if you can get it out of your head when needed, though.
The Rolex site mentions that Abba was aware of evaporative cooling through pots from his childhood growing up in a family of potmakers. The problem was that clay pot technology was being lost by these people, replaced by impermeable plastic and aluminum pots sold to them by importers. This is a pretty common pattern when you think about it - culturual colonisers replacing indigenous technologies with supposedly better stuff that's mainly just more profitable to the colonisers. When something's been done for thousands of years, there's usually a good reason for it.
Note that Abba's particular method of making pots may also be a refinement for the evaporative characteristics of the clay. More importantly, technology in a vacuum is a useless thing - it's not just that he had the idea, but that he's turning it into a real, widespread change for his countrymen in a way that integrates with what they were already doing. Read the Rolex site for more information on that. This isn't just a technology award, it's a humanitarian award.
The spark of genius isn't just knowing that something can be done, it's doing it in a time and place where it has real applicability. And doing that in an evolutionary way - not throwing out the baby with the bathwater - has all sorts of extra benefits. If this method was known for 4000 years and wasn't being used by these people, then that's 4000 years of failure. Not something to get all puffed up about.
(btw I'm also Indian - though not from India - and like you I know through my family that absolutely everything of any importance was done by Indians first;)
They may in fact be driven by powerlust, but they don't believe themselves to be. They believe themselves to be driven by ideals - to be idealogues, as the parent poster noted. They will then act in ways consistent with that belief, and become more idealogically driven in order to rationalise those actions. It's a feedback loop, and it's why politicians (and many other people) tend to extremes.
There is a difference between someone's actual motivation, and their perceived motivation. The key point to consider is that they will act in concordance with their perceived motivation, even when it actually opposes their actual motivation - at least for a while and to a large degree (then they turn around like Talleyrand, but that's rare and visible, if easily forgotten).
Me too. That's why I await the end of advertiser-supported television (and other media) entirely. I watch maybe one TV show or broadcast movie every couple of months, and that figure is dropping (probably to reach zero soon as I find more and more independent film venues in my town). I also never watch any ads. But when I buy many products and services I have to pay for the cost of those ads, which means I'm paying for all kinds of TV that I'm not interested in, apparently so I can subsidise those people who are. Because it's virtually impossible to avoid buying anything internationally advertised, I paid part of the salaries of the cast of "Friends" last year - and that sickens me.
I'd happily use a micropayment system for movies and TV shows (if there were any TV worth watching, anyway - if not I can as happily do without it - half the reason I watch any at all is that I know I'm paying for it anyway). I really resent having to support a Hollywood machine I have no interest in.
Actually I've gotten appallingly bad performance when I try to copy from one 802.11 client to another over a base station (any brand). I'm not sure why, but I suspect the collision rate goes through the roof as the device being copied from saturates the link on the way to the base station, and then the base station competes with it to forward packets to the device being copied to. Either that or I'm just doing something wrong.
Anyone else successfully copied large files this way - wireless to wireless across a basic service set - with reasonable performance? I don't get anywhere near 11 Mbps, or even 2 Mbps. By contrast I get great performance between a wired peer (or the Internet) and a wireless one.
If it's the same for this hard drive kit, I can't see it working well.
Actually it is all about cumulative damage, so in a sense you are soaking something up. DNA can be repaired, but the more damage there is, the more likely something really catastrophic will happen. A very high flash dose virtually guarantees enough cells have scrambled machinery that you will die, but the same sort of thing can happen with a small dose over time.
It comes down to how fast and how completely the exposed tissue is replaced or repaired. In this case she's not spending all her time in the hot zone - her visits are sporadic, unlike say the old guy with the horse-drawn cart (who lives there all the time). So she's probably ok, because she has time to heal in between exposures.
Also, there is a way you can take it out with you - by inhaling radioactive particulate (fallout). This is part of the reason smoking is dangerous - all organic matter has a small percentage of radioactive isotopes, and small particles get lodged in the lungs where they just keep on giving. It's also the only real danger in handling stuff like depleted uranium rounds, if there's an opportunity for them to produce dust. Radiation that can't penetrate the skin can hurt you from within your body. She's specifically staying in the centre of the asphalt and away from the irradiated dirt and dust that's washed off to the side of the road, so again she should be ok.
