The vast majority of americans can't find Rwanda on a map, let alone discourse knowledgeably about the factors that cause ethinic striff an genocide. Their understanding of politics and economics at any age is farcical. So why would being a geek automatically exempt one from these blindnesses?
Um, Rwanda, isn't that the place near Florida that isn't quite a state yet? I think J.Lo came from there.
I get about 100 or so at work, between 40 and 200 at my primary home account, 20 to 100 on my listserv account at eskimo.com (cheap way to run lists, good storage location, been here since time began), 20 to 40 on my web account.
It's not that much. Maybe half is spam, but I narc those to the feds and ISPs.
It means it's dangerous. Note he used a Linux driver to break it. So soon we can expect some states and municipalities to outlaw Linux, since it's associated with criminal behavior, just as glow sticks are associated with use of e at raves.
Didn't you realize that you can't inform people about things that happen in the world without first calling your lawyer and having them find out if you're violating the DMCA.
Just so you know, $50,000 is the going rate for bail.
It's about $250,000 on the West Coast (9th Federal Circuit), where it would probably be filed.
Naturally, the US constitution protects your right to publish such things, but they'll still jail you, sell your car, sell your house, and ruin your reputation before you get the appeal heard.
The tendency of geeks to be narrowly educated, self-serving, smug, and intolerant effectively relegates them to the margins of society. Their technical knowledge is impressive, but from a political/change-the-world standpoint, it is about as useful as knowing the names of all of the Pokemon. If you want to change the world - even a little - you have to be able to engage in intelligent, educated debate. This is a social skill that comes with education and - yes - age.
You mean knowing all the names of all the Pokemon isn't useful? My son knows them in English, French, and Japanese...
Seriously, I think a common thread to most of the posts today, all from/. users (not anonymous, we've got karma and we'll use it if we have to), is that Jon is really pushing the limits in his stereotypic mythologizing, yet again.
Look, we're not gonna uncheck it in our settings, because we know that just encourages more hapless victims to read it. Ignoring the problem won't make it go away.
So, to sum up - Jon, get a life. Teens have way more important things to do than you describe, and geekdom is usually a symptom, not a goal. My son was describing the social scene amongst the teens and preteens yesterday and the groups they were in. Some of us spend a bunch of time with kids, some tech, some not. And we all think Jon is really pushing it with this series.
Drop the series. Stop "having" to write in magazine article length and chopping it into snippets. That is so last century, so pulp paper magazine concept. I've sold many stories to zines and magazines and published in a number of countries for bucks and we all know the drill.
Read your users. We want short, sharp, insightful snippets with links to the boring crap. Stop insulting our intelligence with these recastings of longer "theorizing" or "mythologizing" articles that you broke up because we got angry when you went on for 3 screens. Adapt to the media or get out.
Go out and find some real stories - maybe about rave paraphenalia becoming illegal and how blinky electric things are a new fad sweeping the world. Maybe something about how cell phones are now so popular that they're becoming passe. Do some real work, get a fresh insight. But don't feed us this old old line, ok?
Ask yourself this: would you care at all if some other schmuck in Florida was walking down the street, somebody thought that he was their long-lost ex-husband who had been negelcting the children, and reported them to the police, only to find out it was mistaken identity? Of course not.
I'll admit I would care less about that, but that is not what really concerns me. What concernes me is this:
Suppose there is a criminal who resembles me in basic appearance, buld, facial characteristics etc. (be honest, how many times have you mistaken at total stranger for someone you know) and I go off to the mall/movies/park/office and the software pegs me as the bad guy, and I get swarmed by police officers. But wait here comes the best part, four days later on my way to dinner downtown it happens again.
This really can happen. My favorite coffee shop is apparently frequented by someone who looks amazingly like me - some of the barristas even get confused about who is which. To me, I don't look anything like the guy, but to an optical camera, I would probably become a false positive.
I've never done anything that I should be arrested for. For all I know this guy has a long string of warrants out on him. If they install a camera near the coffee shop, they may do a match on him and stake out and then arrest me.
And, since this is Seattle, they'll probably shoot first and ask questions later. If I was African-American, I'd have a 50 percent chance of getting killed in such an incident.
