...the cost to the *AA of a lawsuit is a lot more than the lost revenue from not selling two (or five or ten or twenty) DVDs/CDs. It doesn't make financial sense to take legal action unless they can get better value for their money, i.e. scare people into not participating in p2p networks.
Translation: If you don't stop sharing, they won't sue you.
...or a legitimate site? It's down (and only 9 posts so far, jeez slashdot), so I can't visit it. I know there's a similar commercial site that promises to reconnect you with old highschool classmates.
I'm of the opinion that even if 50-75% of MS Office users switched over to another office suite but that subscription-based licensing became an accepted method of "selling" software, the costs would outweigh the benefits.
When you reboot, everything is in graphical mode, you don't see any kernel or init messages going on, but rather the Xandros logo animating in the screen while loading the OS. I should point out that in the beginning you get three options, to load the OS in normal mode, safe mode or expert configuration mode (just in case something gone wrong you can actually see the text messages from the booting procedure).
Finally, a linux distro has (by default) hidden those hundreds of lines of text that come up every time the system boots. For the average linux newbie, they do nothing but create confusion and panic. "Was that an error message that just flew by?" "What does that mean?" "Hmm...2645 bogomips? Will I need to remember that later?"...and so on.
I'm not saying they're not useful; in fact, they can be a life saver. Without all those printk's and init messages, it would be awfully hard or even impossible to diagnose and fix many problems. There's just no reason for them to be there when everything's working properly.
I agree with you -- to a point. In the short term, MS switching to subscription-based licensing is good for the public. If the total cost of having office available for use on a given computer went up, more people would consider switching to a free alternative; if it went down, consumers would pay less and consequently MS would make less. Both of these are good things. However, it's the long term effects that trouble me.
...but the more stringent Microsoft licensing becomes the more people will be driven to open source products.
I would say that the more financially expensive Microsoft licensing becomes the more people will be driven to open source products. People don't even seem to take notice when Microsoft licensing becomes more stringent. I doubt many people know they're giving MS permission to disable programs on their computer when they click "I Agree" to install critical updates and security patches. Not a single (not pirate) windows xp user that I've talked to understands how "Product Activation" reduces their personal choice and freedom.
The sucess of subscription-based licensing in the software market, especially with a high-profile item like MS Office, would mean that people would be one step closer to accepting the destructive and false belief that information can be rented or, to put it another way, controlled by its creator once it becomes accessible to other entities.
From the article: "People think of software as a CD in their computer which they can use forever and a day. They're not used to having to reactivate the product after 12 months."
"I think we've learned that the market isn't ready for this type of service. There's value in it but we need to do some thinking around how we market and position it."
Translation: We tried and failed. Once we manipulate people into believing information can be rented, we'll try again.
When I read the article I saw the starting blurb at the top:
Welcome to McDonald's. Would you like virtual fries with that digital Big Mac? No. 1 video game publisher Electronic Arts Inc. said Monday it has struck multimillion-dollar product placement deals with fast-food giant McDonald's Corp. and chip heavyweight Intel Corp. for its heavily anticipated computer game "The Sims Online."
and read:
Welcome to McDonald's. Would you like virtual fries with that digital Big Mac? No.
That pretty much sums up my thoughts.
short rant and a question
on
AMD Delays Hammer
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Everyone always makes the same really annoying mistake when it comes to athlon fsbs. Athlon front side busses do not run at 200MHz and 266MHz. They offer bandwidth equivalent to 200MHz and 266MHz by using both sides of the clock (DDR) on 100MHz and 133MHz fsbs. All new athlons use 133MHz DDR fsbs. The hammers will support 166MHz DDR memory busses, offering performance equivalent to 333MHz SDR memory.
However, the notion of "fsb" is a little blurred with the hammer. Hammers will be directly connected to dimm banks and have integrated memory controllers, so the speed of the fsb will no longer be a determining factor in memory bandwidth. (* see mp note below) The traditional fsb to the traditional northbridge will be replaced by a "high speed" hypertransport link to a chip that connects to the agp slot, and has another (slower) hypertransport link to what could be called the south bridge. This "south bridge" will then connect the pci bus, serial ports, hard drives, usb ports, and any other devices that need to talk to the processor or main memory.
*What does this mean for MP systems? Well, that's actually the really cool part. By moving the memory controller onto the processor and providing communication between processors over a hypertransport link (3.2GB/sec for dual, 6.4GB/sec for quad and above), memory bandwidth actually increases as more cpus are added! This is in contrast to a normal MP system where as more cpus are added, there is increased competition for a fixed resource (main memory) which is already the bottleneck in many single processor applications.
That's my rant on terminology. Here's the question:
I'm no kernel hacker, and I certainly don't know anything about writing schedulers, but it seems like this would require a change in how processes are handled in hammer mp systems. In traditional mp systems, every processor has equal access to main memory. If a process gets moved from one cpu to another, there's initial overhead to do the moving, but after that it can still get to its areas in memory without any problems. On a hammer mp system, migrating a process from one cpu to another would mean that in order to access its memory it would have to reach out of its cpu's hypertransport link, into another cpu's memory controller (which may or may not be busy) and into the attached ram. Considering there would not be enough bandwidth available on the 3.2GB/sec hypertransport bus (in the case of a dp system) for both processors to reach into eachothers 166MHz DDR memory at the same time without suffering a performance hit, it seems like there would definitely be an advantage to keeping processes close to their data.
What changes would this require to scheduling and process management code, if any? Has this already been addressed, or are there people working on it in the linux kernel?
Just then, a rather negative looking chlorine atom walks in and sits down next to the recently robbed sodium: "I snagged it while you weren't looking. Gonna try to grab it back?"
Sodium: "Nah. I don't want to be reduced to your level."
I'm not any kind of grammar nazi, but decent spelling and grammar are important to me. The occasional affect/effect problem doesn't bother me (it just lowers my opinion of the author), but when a piece is riddled with errors (there/they're/their, its/it's, then/than, etc..) it's hard for me to read. Partially, I think this is because I sight read and I don't subvocalize. In other words, when I see, "It's over their," in print the first thing I think is, "It's over their what? Is it hovering over their kitchen counter? Is it over their heads? What is this person trying to say?" Of course, I don't just sit there pondering those questions (it only takes a split second to see there was a grammar error in the sentence), but I can't read as quickly when every few lines my eyes flick back to an earlier word.
Maybe I'm just hypersensitive. I don't know. If you don't know what I'm talking about though, check out this piece by Prince. It doesn't have very many grammar problems, but the "creative" spelling is really distracting.
