I can't imagine taking pictures anymore if I had to pay for film. Out of curiosity, except for issues with dynamic range (which isn't far behind) what do you think film is better at? (In 35mm at any rate.)
And yes, I agree with you about CD-ROMs. I don't use them for backup, I just took a retired 40GB drive and I back up to it, storing it in my safe-deposit box.
Tough luck then, running an OS where it's a pain to get critical bug-fixes without also downloading a bunch of cruft.
That said, even I, a non-MS type, know that it's possible to setup a Win2k (or XP I assume) server box to download and pass patches to all your other machines, they way you can control what they auto-update to.
The only drawback of this is that MS still doesn't release fine-grain patches, they tend to fix ten bugs, introduce two new ones, and introduce a few "features" with each update, so you don't really have all the control an admin wants. Better than nothing though, and having an extra step in the way means that your client machines get all the patches you approve without the danger of letting them auto-update (and maybe download a virus, or update that "accidently" breaks your third-party software.
Really though, the only good protection I saw for code-red, for companies that had MS servers (some ISPs selling co-lo space, for instance) was to transparently route all incoming web traffic through an unaffected type of machine and drop all malformed requests, as well as adding certain IPs to a block list. But that requires a skilled admin who keeps up with the details of the current exploits and can write some custom firewall configs.
Gearheads prefer processes to threads because they get enforced security. You can't go walking over another process' data, but you can with a thread.
Avoiding global variables does avoid the number of locks you need in your code but it doesn't actually make anything safer. All the memory you allocate by your threads is in the same memory space, walking off the end of one thread's array will likely clobber something in another thread.
Processes are inherently safer from a security point of view too. Each process runs with just enough privelleges to perform its task and a hole in a lower-privellege process doesn't risk clobbering an important process. (Like the way sshd was recently split into multiple processes.)
Why does implementing a thread/cpu affinity in the scheduler lead to the ability to starve other processes?
I'd just think that, all else being equal, threads of process X all run on CPU 1, etc. But if you don't have any scheduled to run, you run something else...
Also, do you think HyperThreading is here to stay, or is it just a half-way point to CPUs having caches for CPU-state, allowing quick context switches between processes? I seems that this is the best way to go, eventually allowing hyper-threading's pipeline sharing feature but between unrelated pieces of code.
I don't mind the thread model much, I'm not a purist (I use Perl, to be "pure CompSci" would be somewhat of a contradiction:) but it does distress me to see that many university educated programmers don't know how to work without threads (within one process). I think their over-reliance on threads hurts them by making their programs much more complex than they need to be. Modern programmers, to whom everything looks like an object in search of a thread.
Are the markets comparable? When you buy into Apple (for better or worse) you know up-front that you're getting Apple hardware, specified, designed, and built by Apple. As long as they don't expire their old OSes, it seems fair.
If Apple tried to leverage their monopoly to control new markets, perhaps by saying that come 2003, only Apple scanners would work, or HDs from Apple's partner companies, that would be unfair.
And really, that's what Microsoft would be doing, using their OS monopoly to dictate to the hardware companies.
Now, I don't like controlled markets like that. It's why I use PCs with AMD CPUs and why I run Linux. But if I went Apple, I couldn't help but go into it eyes open.
That said, I think Apple should provide OSes for free, at least to proven owners of Mac hardware (to prevent providing it free to people running emulators or something.) Not only could they use it to support their hardware business, but it'd encourage everyone to upgrade more quickly, boosting the market-share of their latest OS, always important to get drivers written for it, etc.
It makes it easier to transfer to someone else, or store on a portable player.
And with 24b/96khz music supposed to be released soon, we'll see even more benefit from compressing it.
In many ways, the lack of good disk options (DVD) helps the solid-state storage industry. 1GB Compact Flash media exists now (and not just the IBM hard-drives) which beats CD-ROM all to hell. (Except for compatibility, which would be better if everyone had a PCMCIA slot.)
Which cameras do you have that you'd use TIFF mode and RAW mode? A Canon and something else I'd assume, or are the TIFFs just converted RAWs you haven't done anything with? And something recent (high res) to explain the 60-90GB part...
I've got a G2 and I've taken 7500 pictures with it in the three months I've had it. I usually shoot in JPG though when it's "just friends" and save RAW for important stuff. The speed, or lack, of converting RAWs slows things down a bit.
I'd like to pick up a D60 someday (well, I wouldn't turn down a 1D, but they're just kinda pricey). As good as the G2 is, the lack of lenses and the slow autofocus of consumer-level cameras is an issue.
I noticed this when I bought a printer. I had heard rumours of this and only when I asked the salesman directly did he tell me about it. Turns out the only brand (of HP, Epson, Lexmark?, and Canon) that gives you a full cartridge is Canon.
I also looked at the refill kits. Epson and HP had expensive refill kits and you bought new print heads with them when you bought an official refill. Canon not only had every color in a seperate tank (greta for me because I use a lot of highlight color, it won't drain all tanks equally) but you could buy official refills of just the tanks, changing the print head only when it needs it. And the Canon refills were a third the price of those for other printers. (I'm guessing because of the ease, and because there's no monitor chip you need to replace or reset.)
So, not to sound like a Canon advert, but I bought an S750 and have been very happy with it. Especially because I've bought something that I know isn't going to get more expensive when I try to maintain it. The funny thing is that I'm too lazy to refill my own, but just having the option is enough. That way is official supplies ever got real expensive I'd have an out.
Most people miss the whole point of having source code available...
Imagine open-source bridges. In a world where architectural drawings are kept secret you get a group of architects who design bridges (and likely other structures) and they release the drawings requried for you to hire a team of contractors and build your own bridge.
Now, "what use is this" you ask? "I'm never going to have a bridge built and I couldn't decipher the drawings anyways!?" Well, sure, there's no direct benefit. Just like most Linux users aren't going to bother reading 99.9% of the source code, if any.
But it's not something you have to be involved in.
You can drive over open source bridges knowing that the best minds in architecture have seen them and not found any problems. You can rest assured that any Tacoma-Narrows type disasters are avoided, and if any potential weaknesses are found, the bridges you use will be identified to have them (or not) and fixed immediately, instead of the designer's company saying there are no issues for PR reasons and trying to stealthily retrofit repairs next time they paint it.
Similarly, with Ogg, you don't have to read the source to benefit. You know that because it's open source and released royalty free that companies can continue supporting it until the end of time. And because nobody needs to reimplement anything to get around an undocumented feature, or reverse engineer through a lack of documentation, that all versions of it will interoperate as desired. Not all MP3 players (especially hardware) support variable-bit-rate MP3s, wouldn't it suck if you ripped your whole collection in this fashion and then found that your wonderful "standard" MP3 player wouldn't use them? Rip in OGG format and be assured that this won't happen.
Also, rest assured that Ogg is on the cutting edge. Because the source and design processes are all open source you know that if some university student stumbles across some new signal processing technique to perform even more transparent encoding that they'll be able to download the Ogg source and try it in a production-quality codec. In fact, as part of their thesis they'll release the technique, already coded into Ogg, and the properly designed format will guarantee that the existing decoders can play the file, despite the encoder being state of the art, using tricks that weren't invented when the decoder was written, or likely, turned into silicon.
But because none of this requires your participation, it'll be done even if you don't pay attention. Already many of the biggest suppliers of MP3s are switching to Ogg. Look at the collections of the people you see on Kazaa. Find someone with 5k+ songs they ripped themselves and you'll probably find they're Oggs, because people who sit there ripping care about quality. You'll benefit, even if you do nothing, because eventually Oggs will be everywhere, players will support them, and your music listening experience will be better without you lifting a finger. But that'll get here faster if you do help.
The same argument holds for the whole open-source debate. I want an open source, multi-sourced, industry standard operating system. I want teams of experts going over the IP stack, web servers, and other critical code looking for flaws. It may not be perfect, but it's the best choice. Only a platform like this can be trusted enough for run your business, or simply trust that a whole in your personal webserver isn't going to let a worm delete all your personal files. I don't dismantle my car and go through with a fine-toothed comb, but I buy on the recomendation of those who do. If they weren't allowed, I wouldn't buy that car. Why should I lower my standards in any other industry?
I think the main resistance to using other languages in the kernel-building process is that you have to have them installed. Neither Perl nor Python produces a stand-alone runtime.
One of the goals is to make the same code compile on any platform with only a makefile difference. If you require fairly heavy-weight runtimes you limit the platforms you can run things on.
Re:Mods aren't always good for gamers . . .
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I can.:)
If they can't write something with a decent client-server architecture there'll always be cheating. If they scan for simple stuff it'll simply mean that only people with a "large" investment in it can cheat. I'd rather have a game like Ultima Online where everyone could cheat, so I knew not to trust it, than one where two people could cheat but they were taking money to produce items or level-up characters for everyone else.