Luckily for me, I'm not. So I only have a 5 percent chance of being shot for something due to such cameras, should they install them.
Now this is where it really gets fun. Get some of your own face recognition software. It doesnt' have to be perfect, just adaquate and combine the photographs with GPS locations. Then build a database of the daily observed activities of individual police officers. If some public access was allowed to the public recognition systems in question, photographs of cops could be run against databases of wanted individuals until a false positive shows up and then publish that information.
Exactly. And one should also apply for a search warrant for this "criminal" and search their home for illegal gotten gains.
In a city just north of Seattle they're getting about 20 percent false positives on red light license fines - these are not the car they charge them for. At least here you can get a hearing to prove it's not you...
It's been nuking Qwest DSL
on
Code Redux
·
· Score: 1
They had to totally drop in the MidWest and they've been getting hammered with all our Cisco 675s they "upgraded" us to out here in Seattle.
I just unplug the box when I'm at work and plug it in when I need to use it, so it can't scan me when I'm dead.
The reason it's medium is MSFT won't do anything about it, and can cause them more problems if they complain about their inaction. They know which side of the bread has super-glue...
It works and they don't need more
on
Mac Rants
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· Score: 1
Yes, that's exactly what we need more of - More Financial Institutions using hardware that approaches the legal drafting age.
So where do you think Linux grew from? - people using their old boxen for servers. It's a perfectly good box, why toss it? Besides, they don't need high speed access and they don't need to spend time and dollars when it does what they need.
Besides, we got rid of the draft last century. Get with the millenium...
I try to run it, but while I can get Xwindows, I can't get ActiveX. Is this some new code?
Seriously, hasn't everyone turned that off, along with all JavaScript, even if they have a Win box?
But what _is_ the real news?
on
Mac Rants
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· Score: 1
The "Decision Matrix" the guy uses in the original article is full of mistakes and far from an objective comparison of Macs vs. PCs. The original article's author is also one of those people who *still insist* the G4 is faster than the Pentium 4 (and he conveniently "forgets" about the Athlon!)
More interesting news might have been the drop in stock price of Intel, due to the fact they're engaging in a price war with AMD, because AMD has been eating up their market share like crazy.
So articles about how important CPU speed are just ignore the fact that we don't care anymore. Face it, you can get an Athlon running at 800MHz with 256MB of RAM for way less than an Intel running at 1.7MHz with 128MB of RAM and the Athlon will beat it six ways to Sunday.
So G4 has a slower clock speed - how does this impact the users? If it doesn't, so what?
Analyze, think, then post...
It's not the chip speed, it's Net speed
on
Mac Rants
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· Score: 1
Look, different boxen for different people.
First, I got my son and my mom iMacs. I don't have to spend hours telling them how to use their boxen. They just work.
The apples come with built in Ethernet cards - you can hook them up fast, out of the box, and they work - the same can't be said for Win machines. And the users don't care about things that *nix people do - so what's your prob?
I mean, c'mon, the difference in throughput for the average person between a 500MHz Pentium II with 128MB of RAM and a 1.7GHz Pentium IV with 128MB of RAM with similar hard drives is maybe 5 percent at most.
You should be spending your time porting your BSD apps for the Mac, not wasting it talking about silly CPU benchmarks that mean nothing to most endusers. The real world is still using old Mac SEs at my Bank of America branch - as someone said today "hey, at least we don't have to worry about system failure or viruses".
Is Katz a sensationalist or just another troll? He kinda blurs the boundries. And what's this preoccupation with children? Kinda creepy, in that Willy Wonka way.
I think the thing is he's one of those guys who wishes he'd done something when he was a teen, but didn't. So now he writes pieces talking about how teens now have all the advantages he never did, and do stuff, when he knows it's just a straw horse.
It's like his eternal theme of the uber-geek. I mean, if there really were uber-geeks, they wouldn't hang with him anyway, cause he's so last century, but if he writes about how cool "they" are, some get sucked into the fantasy depiction of how much change they cause.
Meantime, the real change agents are going to Montreal or G8 and shredding the WTO and World Bank. These are the real revolutionaries, but they're too scary for Jon to write about.
Hint - the next G8 is in a forest with a single track road to get there - man, talk about massive infiltration deadzone - what were they thinking... this is where the news is, not in Jon's distorted view of how you can sit safe at home and pretend to be a change agent.
