Personally I consider throwing molotov cocktails at cinemagoers, injuring thirteen (four seriously), "violence", but I guess your miliage must vary.
Violence happens. In countries where it's encouraged and people think they can get away with it, then a lot happens. In countries where it's not, relatively little occurs. Right now, a large amount of muslims are centered around the Arabian subcontinents, an area where governments can and do bless violence in favour of the state religion.
Even outside of that though, as the St Michel movie theater incident demonstrates, there are nut jobs even amongst nice, white, civilized, Christian types. (That's sarcasm, btw. I lived in the shadow of IRA terror for much of my life, I don't particularly consider any religion to have a monopoly on violence.)
If you changed the word "innovations" to "inventions" in the above comment, you'd be defining the word "innovate". You can't bring innovations to market in a form that customers can use, because if that were the case, they wouldn't already be innovations.
They invented the PDA, not the "Hand held PC" industry. Casio, Sharp, and Psion were selling pocketable, handheld, personal computers throughout most of the eighties (the Psion Organiser series was pretty much a yuppie icon at one point.) All were programmable in a high level language (which could be done on the machine itself) and most in assembly if need be; they all included removable storage and had alphanumeric input features.
If you're talking literally about handheld PCs (as in PC clones), then Atari's Portfolio predates the Newton series by about four years. (And the Newton certainly wasn't a PC clone anyway!)
Apple was the first to make a market viable application-centric pocketable computer design. Psion's MC400 a few years before that demonstrated the principle, but was poorly marketed and wasn't pocketable. The other handheld computers were, for the most part, still in the stage where applications needed to be built and so put a large amount of concentration on the programmable side of the machines rather than the applications. And in the end, it was a viable design, but it was Palm, not Apple, who profited from it.
The shuffle's battery life is only 12 hours. I would guess a significant number of cellphones could manage MP3 playing (which involves only output to headphones, not radio operation which is the traditional battery eater) for far longer than that.
Personally I think the hand is writing on the wall for dedicated MP3 players. Cellphones are, quite honestly, months away from having enough capacity to replace the majority of MP3 player units out there.
Telegrams stopped being delivered by BT before it was even BT (or British Telecom) - they were still part of the Post Office when Telegrams were phased out.
What you probably saw in the phonebook were "Telemessages." These were actual, normal, letters (ie delivered by the Post Office as regular first class mail) comprised of short messages transcribed over the phone. With the Post Office delivering first class letters overnight anyway, and so far as I'm aware having no international access method, it had limited use.
Also while you build (most of - don't forget CGI) the props for a film before you start filming, the film is already designed by then. The script's been written. The actors have been hired. The entire thing's been storyboarded.
By itself, being a president at NORML is not, in itself, at odds with being a DEA agent. You can believe that the law, as a representation of democratic will and a standard of a cohesive society, must be enforced, while disagreeing with the laws you enforce. And certainly, in that respect, the GP's right, if you fire a DEA agent for being involved with NORML, then you're one step away from firing any cop who also is involved politically (unless, I guess, the cop is only in favour of creating more laws, and not in favour of removing any from the books.)
I hate to say though, while I think employers are underregulated in terms of their ability to hire and fire employees for what they do off the clock, at the same time, comparing public employees, whose employer has a moral and constitutional duty to be blind to the opinions and non-violent expression of those opinions by said employees, and private employees as in this case, strikes me as a little wrong, to say the least. This is especially the case when we're talking about law firms, whose first duty is advocacy, and whose sizes makes them less of a menace to the job market than many other businesses.
I don't know what planet you live on, but on mind, criminal law firms tend to put a client's case that he or she is innocent of murder, not that murder is "acceptable".
"Your honour, if it pleases the court, I'd like to point out that the defendent's so-called "victim" was, in fact, a complete ass, who deserves to die. So why is my client being treated as the guilty one here? I mean, I don't know about you, but killing people is A-OK in my book as long as the guy deserves it."