If a game developer choses to use a p2p game model where any peer can tell the others that something happened (and not - "my client moved left", but "my client picked up gold") obviously doesn't care enough about security to do it right.
It's like MS blaming script kiddies for crashing servers. Sure, it's technically the fault of the person pressing the 'Nuke' button, but these attackers will always exist. In a world like this you need to develop secure products.
From the resolution of your brother's camera, I'd guess it's a Canon G2...
Anyways, that guy was probably talking about maximum quality JPGs... It's still much larger than a 1600x1200 should be (2mb) but JPEG compression takes time and some cameras skimp on it. I could see 2mb if they were used to shooting complex scenes and had everything cranked.
My Canon G2 averages about 1.1MB per picture at large, and one step away from maximum compression.
But with the Canon's, you don't ever really need to go higher than that. If you're considering going to a higher compression you switch to shooting in RAW and get all the benefits. Other cameras with TIFFs don't compress the image, but they adjust the white-balance and everything, which is lossy. And TIFFs are huge.
It's a fair risk. It's like if I wanted to distribute Foo brand hair gel in Russia. I'd buy a bunch of try to sell it there. The shipping and local advertising costs are mine, helped only by whatever global advertising Foo Corp has bought.
Loki offered a real product, took a real risk, and didn't make it. Unlike all the companies like Rambus who don't offer a product, don't take risks, and expect to cash in big by screwing everyone over with a product they don't want or need.
Loki may have died, but someone will make it work. There's a real market there, even if it's smaller than others. In fact, there might be a larger market there, when divided among all the players, than the Windows market. Especially since they can choose to only port games that are proven winners. (Or easy games, like Quake-Engine games that are most of the way there already.)
Actually, I think that margin of error makes sense. It's hard to identify linux computers. They tend to identify themselves as IE on Windows just to get websites to work.
And what counts as a user? If I have three computers, do I count as three people instead of one? Or if two are Linux and one is Windows, do I count as 2/3rds of a user for Linux?
For Windows they can simply claim every sale (except upgrades) as a new user. It might not be accurate, but it's easier to count and harder to refute. (Despite the fact that by this logic I count as six MS users, because of computers at work that came with OSes despite being turned into Linux boxes.)
Rather, I'd be suspicious of anyone claiming to have accurate numbers.
Heh, quality of programming will go down? That's a nasty prediction. The TV arguments are actually a little distant for me, I haven't watched TV in almost a year.
Could you have just gone 'back' and gotten your reply? Mozilla is pretty good about keep the contents of forms, but I'm not sure about other browsers...
By the way, I don't think you need to be self-contradictory to be anti-copyright and strongly pro-GPL. The GPL is intended to subvert copyright, to use the ever increasing strength of the copyright laws against the robber-barons that keep increasing it's length and strength. In fact, I think the people most opposed to copyright should be the strongest supporters of the GPL.
I'm not against copyright, but I think the foundations of our most important technology shouldn't be locked up by even many corporations. I think specs and source-code for implementing a basic compatible computer, or car, or performing surgery, should be available for everyone. I see the GPL as a means of enforcing this, of making copyright law which recently has seemed very anti-user as working for 'us', but I'm not anti-copyright. I just advocate a balanced copyright.
On the subject of balanced law, any law that targets a class of people directly is likely to be unjust. I'd benefit from a law that said 'WNight gets Gates' money' but it's as unfair as a law that says the opposite. Extending copyright law without limit is one of those unbalancing factors that targets a certain class of people (those who own Mickey Mouse).
Few people are going to be tossed into mexican prisons for violating copyright, but people may be imprisoned for a "crime" half a world away. A crime like letting someone watch a DVD outside of the continent where they bought it. Copyright laws are fairly lenient but the supporting laws like the DMCA which could forbid pretty much any sane application of our right, aren't. Dmitry might not have been a saint, but then I'm with the ACLU, if a child molestor has been unfairly treated he deserves his rights as much as a nun would, were she to be arrested. The "crime" he committed was in allowing people to copy copyrighted materials, something they have a legal and moral right to do. Except, in this case, the legal right was superceeded by a dirty law full of impossible-to-use exceptions.
I do believe (DVD pricing) that anyone should be able to sell anything for any price someone will buy it for, and that they should even be able to sell two identical things for two different prices. But I don't believe they should have any control on the things they make after they sell them, other than to in the case of copyrighted works, forbid you to make your own copies for sale. This way if they want to sell the good DVDs, with all the extras, for less money in the USA and Canada than they sell the crappy ones for in France another business could be formed taking orders in france and sending the Region 1 product to Europe. This would also fix discriminatory pricing, where southern businesses would sell to Blacks for twice the price, or where MS-owned MS-Ford wouldn't sell cars to known open source developers, or whatever. If you want a capitalist market economy, you accept that it's a free market and you don't get any protected markets.
I think my views on copyright violation and on theft are fairly consistent. Re: your examples. 1) No loss, except a potential sale. 2) Ditto, as long as the freeloader isn't denying a seat to a paying customer. 3) The contractor had their time wasted, clearly unfair.
Now, I think that taking advantage of the no-harm aspect of CD copying is unfair in the long run, it's basically the trajegy of the commons. If everyone takes everything they get, for as little as they can pay, all pleasantry is gone and everything is a fight. If however everyone plays nicely, taking a little extra only every now and then when it won't be missed, people can share more efficiently.
An example is crowding on a subway. If people crowd on while people are getting off the first few people in the crowd get a better seat, but everyone else is held up and suffers. If everyone waited their turn they would all get seats an equal percentage of the time. And if they really needed a seat, people would probably give them one if they were polite.
The analogy to CDs is that if I copy a CD to listen to and decide even to listen to a few songs every now and then, it won't hurt anyone if I do it sparingly and honestly do purchase everything I really do want to listen to. The artist is no worse off because I wouldn't have paid for the music, and I get a small gain. If everyone did that, all the time, they'd kill the goose that laid the golden eggs. The musicians wouldn't have had anything taken from them but they'd decide music wasn't profitable in a society of jerks and they'd get day jobs.
Just as any substance is harmful in large enough doses, any activity can be harmful it everyone does it to the exclusion of all other activities. If nobody bought CDs, using Napster would be harmful overall. If everyone bought CDs and used Napster to choose which ones to buy, it wouldn't be a problem for anyone except bad musicians with deceptive advertising, and for the most part everyone would benefit.
The problem is that patents are easy money. You patents something and either end up collecting royalties for valid use, or blackmail payments to make you stop trying to collect. Or, just maybe someone manages to fight your patents and beat it, but that's a small risk for a company that just declares bankruptcy if they lose.
Ignoring patents is part of the answer. You certainly can't run around giving them too much weight, or you'll do the bad guys' work for them.
But, you need to cost them enough money that it's not worth it. Open Source programmers tend to not have enough money to fight a big corp in court, so they need to do it elsewhere.
So, if your favorite OSS project gets sued, write a nasty note about it on a brick and pitch it through the company's window. If that doesn't work, use flaming bricks.... The above message is only slightly tounge-in-cheek. When some paper-patent holding company pulls a Scientology and threatens to destroy people's lives via the courts, they don't leave people much choice. People *will* fight back. If you use a corrupt system to deny them the chance, they will go outside the system.
Hmmmm, speaking of Scientology, maybe next time Adobe gets someone arrested, or whatever, people can file nuisanse lawsuits against the company that did it. Doesn't matter what, as long as it sounds valid enough that a judge has to look at it and the corp has to send lawyers to defend against it. Hear that HP? Back off the stupid DMCA threats.
Ok, so "rationalizing" is picking a belief first and supporting it later, but how do you distinguish this from examining an issue rationally and choosing what you feel is the best solution? You can't, it's an exercise in semantics. If I do something you don't agree with, I'm rationalizing.
You say I've got curious issues about theft, but I can't see how the idea that if you don't take something away from someone, or hurt them, it's theft. Freeloading perhaps, but not theft. Dictionary definitions don't count for anything either, as they were all written before there was anything you could take without removing the original and will thus be irrelevant.
You ask why I'm attached to the early US version of copyrights. The answer is that I'm not, or not to the letter of it. (I'm not an American (to use the USA meaning of the term) actually.) Their definition of copyright spells out the give and take, and has the phrase "limited time" which I feel to be of paramount importance.
The specific ammount of time authors have doesn't seem important. 7, 12, 15, all fine. Even 50 would be somewhat acceptable if some concessions were made. But the trend towards longer-than-human-lifespan terms makes the "limited time" clause seem ridiculous.