Are brilliant 15-year-old computer geeks running the world, upending existing institutions?
No. If you'd pay attention to what's been going on, like G8 (Genoa) and the like, you'd realize it's the 20-somethings, as always, who dictate change. Aided and abetted by the Edge-Gen and X-Gen elders who assist with logistics, money, corporate actions, and the like. The teens are just mucking around like they always do, generation after generation. For example, Jon would have you believe more kid-on-kid violence is happening when all measures indicate the percentage of this is dropping year after year, and the per capita rate as well. It's just that we televise these things now, so you see the whole world, not the tiny sliver that people are accustomed to seeing. The bandwidth increased, the network extends further, but the content ain't radically different.
Does it matter that childhood sometimes ends when computers arrive?
Yes. So stop using them. Oh, wait, you just want to stir up things, not really solve anything. I was just at a 10 year old's birthday party, and kids are still kids. And Kelsey, who's 16, pretty much describes most of the same things - the only thing is he doesn't play games with the computer - he uses the computer to play games with other kids and adults.
Better to ask a more useful question, like why the Media needs to hype things more and more, when there's less and less there? More hype, less content.
1. A new motherboard, capable of faster bus access and with more RAM, might be worth it. But just because it can take a 1.0 to 1.4 GHz chip, doesn't mean you should put a 1.4 in it. Consider buying a 1.0 and replacing it with a 1.4 when you buy more RAM.
2. New RAM is almost always a better choice than a new CPU. Consider having your CPU be "ancient" - buy a 1.2 GHz instead of a 1.4 GHz, and spend the difference on more RAM.
3. Faster disk access and even multiple disks (for striping or redundant access) might be more cost-effective than a better CPU.
4. If you are a graphics professional, game designer, or are already maxing your systems out on RAM and hard disk, then you should consider buying a new, faster CPU. Otherwise, don't. Or, even better, take the same money you're spending on Intel chips and buy AMD or Transmeta - twice the bang for the buck.
I'm sure he'll be glad to hear he doesn't have any talent. Just like my friends who are in bands don't, just because they haven't been absorbed into the maw of the corporate music machine.
You confuse two things. One is that recording companies provide a service to artists - yes, they provide publicity, and upfront money, but at usurious rates. The second is that one must therefore choose to go that route. That is one method, but not necessarily the best one.
The services that recording companies provide could be provided by other means - better MP3 publicity tie-ins for one, better splits on profits for upfront money for another. Neither needs to come from existing recording companies.
And you can get studio space at a lot of locations - a friend of mine at work has a recording studio on Vashon that some of the local bands use. It's not as hard as you think.
Seriously. People will switch to Ogg Vorbis if MP3 starts costing real bucks.
If RIAA succeeds in cracking down on it, or levying some extra fee, people will choose the cheaper version. Free is a lot cheaper than expensive.
But if the current stalemate continues, with most MP3 near free in price (e.g. voluntary or less than 25 cents for decent quality), people won't have a reason to desert it.
What really matters, and I know you don't want to hear this, is how many decent Windows Ogg Vorbis encoder/decoder cheap-or-free suites are out there and how easy they are to use. Second impact is how easy it is to do a Linux and a Mac version.
It's all about the market. Ease of use, what you got, how easy it is to swap with friends, and can you get the music you want at a price you don't mind paying.
You are incorrect. If they put a shrink wrap license on a CD saying you're not even allowed to listen to it it's the UCITA that gives shrink wrap (and click-through) licences their teeth, not the DMCA or any copyright law already on the books.
But UCITA is only in one state, and two other states have watered down versions. Some states have firewall anti-UCITA laws too. In no case is UCITA the law of the land, unless you're in Virginia (think that's the state that bought that bag of foobar).
So, lacking UCITA, we default to DMCA or standard consumer case law, both of which preserve fair use as they can't override consumer protections.
It's not like the bands the RIAA push onto us are significantly better than most of the better artists on MP3.com, anyway.
This raises a very good point. If RIAA's music control fails, and the consumers route around the damage, buying CDs in the Bahamas for artists who are willing to list MP3 songs so we can try them out, it really doesn't matter what Congress tries to do.