I'm having difficulty understanding your logic. Would you explain it to me?
The scenarios I'm reading into your comment are:
1. Torvalds decides he hates the GPL, revokes it and switches to closed source. In this instance, everyone uses the last GPL'd version and forks the operating system.
2. Someone sues Linus for copyright infringement. While the case is bogus, Torvalds settles out of court, agreeing to no longer distribute Linux. Everyone uses the last GPL'd version and forks the operating system.
3. Someone sneaks code into the operating system that they didn't own the copyright to in the first place, and sues Torvalds. This is exactly the same scenario as would happen anyway (eg if IBM lost its lawsuit to SCO.)
How would Torvalds be a single point of failure? The principle of forking the last known Free Software licensed version is well established in instances where the licencer has refused to release Free Software future versions, either deliberately (AmiTCP, Gosling EMACS, etc) or through circumstances beyond his or her control (AtheOS.)
The worst is it kind of works the other way. As it stands, Linus Torvalds would have more difficulty than most enforcing the copyrights on Linux, as he would have to prove he has standing to sue. This was the original reason why the FSF recommended people assign copyrights to the project maintainer - because if you own the copyrights, you don't have to cross that hurdle.
I think the GP was right. Schwartz is talking about possibly switching, not saying that Sun's actually doing it. Note in particular this paragraph:
We also recognize that diversity and choice are important - which is why we've begun looking at the possibility of releasing Solaris (and potentially the entire Solaris Enterprise System), under dual open source licenses. CDDL (which allows customer IP to safely comingle with Solaris source code) and under the Free Software Foundation's GPL3. It's early days, but we're looking at two things as we make that decision.
Not "Yes, we're gonna do it!" but "We've begun looking at the possibility of..." and "It's early days... looking at (things)... make that decision"
There's nothing in Schwartz's blog that suggests the decision has been made, that Sun are doing this, or that they're unaware of the draft nature of the license. By all means criticise them as stupid if they actually switch before the GPL3 has been released, but it's great they're looking at the current draft and saying "This is something we can seriously consider." It gives valuable feedback to the FSF, and it suggests Sun are going to become even better Free Software players in the near future.
It's an understandable one though. I, personally, can't see myself releasing software under the GPL with the "or any future version" add-on.
What I can see is similar language that makes such an upgrade allowable on condition of my approval (eg both the FSF and me, Squiggleslash, have to approve of a license, but once both of us do, the software becomes licensed under it, and that applies both to code I've written and stuff submitted to me. The license must be a newer version of the GPL.) That would make it easier to propogate the most important (IMO) Free Software license (and thus aid interoperability and license compatability) while providing an additional check to make sure anything going wrong at the FSF doesn't do damage.
That's relatively novel though. What Torvalds should, at the time, have considered was an FSF-style "If you want to contribute to the core version of Linux, you must assign copyrights to me" policy, would would have side-stepped this all to begin with, and also allowed him more flexibility in terms of ensuring the code can be used with other code licensed under GPL-incompatable licences.
...which may violate British copyright laws anyway. British copyright laws have little or no concept of "fair use" (there are some very strict and limited rights you have codified in law, but not many, and they concern specific applications, not general principles.) If you make a copy of someone else's work, you're probably - unless there's some permission or licence, written or implied - in breach of copyright.
So if you've ripped your CD to your hard disk, or copied someone else's MP3s to your disk, you're probably already there. And clearly you don't have an licence, implied or written, to stick them in a folder to be advertised and transmitted by your P2P client.
If this is the reasoning (and I really don't know, and I'm not a lawyer), then it's kind of funny, because P2P clients aren't simply infringing copyright, but they're actually using their software to advertise the fact! P2P is, for the most part, putting a big target for the lawyers on your head anyway, this is one better.
If I sell you box which claims it has a TV in it, and you get home, and it actually turns out to be full of bricks, then I'm committing fraud. I doubt fraud laws are written to be void if the perceived transaction would have been illegal anyway.