I'm not even sure I support the idea that people can control an idea, certainly not an unlimited government-backed monopoly on them.
It's like patents. I recognize that they have their uses, and they in some cases are very helpful to society. But the way we let people patent business models, and final goals, not just specific methods, seems ridiculous. Especially if you consider different industries. Pharmecutical companies often go through five or more years of government mandated testing on top of the R&D, patents need to last long enough to benefit from actual market time. Lifecycles in computer companies are closer to three years for design, testing, and bringing a product to market. The whole "computer industry" is barely twenty years old. To allow the same terms for patents in both industries is harmful.
In the same way, copyright can serve a purpose, but if misapplied it hurts everyone. Why accept the existance of a law like this as given, regardless of the particulars and the effects?
This is an example of my "rationalizing". I'm trying to examine the purpose of a law and how it can be applied to benefit everyone. My "existing bias" perhaps is that the government my taxes pay for should be looking out for me as well, but that does seem reasonable.
In many cases I see that the laws don't benefit me directly, but that they help society as a whole and I accept that a disadvantage to me is worth it in trade for a better society. (Socialized health care, patents, etc.) In other cases I see abuses like Disney's bribing of politicians to extend copyright well beyond any possible give and take. That's an abuse of the system and I don't see why I should bother following what I see as being an unjust law, created by bribery.
You say that people should change the law by doing as Scopes did, breaking it in a very public way. It's all well and good to talk about, but for every Ghandi, or Rosa Parks, or Scopes, there are hundreds of people in dank jails for life, or beaten to death by the roadside. Or, simply financially ruined and unable to get work in their industry. Changing the world is all well and good, but I don't wish to martyr myself for it. You've seen what happens, Dmitry could have ended up in a foreign jail for longer than the Enron execs will collectively be behind bars.
The problem with your question on profit is that it assumes any movie is worth $15 to all customers. If watching a movie once is allowed "for free" because I recorded it, is charging $15 justified because I want to go back and watch the end again? That seems somewhat boolean as well. Of course, full repeated access for $0 isn't fair either. Somewhere in the middle though you come to something that's fair.
And yes, the broadcast model assumes people can, but don't bother, to skip commercials. If that changes, so will the model. (Hopefully... maybe they'll just mandate a policeman for every TV, to enforce the current model. Skip more than every 1/3rd commercial and get a truncheon in the ribs...) But how much does commercial airtime cost, ammortized across the number of people who will watch? How much is the studio being paid per viewer?
I assume that when pay-per-view replaces broadcast, that the prices will skyrocket. Look at the downloadable MP3 deals from the big studios. You don't require any physical media, shipping, or retail costs, and yet they want to charge more per track (usually) than current retail prices. Does this suddenly mean the song is worth more?
They probably encrypt the data on the disk, with a huge, almost impossible to break key.
And then they send the key to the program from the smart card, maybe even in a secure way, and the program decrypts the data to play it.
The hacker nabs it here.
Or, they got even more clever, the program reads the data, passes it to the smart card, and reads the decrypted data out the the smart card to play it.
The hacker nabs it here.
There's likely some funky tech involved to embed the smart card in the disk, and to read and write to it with a normal CD drive, but in the end, the data has to be played on a computer I control, so I can always sniff it out.
Even if they take away my control of the computer, via Palladium or something, I can always clip into the wires right at the cones of my speakers, translating that back to audio either on an old, contraband computer, or in an emulator of one that I write on the new protected computer.
They'll never plug the "analog hole" and the harder they try, the more motive I have for distributing the copies I make and trying to put them out of business.
As to how it's powered, these devices can be made to run on almost no power, a battery could be embedded into it that would power it for years, or it could use the rotational energy of the disk much like self-winding watches. If it only sends a key to a program that properly identifies itself, it doesn't need to do much and could survive years on the smallest of batteries. Hell, it could even have a solar-cell, powered by the read laser, though I doubt they'd go that far.
Your silly comments about rationalizing are the call of someone who likes the status quo but can't defend it.
*Everything* is rationalized. Man is the rational animal. If we don't rationalize, we irrationalize. What you deride as rationalizing is what I call "examining and judging".
If I buy a DVD I'll use DeCSS on it to watch it if I move overseas, as I would if I bought it overseas and came here. If I can do it with a book, which I bought with the same (ie, none) prior contract, and at the same store, why should I think one is my possession and the other not?
Furthermore, "rationalizing" often leads people to avoid legal, though immoral actions. If I feel it's bad to steal something, I'm going to think about it and decide not to try to trick someone out of their possessions either. Had I not "rationalized" I'd be just like the CEO of Enron, breaking the spirit of laws and ruining lives, but trying to stay just on the side of technical legality.
You could make the argument that blind acceptance of the law is preferable to everyone making up their own minds as to which laws to follow, but I disagree. The history of the Western world is full of example of people who fought against unjust laws and won, thus becoming heroes to their fellows. Our whole society is based on reasoned (rationalized) acceptance of societal rules. Based on informed people making informed choices. We even have it enshrined in law that blindly following the law, despite obvious moral consequences is an offense. ("I was just following a legal order" isn't a valid defense against heinous crimes.)
My views of copyright law are based on the idea that it's a social contract, the people provide a temporary monopoly on the duplication of a work *for the purpose of making the author money*, and the author makes the work publicly available in trade. Society grants a right above and beyond "human rights", and expects certain things in return.
Based on this, I feel I have the right to follow the spirit of this law when the letter isn't reasonable. An alternate example is that audio recordings of someone without their knowledge, in a private place where they expect privacy, is forbidden in the US (in most states.) But this law was written in the 70s when video cameras were large and they didn't see a need to write a law for video recordings. One landlord was taping young women in the shower in his apartments and he ended up getting off (pun?) on the charges because he hadn't recorded audio, just video.
To any reasonable person this is still an offense, a worse one in many ways even. Had he been moral and examined this, he would have realized that despite a loophole, his actions were viewed as criminal and damaging by the majority, especially the women he was taping, and he wouldn't have done this.
I feel that as long as I follow the spirit of copyright law, to not deprive authors of sales of their works unfairly, that I'm justified in downloading them for sample purposes. I could call a friend and get him to play his copy over the phone, or try to find it on a website, or drive to a store to listen, but in the end, if I buy the song if I like it, what's the difference?
Copyright law was never intended to control access to the work, the whole idea that it goes into the public domain after a short time supports this. Once the author released a work, it was public. The law was only concerned with making sure the author got paid, and thus was encouraged to produce more. The fact that I copy the work without the author's permission doesn't seem relevant, that's not the point of the law, nor can I see damage being caused by my doing it.
Furthermore, as to the "right to record a copy if I'd watched it on TV", this is a right. The home recording act supports it. You are allowed to record television programs, but not to trade in them. That "trade in them" to me is, conduct business in trading in them. If I get a friend with two VCRs to record something for me, because my VCR is broken, how does that hurt the copyright holder? How about if the friend records a copy for me later? Now what's the difference if I download them?
One real difference is that shows are currently supported by commercials. But watching the Simpsons episode, I paid fair market price for that recording. By downloading a Babylon 5 episode without commercials (if I haven't seen it on TV), I haven't. (Not that I think you have to watch commercials, I think they provide the shows on the assumption that you will have the choice to watch them, and will usually be lazy. They know people ignore commercials and they still decide they're worth paying for, they must think they have value.)
This is how I justify what you may see as a crime, but the same thought processes keep me from using some still-legal drug on your sister without her knowledge and taking advantage of her because of a legal loophole.
I'm not going to adress the rest of your points. If you honestly don't believe people have the power and right to judge the morality of their actions and act accordingly, there's really no point in continuing.
This round of responses make sense, but my guess was that you were quoting out of the "Responses to/.er's responses to..." book last time. I disagreed with the conclusions, but I also thought you jumped to them for incorrect reasons. This time while I disagree with some of your points, they seem to be your honest views and as such they carry more weight.
As to the optimum price point... Yes, I agree that $20 CDs, or whatever price they have, are the "optimum" price, by the company's standards. But what I was saying is that the public is probably going to spend roughly the same ammount, as most people I know hit their music budget without buying everything they want.
Currently the studios get this money by promoting a few big artists and selling expensive CDs. I can easily imagine a less star-dominated industry where prices were lower and people listened to more groups, thus spending the same ammount.
That "optimum" price calculation isn't the whole story. It's calculated based on the current industry, the insane cost of promoting someone, the easy cost of milking stardom when promotion pays off, thus the balace to fewer larger stars.
As to competition, a duopoly or cartel can often be looked at as a monopoly for purposes of assessing its influence of the markets. OPEC is made up of multiple companies and yet they price similarly and are usually seen as a single entity.