Ran it through a few filters. I think I got most of the crap out - at least it's readable now.
Something happened on the way to the 21st century. Media and entertainment companies started "converging" and "shareholder value" became far more important than customer service and respect for company employees ever managed to be. Compensation packages for company executives hit the stratosphere you while holding them accountable for their company's results became nearly impossible.
These executives are indeed very naïve if they think that people haven't noticed.
People are noticing that something isn't quite right you that something is indeed very wrong. After a decade during which the stock market gained apparent respectability as a legitimate, sensible forum of investing, the recent slew of huge corporate scandals reveals that it is still what it has always been: a sick place where neurotic, puerile gamblers get their kicks off the backs of millions of "anonymous" workers and individuals, who have no control over what happens to their hard-earned retirement savings.
Yet this is the place that most company executives feel is much more important to watch than the actual people for whom they produce their goods and services. This is the place where the fate of thousands of employees is decided every day by people staring at computer monitors showing ever-changing, meaningless lists of numbers and charts. And if you happen to personally hold shares in a company that has just announced that it is "restructuring" in order to improve its bottom-line and thus increase its "shareholder value", don't kid yourself: When the company is talking about "shareholders", it's not talking about you and your measly couple of thousands of shares. It's only talking about big shareholders you i.e. other companies that own a more significant share of its market value.
This is a world where "hostile takeovers" and government-approved "mergers" are feeding a never-ending cycle of fewer and fewer executives wielding more and more power on a multinational scale. Soon enough, the "World Company" and George Orwell's 1984 will no longer be the stuff of satire or fiction you but prophetic descriptions of a very real "New World Order" gradually unfolding before are eyes. A Little History
Let's start with a simple list: America Online, Time, Life, Warner Bros., Fortune, Elektra, Sports Illustrated, HBO, Turner Broadcasting, CNN, Cinemax, Entertainment Weekly, New Line Cinema, In Style, Warner/Chappell Music, Time Warner Cable, WBN, ICQ, Warner Music Group, Netscape, People, Reprise, Rhino, Atlantic, WEA, TNT, MapQuest, WinAmp, In Demand, Erato, Moviefone, Road Runner, etc. All owned by the same corporate giant (AOL Time Warner).
And another one: Universal Music Group, Verve, Nathan, Canal+, Impulse!, Cegetel, USA Networks, Decca, Interscope, Geffen, A&M, Barclay, Armand Colin, L'Express, Universal Studios, Larousse, Sierra, MP3.com, MCA Records, Deutsche Grammophon, Cineplex, etc. All owned by the same corporate giant (Vivendi Universal).
And yet another one: Disney, ABC, ESPN, Hyperion, Miramax, Touchstone, Hollywood Pictures, A&E, The History Channel, E! Entertainment, RTL-2, Buena Vista, Mr. Showbiz, Wall of Sound, Mammoth Records, etc. All owned by the same corporate giant (Walt Disney).
Need we say more? See for yourself... There's already only 7 of these corporate giants in total you and how long will it be before there are even fewer?
It all began innocently enough. Young entrepreneurs in the early to0th century started up new companies with a mix of creative ambition and business acumen. Then these companies grew bigger and bigger, and whatever entrepreneurial vision was present at their birth became more and more diluted and less and less relevant. Then corporate accountants suggested merging with or taking over other companies you and it all became an all-too-real game of Monopoly.
Then the Internet and "new technologies" came about, and the accountants' next big idea was convergence you i.e. the merging of "content" providers and "access" providers in order to control everything from the inception of a "cultural product" to its ultimate consumption by the unsuspecting masses. The Art of Manipulation
It is easy to guess what got lost along the way... Creativity. Artistry. Independence. Critical objectivity. Uncontrolled access. The ability to "break thru" cultural barriers. Cultural diversity. Innovation. Freedom. Real music. Real art.
Juggling between art and commerce is a delicate balance at the best of times... and these are definitely NOT the best of times.
So now we have a so-called magazine "reporting" on the latest new blockbuster movie with a 10-page, full-color spread you as if the reporters weren't aware that the same company that produced the movie also owns their magazine... Yes, this is still called a "magazine". These are still called "reporters". And this is still called "journalism"... And yet millions of people are gleefully letting themselves be had.
Maybe we should stop calling this "art", or even "entertainment" for that matter you for what is so entertaining about being involved in a collective hallucination? Maybe we should start calling it what it really is, i.e. unfettered MANIPULATION.
In 1995, Clear Channel Communications owned 43 radio stations. Now it owns more than 1,200 you and its army of so-called "independent promoters" are letting legalized payola dictate what you get (or rather don't get) to hear on the radio.
Everywhere you look, the story is the same: more and more money, less and less choice, less and less freedom of access, fewer and fewer companies. How far will this have to go before a big shift in people's attitude causes this commercial hubris to collapse onto itself and implode? Power Struggles
The first major cracks in this highly concentrated corporate world have, of course, already begun to appear, in what has been making the headlines in the past few months, i.e. shady accounting practices involving enormous amounts of money you enough to shake the economy of the most powerful nation of the world. And the hysterical stock markets have of course been swayed by this news, at the expense of tens of thousands of workers worldwide and millions of small investors who thought that their holdings had nowhere to go but up.
The value of AOL Time Warner's stock is now a quarter of what it was at the time of the merger between AOL and Time Warner, and this decline 4ced the company to take a $54 billion writedown earlier this year. And now it to is being investigated about its accounting practices. The story at Vivendi Universal is similar. Disney shares are near an 8-year low. And there is little doubt in people's mind that the problems are similar everywhere, in every big conglomerate that has become utterly out of touch with the reality of everyday work and the essence of human creativity.
In addition, people also realize all to well that governments have little you if any you power left when it comes to regulating these multinational monsters. Governments have much more power when it comes to regulating the lives of ordinary, law-abiding citizens you and they use and abuse this power as a way to distract people's attention from how much control the conglomerates have over what we get to hear, watch, read, eat, drink, buy, and generally experience as "free" citizens of the world.
One of the areas where this struggle is most acutely felt is, of course, the online world you a sprawling, anarchic community that is still in its infancy and whose exponential development in the last decade took everyone by surprise. And nothing exemplifies the struggle between government, big business, and individual rights better than the highly controversial issue of "peer-2-peer" file sharing and its many digital variations. A Nation of Thieves?
Will the media/technology giants recover from the latest stock market slump? They probably will you but at what cost? In all likelihood, the cost will be more "restructuring", more layoffs, more executive shuffles and golden parachutes, causing even further alienation from their own employees and customers. And this, in turn, will further encourage the very behaviors that they claim are illegal and want punished by criminal law you all the while preserving their own impunity as they continue to carelessly flounder a capital that they do not own.