Kind of a shame this wasn't reported in Britain's Daily Telegraph newspaper then.;-)
(It's kind of funny to think the Daily Telegraph was presumably founded with that name because they wanted to look "hip" and "modern" and "all with the technology". I guess if they'd been started ten years ago, they'd have probably gone under the name "The Modem" or "The Gopher Page".)
Did anyone else read this, slap their foreheads, and yell "THAT's why Apple is claiming the demonstration MacBook Pros were prototypes and why they're not releasing battery life figures?"
It actually all makes sense now. The hardware may be finalised and actually be rolling off production lines, but I'm guessing the "prototype" designation actually reflects the software side, with Apple also triggering the same bug and wanting to work with Intel on a workaround.
So your complaint was that this vacious, airheaded, personality-obsessed article was presented in a particularly airheaded, vacious, design-over-substance way?
Heh:)
I thought the entire premise of the article was crap. It reminds me of the Wired "Ten Important Personalities Who Have Something Or Other To Do With A Technology We're Hyping Right Now" type thing (you know the sort? It always includes:
a professor from MIT who invents knew uses for the prefix "Cyber" a lot (Probably Negroponte)
a "hip" CEO of a small "hip" start-up
a particularly stupid venture capitalist who'll put money into anything
a lawyer who "gets it"
a libertarian blowhard
some guy who works at a high level for a giant, gray, corporation who's approved doing research into whatever-it-is and "gets it"
an open source programmer
a senator who once voted against a draconian copyright bill, or some other bill that's currently unpopular (though he voted for all the other ones, a fact not mentioned by the article.)
that guy from MTV who writes a blog about his iPod
Steve Jobs, Bill Joy, or Larry Ellison
Forbes does these types of articles, with a slightly different make up, on a regular basis too.
Essentally it works like this: The magazine in question doesn't actually know what to write about, and the editors rather like People magazine and other similar gossip rags. So they conclude the best way to bump up sales is to focus on personalities rather than actual facts and information.
This is BusinessWeek doing their own version. This Jobs fellow is in the news rather a lot these days, I mean he's CEO of Apple and that was kind of interesting because he was fired from Apple and then came back, and now he's also the power behind the throne of the most famous media company, Disney, I mean, he's hip, and we ought to show everyone that we think he's hip. And how better than a content free slideshow? That way our readers don't have to read anything, we don't have to do any thorough fact checking, we can just regurgitate what everyone knows anyway with a few obvious observations, and everyone will read it and go "Gosh, BusinessWeek said exactly what I was thinking about this Steve Jobs fellow, truly they are an insightful magazine."
This is why I don't read Forbes, or BusinessWeek, and why I don't read Wired any more. (On a similar note, New Scientist's habit of comparing everything to The Matrix in the year I subscribed to them is why I never renewed my subscription.)
I did not IN ANY WAY defend either the Reagan or Bush administrations.
Yes, you did. The OP mentioned both as examples of corruption, and you felt the need to issue a knee-jerk "defense" of them by suggesting they were no worse than anyone else. There was nothing in the OP's post that implied they were especially bad (though, IMO, both were pretty fucking awful), but you defended them anyway.
It gets worse when one considers the fact that you've taken the fact someone foed you as some kind of evidence he's an extreme left-winger. It could just as easily be that he saw you're the kind of person who responds to any "Such-and-such a person, who happens to be a hero to the right-wing, did bad things" as "Yeah, but so did the other presidents." You took the trouble to write a little hate-filled rant against someone criticising them for kneejerk responses when all you know about them is that they may have read a kneejerk response from you.
You're a typical right-winger, totally unable to justify the behaviour of your own side, yet completely unable to criticise your own side for its abuses. This is yet another example of the utter moral bankruptsy of the right. Nobody defends Clinton by saying "Yeah, but so did everyone else".
If someone like Sarah McLauglan gets up on the stand and says "File sharing actually helps my sales," it will also blow a big hole in the RIAA's legal case.