This is especially true with vertical monopolies, where one companies owns the means of production (the stars) and the distribution systems (the radio stations and CD stores) or is in such a tight, exclusive, relationship that new competitors face the same obstacles.
There are some alternatives, the $.99 CDs you mention, and the odd ones in the middle ranges, but these aren't real alternatives. If someone wants party music a $.99 CD of elevator music, or ocean sounds, isn't the same product. And a 1/2 price CD of a failed band isn't going to be half a good, for party purposes, as a current CD of a star.
If it wasn't for clear channel, the "indie" promoters (anything but), and the exclusive agreements with CD stores, the monopoly wouldn't be so bad, but the barriers of entry (abuse of the monopoly) prevent what competition there is from making a dent except in certain abondoned markets, like the $.99 CDs of uncopyrighted insturmentals and ambient sounds.
Contrast this to the car market you mentioned where last years car is essentially indistinguishable from the new one, where the performance is identical, and you don't suffer social disgrace for driving it. I don't think it's a fair analogy.
As to the morality of unauthorized copying, I think we mostly agree. As long as copyright is used in the way it was originally intended instead of the way Disney uses it, I think it's wrong to cheat an artist. It's more along the lines of not typing a street performer than it is of stealing his shoes, because he "just" loses a potential payment, but I think it's still wrong when used in bulk.
I don't think copyright was meant to give someone monopoly control on their ideas, just to ensure payment, so I don't see downloading test music to be bad, if it wouldn't have been bought anyways they aren't being hurt by a real loss. So, I'm in the air over file sharing. I think I'm entitled to my Simpsons episodes because I watched them on TV and could have recorded them; downloading them now seems equivalent. But for me to feel right about downloading Babylon 5 which I didn't see, I'd want to pay for it.
However, my moral views (artists should be paid) are the primary reason that I dislike the current system. Because they've got a near monopoly on the the industry, artists are forced to sign unreasonable contracts if they want to be professional musicians and they are then, imho, cheated out of the money they deserve.
Intel has likely adjusted by now to the competition, but when the Athlon first started winning people over I'd bet they were apoplectic. They had a guaranteed market and they could carefully feed speed advances out to keep their chips in the sweet spot, dollar wise. I remember when the newest Intel chip was always just around $1000 (Canadian, $700 US at the time) and now they're about half of that. A large ammount of their profit comes from those high end chips that the bleeding edge just has to have.
AMD came along and started cutting into that market, and into their lucrative OEM markets. $99 CPUs might not net them much, but it's a large market and that market share # is how companies sometimes judge who a newcomer. When AMD got 20% of the PC market they started getting respect from people building regular workstations and servers.
More than this though, I believe AMD is what threw the Itanium marketing for a loop. Intel was probably planning to slow down the speed increases for the P4 while ramping the Itanium up (and it's later family members) to convince people that the 32b CPUs were dead and they'd need to move to the new architecture. AMD came along and ruined the planned (I think) slowdown of the P4 and then they did the unthinkable, they hung an even larger bag on the side of the x86, 64b registers. They showed people that there was no need to go to a new architecture. AMD can kill the Itanium line simply by keeping enough pressure on the P4 that consumers don't see a need to switch. Same with RAMBUS. Intel had said that they needed this funky new (expensive) RAM to make the new CPUs run quickly. AMD kept using the same commodity RAM and provided consumers with an option.
At that point, they cut off Intel's highly profitable bleeding edge, chopped their market share significantly (looks bad for stock analysts, dropping the CEOs stock portfolio), and took away Intel's ability to lead everyone around by the nose. Add in the failure of RAMBUS (It was supposed to completely replace DDR, not be a niche market) and AMD cost Intel a few billion more, not to mention the trust of everyone who can read and knows the dirty pool involved.
I think Intel was shaking, both with fear and with fury.
I haven't found the speed rating to be very accurate. I've got a 24x burner and I've use media that was unrated, all the way through 24x rated.
It's coastered a few very old CDRs when I forgot to set the speed to 8x (they were unrated) but this was the only speed related problem.
I've burned 8x certified media at 24x, and it seems to work in just as many readers as the other disks.
Actually, my biggest problem has been cheap media that happened to be rated for 24x. The spindle said Memorex, but the disks were unbranded white and came up as CMC Magnetics when I checked them. They never actually failed a burn, but only one drive other than the burner could ever read them and the burner was really slow at it even. I just checked a 2-month old disk and I got a ton of read errors.
I've never had the problem before where a disk I burned was only readable in some drives, so I attribute it completely to these disks. But, a friend tried them in his old burner and they seemed to work fine. I never tried them as 2x, so maybe they were just very very over rated.
So, I guess the answer is, good companies who make their own media will put on a good margin of error to make sure you don't coaster and blame them. You can double or triple most listed ratings from all the big names, but get unbranded media and you're lucky if it burns at all. I normally use cheap cheap disks, like GigaStor, but those CMC ones were the first totally unbranded ones and I guess they were counting on the fact that you couldn't identify them in the future. (Like motherboards so cheap they don't come with a company name.)
You should try MP3s encoded with lame --r3mix, they're so close to the original that I don't know anyone who can tell the difference, and they're only ~192kbps, for ~240kbps you can use the paranoid settings which even the creators of the encoder say is overkill.
And, if you don't like that, there are lossless compressors specifically designed for audio that get about 3:1, sometimes more. It's not as good as MP3 compression, but it's pretty good.
And then, I thought I'd mentioned OGGs, they're essentially as good as lame --r3mix, smaller and, of course, open source.
Gone are the days of bad MP3s, providing you encode your own or get them from someone of similar audiophile tastes.
Knowing the rebuttals to common/. arguments might be helpful if your rebuttals made sense.
It is the business of government to enforce laws, but it's also the business of government to make reasonable laws. Propping up an industry by trying to legislate against the tide isn't reasonable. It also ignores the fact that as long as an industry dies gracefully (not overnight) it doesn't hurt the economy. People get new jobs, factories make new things.
The telegram industry was replaced by the telephone industry, and the music distributors are being replace by direct-to-consumer music sales. Music promoters are being obsoleted by online music distributors. No longer is paying for airplay the only way to be heard, so the monopoly owners of that gateway aren't as important.
You claim that the ability (or lack thereof) to buy MP3s directly is a red herring. It's not, it's the central issue. The music industry is refusing to sell MP3s to people, with the excuse of rampant piracy despite all indicators to the contrary, because their whole business model is based on selling physical disks in physical stores after hyping them on the radio. This is the dying industry that we're being asked to prop up, despite better alternatives.
The issue of the companies improving their product has nothing to do with hiring better talent and everything to do with offering their product in a form that consumers want. Millions may love Britney, but these days sales of MP3 players are surging, cutting out the market of CD-Audio players. The consumers of these products only want the music, not the shiny disk.
Of course, the lack of monopoly control over promotion and distribution would likely mean that there would be more famous musicians and less manufactured stars like Britney, but that's a by-product, not the goal.
Finally, capitalism is supposed to work in a free, open, market. CDs are in the $20 range now simply because there isn't competition. The airwaves are "owned" by two major companies in a duopoly, selling promo space for huge fees and usually only to insiders anyways, to better protect their closed economy. Distribution chains also have exclusive contracts that often prevent them from selling indie music. (The "indie" music seen in most stores comes from a few large supposedly "indie" studios that aren't much different from the big guys, much like Fox bills themselves as so much different than "The Networks".)
If the industry wasn't being propped up by government these companies would quickly drop their exclusive contracts to avoid being pulled down by a dying industry and they'd branch out, or as proper in a capitalist world, be replaced by someone who changed faster.
Finally, you seem to disapointed that the previous poster left out the labels ripping off the artists so I decided I'd bring it up.
It's the job of government to protect industry from certain unforseen swings, like bailing out the airlines for terrorism losses (ignoring for now that they got a lot more money than they needed for just that and that it was handed out unfairly). It's not the job of government to pick an industry and protect it to the detriment of all others. Artists are being ripped off, having unfair contracts forced on them, often retroactively, by a monopolistic industry.
Likely the public's eternal demand for music (It's been around longer than most other products) would result in the same ammount of money being spent on music. It'd simply go to different people, people who are now being prevented from creating a product by the unreasonable financial conditions. It'd likely actually provide more, better, product and in turn, bring in more money, with less "waste" like CDs which aren't really any more useful than jewel cases, or the plastic wrap they come in, to the music-listening consumer.
People recognize that monopolies provide lousy products and service for inflated price, that's why there are laws regulating big business. So why do you seem to think the music industry works better as a government protected monopoly?
You repeat the same shill arguments defending business, while at the same time trying to destroy any potential competition in your supposed free markets. Sounds like astro-turfing to me.