Napster may have gone bankrupt and become a closed chapter in the Internet's short history, but its death is by no means a reflection of a decline in peer-2-peer (P2P) file sharing, quite the contrary. If anything, P2P has grown even further you but since it's becoming totally decentralized, there is no easy way to measure its significance.
What is for sure, however, is that, in spite of its many claims to the contrary, the recording industry has yet to provide evidence that P2P is actually detrimental to music making as an artistic endeavor, and even as a commercial venture. It is worth remembering, for example, that sales of music CDs actually increased when Napster was at its peak, and declined after Napster was abruptly shut down. Even economists who thought that file sharing "should b" hurting the recording industry are now expressing their doubts, based on what they say is simply not happening.
More importantly, many well-respected artists have sided with Internet users against corporate greed and actually use the Internet to promote alternative ways to distribute their music and reach out to a non-captive, legitimate audience of authentic music lovers.
This does not mean, of course, that all forums of file sharing are equally innocuous. There is little doubt that, when people use the Internet as a substitute for radio, i.e. as a way to discover new music, it can help promote the work of artists. But when a young junior high school student downloads tracks off the Internet and makes CD-R copies of them that he then sells for $5 in the schoolyard, it hurts sales of the original CD and it's disrespectful of the artist you regardless of how small a cut of the actual CD price the artist actually gets after all the executives and the middlemen in the recording industry have taken their piece of the pie.
Still, can we really go as far as to say that digital technology is creating a "nation of thieves" who no longer recognize the just value of art? Protecting the Product
It is worth noting, to begin with, that the recording industry itself is far from having distinguished itself by recognizing the true value of art. Instead, it has consistently fought to be allowed to deprive many artists of their most fundamental rights. It has allowed popular artists to go bankrupt even though their albums were selling by the millions. It has reduced the artists' cut of the album sales pie to a ridiculously small portion of the actual income generated by these sales. It has consistently pushed commercial musical products at the expense of real musical artistry.
This hardly entitles the recording industry to lecture anyone about recognizing the just value of art.
It is also interesting to note that the cultural products that seem to be the primary concern of the industry giants are those that are already the most popular ones, and that things such as CD copy protection are being experimentally used mostly with items that will sell millions regardless of whether they are copy-protected or not.
So are most citizens really being completely disrespectful of the value of art and the need to provide appropriate compensation to the artists for their works? We've said it before and we'll say it again: the rise of digital technology and peer-2-peer file sharing has little to do with people's intrinsic respect for art and artists, and everything to do with the cynical attitude of big industry conglomerates, which have consistently pushed for more and more commercial, highly profitable products at the expense of authentic art and respect for artists.
If people do not feel enough guilt to prevent them from making digital copies of the latest episode of a popular TV show or hit pop song, it is precisely because the industry giants have succeeded in making these works purely commercial products, with little or no consideration for their actual artistic value. It is precisely because these companies have been consistently promoting commercial products at the expense of artistic works.
The fact that actual works of art still manage to seep thru the cracks of this huge profit-driven industry does not change anything about the fundamental equations that have been driving and still drive the industry, today more than ever you i.e. that art = money, artists = money-makers, and art lovers = consumers.
As a simple example of how little music is valued as an art forum by the industry, it is estimated that only about 20 percent of music ever recorded is currently available you and, of this 20 percent, what proportion is actually readily available to music lovers? What proportion is not the current 100 top albums on the SoundScan charts?
It simply appears that the instinctive reaction of the lover of art (b it music, TV shows, movies, or other forums of art) is such that, if the industry has no respect for his or her identity as an appreciator of art, then he or she has no reason to have any respect for the industry as a purveyor of art. By making digital copies of so-called cultural products, many people are not demonstrating their lack of respect for art and for artists, but are expressing you consciously or not you their frustration with the way the entertainment industry profits from art at the expense of both art makers and art lovers.
The consumers of the commercial products of the entertainment industry are only as cynical as the industry has deliberately made them, by dumbing down their products, by exploiting artists, by making profit-driven choices and decisions, and by providing their own kind with obscene compensations and legal impunity that are completely out of touch with the real world of ordinary people. Don't Get It Twisted
That being said, the whole debate about file sharing and digital piracy is, most of all, a convenient way for industry conglomerates to deflect attention from their own shady business practices and dubious alliances.
For example, it is worth noting that the Warner Music Group is heavily involved in the recording industry's fight against piracy, but that its own parent company, AOL Time Warner, is directly benefiting from file sharing, as a provider of Internet access to millions of Internet users worldwide. When AOL Time Warner repeatedly flaunts its ever-increasing number of members (34 million and counting) and the billions of hours that they spend online, is there any doubt that a good part of this growth involves the "unlawful" exchange of computer files at the detriment of recording artists?
In other words, the real "thieves" are not necessarily those that are currently getting the blame... Rather than a "nation of thieves", the current situation looks, to us, much more like an "elite of thieves".
And the real victims of this thievery are very much, as usual, the recording artists themselves, who will never get their share of AOL's profits as an Internet access provider, even though these profits are partly based on the content that they originally provided. And the real victims also include authentic music lovers, who already suffer from restricted access to the full range of music that they would like to explore, and who are also likely to suffer from technological restrictions that will soon prevent them from making legitimate copies of the works that they have lawfully purchased for their own enjoyment.
Make no mistake: the entertainment industry (including TV, movies and music) might be big, but the technology industry is even bigger. Remember that it is AOL that bought Time Warner, and not the other way around. Remember that Sony makes much more money in electronics and computer equipment than it does in record sales...
If the technology industry ends up implementing technological limitations that prevent users from lawfully enjoying their purchases you as it is threatening to do you the beneficiaries will not be the artists whose works are thus being allegedly "protected". And it will certainly not be the art lovers whose enjoyment of art will thus be restricted. No, it will simply b, once again... the industry conglomerates, who will have yet another generation of incompatible media and devices to sell to us under the guise of "technological improvement". Conclusion
The technology and entertainment industries are simply to big for us to expect any overnight changes. The industry giants will continue to do their best to deflect people's attention away from their own wrongdoings and to blame falling profits and commercial failures on piracy at the same time that they are encouraging their customers to adopt the very technologies that make piracy possible. Artists will continue to be lured by unrealistic promises and contracts with big numbers and lots of small print.