Yes and no - you can certainly see all the song files, but to get back the title and artist organisation, you need to read the iPod's proprietary data file format. That has so far only been possible with reverse-engineered third-party software.
I don't relish finding the particular track I want to retrieve out of the thousands on my iPod by trial and error.
The interesting question is whether they did this as pure obfuscation to placate the RIAA, or in order to work around filesystem weakness (especially with FAT filesystems), or simply because the author of the iPod firmware they purchased chose to do it that way.
I agree that each forward address should also have a reverse address, and if that were what's being checked I'd be fine with it. For an SMTP connection, it's not. Rather, my MTA is saying "HELO something.dyndns.org" and the AOL server is apparently(*) balking when my IP address doesn't resolve back to "something.dyndns.org". Perhaps I could find out what my current IP resolves to and use that for HELO instead - could probably even automate it - but then I may as well just use an external SMTP server.
I don't have a problem with doing a reverse lookup and then a forward lookup based on the name returned, though the actual utility of the data so logged remains questionable.
As for the RFC1918 addresses, I don't see the problem - the external MTA isn't going to ever see that address.
* At least I assume a failed reverse lookup is what's happening. Oddly, I have been able to mail to AOL from my home site in the past. What may be happening is that my entire current IP range is being blacklisted temporarily, in the rolling fashion described elsewhere in this discussion. That's even more reprehensible, since this is a large ISP with gobs of customers using both ADSL and dialup. If AOL continue to make themselves more and more unreachable, they'll slowly but surely lose customers.
I have no reverse resolution, because I send mail directly from exim on a roaming notebook with a dyndns.org address. The only place I can't send mail is AOL. Unless a whole lot is getting dropped on the floor silently (which doesn't appear to be the case, since people are getting my mail).
PTR records are nice, but they're not always possible and they shouldn't be required by a receiving system. They offer no real defence against spam nor anything else.
You're not supposed to be "interested in music". You're supposed to be a passive consumer of it. If you were interested, they'd have to keep producing novel, innovative stuff to meet your interest. If you just eat up any old drivel, the cost of producing that drivel is much lower. This can in turn drive the price down and everyone's better off and music more available, in a sort of trickle-down economics. Picky "music lovers" are frankly just spoiling it for everyone by raising the barrier to success and keeping prices high.
Once all of the "interested" types are properly behind bars, the music industry can really get rolling.
(seriously, there's no "creative industry" that's fond of its aesthete fans, whether it's music, film, software, or industrial design - the people you cater to are the teeming masses who don't really care too much about what they're being sold.)
Not only does it not help, it does harm, since the small site keeps getting hit for the inline images.
There is no real distinction between the slashdot effect and a DDOS; Slashdot should think itself lucky this hasn't come up in the courts yet. It will. This guy does business through his website (selling the fruits of all the electricity). One day someone will be inconvenienced and have no sense of humour about it.
A proper mirror for small sites in an upcoming story is a necessity. Slashdot should already be contacting site owners to warn them before posting a story and knowingly sending them a huge flood of visitors that they may not be able to deal with, so copyright issues could be worked out then. A standard "we'll only mirror it for 24 hours" deal would be fine with most everyone. Some story submitters are already doing this, but it's not their responsibility - it's slashdots.
This problem will eventually result in a lawsuit if it's not addressed. It stopped being funny years ago.
I agree, but there is one additional point - other OS and hardware development has been driven not by game sales, but free copying of games (aka piracy). Widespread piracy is why computers and media have become popular and dropped in price and it's certainly why Windows achieved the popularity it has (Windows itself is commonly copied for free, but I'm referring here specifically to games as a driving force, which I believe they are).