No, it wouldn't. Copyright infringement is copyright infringement, regardless of whether it "helps" the artist, or helps the publisher (which is not the same thing), or not. Even if you extrapolate that all artists are helped because Sarah McLauglan is (huh?), the argument is irrelevent.
So far I've not seen anything that suggests the RIAA's legal case isn't watertight in the vast majority of the lawsuits it's pushing. As long as an infringment of copyright has occurred, it's illegal.
Worse still, even if we pretend, for a moment, that the issue of "helping artists" actually affects legality, if McLauglan sincerely believes (as you speculate) that uncontrolled peer-to-peer file copying is helping her, she, as the copyright holder, is perfectly free to authorize such usage anyway. So the tools are available, under copyright law, to ensure artists who benefit from uncontrolled peer-to-peer copying can actually do so, with those who use these mechanisms doing so legally, while artists who do not feel the same way can continue to exert control. The courts aren't going to ask "Why is the RIAA suing if clearly every artist benefits from this kind of activity, as Sarah McLauglan says", the courts are, rightly, going to say "If Sarah McLaughlan benefits from this activity, why hasn't she given her consent for it to happen? Why is she insisting that her lack of consent be ignored together with everyone else's, purely because she benefits from it?"
The solution to the RIAA lawsuits is consent. People need to acknowledge that the works they're copying wouldn't have been created without the artists who created them, and that their consent is critical to an infrastructure where these works circulate. If you don't have the consent, don't redistribute the file. Don't expect one artist giving implied consent (or one label doing likewise) to mean that everyone does, any more than one woman consenting to a spanking means they all do.
Well, one of the things they do is protect the copyrights of their members in areas where a collective approach is probably a better thing. For example, there's this "P2P piracy" epidemic at the moment, comprising of large numbers of people running programs that take rips of music from CDs and make them available to anyone on the network, without the need to pay royalties.
These networks do not focus on music from one particular publisher, but a great many, the vast majority (if not all) the RIAA members, for instance. So it makes little sense for each publisher in turn to sue each of the network user/operators one by one. (ie Universal look for someone distributing a Universal song and suing them, then Sony looking for someone distributing a Sony song and suing them, etc.) Instead, the RIAA can cut the costs of the process, while still acting as a deterent, by suing on behalf of all of its members.
Apple has to include Firewire in their low-end machines because of the FCC?
Or do you just mean that high-end equipment needs to support Firewire? That's important in terms of what goes into consumer Macs as it is in the same way that my DV camera needs to support Beta tapes (ie it doesn't.)
Don't get me wrong, I love Firewire. But I've played this game too many times in the past. I was on the side of SCSI when IDE replaced it too. I looked at IDE's inferior performance, SCSI's greater standardization (when Apple phased out SCSI, you could still get "IDE" CDROMs that required special non-standard drivers to use), and SCSI's ability to support more than just storage devices. I can see when the writing is on the wall for a perfectly good technology. When its most enthusiastic sponsor is downgrading support (and blaming Intel for FW800 being gone isn't going to cut it - it doesn't explain what's happening with iPod, and it's something Apple could fix anyway by including a FW800 card), it's obvious Apple isn't interested in pushing it.
Look also at where the industry is heading. When Firewire was first announced, people were talking about networking all audio-visual equipment with it, consumer and pro. SPDIF is where the audio is. Video "networking" looks set to be HDMI based in the near future. Hard to see where Firewire will fit in the picture for consumer AV.
I really, seriously, believe people are deluding themselves when they posit arguments in favour of consumer Firewire continuing to attract the support of major manufacturers like Apple. Apple is taking steps to downgrade it in the non-pro sphere. That's demonstrable fact. It's not because of Intel, it's something they were already doing well before the MacBook Pro.