How long, however, before a critical mass of established artists realize that it is in their best interests, both artistically and commercially, to leave the system for good? How long before a critical mass of young aspiring artists become aware of the enslaving aspects of the system and are careful not to get involved in it without a maximum of precautions? And how long before a critical mass of art lovers get together to provide these artists with a real, valuable, legitimate, truthfully enthusiastic alternative audience that completes the process of rendering the existing system artistically irrelevant?
It all depends on us you and it all depends on you.
It's impossible to implement effective copy-prevention technology on a general purpose pc for a very simple reason. If it is possible to create a program that does "task x" (plays a game, does CAD, etc...) and checks to make sure the cd is in the drive before it does so, it also must be possible to create a program that does "task x" and does not check the cd. It is highly likely that these two programs differ only by a very small amount of code. Therefore, it is obvious that every copy-protection scheme designed for the modern pc is crackable and, depending on the the skill and interest of the cracker, will eventually be cracked.
However, this is not a solution to the copy-prevention problem. If Joe Average has to go to a seedy web site, download a program that he cannot trust not to wipe his machine, and run it so that his kids can play "The Magic Schoolbus" without scratching the cd then something is obviously wrong with this picture. What about when the company releases an updated executable to correct inevitable bugs? Joe must go through the same process all over again. Extend his trust to people he doesn't know all over again. Take time out of his day all over again. Deal with copy-prevention all over again.
This is clearly not ok. Slashdotters, instead of churning out the usual, "This will be cracked before it's released," and, "Why are they doing this? They'll never make money," think about where all this is going. General purpose PC hardware that is free of DRM chips could cease to be produced. AMD and Intel have already committed to it. Laws could be passed to make it illegal to pass on knowledge of how to crack executables. A provision to make it illegal to tell someone how to make methamphetamines snuck by congress in a banking reform bill. A banking reform bill! There is no reason why this could not happen again.
Don't let the "3-2-1...cracked" mantra-drug turn you into a Slashdot Slug! Join the EFF. Get political. Get vocal. Get to it while you still can!
"..but are you willing to dedicate your entire (possiby unreliable) upstream connection to your conversation?"
Actually, yes!:)
Will your ISP let you? The ISP business model is based on buying a lot of bandwidth and betting it won't be used so if every Bob and Susan is yammering away on the internet at "peak usage" time, the pipes will definitely get clogged. That means dropped packets for everyone, including legitimate data users.
I'm guessing a conversation would be more enjoyable at higher bitrates (besides, you're probably loosing out on nuances in the conversation when everything over a certain frequency is cut off - perhaps unconciously, but still...)
Conversations sound much better at higher bitrates. Sure, very high frequencies are cut off, but only the ones you can't hear (or produce with your mouth). The effect you get from cutting down the bitrate is that the audio sounds (for lack of a better word) burbly-wurbly. You can sometimes hear this on digital cell phones.
My point is this: While clearer calls would be nice, the costs would be too great. Joe Average would rather settle for less fidelity than pay more money, and Joe Average is 99% of the telephone company's (residential) business.
This article just reiterates stuff that we've all heard before about the Hammers. However, there is one new piece of interesting information: if the pictures are to be interpreted at face value, the hammers will finally get the heat spreaders that the P4s have had for a long time. Don't get me wrong, I'm an amd fan all the way, but athlons (aka fires waiting to happen) have needed these for a long time.
POTS is ok, but it's analog and travels over wires of unknown quality. You could replace the aging portions of the system, but that costs the phone company $. Analog cell phones are subject to static which is caused by the lack of a good (close) connection to a cell tower. You could put up more cell towers, but that costs the phone company $. Digital cell phone audio is very highly compressed to save bandwidth. You could allocate more bandwidth to each link, but RF spectrum costs the phone company $.
I've never used VoIP. However, I would tend to think that sound quality wouldn't be anywhere near CD quality just because of bandwidth constraints. Most people only get a pitiful 128-256kbps of upstream bandwidth from their homes with broadband internet, and, thanks to deregulation, choice in providers and quality of service is diminishing all the time. You could increase upstream bandwidth for customers, but that costs the phone (or cable) company $. I'm not saying that you couldn't get high quality (CD quality depending on who you talk to) audio over a 128-256kbps connection, but are you willing to dedicate your entire (possiby unreliable) upstream connection to your conversation?
We're probably at distant ends of the network. If you close KaZaA Lite and reopen it, you should connect to a different supernode and you might have better luck. Also, check for typos in your search just in case.
While I like your idea in principle, it violates information physics. The idea that you can set [the book] to expire when the book is "due" is just as fallacious as the idea that you can rent a secret. "Information" isn't a block of cheese that can rot over time or a car that can be rented and returned. It isn't anything physical. It's simply the organization of discrete bits into a specific order. This requires physical material to store that order, but the information stored on the pages of a book is not the same thing as the book.
Linux is not the units of magnetic material on your hard drive that store it. A story is not ink and paper.
People fall into this way of thinking all the time because information is so closely tied to the material on which it is stored. Sure, you can rent a book, but you can't prevent someone from taking it home and scanning it in. That person wouldn't be stealing the book - she could still return it - but she would have a copy of the information represented by the order of ink blots on its pages.
When you introduce eBook readers into the equation, you mix two fundamentally incompatible areas of thinking: the old world view that can't properly distinguish between information and the physical material that contains it (book publishers), and the new world view that understands the physics of information (tech savvy people). By making easy the electronic distribution of information that is usually contained in books, it becomes easy to copy that information - much easier than scanning a page. Sure, you can have software that looks at a clock and zeros out flash memory depending on a rental table, but any technology like this, any technology that attempts to control information copying, is doing so artificially. Information does not naturally expire or resist copying.
This opens the door to widespread copying and distribution once someone hacks the eBook device. While there would be no "theft", people would have their desires satisfied (i.e. they wolud be able to read the book) without paying for it. Sure, those people could go down to the library and rent the book, but they would risk having to wait in a queue for a limited resource. Also, "renting" something is not nearly as satisfying (to most people) as "owning" it. However, it would decrease the amount of demand for that book that would be channeled into the purchasing process resulting in revenue for the book publisher and author.
Copying copyrighted information is not stealing - it doesn't detract from the quantity of stock the "owner" of the copyright has. It detracts from the market value of the stock the "owner" of the copyright has.
Slashdot Mirror
...the cost to the *AA of a lawsuit is a lot more than the lost revenue from not selling two (or five or ten or twenty) DVDs/CDs. It doesn't make financial sense to take legal action unless they can get better value for their money, i.e. scare people into not participating in p2p networks.
Translation: If you don't stop sharing, they won't sue you.
Get the word out.
...or a legitimate site? It's down (and only 9 posts so far, jeez slashdot), so I can't visit it. I know there's a similar commercial site that promises to reconnect you with old highschool classmates.