I remember when floppy disks were $50 for a box of ten (5.25"). I watched the price drop as the volume of sales went up, and I knew for sure what was being stored on them, because I was one of the people buying them (along with everyone I knew). Same applies to CD-R blanks and burners, larger hard drives, more RAM, better video cards, faster processors, etc - but also the OS platform to use it all. People often wonder why the computer market grew if all people wanted was a machine fast enough to run a word processor (however bloated). Here's your answer - that isn't what they were doing with their time.
People take OSes for granted as a way to play all the free games they share. Historically "free" has meant "pirated", but Linux presents other possibilities. A few open-source engines and quality user-supplied mods could create a fertile gaming community - people have amply demonstrated that given the tools, they'll develop these for free. Once that market is established, commercial developers will begin to move in too. They may pursue more typical proprietary models in which case their work will be widely copied without licence, but they'll still make money, as piracy is largely just free marketing rather than representing much actual lost sales.
So the way out of the catch-22 in the past has been to end-around "not enough people willing to pay for games" by turning a blind eye to free copying and allowing piracy to develop the market. In the future, Linux may be able to do the same thing with free copying that really is FREE.
Today is infinitely better than 1948, when I was born
Hell, yes. Though note that the old conditions you mention in this and another post are faithfully preserved in other parts of the world - the majority, in fact. Disease, famine, slavery, mortality in childbirth, etc. Our technological tools cannot, IMO, be separated from the social environment that develops, produces and distributes them, and I find myself more guarded in my optimism than you. In part this is because of the very recent history of real post-industrial technology; basically the span of your life to date (more on that below).
and 2060 will be so much better than this, superlatives become ineffective.
This we cannot say. Again, the sample of time you're predicting from is short - so short and unprecedented that it's impossible to make a meaningful extrapolation to an even farther point in the future. There has to be a balance, and every positive has a corresponding negative, which is essentially its cost. We're just now arriving at the point where we can understand and reflect on that cost, and we're frankly a little alarmed at ourselves. That's the source of much of the perfectly natural paranoia and pessimism you describe.
We're realising our mortality as a technological species, in effect. In the 1950s it seemed that new technology would solve every problem in time. Now we find that many of the solutions have created their own problems. Is it worth it? I refer you again to "Hell, yes". But the best anyone can or should be able to manage these days is that guarded optimism I also mentioned. It's possible that 2060 will be heaven on Earth. It's also possible that this is a Type 13 planet. The only real difference is the caution with which we develop and apply technology.
blockquote> The sky is NOT the limit
Maybe it isn't, but there IS always a limit, and that's what we've only begun to realise. We are finite beings on a vulnerable world, and there is a widely growing and very deeply rooted belief that it's a world we need to get way more in tune with if we know what's good for us (and a corollary uneasiness that we don't, which largely manifests as fear of technology). That's my personal interpretation of Tolkein's fantasy worldview, which ended up as not dissimilar from every natural cosmology before it. We now have a rash of technological tools and we'll always have more on the way, but we need to develop an understanding of how to meld them with the world in a less brutish way. Again I fall back on my guarded optimism - guarded because there's been an almost complete failure to do this until recently, but optimistic because I see an awareness of this fact arising. It may "slow us down" a bit, but that's not a bad thing any more than it's a good thing. There's no schedule to keep.
No one (well, almost) wants a wholesale return to a pretechnological age, but the point of our civil evolution ought to be that we can take the best of nature, history, and technology and combine them in some vaguely harmonious way. Think of it as the Taoist approach to design. I don't know or really give a rat's ass whether that's what Tolkein described or wanted, but it's what I want. I recognise that some technologies simply don't play well with others, and will probably have to go (combustion-powered, individually human-driven SUVs are right out). And I'm not talking about some monstrous Borg future. Just a rational use of technology that capitalises on this AMAZING world without trying to replace it. You co-authored a couple o' books on zero-gravity dance, a combination of some of the most primal and wonderfully inexplicable human drives set in a very technological space. So really I suspect you already know what I'm getting at.
btw speaking of moldy old stuff I've read;), what was the inspiration for Mucous Moose, the Mucilage Machine? I think I've got the right author.;)
Slashdot Mirror
You're on the right track here, but the logical extension is that the DRM is unnecessary - what keeps people buying is the better and more consistent experience of buying from a place like the iTMS (and perhaps a mild warm fuzzy of doing things the legal way, and/or paying the companies and people involved). It's not the stick of DRM, but the carrot of a well-designed service.