I don't think SCSI is going away any time soon either, as long as SCSI is THE interface for scanners.;-)
DV cameras are migrating to USB. Firewire support can always be provided in terms of a plug-in card for the minority that (a) use DV, (b) want to import it into their computers, and (c) use non-USB version. That minority is relatively large right now but it's going to get smaller. Firewire's other applications are relatively obsolete too. Sure, it's a better way of doing much of this stuff, but it's redundant against good-enough technologies that have to be included anyway. USB2 is on all Windows PCs because it's good-enough, Firewire is usually optional because it's a little bit better.
With Apple no longer including Firewire cables with iPods, with the nano and shuffle being USB only, with Apple actually going backwards in terms of support (800 replaced with the older USB2-speed 400), it's relatively clear they're not seeing this as a technology they're fully behind any more. I would be unsurprised if their consumer Macs drop Firewire support completely (but available via a plug-in card) next year.
The headline is wrong. The MacBook Pro has Firewire, it just doesn't have FW800.
It's clear Apple is downplaying Firewire, quite possibly planning to drop it as a standard feature some time in the next few years, but they haven't gone the whole way yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Violence happens. In countries where it's encouraged and people think they can get away with it, then a lot happens. In countries where it's not, relatively little occurs. Right now, a large amount of muslims are centered around the Arabian subcontinents, an area where governments can and do bless violence in favour of the state religion.
Even outside of that though, as the St Michel movie theater incident demonstrates, there are nut jobs even amongst nice, white, civilized, Christian types. (That's sarcasm, btw. I lived in the shadow of IRA terror for much of my life, I don't particularly consider any religion to have a monopoly on violence.)
If you changed the word "innovations" to "inventions" in the above comment, you'd be defining the word "innovate". You can't bring innovations to market in a form that customers can use, because if that were the case, they wouldn't already be innovations.
If you're talking literally about handheld PCs (as in PC clones), then Atari's Portfolio predates the Newton series by about four years. (And the Newton certainly wasn't a PC clone anyway!)
Apple was the first to make a market viable application-centric pocketable computer design. Psion's MC400 a few years before that demonstrated the principle, but was poorly marketed and wasn't pocketable. The other handheld computers were, for the most part, still in the stage where applications needed to be built and so put a large amount of concentration on the programmable side of the machines rather than the applications. And in the end, it was a viable design, but it was Palm, not Apple, who profited from it.
They'll be sending over some terrorists with WMDs...
Personally I think the hand is writing on the wall for dedicated MP3 players. Cellphones are, quite honestly, months away from having enough capacity to replace the majority of MP3 player units out there.
What you probably saw in the phonebook were "Telemessages." These were actual, normal, letters (ie delivered by the Post Office as regular first class mail) comprised of short messages transcribed over the phone. With the Post Office delivering first class letters overnight anyway, and so far as I'm aware having no international access method, it had limited use.
Also while you build (most of - don't forget CGI) the props for a film before you start filming, the film is already designed by then. The script's been written. The actors have been hired. The entire thing's been storyboarded.
I hate to say though, while I think employers are underregulated in terms of their ability to hire and fire employees for what they do off the clock, at the same time, comparing public employees, whose employer has a moral and constitutional duty to be blind to the opinions and non-violent expression of those opinions by said employees, and private employees as in this case, strikes me as a little wrong, to say the least. This is especially the case when we're talking about law firms, whose first duty is advocacy, and whose sizes makes them less of a menace to the job market than many other businesses.
"Your honour, if it pleases the court, I'd like to point out that the defendent's so-called "victim" was, in fact, a complete ass, who deserves to die. So why is my client being treated as the guilty one here? I mean, I don't know about you, but killing people is A-OK in my book as long as the guy deserves it."
The scenarios I'm reading into your comment are:
1. Torvalds decides he hates the GPL, revokes it and switches to closed source. In this instance, everyone uses the last GPL'd version and forks the operating system.
2. Someone sues Linus for copyright infringement. While the case is bogus, Torvalds settles out of court, agreeing to no longer distribute Linux. Everyone uses the last GPL'd version and forks the operating system.