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I can't imagine taking pictures anymore if I had to pay for film. Out of curiosity, except for issues with dynamic range (which isn't far behind) what do you think film is better at? (In 35mm at any rate.)
And yes, I agree with you about CD-ROMs. I don't use them for backup, I just took a retired 40GB drive and I back up to it, storing it in my safe-deposit box.
Tough luck then, running an OS where it's a pain to get critical bug-fixes without also downloading a bunch of cruft.
That said, even I, a non-MS type, know that it's possible to setup a Win2k (or XP I assume) server box to download and pass patches to all your other machines, they way you can control what they auto-update to.
The only drawback of this is that MS still doesn't release fine-grain patches, they tend to fix ten bugs, introduce two new ones, and introduce a few "features" with each update, so you don't really have all the control an admin wants. Better than nothing though, and having an extra step in the way means that your client machines get all the patches you approve without the danger of letting them auto-update (and maybe download a virus, or update that "accidently" breaks your third-party software.
Really though, the only good protection I saw for code-red, for companies that had MS servers (some ISPs selling co-lo space, for instance) was to transparently route all incoming web traffic through an unaffected type of machine and drop all malformed requests, as well as adding certain IPs to a block list. But that requires a skilled admin who keeps up with the details of the current exploits and can write some custom firewall configs.
You are trolling, right?
Gearheads prefer processes to threads because they get enforced security. You can't go walking over another process' data, but you can with a thread.
Avoiding global variables does avoid the number of locks you need in your code but it doesn't actually make anything safer. All the memory you allocate by your threads is in the same memory space, walking off the end of one thread's array will likely clobber something in another thread.
Processes are inherently safer from a security point of view too. Each process runs with just enough privelleges to perform its task and a hole in a lower-privellege process doesn't risk clobbering an important process. (Like the way sshd was recently split into multiple processes.)
Why does implementing a thread/cpu affinity in the scheduler lead to the ability to starve other processes?
:) but it does distress me to see that many university educated programmers don't know how to work without threads (within one process). I think their over-reliance on threads hurts them by making their programs much more complex than they need to be. Modern programmers, to whom everything looks like an object in search of a thread.
I'd just think that, all else being equal, threads of process X all run on CPU 1, etc. But if you don't have any scheduled to run, you run something else...
Also, do you think HyperThreading is here to stay, or is it just a half-way point to CPUs having caches for CPU-state, allowing quick context switches between processes? I seems that this is the best way to go, eventually allowing hyper-threading's pipeline sharing feature but between unrelated pieces of code.
I don't mind the thread model much, I'm not a purist (I use Perl, to be "pure CompSci" would be somewhat of a contradiction
Are the markets comparable? When you buy into Apple (for better or worse) you know up-front that you're getting Apple hardware, specified, designed, and built by Apple. As long as they don't expire their old OSes, it seems fair.
If Apple tried to leverage their monopoly to control new markets, perhaps by saying that come 2003, only Apple scanners would work, or HDs from Apple's partner companies, that would be unfair.
And really, that's what Microsoft would be doing, using their OS monopoly to dictate to the hardware companies.
Now, I don't like controlled markets like that. It's why I use PCs with AMD CPUs and why I run Linux. But if I went Apple, I couldn't help but go into it eyes open.
That said, I think Apple should provide OSes for free, at least to proven owners of Mac hardware (to prevent providing it free to people running emulators or something.) Not only could they use it to support their hardware business, but it'd encourage everyone to upgrade more quickly, boosting the market-share of their latest OS, always important to get drivers written for it, etc.
It makes it easier to transfer to someone else, or store on a portable player.
And with 24b/96khz music supposed to be released soon, we'll see even more benefit from compressing it.
In many ways, the lack of good disk options (DVD) helps the solid-state storage industry. 1GB Compact Flash media exists now (and not just the IBM hard-drives) which beats CD-ROM all to hell. (Except for compatibility, which would be better if everyone had a PCMCIA slot.)
Which cameras do you have that you'd use TIFF mode and RAW mode? A Canon and something else I'd assume, or are the TIFFs just converted RAWs you haven't done anything with? And something recent (high res) to explain the 60-90GB part...
I've got a G2 and I've taken 7500 pictures with it in the three months I've had it. I usually shoot in JPG though when it's "just friends" and save RAW for important stuff. The speed, or lack, of converting RAWs slows things down a bit.
I'd like to pick up a D60 someday (well, I wouldn't turn down a 1D, but they're just kinda pricey). As good as the G2 is, the lack of lenses and the slow autofocus of consumer-level cameras is an issue.
I noticed this when I bought a printer. I had heard rumours of this and only when I asked the salesman directly did he tell me about it. Turns out the only brand (of HP, Epson, Lexmark?, and Canon) that gives you a full cartridge is Canon.
I also looked at the refill kits. Epson and HP had expensive refill kits and you bought new print heads with them when you bought an official refill. Canon not only had every color in a seperate tank (greta for me because I use a lot of highlight color, it won't drain all tanks equally) but you could buy official refills of just the tanks, changing the print head only when it needs it. And the Canon refills were a third the price of those for other printers. (I'm guessing because of the ease, and because there's no monitor chip you need to replace or reset.)
So, not to sound like a Canon advert, but I bought an S750 and have been very happy with it. Especially because I've bought something that I know isn't going to get more expensive when I try to maintain it. The funny thing is that I'm too lazy to refill my own, but just having the option is enough. That way is official supplies ever got real expensive I'd have an out.
Most people miss the whole point of having source code available...
Imagine open-source bridges. In a world where architectural drawings are kept secret you get a group of architects who design bridges (and likely other structures) and they release the drawings requried for you to hire a team of contractors and build your own bridge.
Now, "what use is this" you ask? "I'm never going to have a bridge built and I couldn't decipher the drawings anyways!?" Well, sure, there's no direct benefit. Just like most Linux users aren't going to bother reading 99.9% of the source code, if any.
But it's not something you have to be involved in.
You can drive over open source bridges knowing that the best minds in architecture have seen them and not found any problems. You can rest assured that any Tacoma-Narrows type disasters are avoided, and if any potential weaknesses are found, the bridges you use will be identified to have them (or not) and fixed immediately, instead of the designer's company saying there are no issues for PR reasons and trying to stealthily retrofit repairs next time they paint it.
Similarly, with Ogg, you don't have to read the source to benefit. You know that because it's open source and released royalty free that companies can continue supporting it until the end of time. And because nobody needs to reimplement anything to get around an undocumented feature, or reverse engineer through a lack of documentation, that all versions of it will interoperate as desired. Not all MP3 players (especially hardware) support variable-bit-rate MP3s, wouldn't it suck if you ripped your whole collection in this fashion and then found that your wonderful "standard" MP3 player wouldn't use them? Rip in OGG format and be assured that this won't happen.
Also, rest assured that Ogg is on the cutting edge. Because the source and design processes are all open source you know that if some university student stumbles across some new signal processing technique to perform even more transparent encoding that they'll be able to download the Ogg source and try it in a production-quality codec. In fact, as part of their thesis they'll release the technique, already coded into Ogg, and the properly designed format will guarantee that the existing decoders can play the file, despite the encoder being state of the art, using tricks that weren't invented when the decoder was written, or likely, turned into silicon.
But because none of this requires your participation, it'll be done even if you don't pay attention. Already many of the biggest suppliers of MP3s are switching to Ogg. Look at the collections of the people you see on Kazaa. Find someone with 5k+ songs they ripped themselves and you'll probably find they're Oggs, because people who sit there ripping care about quality. You'll benefit, even if you do nothing, because eventually Oggs will be everywhere, players will support them, and your music listening experience will be better without you lifting a finger. But that'll get here faster if you do help.
The same argument holds for the whole open-source debate. I want an open source, multi-sourced, industry standard operating system. I want teams of experts going over the IP stack, web servers, and other critical code looking for flaws. It may not be perfect, but it's the best choice. Only a platform like this can be trusted enough for run your business, or simply trust that a whole in your personal webserver isn't going to let a worm delete all your personal files. I don't dismantle my car and go through with a fine-toothed comb, but I buy on the recomendation of those who do. If they weren't allowed, I wouldn't buy that car. Why should I lower my standards in any other industry?
Yeah, I knew about encapsulating. I meant, runtimes of a reasonable size as you said.
I think the main resistance to using other languages in the kernel-building process is that you have to have them installed. Neither Perl nor Python produces a stand-alone runtime.
One of the goals is to make the same code compile on any platform with only a makefile difference. If you require fairly heavy-weight runtimes you limit the platforms you can run things on.
I can. :)
If they can't write something with a decent client-server architecture there'll always be cheating. If they scan for simple stuff it'll simply mean that only people with a "large" investment in it can cheat. I'd rather have a game like Ultima Online where everyone could cheat, so I knew not to trust it, than one where two people could cheat but they were taking money to produce items or level-up characters for everyone else.