I'm of the opinion that even if 50-75% of MS Office users switched over to another office suite but that subscription-based licensing became an accepted method of "selling" software, the costs would outweigh the benefits.
When you reboot, everything is in graphical mode, you don't see any kernel or init messages going on, but rather the Xandros logo animating in the screen while loading the OS. I should point out that in the beginning you get three options, to load the OS in normal mode, safe mode or expert configuration mode (just in case something gone wrong you can actually see the text messages from the booting procedure).
Finally, a linux distro has (by default) hidden those hundreds of lines of text that come up every time the system boots. For the average linux newbie, they do nothing but create confusion and panic. "Was that an error message that just flew by?" "What does that mean?" "Hmm...2645 bogomips? Will I need to remember that later?"...and so on.
I'm not saying they're not useful; in fact, they can be a life saver. Without all those printk's and init messages, it would be awfully hard or even impossible to diagnose and fix many problems. There's just no reason for them to be there when everything's working properly.
I agree with you -- to a point. In the short term, MS switching to subscription-based licensing is good for the public. If the total cost of having office available for use on a given computer went up, more people would consider switching to a free alternative; if it went down, consumers would pay less and consequently MS would make less. Both of these are good things. However, it's the long term effects that trouble me.
...but the more stringent Microsoft licensing becomes the more people will be driven to open source products.
I would say that the more financially expensive Microsoft licensing becomes the more people will be driven to open source products. People don't even seem to take notice when Microsoft licensing becomes more stringent. I doubt many people know they're giving MS permission to disable programs on their computer when they click "I Agree" to install critical updates and security patches. Not a single (not pirate) windows xp user that I've talked to understands how "Product Activation" reduces their personal choice and freedom.
The sucess of subscription-based licensing in the software market, especially with a high-profile item like MS Office, would mean that people would be one step closer to accepting the destructive and false belief that information can be rented or, to put it another way, controlled by its creator once it becomes accessible to other entities.
From the article:
"People think of software as a CD in their computer which they can use forever and a day. They're not used to having to reactivate the product after 12 months."
"I think we've learned that the market isn't ready for this type of service. There's value in it but we need to do some thinking around how we market and position it."
Translation:
We tried and failed. Once we manipulate people into believing information can be rented, we'll try again.
Slashdotters, this is not a victory.
When I read the article I saw the starting blurb at the top:
Welcome to McDonald's. Would you like virtual fries with that digital Big Mac? No. 1 video game publisher Electronic Arts Inc. said Monday it has struck multimillion-dollar product placement deals with fast-food giant McDonald's Corp. and chip heavyweight Intel Corp. for its heavily anticipated computer game "The Sims Online."
and read:
Welcome to McDonald's. Would you like virtual fries with that digital Big Mac? No.
That pretty much sums up my thoughts.
Everyone always makes the same really annoying mistake when it comes to athlon fsbs. Athlon front side busses do not run at 200MHz and 266MHz. They offer bandwidth equivalent to 200MHz and 266MHz by using both sides of the clock (DDR) on 100MHz and 133MHz fsbs. All new athlons use 133MHz DDR fsbs. The hammers will support 166MHz DDR memory busses, offering performance equivalent to 333MHz SDR memory.
However, the notion of "fsb" is a little blurred with the hammer. Hammers will be directly connected to dimm banks and have integrated memory controllers, so the speed of the fsb will no longer be a determining factor in memory bandwidth. (* see mp note below) The traditional fsb to the traditional northbridge will be replaced by a "high speed" hypertransport link to a chip that connects to the agp slot, and has another (slower) hypertransport link to what could be called the south bridge. This "south bridge" will then connect the pci bus, serial ports, hard drives, usb ports, and any other devices that need to talk to the processor or main memory.
*What does this mean for MP systems? Well, that's actually the really cool part. By moving the memory controller onto the processor and providing communication between processors over a hypertransport link (3.2GB/sec for dual, 6.4GB/sec for quad and above), memory bandwidth actually increases as more cpus are added! This is in contrast to a normal MP system where as more cpus are added, there is increased competition for a fixed resource (main memory) which is already the bottleneck in many single processor applications.
That's my rant on terminology. Here's the question:
I'm no kernel hacker, and I certainly don't know anything about writing schedulers, but it seems like this would require a change in how processes are handled in hammer mp systems. In traditional mp systems, every processor has equal access to main memory. If a process gets moved from one cpu to another, there's initial overhead to do the moving, but after that it can still get to its areas in memory without any problems. On a hammer mp system, migrating a process from one cpu to another would mean that in order to access its memory it would have to reach out of its cpu's hypertransport link, into another cpu's memory controller (which may or may not be busy) and into the attached ram. Considering there would not be enough bandwidth available on the 3.2GB/sec hypertransport bus (in the case of a dp system) for both processors to reach into eachothers 166MHz DDR memory at the same time without suffering a performance hit, it seems like there would definitely be an advantage to keeping processes close to their data.
What changes would this require to scheduling and process management code, if any? Has this already been addressed, or are there people working on it in the linux kernel?
Just then, a rather negative looking chlorine atom walks in and sits down next to the recently robbed sodium: "I snagged it while you weren't looking. Gonna try to grab it back?"
Sodium: "Nah. I don't want to be reduced to your level."
Start a web site for your coalition. I'll sign up.
I'm not any kind of grammar nazi, but decent spelling and grammar are important to me. The occasional affect/effect problem doesn't bother me (it just lowers my opinion of the author), but when a piece is riddled with errors (there/they're/their, its/it's, then/than, etc..) it's hard for me to read. Partially, I think this is because I sight read and I don't subvocalize. In other words, when I see, "It's over their," in print the first thing I think is, "It's over their what? Is it hovering over their kitchen counter? Is it over their heads? What is this person trying to say?" Of course, I don't just sit there pondering those questions (it only takes a split second to see there was a grammar error in the sentence), but I can't read as quickly when every few lines my eyes flick back to an earlier word.
Maybe I'm just hypersensitive. I don't know. If you don't know what I'm talking about though, check out this piece by Prince. It doesn't have very many grammar problems, but the "creative" spelling is really distracting.
Ran it through a few filters. I think I got most of the crap out - at least it's readable now.
Something happened on the way to the 21st century. Media and entertainment companies started "converging" and "shareholder value" became far more important than customer service and respect for company employees ever managed to be. Compensation packages for company executives hit the stratosphere you while holding them accountable for their company's results became nearly impossible.
These executives are indeed very naïve if they think that people haven't noticed.