In the end, the market has no soul, no love for RIAA and the corporate music scene. If they increase costs and try to closed source their music, open source music alternatives will become more attractive. If I'm into Techno and they try to charge me USD$20 for a CD of 10 songs, when I can get decent (if not better) quality Techno for USD$0 for tryout and USD$0 for one or two sample MP3 songs (full length), then I'll send them USD$10 for the 10 song CD. Cost to band - USD$7 for production, shipping, handling, MP3.com split. Profit to band - USD$3. Profit under RIAA USD$20 CD to band is USD$0.20 at most. If you're a techno band and you can sell 2 million CDs with USD$3 profit or choose to sell 1 million CDs via RIAA groups for USD$0.20 profit, which will you choose?
Right, you choose open source, cause you get more fans, more net dollars to band, and you also get the charts of where your CDs sell the most to plan tours with and can then email those fans and crash at their places.
Friends, Geeks, Script Kiddies, Lend me your ears!
Seriously, while I support the actions taken against the DCMA and believe the charges he's jailed under to be illegal under our own constitution, as well as ill founded and unevenly applied, I still think he's a crook who should rot in jail.
It's like the Mafia - so we got him on tax charges, he still belongs there.
But is the DCMA right? Should the feds be able to do this? Should Adobe get off scot free by saying "oh, gee, wish we could help, but after we signed the death warrant it's all out of our hands and we really think he shouldn't die, but we won't do anything about it"?
No.
So, fight the good fight. Win against the forces that oppose you. I support the cause, but not the man.
Meanwhile, Texas continues to execute poor black men for the crime of not being rich enough to afford lawyers, and DNA evidence to prove innocence is still the exception after commital and sentencing, not the rule.
Slashdot Mirror
He didn't crack any encryption, he merely showed a real world implementation of someone elses work using cheap hardware ...
Oh, like that will stop them from tossing him in the jail when they bust into his house.
Not.
The vast majority of americans can't find Rwanda on a map, let alone discourse knowledgeably about the factors that cause ethinic striff an genocide. Their understanding of politics and economics at any age is farcical. So why would being a geek automatically exempt one from these blindnesses?
Um, Rwanda, isn't that the place near Florida that isn't quite a state yet? I think J.Lo came from there.
I get about 100 or so at work, between 40 and 200 at my primary home account, 20 to 100 on my listserv account at eskimo.com (cheap way to run lists, good storage location, been here since time began), 20 to 40 on my web account.
It's not that much. Maybe half is spam, but I narc those to the feds and ISPs.
It means it's dangerous. Note he used a Linux driver to break it. So soon we can expect some states and municipalities to outlaw Linux, since it's associated with criminal behavior, just as glow sticks are associated with use of e at raves.
Didn't you realize that you can't inform people about things that happen in the world without first calling your lawyer and having them find out if you're violating the DMCA.
Just so you know, $50,000 is the going rate for bail.
It's about $250,000 on the West Coast (9th Federal Circuit), where it would probably be filed.
Naturally, the US constitution protects your right to publish such things, but they'll still jail you, sell your car, sell your house, and ruin your reputation before you get the appeal heard.
The tendency of geeks to be narrowly educated, self-serving, smug, and intolerant effectively relegates them to the margins of society. Their technical knowledge is impressive, but from a political/change-the-world standpoint, it is about as useful as knowing the names of all of the Pokemon. If you want to change the world - even a little - you have to be able to engage in intelligent, educated debate. This is a social skill that comes with education and - yes - age.
...
/. users (not anonymous, we've got karma and we'll use it if we have to), is that Jon is really pushing the limits in his stereotypic mythologizing, yet again.
You mean knowing all the names of all the Pokemon isn't useful? My son knows them in English, French, and Japanese
Seriously, I think a common thread to most of the posts today, all from
Look, we're not gonna uncheck it in our settings, because we know that just encourages more hapless victims to read it. Ignoring the problem won't make it go away.
So, to sum up - Jon, get a life. Teens have way more important things to do than you describe, and geekdom is usually a symptom, not a goal. My son was describing the social scene amongst the teens and preteens yesterday and the groups they were in. Some of us spend a bunch of time with kids, some tech, some not. And we all think Jon is really pushing it with this series.