If a game developer choses to use a p2p game model where any peer can tell the others that something happened (and not - "my client moved left", but "my client picked up gold") obviously doesn't care enough about security to do it right.
It's like MS blaming script kiddies for crashing servers. Sure, it's technically the fault of the person pressing the 'Nuke' button, but these attackers will always exist. In a world like this you need to develop secure products.
From the resolution of your brother's camera, I'd guess it's a Canon G2...
Anyways, that guy was probably talking about maximum quality JPGs... It's still much larger than a 1600x1200 should be (2mb) but JPEG compression takes time and some cameras skimp on it. I could see 2mb if they were used to shooting complex scenes and had everything cranked.
My Canon G2 averages about 1.1MB per picture at large, and one step away from maximum compression.
But with the Canon's, you don't ever really need to go higher than that. If you're considering going to a higher compression you switch to shooting in RAW and get all the benefits. Other cameras with TIFFs don't compress the image, but they adjust the white-balance and everything, which is lossy. And TIFFs are huge.
It's a fair risk. It's like if I wanted to distribute Foo brand hair gel in Russia. I'd buy a bunch of try to sell it there. The shipping and local advertising costs are mine, helped only by whatever global advertising Foo Corp has bought.
Loki offered a real product, took a real risk, and didn't make it. Unlike all the companies like Rambus who don't offer a product, don't take risks, and expect to cash in big by screwing everyone over with a product they don't want or need.
Loki may have died, but someone will make it work. There's a real market there, even if it's smaller than others. In fact, there might be a larger market there, when divided among all the players, than the Windows market. Especially since they can choose to only port games that are proven winners. (Or easy games, like Quake-Engine games that are most of the way there already.)
Actually, I think that margin of error makes sense. It's hard to identify linux computers. They tend to identify themselves as IE on Windows just to get websites to work.
And what counts as a user? If I have three computers, do I count as three people instead of one? Or if two are Linux and one is Windows, do I count as 2/3rds of a user for Linux?
For Windows they can simply claim every sale (except upgrades) as a new user. It might not be accurate, but it's easier to count and harder to refute. (Despite the fact that by this logic I count as six MS users, because of computers at work that came with OSes despite being turned into Linux boxes.)
Rather, I'd be suspicious of anyone claiming to have accurate numbers.
Heh, quality of programming will go down? That's a nasty prediction. The TV arguments are actually a little distant for me, I haven't watched TV in almost a year.
Could you have just gone 'back' and gotten your reply? Mozilla is pretty good about keep the contents of forms, but I'm not sure about other browsers...
By the way, I don't think you need to be self-contradictory to be anti-copyright and strongly pro-GPL. The GPL is intended to subvert copyright, to use the ever increasing strength of the copyright laws against the robber-barons that keep increasing it's length and strength. In fact, I think the people most opposed to copyright should be the strongest supporters of the GPL.
I'm not against copyright, but I think the foundations of our most important technology shouldn't be locked up by even many corporations. I think specs and source-code for implementing a basic compatible computer, or car, or performing surgery, should be available for everyone. I see the GPL as a means of enforcing this, of making copyright law which recently has seemed very anti-user as working for 'us', but I'm not anti-copyright. I just advocate a balanced copyright.
On the subject of balanced law, any law that targets a class of people directly is likely to be unjust. I'd benefit from a law that said 'WNight gets Gates' money' but it's as unfair as a law that says the opposite. Extending copyright law without limit is one of those unbalancing factors that targets a certain class of people (those who own Mickey Mouse).
Few people are going to be tossed into mexican prisons for violating copyright, but people may be imprisoned for a "crime" half a world away. A crime like letting someone watch a DVD outside of the continent where they bought it. Copyright laws are fairly lenient but the supporting laws like the DMCA which could forbid pretty much any sane application of our right, aren't. Dmitry might not have been a saint, but then I'm with the ACLU, if a child molestor has been unfairly treated he deserves his rights as much as a nun would, were she to be arrested. The "crime" he committed was in allowing people to copy copyrighted materials, something they have a legal and moral right to do. Except, in this case, the legal right was superceeded by a dirty law full of impossible-to-use exceptions.
I do believe (DVD pricing) that anyone should be able to sell anything for any price someone will buy it for, and that they should even be able to sell two identical things for two different prices. But I don't believe they should have any control on the things they make after they sell them, other than to in the case of copyrighted works, forbid you to make your own copies for sale. This way if they want to sell the good DVDs, with all the extras, for less money in the USA and Canada than they sell the crappy ones for in France another business could be formed taking orders in france and sending the Region 1 product to Europe. This would also fix discriminatory pricing, where southern businesses would sell to Blacks for twice the price, or where MS-owned MS-Ford wouldn't sell cars to known open source developers, or whatever. If you want a capitalist market economy, you accept that it's a free market and you don't get any protected markets.
I think my views on copyright violation and on theft are fairly consistent. Re: your examples. 1) No loss, except a potential sale. 2) Ditto, as long as the freeloader isn't denying a seat to a paying customer. 3) The contractor had their time wasted, clearly unfair.
Now, I think that taking advantage of the no-harm aspect of CD copying is unfair in the long run, it's basically the trajegy of the commons. If everyone takes everything they get, for as little as they can pay, all pleasantry is gone and everything is a fight. If however everyone plays nicely, taking a little extra only every now and then when it won't be missed, people can share more efficiently.
An example is crowding on a subway. If people crowd on while people are getting off the first few people in the crowd get a better seat, but everyone else is held up and suffers. If everyone waited their turn they would all get seats an equal percentage of the time. And if they really needed a seat, people would probably give them one if they were polite.
The analogy to CDs is that if I copy a CD to listen to and decide even to listen to a few songs every now and then, it won't hurt anyone if I do it sparingly and honestly do purchase everything I really do want to listen to. The artist is no worse off because I wouldn't have paid for the music, and I get a small gain. If everyone did that, all the time, they'd kill the goose that laid the golden eggs. The musicians wouldn't have had anything taken from them but they'd decide music wasn't profitable in a society of jerks and they'd get day jobs.
Just as any substance is harmful in large enough doses, any activity can be harmful it everyone does it to the exclusion of all other activities. If nobody bought CDs, using Napster would be harmful overall. If everyone bought CDs and used Napster to choose which ones to buy, it wouldn't be a problem for anyone except bad musicians with deceptive advertising, and for the most part everyone would benefit.
The problem is that patents are easy money. You patents something and either end up collecting royalties for valid use, or blackmail payments to make you stop trying to collect. Or, just maybe someone manages to fight your patents and beat it, but that's a small risk for a company that just declares bankruptcy if they lose.
... The above message is only slightly tounge-in-cheek. When some paper-patent holding company pulls a Scientology and threatens to destroy people's lives via the courts, they don't leave people much choice. People *will* fight back. If you use a corrupt system to deny them the chance, they will go outside the system.
Ignoring patents is part of the answer. You certainly can't run around giving them too much weight, or you'll do the bad guys' work for them.
But, you need to cost them enough money that it's not worth it. Open Source programmers tend to not have enough money to fight a big corp in court, so they need to do it elsewhere.
So, if your favorite OSS project gets sued, write a nasty note about it on a brick and pitch it through the company's window. If that doesn't work, use flaming bricks.
Hmmmm, speaking of Scientology, maybe next time Adobe gets someone arrested, or whatever, people can file nuisanse lawsuits against the company that did it. Doesn't matter what, as long as it sounds valid enough that a judge has to look at it and the corp has to send lawyers to defend against it. Hear that HP? Back off the stupid DMCA threats.
Ok, so "rationalizing" is picking a belief first and supporting it later, but how do you distinguish this from examining an issue rationally and choosing what you feel is the best solution? You can't, it's an exercise in semantics. If I do something you don't agree with, I'm rationalizing.
You say I've got curious issues about theft, but I can't see how the idea that if you don't take something away from someone, or hurt them, it's theft. Freeloading perhaps, but not theft. Dictionary definitions don't count for anything either, as they were all written before there was anything you could take without removing the original and will thus be irrelevant.
You ask why I'm attached to the early US version of copyrights. The answer is that I'm not, or not to the letter of it. (I'm not an American (to use the USA meaning of the term) actually.) Their definition of copyright spells out the give and take, and has the phrase "limited time" which I feel to be of paramount importance.
The specific ammount of time authors have doesn't seem important. 7, 12, 15, all fine. Even 50 would be somewhat acceptable if some concessions were made. But the trend towards longer-than-human-lifespan terms makes the "limited time" clause seem ridiculous.