People are noticing that something isn't quite right you that something is indeed very wrong. After a decade during which the stock market gained apparent respectability as a legitimate, sensible forum of investing, the recent slew of huge corporate scandals reveals that it is still what it has always been: a sick place where neurotic, puerile gamblers get their kicks off the backs of millions of "anonymous" workers and individuals, who have no control over what happens to their hard-earned retirement savings.
Yet this is the place that most company executives feel is much more important to watch than the actual people for whom they produce their goods and services. This is the place where the fate of thousands of employees is decided every day by people staring at computer monitors showing ever-changing, meaningless lists of numbers and charts. And if you happen to personally hold shares in a company that has just announced that it is "restructuring" in order to improve its bottom-line and thus increase its "shareholder value", don't kid yourself: When the company is talking about "shareholders", it's not talking about you and your measly couple of thousands of shares. It's only talking about big shareholders you i.e. other companies that own a more significant share of its market value.
This is a world where "hostile takeovers" and government-approved "mergers" are feeding a never-ending cycle of fewer and fewer executives wielding more and more power on a multinational scale. Soon enough, the "World Company" and George Orwell's 1984 will no longer be the stuff of satire or fiction you but prophetic descriptions of a very real "New World Order" gradually unfolding before are eyes.
A Little History
Let's start with a simple list: America Online, Time, Life, Warner Bros., Fortune, Elektra, Sports Illustrated, HBO, Turner Broadcasting, CNN, Cinemax, Entertainment Weekly, New Line Cinema, In Style, Warner/Chappell Music, Time Warner Cable, WBN, ICQ, Warner Music Group, Netscape, People, Reprise, Rhino, Atlantic, WEA, TNT, MapQuest, WinAmp, In Demand, Erato, Moviefone, Road Runner, etc. All owned by the same corporate giant (AOL Time Warner).
And another one: Universal Music Group, Verve, Nathan, Canal+, Impulse!, Cegetel, USA Networks, Decca, Interscope, Geffen, A&M, Barclay, Armand Colin, L'Express, Universal Studios, Larousse, Sierra, MP3.com, MCA Records, Deutsche Grammophon, Cineplex, etc. All owned by the same corporate giant (Vivendi Universal).
And yet another one: Disney, ABC, ESPN, Hyperion, Miramax, Touchstone, Hollywood Pictures, A&E, The History Channel, E! Entertainment, RTL-2, Buena Vista, Mr. Showbiz, Wall of Sound, Mammoth Records, etc. All owned by the same corporate giant (Walt Disney).
Need we say more? See for yourself... There's already only 7 of these corporate giants in total you and how long will it be before there are even fewer?
It all began innocently enough. Young entrepreneurs in the early to0th century started up new companies with a mix of creative ambition and business acumen. Then these companies grew bigger and bigger, and whatever entrepreneurial vision was present at their birth became more and more diluted and less and less relevant. Then corporate accountants suggested merging with or taking over other companies you and it all became an all-too-real game of Monopoly.
Then the Internet and "new technologies" came about, and the accountants' next big idea was convergence you i.e. the merging of "content" providers and "access" providers in order to control everything from the inception of a "cultural product" to its ultimate consumption by the unsuspecting masses.
The Art of Manipulation
It is easy to guess what got lost along the way... Creativity. Artistry. Independence. Critical objectivity. Uncontrolled access. The ability to "break thru" cultural barriers. Cultural diversity. Innovation. Freedom. Real music. Real art.
Juggling between art and commerce is a delicate balance at the best of times... and these are definitely NOT the best of times.
So now we have a so-called magazine "reporting" on the latest new blockbuster movie with a 10-page, full-color spread you as if the reporters weren't aware that the same company that produced the movie also owns their magazine... Yes, this is still called a "magazine". These are still called "reporters". And this is still called "journalism"... And yet millions of people are gleefully letting themselves be had.
Maybe we should stop calling this "art", or even "entertainment" for that matter you for what is so entertaining about being involved in a collective hallucination? Maybe we should start calling it what it really is, i.e. unfettered MANIPULATION.
In 1995, Clear Channel Communications owned 43 radio stations. Now it owns more than 1,200 you and its army of so-called "independent promoters" are letting legalized payola dictate what you get (or rather don't get) to hear on the radio.
Everywhere you look, the story is the same: more and more money, less and less choice, less and less freedom of access, fewer and fewer companies. How far will this have to go before a big shift in people's attitude causes this commercial hubris to collapse onto itself and implode?
Power Struggles
The first major cracks in this highly concentrated corporate world have, of course, already begun to appear, in what has been making the headlines in the past few months, i.e. shady accounting practices involving enormous amounts of money you enough to shake the economy of the most powerful nation of the world. And the hysterical stock markets have of course been swayed by this news, at the expense of tens of thousands of workers worldwide and millions of small investors who thought that their holdings had nowhere to go but up.
The value of AOL Time Warner's stock is now a quarter of what it was at the time of the merger between AOL and Time Warner, and this decline 4ced the company to take a $54 billion writedown earlier this year. And now it to is being investigated about its accounting practices. The story at Vivendi Universal is similar. Disney shares are near an 8-year low. And there is little doubt in people's mind that the problems are similar everywhere, in every big conglomerate that has become utterly out of touch with the reality of everyday work and the essence of human creativity.
In addition, people also realize all to well that governments have little you if any you power left when it comes to regulating these multinational monsters. Governments have much more power when it comes to regulating the lives of ordinary, law-abiding citizens you and they use and abuse this power as a way to distract people's attention from how much control the conglomerates have over what we get to hear, watch, read, eat, drink, buy, and generally experience as "free" citizens of the world.
One of the areas where this struggle is most acutely felt is, of course, the online world you a sprawling, anarchic community that is still in its infancy and whose exponential development in the last decade took everyone by surprise. And nothing exemplifies the struggle between government, big business, and individual rights better than the highly controversial issue of "peer-2-peer" file sharing and its many digital variations.
A Nation of Thieves?
Will the media/technology giants recover from the latest stock market slump? They probably will you but at what cost? In all likelihood, the cost will be more "restructuring", more layoffs, more executive shuffles and golden parachutes, causing even further alienation from their own employees and customers. And this, in turn, will further encourage the very behaviors that they claim are illegal and want punished by criminal law you all the while preserving their own impunity as they continue to carelessly flounder a capital that they do not own.
Napster may have gone bankrupt and become a closed chapter in the Internet's short history, but its death is by no means a reflection of a decline in peer-2-peer (P2P) file sharing, quite the contrary. If anything, P2P has grown even further you but since it's becoming totally decentralized, there is no easy way to measure its significance.