As you say, the ability to conveniently obtain the music you want has driven your MP3 download count to nothing. Removing the DRM from the bought tracks would only strengthen that impulse, as well as extend it to people like me who won't buy unless there is no DRM (though I also won't be buying until the price is at least halved - the current rate remains exorbitant, even compared to CD prices where I live, and downloading shared music is legal here).
Oh, well!
No matter.
Like most companies selling security software for personal computers, they're basically in the business of marketing snake oil, and that means the creation of FUD. It's a new concept in the Mac world, but age-old for Windows.
From the Intego site:
WTF is that supposed to mean? And what is "infection" in the context of a Trojan horse?
In my 25 year experience, the primary use of personal computers is piracy. Most software distribution is unlicenced, and as computers have become capable of handling images, music and video in turn, the unfettered distribution of those media has become the foremost use of computers, in terms of CPU time, bandwidth, storage space, and most importantly human hours spent.
In fact I will go much farther and say that so-called piracy has built the computer industry. Those faster machines, better video cards, mass storage devices of all types, and improved network connections are all driven by the desire to improve the movement of mostly-unlicenced mostly-copyrighted material.
I draw no moral or legal conclusion from this, but I am entirely certain that the computer industry would not exist, or would be a pale, 10MHz shadow of itself, without the widespread, efficient unlicenced copying of material that has been its one defining characteristic pretty much since Bill Gates first objected to it (and ironically, his company has been the biggest beneficiary in the form of its unbelievable market share).
People in the media industry who object to "piracy" are hypocritical, deluded, or possibly both. They depend on it, always have, and always will. Piracy doesn't afflict the market; piracy is the market. If more companies realised that, they could probably save a lot on advertising...
Better still: a slobbery article in Wired vastly overstating the importance of tech journalists. Journalism is mostly logrolling, but this sort of thing is right at the top of the incest dogpile (hmm, if it's phrased that way maybe John Ashcroft will decide he has to do something about it).
That said, being obvious, mundane and not terribly insightful is kind of the point of a column like Mossberg's. He's simply a clearing house for new crap - the person you send it to with an outlook pretty much equivalent to his readers'. They can't try out all the new kit individually, so someone was elected as guinea pig. And from that perspective he really doesn't have much "power" at all, because he has to write pretty much what his audience would have written, or they won't read him. Nothing limits the scope of what one can say like popularity.
What I don't get is why anyone would think calling someone a cunt was in any way pejorative. I mean, they're great. Unless you're a gay male perhaps. I don't give enough of a crap about video game developers to know or care whether Minter is, though. Or their opinions.
Actually, most of our pejoratives make no sense and aren't really pejorative at all. Scum is an essential component of most ecosystems. Fucker describes, well, most every human being througout history except some religious nuts. Lots of people I know are bastards and are perfectly nice (including my mother, in fact). I also know lots of nice bitches, though some of them do tend to drool on me. As do cocksuckers, who are certainly some of my favourite people past and present. And I scarcely need mention why a dick is a perfectly good thing to have.
Even shit has a purpose in the world. We need a nice original pejorative with no other connotation. Which, of course, would kind of defeat the purpose. But I still can't imagine why anyone would dislike cunts. Maybe Minter's just not getting any? That would explain the uptight obsession with things that just don't matter.
Thanks for reading.
Decent interpretation, but one caveat: they're not scientific facts, but merely empirical facts. "Scientific" implies more than mere objective reportability (and especially, more specific constraints on what you can assume).
Most people do conflate the two, however. I get quite tired of hearing about "scientifically proven" facts when there's no scientific method in use, and likewise get tired of people who assume Science can describe all, when it has very definite limits, which are important to its own functioning.