I'm not even sure I support the idea that people can control an idea, certainly not an unlimited government-backed monopoly on them.
It's like patents. I recognize that they have their uses, and they in some cases are very helpful to society. But the way we let people patent business models, and final goals, not just specific methods, seems ridiculous. Especially if you consider different industries. Pharmecutical companies often go through five or more years of government mandated testing on top of the R&D, patents need to last long enough to benefit from actual market time. Lifecycles in computer companies are closer to three years for design, testing, and bringing a product to market. The whole "computer industry" is barely twenty years old. To allow the same terms for patents in both industries is harmful.
In the same way, copyright can serve a purpose, but if misapplied it hurts everyone. Why accept the existance of a law like this as given, regardless of the particulars and the effects?
This is an example of my "rationalizing". I'm trying to examine the purpose of a law and how it can be applied to benefit everyone. My "existing bias" perhaps is that the government my taxes pay for should be looking out for me as well, but that does seem reasonable.
In many cases I see that the laws don't benefit me directly, but that they help society as a whole and I accept that a disadvantage to me is worth it in trade for a better society. (Socialized health care, patents, etc.) In other cases I see abuses like Disney's bribing of politicians to extend copyright well beyond any possible give and take. That's an abuse of the system and I don't see why I should bother following what I see as being an unjust law, created by bribery.
You say that people should change the law by doing as Scopes did, breaking it in a very public way. It's all well and good to talk about, but for every Ghandi, or Rosa Parks, or Scopes, there are hundreds of people in dank jails for life, or beaten to death by the roadside. Or, simply financially ruined and unable to get work in their industry. Changing the world is all well and good, but I don't wish to martyr myself for it. You've seen what happens, Dmitry could have ended up in a foreign jail for longer than the Enron execs will collectively be behind bars.
The problem with your question on profit is that it assumes any movie is worth $15 to all customers. If watching a movie once is allowed "for free" because I recorded it, is charging $15 justified because I want to go back and watch the end again? That seems somewhat boolean as well. Of course, full repeated access for $0 isn't fair either. Somewhere in the middle though you come to something that's fair.
And yes, the broadcast model assumes people can, but don't bother, to skip commercials. If that changes, so will the model. (Hopefully... maybe they'll just mandate a policeman for every TV, to enforce the current model. Skip more than every 1/3rd commercial and get a truncheon in the ribs...) But how much does commercial airtime cost, ammortized across the number of people who will watch? How much is the studio being paid per viewer?
I assume that when pay-per-view replaces broadcast, that the prices will skyrocket. Look at the downloadable MP3 deals from the big studios. You don't require any physical media, shipping, or retail costs, and yet they want to charge more per track (usually) than current retail prices. Does this suddenly mean the song is worth more?
They probably encrypt the data on the disk, with a huge, almost impossible to break key.
And then they send the key to the program from the smart card, maybe even in a secure way, and the program decrypts the data to play it.
The hacker nabs it here.
Or, they got even more clever, the program reads the data, passes it to the smart card, and reads the decrypted data out the the smart card to play it.
The hacker nabs it here.
There's likely some funky tech involved to embed the smart card in the disk, and to read and write to it with a normal CD drive, but in the end, the data has to be played on a computer I control, so I can always sniff it out.
Even if they take away my control of the computer, via Palladium or something, I can always clip into the wires right at the cones of my speakers, translating that back to audio either on an old, contraband computer, or in an emulator of one that I write on the new protected computer.
They'll never plug the "analog hole" and the harder they try, the more motive I have for distributing the copies I make and trying to put them out of business.
As to how it's powered, these devices can be made to run on almost no power, a battery could be embedded into it that would power it for years, or it could use the rotational energy of the disk much like self-winding watches. If it only sends a key to a program that properly identifies itself, it doesn't need to do much and could survive years on the smallest of batteries. Hell, it could even have a solar-cell, powered by the read laser, though I doubt they'd go that far.
Oh now you're just trolling again.
Your silly comments about rationalizing are the call of someone who likes the status quo but can't defend it.
*Everything* is rationalized. Man is the rational animal. If we don't rationalize, we irrationalize. What you deride as rationalizing is what I call "examining and judging".
If I buy a DVD I'll use DeCSS on it to watch it if I move overseas, as I would if I bought it overseas and came here. If I can do it with a book, which I bought with the same (ie, none) prior contract, and at the same store, why should I think one is my possession and the other not?
Furthermore, "rationalizing" often leads people to avoid legal, though immoral actions. If I feel it's bad to steal something, I'm going to think about it and decide not to try to trick someone out of their possessions either. Had I not "rationalized" I'd be just like the CEO of Enron, breaking the spirit of laws and ruining lives, but trying to stay just on the side of technical legality.
You could make the argument that blind acceptance of the law is preferable to everyone making up their own minds as to which laws to follow, but I disagree. The history of the Western world is full of example of people who fought against unjust laws and won, thus becoming heroes to their fellows. Our whole society is based on reasoned (rationalized) acceptance of societal rules. Based on informed people making informed choices. We even have it enshrined in law that blindly following the law, despite obvious moral consequences is an offense. ("I was just following a legal order" isn't a valid defense against heinous crimes.)
My views of copyright law are based on the idea that it's a social contract, the people provide a temporary monopoly on the duplication of a work *for the purpose of making the author money*, and the author makes the work publicly available in trade. Society grants a right above and beyond "human rights", and expects certain things in return.
Based on this, I feel I have the right to follow the spirit of this law when the letter isn't reasonable. An alternate example is that audio recordings of someone without their knowledge, in a private place where they expect privacy, is forbidden in the US (in most states.) But this law was written in the 70s when video cameras were large and they didn't see a need to write a law for video recordings. One landlord was taping young women in the shower in his apartments and he ended up getting off (pun?) on the charges because he hadn't recorded audio, just video.
To any reasonable person this is still an offense, a worse one in many ways even. Had he been moral and examined this, he would have realized that despite a loophole, his actions were viewed as criminal and damaging by the majority, especially the women he was taping, and he wouldn't have done this.
I feel that as long as I follow the spirit of copyright law, to not deprive authors of sales of their works unfairly, that I'm justified in downloading them for sample purposes. I could call a friend and get him to play his copy over the phone, or try to find it on a website, or drive to a store to listen, but in the end, if I buy the song if I like it, what's the difference?
Copyright law was never intended to control access to the work, the whole idea that it goes into the public domain after a short time supports this. Once the author released a work, it was public. The law was only concerned with making sure the author got paid, and thus was encouraged to produce more. The fact that I copy the work without the author's permission doesn't seem relevant, that's not the point of the law, nor can I see damage being caused by my doing it.
Furthermore, as to the "right to record a copy if I'd watched it on TV", this is a right. The home recording act supports it. You are allowed to record television programs, but not to trade in them. That "trade in them" to me is, conduct business in trading in them. If I get a friend with two VCRs to record something for me, because my VCR is broken, how does that hurt the copyright holder? How about if the friend records a copy for me later? Now what's the difference if I download them?
One real difference is that shows are currently supported by commercials. But watching the Simpsons episode, I paid fair market price for that recording. By downloading a Babylon 5 episode without commercials (if I haven't seen it on TV), I haven't. (Not that I think you have to watch commercials, I think they provide the shows on the assumption that you will have the choice to watch them, and will usually be lazy. They know people ignore commercials and they still decide they're worth paying for, they must think they have value.)
This is how I justify what you may see as a crime, but the same thought processes keep me from using some still-legal drug on your sister without her knowledge and taking advantage of her because of a legal loophole.
I'm not going to adress the rest of your points. If you honestly don't believe people have the power and right to judge the morality of their actions and act accordingly, there's really no point in continuing.
This round of responses make sense, but my guess was that you were quoting out of the "Responses to /.er's responses to ..." book last time. I disagreed with the conclusions, but I also thought you jumped to them for incorrect reasons. This time while I disagree with some of your points, they seem to be your honest views and as such they carry more weight.
As to the optimum price point... Yes, I agree that $20 CDs, or whatever price they have, are the "optimum" price, by the company's standards. But what I was saying is that the public is probably going to spend roughly the same ammount, as most people I know hit their music budget without buying everything they want.
Currently the studios get this money by promoting a few big artists and selling expensive CDs. I can easily imagine a less star-dominated industry where prices were lower and people listened to more groups, thus spending the same ammount.
That "optimum" price calculation isn't the whole story. It's calculated based on the current industry, the insane cost of promoting someone, the easy cost of milking stardom when promotion pays off, thus the balace to fewer larger stars.
As to competition, a duopoly or cartel can often be looked at as a monopoly for purposes of assessing its influence of the markets. OPEC is made up of multiple companies and yet they price similarly and are usually seen as a single entity.