What is for sure, however, is that, in spite of its many claims to the contrary, the recording industry has yet to provide evidence that P2P is actually detrimental to music making as an artistic endeavor, and even as a commercial venture. It is worth remembering, for example, that sales of music CDs actually increased when Napster was at its peak, and declined after Napster was abruptly shut down. Even economists who thought that file sharing "should b" hurting the recording industry are now expressing their doubts, based on what they say is simply not happening.
More importantly, many well-respected artists have sided with Internet users against corporate greed and actually use the Internet to promote alternative ways to distribute their music and reach out to a non-captive, legitimate audience of authentic music lovers.
This does not mean, of course, that all forums of file sharing are equally innocuous. There is little doubt that, when people use the Internet as a substitute for radio, i.e. as a way to discover new music, it can help promote the work of artists. But when a young junior high school student downloads tracks off the Internet and makes CD-R copies of them that he then sells for $5 in the schoolyard, it hurts sales of the original CD and it's disrespectful of the artist you regardless of how small a cut of the actual CD price the artist actually gets after all the executives and the middlemen in the recording industry have taken their piece of the pie.
Still, can we really go as far as to say that digital technology is creating a "nation of thieves" who no longer recognize the just value of art?
Protecting the Product
It is worth noting, to begin with, that the recording industry itself is far from having distinguished itself by recognizing the true value of art. Instead, it has consistently fought to be allowed to deprive many artists of their most fundamental rights. It has allowed popular artists to go bankrupt even though their albums were selling by the millions. It has reduced the artists' cut of the album sales pie to a ridiculously small portion of the actual income generated by these sales. It has consistently pushed commercial musical products at the expense of real musical artistry.
This hardly entitles the recording industry to lecture anyone about recognizing the just value of art.
It is also interesting to note that the cultural products that seem to be the primary concern of the industry giants are those that are already the most popular ones, and that things such as CD copy protection are being experimentally used mostly with items that will sell millions regardless of whether they are copy-protected or not.
So are most citizens really being completely disrespectful of the value of art and the need to provide appropriate compensation to the artists for their works? We've said it before and we'll say it again: the rise of digital technology and peer-2-peer file sharing has little to do with people's intrinsic respect for art and artists, and everything to do with the cynical attitude of big industry conglomerates, which have consistently pushed for more and more commercial, highly profitable products at the expense of authentic art and respect for artists.
If people do not feel enough guilt to prevent them from making digital copies of the latest episode of a popular TV show or hit pop song, it is precisely because the industry giants have succeeded in making these works purely commercial products, with little or no consideration for their actual artistic value. It is precisely because these companies have been consistently promoting commercial products at the expense of artistic works.
The fact that actual works of art still manage to seep thru the cracks of this huge profit-driven industry does not change anything about the fundamental equations that have been driving and still drive the industry, today more than ever you i.e. that art = money, artists = money-makers, and art lovers = consumers.
As a simple example of how little music is valued as an art forum by the industry, it is estimated that only about 20 percent of music ever recorded is currently available you and, of this 20 percent, what proportion is actually readily available to music lovers? What proportion is not the current 100 top albums on the SoundScan charts?
It simply appears that the instinctive reaction of the lover of art (b it music, TV shows, movies, or other forums of art) is such that, if the industry has no respect for his or her identity as an appreciator of art, then he or she has no reason to have any respect for the industry as a purveyor of art. By making digital copies of so-called cultural products, many people are not demonstrating their lack of respect for art and for artists, but are expressing you consciously or not you their frustration with the way the entertainment industry profits from art at the expense of both art makers and art lovers.
The consumers of the commercial products of the entertainment industry are only as cynical as the industry has deliberately made them, by dumbing down their products, by exploiting artists, by making profit-driven choices and decisions, and by providing their own kind with obscene compensations and legal impunity that are completely out of touch with the real world of ordinary people.
Don't Get It Twisted
That being said, the whole debate about file sharing and digital piracy is, most of all, a convenient way for industry conglomerates to deflect attention from their own shady business practices and dubious alliances.
For example, it is worth noting that the Warner Music Group is heavily involved in the recording industry's fight against piracy, but that its own parent company, AOL Time Warner, is directly benefiting from file sharing, as a provider of Internet access to millions of Internet users worldwide. When AOL Time Warner repeatedly flaunts its ever-increasing number of members (34 million and counting) and the billions of hours that they spend online, is there any doubt that a good part of this growth involves the "unlawful" exchange of computer files at the detriment of recording artists?
In other words, the real "thieves" are not necessarily those that are currently getting the blame... Rather than a "nation of thieves", the current situation looks, to us, much more like an "elite of thieves".
And the real victims of this thievery are very much, as usual, the recording artists themselves, who will never get their share of AOL's profits as an Internet access provider, even though these profits are partly based on the content that they originally provided. And the real victims also include authentic music lovers, who already suffer from restricted access to the full range of music that they would like to explore, and who are also likely to suffer from technological restrictions that will soon prevent them from making legitimate copies of the works that they have lawfully purchased for their own enjoyment.
Make no mistake: the entertainment industry (including TV, movies and music) might be big, but the technology industry is even bigger. Remember that it is AOL that bought Time Warner, and not the other way around. Remember that Sony makes much more money in electronics and computer equipment than it does in record sales...
If the technology industry ends up implementing technological limitations that prevent users from lawfully enjoying their purchases you as it is threatening to do you the beneficiaries will not be the artists whose works are thus being allegedly "protected". And it will certainly not be the art lovers whose enjoyment of art will thus be restricted. No, it will simply b, once again... the industry conglomerates, who will have yet another generation of incompatible media and devices to sell to us under the guise of "technological improvement".
Conclusion
The technology and entertainment industries are simply to big for us to expect any overnight changes. The industry giants will continue to do their best to deflect people's attention away from their own wrongdoings and to blame falling profits and commercial failures on piracy at the same time that they are encouraging their customers to adopt the very technologies that make piracy possible. Artists will continue to be lured by unrealistic promises and contracts with big numbers and lots of small print.
How long, however, before a critical mass of established artists realize that it is in their best interests, both artistically and commercially, to leave the system for good? How long before a critical mass of young aspiring artists become aware of the enslaving aspects of the system and are careful not to get involved in it without a maximum of precautions? And how long before a critical mass of art lovers get together to provide these artists with a real, valuable, legitimate, truthfully enthusiastic alternative audience that completes the process of rendering the existing system artistically irrelevant?
It all depends on us you and it all depends on you.