I see the term "safe harbor" a lot in American law. What is it actually supposed to mean, what is it's provenance, and where is it applied? So far it seems a very vague and generic catch-all, but it obviously has some specific meaning to the courts, and seems particularly meaningful in the context of the DMCA.
You certainly did pay for your TV and radio content today. Through the nose in fact. In the process you also lined the pockets of a bunch of advertising middlemen who oughta have been sent off on a Golgafrinchan luxury liner eons ago. And the best part is that if you stopped watching inane TV shows and listening to droning disk jockeys and rancid pop on the radio entirely, you'd still get to pay for it every single day, conveniently bundled with most of the products and services you buy.
Ad-sponsored media isn't free. It's very, very expensive. You just don't have much choice about whether you pay for it.
And this, of course, is the only reason Apple is bullying Sarovar with baseless legal threats.
A lot of people seem to think it's about walking a fine line with the music industry - that they won't cooperate with Apple and the iTMS if Apple doesn't defend the DRM (and thus Apple is really working for consumers). Maybe the RIAA would react that way, though it's doubtful at this point given the iTMS's profitability to them (not to Apple). But that's not Apple's real concern.
Apple wants control over the iTMS so it can sell iPods and retain its market position in online music sales. In its current view, that means no other players should be able to play iTMS tracks. This is the reason for the threats. Check out some recent links.
If the Playfair code exists, another rival music player vendor can incorporate it into their own music player download app (for instance). They could seamlessly support iTMS tracks to their own player, just by supporting straight AAC and stripping Fairplay. I think this is Apple's biggest fear (never mind that the DMCA and like laws would make that illegal in the US and probably the EU). It's not about the RIAA, it's about Rio.
They're probably pretty scared right now. The DMCA takedown against Sourceforge was obvious, but they have no legal basis for these claims in India - it's pure old-fashioned extortion and copyright chill. They must know that, but then you'd think they'd have known that Fairplay would be quickly broken too.
Apple makes great products and if they were content to do that and remain a successful niche player they'd continue to do well. But this kind of bullying turns my stomach; it makes me want to trade in the iBook I'm typing this on for an x86 Linux box, and it puts me off buying the iPod I'd eventually have succumbed to. It damn sure means I'll never spend a cent at the iTMS. I'm not deluded enough to think that means they're shooting themselves in the foot (most people will never hear of these threats or give a damn if they do), but it loses them goodwill in the user community, and that kind of erosion is what's hurting them the most.
The irony is that while Playfair may not be good for their vision of the iPod and iTMS, it is good for Mac sales. So-called piracy has always driven the computer industry, in part because it generally represents the same sort of ease-of-use that Apple is known for.
But intent notwithstanding, the point really is that it's chronophotography. A set of consecutive images isn't a movie, but a set of images with time series data is. This is why the format this movie is in is called "QuickTime" (after "QuickDraw").
By taking the images and carefully recording the time at which each was taken, Todd made a movie. It could have been played back right then in flip-book fashion, and odds are it was - let alone with a zoetrope-style revolver.
Most people probably knew the "four quadrants of knowledge" thing, but didn't know they knew (DK). That is, they have enough to put it together, but have probably never put it into words before. Intuitive knowledge is one way of putting it. The bulk of most people's knowledge probably falls into this category, which is fine - language is often overrated as a conduit of knowledge (not that it's not incredibly useful and important, but other means exist and are constantly used).
;)
I don't actually believe particularly firmly in that model, though, because I don't agree with the D-K dichotomy that underlies it. It's your usual classical Greek quadrant, which means it springs from a dual dichotomy, or in this case a dual-aspect single one. Dichotomy (or even one-dimensional spectra) is not the only way to look at things, but it is a dangerously compelling model - that is, when people have been presented with a dichotomy, they typically become unable to consider without it. And the defence of a dichotomy is usually a tautology - I mean it's obvious, isn't it, you either know something or you don't?
Still useful and interesting if you can get it out of your head when needed, though.