3. Someone sneaks code into the operating system that they didn't own the copyright to in the first place, and sues Torvalds. This is exactly the same scenario as would happen anyway (eg if IBM lost its lawsuit to SCO.)
How would Torvalds be a single point of failure? The principle of forking the last known Free Software licensed version is well established in instances where the licencer has refused to release Free Software future versions, either deliberately (AmiTCP, Gosling EMACS, etc) or through circumstances beyond his or her control (AtheOS.)
The worst is it kind of works the other way. As it stands, Linus Torvalds would have more difficulty than most enforcing the copyrights on Linux, as he would have to prove he has standing to sue. This was the original reason why the FSF recommended people assign copyrights to the project maintainer - because if you own the copyrights, you don't have to cross that hurdle.
There's nothing in Schwartz's blog that suggests the decision has been made, that Sun are doing this, or that they're unaware of the draft nature of the license. By all means criticise them as stupid if they actually switch before the GPL3 has been released, but it's great they're looking at the current draft and saying "This is something we can seriously consider." It gives valuable feedback to the FSF, and it suggests Sun are going to become even better Free Software players in the near future.
What I can see is similar language that makes such an upgrade allowable on condition of my approval (eg both the FSF and me, Squiggleslash, have to approve of a license, but once both of us do, the software becomes licensed under it, and that applies both to code I've written and stuff submitted to me. The license must be a newer version of the GPL.) That would make it easier to propogate the most important (IMO) Free Software license (and thus aid interoperability and license compatability) while providing an additional check to make sure anything going wrong at the FSF doesn't do damage.
That's relatively novel though. What Torvalds should, at the time, have considered was an FSF-style "If you want to contribute to the core version of Linux, you must assign copyrights to me" policy, would would have side-stepped this all to begin with, and also allowed him more flexibility in terms of ensuring the code can be used with other code licensed under GPL-incompatable licences.
So if you've ripped your CD to your hard disk, or copied someone else's MP3s to your disk, you're probably already there. And clearly you don't have an licence, implied or written, to stick them in a folder to be advertised and transmitted by your P2P client.
If this is the reasoning (and I really don't know, and I'm not a lawyer), then it's kind of funny, because P2P clients aren't simply infringing copyright, but they're actually using their software to advertise the fact! P2P is, for the most part, putting a big target for the lawyers on your head anyway, this is one better.
If I sell you box which claims it has a TV in it, and you get home, and it actually turns out to be full of bricks, then I'm committing fraud. I doubt fraud laws are written to be void if the perceived transaction would have been illegal anyway.
(It's kind of funny to think the Daily Telegraph was presumably founded with that name because they wanted to look "hip" and "modern" and "all with the technology". I guess if they'd been started ten years ago, they'd have probably gone under the name "The Modem" or "The Gopher Page".)
It actually all makes sense now. The hardware may be finalised and actually be rolling off production lines, but I'm guessing the "prototype" designation actually reflects the software side, with Apple also triggering the same bug and wanting to work with Intel on a workaround.
Heh :)
I thought the entire premise of the article was crap. It reminds me of the Wired "Ten Important Personalities Who Have Something Or Other To Do With A Technology We're Hyping Right Now" type thing (you know the sort? It always includes:
Essentally it works like this: The magazine in question doesn't actually know what to write about, and the editors rather like People magazine and other similar gossip rags. So they conclude the best way to bump up sales is to focus on personalities rather than actual facts and information.
This is BusinessWeek doing their own version. This Jobs fellow is in the news rather a lot these days, I mean he's CEO of Apple and that was kind of interesting because he was fired from Apple and then came back, and now he's also the power behind the throne of the most famous media company, Disney, I mean, he's hip, and we ought to show everyone that we think he's hip. And how better than a content free slideshow? That way our readers don't have to read anything, we don't have to do any thorough fact checking, we can just regurgitate what everyone knows anyway with a few obvious observations, and everyone will read it and go "Gosh, BusinessWeek said exactly what I was thinking about this Steve Jobs fellow, truly they are an insightful magazine."