Drop the series. Stop "having" to write in magazine article length and chopping it into snippets. That is so last century, so pulp paper magazine concept. I've sold many stories to zines and magazines and published in a number of countries for bucks and we all know the drill.
Read your users. We want short, sharp, insightful snippets with links to the boring crap. Stop insulting our intelligence with these recastings of longer "theorizing" or "mythologizing" articles that you broke up because we got angry when you went on for 3 screens. Adapt to the media or get out.
Go out and find some real stories - maybe about rave paraphenalia becoming illegal and how blinky electric things are a new fad sweeping the world. Maybe something about how cell phones are now so popular that they're becoming passe. Do some real work, get a fresh insight. But don't feed us this old old line, ok?
are really federal agents in disguise, Jon.
...
Man, must have struck a nerve last time, he's getting all defensive about his street creds
Ask yourself this: would you care at all if some other schmuck in Florida was walking down the street, somebody thought that he was their long-lost ex-husband who had been negelcting the children, and reported them to the police, only to find out it was mistaken identity? Of course not.
I'll admit I would care less about that, but that is not what really concerns me. What concernes me is this:
Suppose there is a criminal who resembles me in basic appearance, buld, facial characteristics etc. (be honest, how many times have you mistaken at total stranger for someone you know) and I go off to the mall/movies/park/office and the software pegs me as the bad guy, and I get swarmed by police officers. But wait here comes the best part, four days later on my way to dinner downtown it happens again.
This really can happen. My favorite coffee shop is apparently frequented by someone who looks amazingly like me - some of the barristas even get confused about who is which. To me, I don't look anything like the guy, but to an optical camera, I would probably become a false positive.
I've never done anything that I should be arrested for. For all I know this guy has a long string of warrants out on him. If they install a camera near the coffee shop, they may do a match on him and stake out and then arrest me.
And, since this is Seattle, they'll probably shoot first and ask questions later. If I was African-American, I'd have a 50 percent chance of getting killed in such an incident.
Luckily for me, I'm not. So I only have a 5 percent chance of being shot for something due to such cameras, should they install them.
mod the parent up!
...
Now this is where it really gets fun. Get some of your own face recognition software. It doesnt' have to be perfect, just adaquate and combine the photographs with GPS locations. Then build a database of the daily observed activities of individual police officers. If some public access was allowed to the public recognition systems in question, photographs of cops could be run against databases of wanted individuals until a false positive shows up and then publish that information.
Exactly. And one should also apply for a search warrant for this "criminal" and search their home for illegal gotten gains.
In a city just north of Seattle they're getting about 20 percent false positives on red light license fines - these are not the car they charge them for. At least here you can get a hearing to prove it's not you
They had to totally drop in the MidWest and they've been getting hammered with all our Cisco 675s they "upgraded" us to out here in Seattle.
...
I just unplug the box when I'm at work and plug it in when I need to use it, so it can't scan me when I'm dead.
The reason it's medium is MSFT won't do anything about it, and can cause them more problems if they complain about their inaction. They know which side of the bread has super-glue
Yes, that's exactly what we need more of - More Financial Institutions using hardware that approaches the legal drafting age.
...
So where do you think Linux grew from? - people using their old boxen for servers. It's a perfectly good box, why toss it? Besides, they don't need high speed access and they don't need to spend time and dollars when it does what they need.
Besides, we got rid of the draft last century. Get with the millenium
I try to run it, but while I can get Xwindows, I can't get ActiveX. Is this some new code?
Seriously, hasn't everyone turned that off, along with all JavaScript, even if they have a Win box?
The "Decision Matrix" the guy uses in the original article is full of mistakes and far from an objective comparison of Macs vs. PCs. The original article's author is also one of those people who *still insist* the G4 is faster than the Pentium 4 (and he conveniently "forgets" about the Athlon!)
...
More interesting news might have been the drop in stock price of Intel, due to the fact they're engaging in a price war with AMD, because AMD has been eating up their market share like crazy.
So articles about how important CPU speed are just ignore the fact that we don't care anymore. Face it, you can get an Athlon running at 800MHz with 256MB of RAM for way less than an Intel running at 1.7MHz with 128MB of RAM and the Athlon will beat it six ways to Sunday.