It's impossible to implement effective copy-prevention technology on a general purpose pc for a very simple reason. If it is possible to create a program that does "task x" (plays a game, does CAD, etc...) and checks to make sure the cd is in the drive before it does so, it also must be possible to create a program that does "task x" and does not check the cd. It is highly likely that these two programs differ only by a very small amount of code. Therefore, it is obvious that every copy-protection scheme designed for the modern pc is crackable and, depending on the the skill and interest of the cracker, will eventually be cracked.
However, this is not a solution to the copy-prevention problem. If Joe Average has to go to a seedy web site, download a program that he cannot trust not to wipe his machine, and run it so that his kids can play "The Magic Schoolbus" without scratching the cd then something is obviously wrong with this picture. What about when the company releases an updated executable to correct inevitable bugs? Joe must go through the same process all over again. Extend his trust to people he doesn't know all over again. Take time out of his day all over again. Deal with copy-prevention all over again.
This is clearly not ok. Slashdotters, instead of churning out the usual, "This will be cracked before it's released," and, "Why are they doing this? They'll never make money," think about where all this is going. General purpose PC hardware that is free of DRM chips could cease to be produced. AMD and Intel have already committed to it. Laws could be passed to make it illegal to pass on knowledge of how to crack executables. A provision to make it illegal to tell someone how to make methamphetamines snuck by congress in a banking reform bill. A banking reform bill! There is no reason why this could not happen again.
Don't let the "3-2-1...cracked" mantra-drug turn you into a Slashdot Slug! Join the EFF. Get political. Get vocal. Get to it while you still can!
I'm going to guess cox. They just raised the rates 5$ to $45/month and they prohibit servers.
class Gorilla : public monkey {
//That's how I understand it. Maybe I'm wrong.
bodypart snout;
}
Gorilla::Gorilla() {
size = freakin_huge;
}
Linux support for 802.b11? Finally, we'll be the first to support the latest bass ackwards wireless communication protocol!
"..but are you willing to dedicate your entire (possiby unreliable) upstream connection to your conversation?"
:)
Actually, yes!
Will your ISP let you? The ISP business model is based on buying a lot of bandwidth and betting it won't be used so if every Bob and Susan is yammering away on the internet at "peak usage" time, the pipes will definitely get clogged. That means dropped packets for everyone, including legitimate data users.
I'm guessing a conversation would be more enjoyable at higher bitrates (besides, you're probably loosing out on nuances in the conversation when everything over a certain frequency is cut off - perhaps unconciously, but still...)
Conversations sound much better at higher bitrates. Sure, very high frequencies are cut off, but only the ones you can't hear (or produce with your mouth). The effect you get from cutting down the bitrate is that the audio sounds (for lack of a better word) burbly-wurbly. You can sometimes hear this on digital cell phones.
My point is this: While clearer calls would be nice, the costs would be too great. Joe Average would rather settle for less fidelity than pay more money, and Joe Average is 99% of the telephone company's (residential) business.
Let's see Intel release a chip where MHz actually indicate performance rather than serve as a watered down marketing tool.
Same here. They sure produce a good amount of heat and my only other source of heat, an electric infra-red heater, doesn't crunch numbers as well.
This article just reiterates stuff that we've all heard before about the Hammers. However, there is one new piece of interesting information: if the pictures are to be interpreted at face value, the hammers will finally get the heat spreaders that the P4s have had for a long time. Don't get me wrong, I'm an amd fan all the way, but athlons (aka fires waiting to happen) have needed these for a long time.
Higher quality costs more money.
POTS is ok, but it's analog and travels over wires of unknown quality. You could replace the aging portions of the system, but that costs the phone company $. Analog cell phones are subject to static which is caused by the lack of a good (close) connection to a cell tower. You could put up more cell towers, but that costs the phone company $. Digital cell phone audio is very highly compressed to save bandwidth. You could allocate more bandwidth to each link, but RF spectrum costs the phone company $.
I've never used VoIP. However, I would tend to think that sound quality wouldn't be anywhere near CD quality just because of bandwidth constraints. Most people only get a pitiful 128-256kbps of upstream bandwidth from their homes with broadband internet, and, thanks to deregulation, choice in providers and quality of service is diminishing all the time. You could increase upstream bandwidth for customers, but that costs the phone (or cable) company $. I'm not saying that you couldn't get high quality (CD quality depending on who you talk to) audio over a 128-256kbps connection, but are you willing to dedicate your entire (possiby unreliable) upstream connection to your conversation?
We're probably at distant ends of the network. If you close KaZaA Lite and reopen it, you should connect to a different supernode and you might have better luck. Also, check for typos in your search just in case.
Whoops. Forgot the extras.
0 02
title=Free Culture
artist=Lawrence Lessig
category=Speech
language=English
year=2
Once again: KaZaA bad, KaZaA Lite good.
While I like your idea in principle, it violates information physics. The idea that you can set [the book] to expire when the book is "due" is just as fallacious as the idea that you can rent a secret. "Information" isn't a block of cheese that can rot over time or a car that can be rented and returned. It isn't anything physical. It's simply the organization of discrete bits into a specific order. This requires physical material to store that order, but the information stored on the pages of a book is not the same thing as the book.
Linux is not the units of magnetic material on your hard drive that store it. A story is not ink and paper.
People fall into this way of thinking all the time because information is so closely tied to the material on which it is stored. Sure, you can rent a book, but you can't prevent someone from taking it home and scanning it in. That person wouldn't be stealing the book - she could still return it - but she would have a copy of the information represented by the order of ink blots on its pages.
When you introduce eBook readers into the equation, you mix two fundamentally incompatible areas of thinking: the old world view that can't properly distinguish between information and the physical material that contains it (book publishers), and the new world view that understands the physics of information (tech savvy people). By making easy the electronic distribution of information that is usually contained in books, it becomes easy to copy that information - much easier than scanning a page. Sure, you can have software that looks at a clock and zeros out flash memory depending on a rental table, but any technology like this, any technology that attempts to control information copying, is doing so artificially. Information does not naturally expire or resist copying.
This opens the door to widespread copying and distribution once someone hacks the eBook device. While there would be no "theft", people would have their desires satisfied (i.e. they wolud be able to read the book) without paying for it. Sure, those people could go down to the library and rent the book, but they would risk having to wait in a queue for a limited resource. Also, "renting" something is not nearly as satisfying (to most people) as "owning" it. However, it would decrease the amount of demand for that book that would be channeled into the purchasing process resulting in revenue for the book publisher and author.
Copying copyrighted information is not stealing - it doesn't detract from the quantity of stock the "owner" of the copyright has. It detracts from the market value of the stock the "owner" of the copyright has.
What about strafing?