The Rolex site mentions that Abba was aware of evaporative cooling through pots from his childhood growing up in a family of potmakers. The problem was that clay pot technology was being lost by these people, replaced by impermeable plastic and aluminum pots sold to them by importers. This is a pretty common pattern when you think about it - culturual colonisers replacing indigenous technologies with supposedly better stuff that's mainly just more profitable to the colonisers. When something's been done for thousands of years, there's usually a good reason for it.
;)
Note that Abba's particular method of making pots may also be a refinement for the evaporative characteristics of the clay. More importantly, technology in a vacuum is a useless thing - it's not just that he had the idea, but that he's turning it into a real, widespread change for his countrymen in a way that integrates with what they were already doing. Read the Rolex site for more information on that. This isn't just a technology award, it's a humanitarian award.
The spark of genius isn't just knowing that something can be done, it's doing it in a time and place where it has real applicability. And doing that in an evolutionary way - not throwing out the baby with the bathwater - has all sorts of extra benefits. If this method was known for 4000 years and wasn't being used by these people, then that's 4000 years of failure. Not something to get all puffed up about.
(btw I'm also Indian - though not from India - and like you I know through my family that absolutely everything of any importance was done by Indians first
s/idealog/ideolog/g - it's late, and about to get later.
They may in fact be driven by powerlust, but they don't believe themselves to be. They believe themselves to be driven by ideals - to be idealogues, as the parent poster noted. They will then act in ways consistent with that belief, and become more idealogically driven in order to rationalise those actions. It's a feedback loop, and it's why politicians (and many other people) tend to extremes.
There is a difference between someone's actual motivation, and their perceived motivation. The key point to consider is that they will act in concordance with their perceived motivation, even when it actually opposes their actual motivation - at least for a while and to a large degree (then they turn around like Talleyrand, but that's rare and visible, if easily forgotten).
Me too. That's why I await the end of advertiser-supported television (and other media) entirely. I watch maybe one TV show or broadcast movie every couple of months, and that figure is dropping (probably to reach zero soon as I find more and more independent film venues in my town). I also never watch any ads. But when I buy many products and services I have to pay for the cost of those ads, which means I'm paying for all kinds of TV that I'm not interested in, apparently so I can subsidise those people who are. Because it's virtually impossible to avoid buying anything internationally advertised, I paid part of the salaries of the cast of "Friends" last year - and that sickens me.
I'd happily use a micropayment system for movies and TV shows (if there were any TV worth watching, anyway - if not I can as happily do without it - half the reason I watch any at all is that I know I'm paying for it anyway). I really resent having to support a Hollywood machine I have no interest in.
Actually I've gotten appallingly bad performance when I try to copy from one 802.11 client to another over a base station (any brand). I'm not sure why, but I suspect the collision rate goes through the roof as the device being copied from saturates the link on the way to the base station, and then the base station competes with it to forward packets to the device being copied to. Either that or I'm just doing something wrong.
Anyone else successfully copied large files this way - wireless to wireless across a basic service set - with reasonable performance? I don't get anywhere near 11 Mbps, or even 2 Mbps. By contrast I get great performance between a wired peer (or the Internet) and a wireless one.
If it's the same for this hard drive kit, I can't see it working well.
Actually it is all about cumulative damage, so in a sense you are soaking something up. DNA can be repaired, but the more damage there is, the more likely something really catastrophic will happen. A very high flash dose virtually guarantees enough cells have scrambled machinery that you will die, but the same sort of thing can happen with a small dose over time.
It comes down to how fast and how completely the exposed tissue is replaced or repaired. In this case she's not spending all her time in the hot zone - her visits are sporadic, unlike say the old guy with the horse-drawn cart (who lives there all the time). So she's probably ok, because she has time to heal in between exposures.