So G4 has a slower clock speed - how does this impact the users? If it doesn't, so what?
Analyze, think, then post
Look, different boxen for different people.
First, I got my son and my mom iMacs. I don't have to spend hours telling them how to use their boxen. They just work.
The apples come with built in Ethernet cards - you can hook them up fast, out of the box, and they work - the same can't be said for Win machines. And the users don't care about things that *nix people do - so what's your prob?
I mean, c'mon, the difference in throughput for the average person between a 500MHz Pentium II with 128MB of RAM and a 1.7GHz Pentium IV with 128MB of RAM with similar hard drives is maybe 5 percent at most.
You should be spending your time porting your BSD apps for the Mac, not wasting it talking about silly CPU benchmarks that mean nothing to most endusers. The real world is still using old Mac SEs at my Bank of America branch - as someone said today "hey, at least we don't have to worry about system failure or viruses".
You just run a Javascript scriplet and harvest the email address from the browser object properties.
...
Plus, you can track which http requests came for the images, and build a list of TCP/IP addresses and then probe the networks.
C'mon, it ain't rocket science
Is Katz a sensationalist or just another troll? He kinda blurs the boundries. And what's this preoccupation with children? Kinda creepy, in that Willy Wonka way.
... this is where the news is, not in Jon's distorted view of how you can sit safe at home and pretend to be a change agent.
I think the thing is he's one of those guys who wishes he'd done something when he was a teen, but didn't. So now he writes pieces talking about how teens now have all the advantages he never did, and do stuff, when he knows it's just a straw horse.
It's like his eternal theme of the uber-geek. I mean, if there really were uber-geeks, they wouldn't hang with him anyway, cause he's so last century, but if he writes about how cool "they" are, some get sucked into the fantasy depiction of how much change they cause.
Meantime, the real change agents are going to Montreal or G8 and shredding the WTO and World Bank. These are the real revolutionaries, but they're too scary for Jon to write about.
Hint - the next G8 is in a forest with a single track road to get there - man, talk about massive infiltration deadzone - what were they thinking
I'm 17 and I run my own corporation.
So? When I was 17 I had a sole proprietorship and created some of the first gaming systems and had customers worldwide.
Same old, same old. The names have changed, the graphics are better, but the content still ain't that great.
Are brilliant 15-year-old computer geeks running the world, upending existing institutions?
No. If you'd pay attention to what's been going on, like G8 (Genoa) and the like, you'd realize it's the 20-somethings, as always, who dictate change. Aided and abetted by the Edge-Gen and X-Gen elders who assist with logistics, money, corporate actions, and the like. The teens are just mucking around like they always do, generation after generation. For example, Jon would have you believe more kid-on-kid violence is happening when all measures indicate the percentage of this is dropping year after year, and the per capita rate as well. It's just that we televise these things now, so you see the whole world, not the tiny sliver that people are accustomed to seeing. The bandwidth increased, the network extends further, but the content ain't radically different.
Does it matter that childhood sometimes ends when computers arrive?
Yes. So stop using them. Oh, wait, you just want to stir up things, not really solve anything. I was just at a 10 year old's birthday party, and kids are still kids. And Kelsey, who's 16, pretty much describes most of the same things - the only thing is he doesn't play games with the computer - he uses the computer to play games with other kids and adults.
Better to ask a more useful question, like why the Media needs to hype things more and more, when there's less and less there? More hype, less content.
If in fact these are faked screens, which we visited, one wonders how much his sites harvested from our browsers that's sitting in his logs now?
...
Just send me more of that tasty spam, it goes well with the can o' beans next to the Audrey
1. A new motherboard, capable of faster bus access and with more RAM, might be worth it. But just because it can take a 1.0 to 1.4 GHz chip, doesn't mean you should put a 1.4 in it. Consider buying a 1.0 and replacing it with a 1.4 when you buy more RAM.
2. New RAM is almost always a better choice than a new CPU. Consider having your CPU be "ancient" - buy a 1.2 GHz instead of a 1.4 GHz, and spend the difference on more RAM.
3. Faster disk access and even multiple disks (for striping or redundant access) might be more cost-effective than a better CPU.