This is especially true with vertical monopolies, where one companies owns the means of production (the stars) and the distribution systems (the radio stations and CD stores) or is in such a tight, exclusive, relationship that new competitors face the same obstacles.
There are some alternatives, the $.99 CDs you mention, and the odd ones in the middle ranges, but these aren't real alternatives. If someone wants party music a $.99 CD of elevator music, or ocean sounds, isn't the same product. And a 1/2 price CD of a failed band isn't going to be half a good, for party purposes, as a current CD of a star.
If it wasn't for clear channel, the "indie" promoters (anything but), and the exclusive agreements with CD stores, the monopoly wouldn't be so bad, but the barriers of entry (abuse of the monopoly) prevent what competition there is from making a dent except in certain abondoned markets, like the $.99 CDs of uncopyrighted insturmentals and ambient sounds.
Contrast this to the car market you mentioned where last years car is essentially indistinguishable from the new one, where the performance is identical, and you don't suffer social disgrace for driving it. I don't think it's a fair analogy.
As to the morality of unauthorized copying, I think we mostly agree. As long as copyright is used in the way it was originally intended instead of the way Disney uses it, I think it's wrong to cheat an artist. It's more along the lines of not typing a street performer than it is of stealing his shoes, because he "just" loses a potential payment, but I think it's still wrong when used in bulk.
I don't think copyright was meant to give someone monopoly control on their ideas, just to ensure payment, so I don't see downloading test music to be bad, if it wouldn't have been bought anyways they aren't being hurt by a real loss. So, I'm in the air over file sharing. I think I'm entitled to my Simpsons episodes because I watched them on TV and could have recorded them; downloading them now seems equivalent. But for me to feel right about downloading Babylon 5 which I didn't see, I'd want to pay for it.
However, my moral views (artists should be paid) are the primary reason that I dislike the current system. Because they've got a near monopoly on the the industry, artists are forced to sign unreasonable contracts if they want to be professional musicians and they are then, imho, cheated out of the money they deserve.
Intel has likely adjusted by now to the competition, but when the Athlon first started winning people over I'd bet they were apoplectic. They had a guaranteed market and they could carefully feed speed advances out to keep their chips in the sweet spot, dollar wise. I remember when the newest Intel chip was always just around $1000 (Canadian, $700 US at the time) and now they're about half of that. A large ammount of their profit comes from those high end chips that the bleeding edge just has to have.
AMD came along and started cutting into that market, and into their lucrative OEM markets. $99 CPUs might not net them much, but it's a large market and that market share # is how companies sometimes judge who a newcomer. When AMD got 20% of the PC market they started getting respect from people building regular workstations and servers.
More than this though, I believe AMD is what threw the Itanium marketing for a loop. Intel was probably planning to slow down the speed increases for the P4 while ramping the Itanium up (and it's later family members) to convince people that the 32b CPUs were dead and they'd need to move to the new architecture. AMD came along and ruined the planned (I think) slowdown of the P4 and then they did the unthinkable, they hung an even larger bag on the side of the x86, 64b registers. They showed people that there was no need to go to a new architecture. AMD can kill the Itanium line simply by keeping enough pressure on the P4 that consumers don't see a need to switch. Same with RAMBUS. Intel had said that they needed this funky new (expensive) RAM to make the new CPUs run quickly. AMD kept using the same commodity RAM and provided consumers with an option.
At that point, they cut off Intel's highly profitable bleeding edge, chopped their market share significantly (looks bad for stock analysts, dropping the CEOs stock portfolio), and took away Intel's ability to lead everyone around by the nose. Add in the failure of RAMBUS (It was supposed to completely replace DDR, not be a niche market) and AMD cost Intel a few billion more, not to mention the trust of everyone who can read and knows the dirty pool involved.
I think Intel was shaking, both with fear and with fury.
I haven't found the speed rating to be very accurate. I've got a 24x burner and I've use media that was unrated, all the way through 24x rated.
It's coastered a few very old CDRs when I forgot to set the speed to 8x (they were unrated) but this was the only speed related problem.
I've burned 8x certified media at 24x, and it seems to work in just as many readers as the other disks.
Actually, my biggest problem has been cheap media that happened to be rated for 24x. The spindle said Memorex, but the disks were unbranded white and came up as CMC Magnetics when I checked them. They never actually failed a burn, but only one drive other than the burner could ever read them and the burner was really slow at it even. I just checked a 2-month old disk and I got a ton of read errors.
I've never had the problem before where a disk I burned was only readable in some drives, so I attribute it completely to these disks. But, a friend tried them in his old burner and they seemed to work fine. I never tried them as 2x, so maybe they were just very very over rated.
So, I guess the answer is, good companies who make their own media will put on a good margin of error to make sure you don't coaster and blame them. You can double or triple most listed ratings from all the big names, but get unbranded media and you're lucky if it burns at all. I normally use cheap cheap disks, like GigaStor, but those CMC ones were the first totally unbranded ones and I guess they were counting on the fact that you couldn't identify them in the future. (Like motherboards so cheap they don't come with a company name.)
You should try MP3s encoded with lame --r3mix, they're so close to the original that I don't know anyone who can tell the difference, and they're only ~192kbps, for ~240kbps you can use the paranoid settings which even the creators of the encoder say is overkill.
And, if you don't like that, there are lossless compressors specifically designed for audio that get about 3:1, sometimes more. It's not as good as MP3 compression, but it's pretty good.
And then, I thought I'd mentioned OGGs, they're essentially as good as lame --r3mix, smaller and, of course, open source.
Gone are the days of bad MP3s, providing you encode your own or get them from someone of similar audiophile tastes.
Knowing the rebuttals to common /. arguments might be helpful if your rebuttals made sense.
It is the business of government to enforce laws, but it's also the business of government to make reasonable laws. Propping up an industry by trying to legislate against the tide isn't reasonable. It also ignores the fact that as long as an industry dies gracefully (not overnight) it doesn't hurt the economy. People get new jobs, factories make new things.
The telegram industry was replaced by the telephone industry, and the music distributors are being replace by direct-to-consumer music sales. Music promoters are being obsoleted by online music distributors. No longer is paying for airplay the only way to be heard, so the monopoly owners of that gateway aren't as important.
You claim that the ability (or lack thereof) to buy MP3s directly is a red herring. It's not, it's the central issue. The music industry is refusing to sell MP3s to people, with the excuse of rampant piracy despite all indicators to the contrary, because their whole business model is based on selling physical disks in physical stores after hyping them on the radio. This is the dying industry that we're being asked to prop up, despite better alternatives.
The issue of the companies improving their product has nothing to do with hiring better talent and everything to do with offering their product in a form that consumers want. Millions may love Britney, but these days sales of MP3 players are surging, cutting out the market of CD-Audio players. The consumers of these products only want the music, not the shiny disk.
Of course, the lack of monopoly control over promotion and distribution would likely mean that there would be more famous musicians and less manufactured stars like Britney, but that's a by-product, not the goal.
Finally, capitalism is supposed to work in a free, open, market. CDs are in the $20 range now simply because there isn't competition. The airwaves are "owned" by two major companies in a duopoly, selling promo space for huge fees and usually only to insiders anyways, to better protect their closed economy. Distribution chains also have exclusive contracts that often prevent them from selling indie music. (The "indie" music seen in most stores comes from a few large supposedly "indie" studios that aren't much different from the big guys, much like Fox bills themselves as so much different than "The Networks".)
If the industry wasn't being propped up by government these companies would quickly drop their exclusive contracts to avoid being pulled down by a dying industry and they'd branch out, or as proper in a capitalist world, be replaced by someone who changed faster.
Finally, you seem to disapointed that the previous poster left out the labels ripping off the artists so I decided I'd bring it up.
It's the job of government to protect industry from certain unforseen swings, like bailing out the airlines for terrorism losses (ignoring for now that they got a lot more money than they needed for just that and that it was handed out unfairly). It's not the job of government to pick an industry and protect it to the detriment of all others. Artists are being ripped off, having unfair contracts forced on them, often retroactively, by a monopolistic industry.
Likely the public's eternal demand for music (It's been around longer than most other products) would result in the same ammount of money being spent on music. It'd simply go to different people, people who are now being prevented from creating a product by the unreasonable financial conditions. It'd likely actually provide more, better, product and in turn, bring in more money, with less "waste" like CDs which aren't really any more useful than jewel cases, or the plastic wrap they come in, to the music-listening consumer.
People recognize that monopolies provide lousy products and service for inflated price, that's why there are laws regulating big business. So why do you seem to think the music industry works better as a government protected monopoly?
You repeat the same shill arguments defending business, while at the same time trying to destroy any potential competition in your supposed free markets. Sounds like astro-turfing to me.