Also, there is a way you can take it out with you - by inhaling radioactive particulate (fallout). This is part of the reason smoking is dangerous - all organic matter has a small percentage of radioactive isotopes, and small particles get lodged in the lungs where they just keep on giving. It's also the only real danger in handling stuff like depleted uranium rounds, if there's an opportunity for them to produce dust. Radiation that can't penetrate the skin can hurt you from within your body. She's specifically staying in the centre of the asphalt and away from the irradiated dirt and dust that's washed off to the side of the road, so again she should be ok.
Yes and no - you can certainly see all the song files, but to get back the title and artist organisation, you need to read the iPod's proprietary data file format. That has so far only been possible with reverse-engineered third-party software.
I don't relish finding the particular track I want to retrieve out of the thousands on my iPod by trial and error.
The interesting question is whether they did this as pure obfuscation to placate the RIAA, or in order to work around filesystem weakness (especially with FAT filesystems), or simply because the author of the iPod firmware they purchased chose to do it that way.
I agree that each forward address should also have a reverse address, and if that were what's being checked I'd be fine with it. For an SMTP connection, it's not. Rather, my MTA is saying "HELO something.dyndns.org" and the AOL server is apparently(*) balking when my IP address doesn't resolve back to "something.dyndns.org". Perhaps I could find out what my current IP resolves to and use that for HELO instead - could probably even automate it - but then I may as well just use an external SMTP server.
I don't have a problem with doing a reverse lookup and then a forward lookup based on the name returned, though the actual utility of the data so logged remains questionable.
As for the RFC1918 addresses, I don't see the problem - the external MTA isn't going to ever see that address.
* At least I assume a failed reverse lookup is what's happening. Oddly, I have been able to mail to AOL from my home site in the past. What may be happening is that my entire current IP range is being blacklisted temporarily, in the rolling fashion described elsewhere in this discussion. That's even more reprehensible, since this is a large ISP with gobs of customers using both ADSL and dialup. If AOL continue to make themselves more and more unreachable, they'll slowly but surely lose customers.
I have no reverse resolution, because I send mail directly from exim on a roaming notebook with a dyndns.org address. The only place I can't send mail is AOL. Unless a whole lot is getting dropped on the floor silently (which doesn't appear to be the case, since people are getting my mail).
PTR records are nice, but they're not always possible and they shouldn't be required by a receiving system. They offer no real defence against spam nor anything else.
You're not supposed to be "interested in music". You're supposed to be a passive consumer of it. If you were interested, they'd have to keep producing novel, innovative stuff to meet your interest. If you just eat up any old drivel, the cost of producing that drivel is much lower. This can in turn drive the price down and everyone's better off and music more available, in a sort of trickle-down economics. Picky "music lovers" are frankly just spoiling it for everyone by raising the barrier to success and keeping prices high.
Once all of the "interested" types are properly behind bars, the music industry can really get rolling.
(seriously, there's no "creative industry" that's fond of its aesthete fans, whether it's music, film, software, or industrial design - the people you cater to are the teeming masses who don't really care too much about what they're being sold.)
Not only does it not help, it does harm, since the small site keeps getting hit for the inline images.
There is no real distinction between the slashdot effect and a DDOS; Slashdot should think itself lucky this hasn't come up in the courts yet. It will. This guy does business through his website (selling the fruits of all the electricity). One day someone will be inconvenienced and have no sense of humour about it.
A proper mirror for small sites in an upcoming story is a necessity. Slashdot should already be contacting site owners to warn them before posting a story and knowingly sending them a huge flood of visitors that they may not be able to deal with, so copyright issues could be worked out then. A standard "we'll only mirror it for 24 hours" deal would be fine with most everyone. Some story submitters are already doing this, but it's not their responsibility - it's slashdots.
This problem will eventually result in a lawsuit if it's not addressed. It stopped being funny years ago.
I agree, but there is one additional point - other OS and hardware development has been driven not by game sales, but free copying of games (aka piracy). Widespread piracy is why computers and media have become popular and dropped in price and it's certainly why Windows achieved the popularity it has (Windows itself is commonly copied for free, but I'm referring here specifically to games as a driving force, which I believe they are).