4. If you are a graphics professional, game designer, or are already maxing your systems out on RAM and hard disk, then you should consider buying a new, faster CPU. Otherwise, don't. Or, even better, take the same money you're spending on Intel chips and buy AMD or Transmeta - twice the bang for the buck.
I'm sure he'll be glad to hear he doesn't have any talent. Just like my friends who are in bands don't, just because they haven't been absorbed into the maw of the corporate music machine.
You confuse two things. One is that recording companies provide a service to artists - yes, they provide publicity, and upfront money, but at usurious rates. The second is that one must therefore choose to go that route. That is one method, but not necessarily the best one.
The services that recording companies provide could be provided by other means - better MP3 publicity tie-ins for one, better splits on profits for upfront money for another. Neither needs to come from existing recording companies.
And you can get studio space at a lot of locations - a friend of mine at work has a recording studio on Vashon that some of the local bands use. It's not as hard as you think.
Seriously. People will switch to Ogg Vorbis if MP3 starts costing real bucks.
If RIAA succeeds in cracking down on it, or levying some extra fee, people will choose the cheaper version. Free is a lot cheaper than expensive.
But if the current stalemate continues, with most MP3 near free in price (e.g. voluntary or less than 25 cents for decent quality), people won't have a reason to desert it.
What really matters, and I know you don't want to hear this, is how many decent Windows Ogg Vorbis encoder/decoder cheap-or-free suites are out there and how easy they are to use. Second impact is how easy it is to do a Linux and a Mac version.
It's all about the market. Ease of use, what you got, how easy it is to swap with friends, and can you get the music you want at a price you don't mind paying.
You are incorrect. If they put a shrink wrap license on a CD saying you're not even allowed to listen to it it's the UCITA that gives shrink wrap (and click-through) licences their teeth, not the DMCA or any copyright law already on the books.
...
But UCITA is only in one state, and two other states have watered down versions. Some states have firewall anti-UCITA laws too. In no case is UCITA the law of the land, unless you're in Virginia (think that's the state that bought that bag of foobar).
So, lacking UCITA, we default to DMCA or standard consumer case law, both of which preserve fair use as they can't override consumer protections.
IANAL, thank god
Or download free stuff from MP3.com.
It's not like the bands the RIAA push onto us are significantly better than most of the better artists on MP3.com, anyway.
This raises a very good point. If RIAA's music control fails, and the consumers route around the damage, buying CDs in the Bahamas for artists who are willing to list MP3 songs so we can try them out, it really doesn't matter what Congress tries to do.
In the end, the market has no soul, no love for RIAA and the corporate music scene. If they increase costs and try to closed source their music, open source music alternatives will become more attractive. If I'm into Techno and they try to charge me USD$20 for a CD of 10 songs, when I can get decent (if not better) quality Techno for USD$0 for tryout and USD$0 for one or two sample MP3 songs (full length), then I'll send them USD$10 for the 10 song CD. Cost to band - USD$7 for production, shipping, handling, MP3.com split. Profit to band - USD$3. Profit under RIAA USD$20 CD to band is USD$0.20 at most. If you're a techno band and you can sell 2 million CDs with USD$3 profit or choose to sell 1 million CDs via RIAA groups for USD$0.20 profit, which will you choose?
Right, you choose open source, cause you get more fans, more net dollars to band, and you also get the charts of where your CDs sell the most to plan tours with and can then email those fans and crash at their places.
The market wins, open source wins, RIAA loses.
Friends, Geeks, Script Kiddies, Lend me your ears!
Seriously, while I support the actions taken against the DCMA and believe the charges he's jailed under to be illegal under our own constitution, as well as ill founded and unevenly applied, I still think he's a crook who should rot in jail.
It's like the Mafia - so we got him on tax charges, he still belongs there.
But is the DCMA right? Should the feds be able to do this? Should Adobe get off scot free by saying "oh, gee, wish we could help, but after we signed the death warrant it's all out of our hands and we really think he shouldn't die, but we won't do anything about it"?
No.
So, fight the good fight. Win against the forces that oppose you. I support the cause, but not the man.
Meanwhile, Texas continues to execute poor black men for the crime of not being rich enough to afford lawyers, and DNA evidence to prove innocence is still the exception after commital and sentencing, not the rule.