I remember when floppy disks were $50 for a box of ten (5.25"). I watched the price drop as the volume of sales went up, and I knew for sure what was being stored on them, because I was one of the people buying them (along with everyone I knew). Same applies to CD-R blanks and burners, larger hard drives, more RAM, better video cards, faster processors, etc - but also the OS platform to use it all. People often wonder why the computer market grew if all people wanted was a machine fast enough to run a word processor (however bloated). Here's your answer - that isn't what they were doing with their time.
People take OSes for granted as a way to play all the free games they share. Historically "free" has meant "pirated", but Linux presents other possibilities. A few open-source engines and quality user-supplied mods could create a fertile gaming community - people have amply demonstrated that given the tools, they'll develop these for free. Once that market is established, commercial developers will begin to move in too. They may pursue more typical proprietary models in which case their work will be widely copied without licence, but they'll still make money, as piracy is largely just free marketing rather than representing much actual lost sales.
So the way out of the catch-22 in the past has been to end-around "not enough people willing to pay for games" by turning a blind eye to free copying and allowing piracy to develop the market. In the future, Linux may be able to do the same thing with free copying that really is FREE.
Hell, yes. Though note that the old conditions you mention in this and another post are faithfully preserved in other parts of the world - the majority, in fact. Disease, famine, slavery, mortality in childbirth, etc. Our technological tools cannot, IMO, be separated from the social environment that develops, produces and distributes them, and I find myself more guarded in my optimism than you. In part this is because of the very recent history of real post-industrial technology; basically the span of your life to date (more on that below).
This we cannot say. Again, the sample of time you're predicting from is short - so short and unprecedented that it's impossible to make a meaningful extrapolation to an even farther point in the future. There has to be a balance, and every positive has a corresponding negative, which is essentially its cost. We're just now arriving at the point where we can understand and reflect on that cost, and we're frankly a little alarmed at ourselves. That's the source of much of the perfectly natural paranoia and pessimism you describe. We're realising our mortality as a technological species, in effect. In the 1950s it seemed that new technology would solve every problem in time. Now we find that many of the solutions have created their own problems. Is it worth it? I refer you again to "Hell, yes". But the best anyone can or should be able to manage these days is that guarded optimism I also mentioned. It's possible that 2060 will be heaven on Earth. It's also possible that this is a Type 13 planet. The only real difference is the caution with which we develop and apply technology.
blockquote> The sky is NOT the limit
Maybe it isn't, but there IS always a limit, and that's what we've only begun to realise. We are finite beings on a vulnerable world, and there is a widely growing and very deeply rooted belief that it's a world we need to get way more in tune with if we know what's good for us (and a corollary uneasiness that we don't, which largely manifests as fear of technology). That's my personal interpretation of Tolkein's fantasy worldview, which ended up as not dissimilar from every natural cosmology before it. We now have a rash of technological tools and we'll always have more on the way, but we need to develop an understanding of how to meld them with the world in a less brutish way. Again I fall back on my guarded optimism - guarded because there's been an almost complete failure to do this until recently, but optimistic because I see an awareness of this fact arising. It may "slow us down" a bit, but that's not a bad thing any more than it's a good thing. There's no schedule to keep.
No one (well, almost) wants a wholesale return to a pretechnological age, but the point of our civil evolution ought to be that we can take the best of nature, history, and technology and combine them in some vaguely harmonious way. Think of it as the Taoist approach to design. I don't know or really give a rat's ass whether that's what Tolkein described or wanted, but it's what I want. I recognise that some technologies simply don't play well with others, and will probably have to go (combustion-powered, individually human-driven SUVs are right out). And I'm not talking about some monstrous Borg future. Just a rational use of technology that capitalises on this AMAZING world without trying to replace it. You co-authored a couple o' books on zero-gravity dance, a combination of some of the most primal and wonderfully inexplicable human drives set in a very technological space. So really I suspect you already know what I'm getting at.
btw speaking of moldy old stuff I've read ;), what was the inspiration for Mucous Moose, the Mucilage Machine? I think I've got the right author. ;)