This is why I don't read Forbes, or BusinessWeek, and why I don't read Wired any more. (On a similar note, New Scientist's habit of comparing everything to The Matrix in the year I subscribed to them is why I never renewed my subscription.)
It's called the "media" because it's mediocre.
It gets worse when one considers the fact that you've taken the fact someone foed you as some kind of evidence he's an extreme left-winger. It could just as easily be that he saw you're the kind of person who responds to any "Such-and-such a person, who happens to be a hero to the right-wing, did bad things" as "Yeah, but so did the other presidents." You took the trouble to write a little hate-filled rant against someone criticising them for kneejerk responses when all you know about them is that they may have read a kneejerk response from you.
You're a typical right-winger, totally unable to justify the behaviour of your own side, yet completely unable to criticise your own side for its abuses. This is yet another example of the utter moral bankruptsy of the right. Nobody defends Clinton by saying "Yeah, but so did everyone else".
So far I've not seen anything that suggests the RIAA's legal case isn't watertight in the vast majority of the lawsuits it's pushing. As long as an infringment of copyright has occurred, it's illegal.
Worse still, even if we pretend, for a moment, that the issue of "helping artists" actually affects legality, if McLauglan sincerely believes (as you speculate) that uncontrolled peer-to-peer file copying is helping her, she, as the copyright holder, is perfectly free to authorize such usage anyway. So the tools are available, under copyright law, to ensure artists who benefit from uncontrolled peer-to-peer copying can actually do so, with those who use these mechanisms doing so legally, while artists who do not feel the same way can continue to exert control. The courts aren't going to ask "Why is the RIAA suing if clearly every artist benefits from this kind of activity, as Sarah McLauglan says", the courts are, rightly, going to say "If Sarah McLaughlan benefits from this activity, why hasn't she given her consent for it to happen? Why is she insisting that her lack of consent be ignored together with everyone else's, purely because she benefits from it?"
The solution to the RIAA lawsuits is consent. People need to acknowledge that the works they're copying wouldn't have been created without the artists who created them, and that their consent is critical to an infrastructure where these works circulate. If you don't have the consent, don't redistribute the file. Don't expect one artist giving implied consent (or one label doing likewise) to mean that everyone does, any more than one woman consenting to a spanking means they all do.
I suspect many of their members do, but that's not the same thing.
These networks do not focus on music from one particular publisher, but a great many, the vast majority (if not all) the RIAA members, for instance. So it makes little sense for each publisher in turn to sue each of the network user/operators one by one. (ie Universal look for someone distributing a Universal song and suing them, then Sony looking for someone distributing a Sony song and suing them, etc.) Instead, the RIAA can cut the costs of the process, while still acting as a deterent, by suing on behalf of all of its members.
Or do you just mean that high-end equipment needs to support Firewire? That's important in terms of what goes into consumer Macs as it is in the same way that my DV camera needs to support Beta tapes (ie it doesn't.)
Don't get me wrong, I love Firewire. But I've played this game too many times in the past. I was on the side of SCSI when IDE replaced it too. I looked at IDE's inferior performance, SCSI's greater standardization (when Apple phased out SCSI, you could still get "IDE" CDROMs that required special non-standard drivers to use), and SCSI's ability to support more than just storage devices. I can see when the writing is on the wall for a perfectly good technology. When its most enthusiastic sponsor is downgrading support (and blaming Intel for FW800 being gone isn't going to cut it - it doesn't explain what's happening with iPod, and it's something Apple could fix anyway by including a FW800 card), it's obvious Apple isn't interested in pushing it.
Look also at where the industry is heading. When Firewire was first announced, people were talking about networking all audio-visual equipment with it, consumer and pro. SPDIF is where the audio is. Video "networking" looks set to be HDMI based in the near future. Hard to see where Firewire will fit in the picture for consumer AV.
I really, seriously, believe people are deluding themselves when they posit arguments in favour of consumer Firewire continuing to attract the support of major manufacturers like Apple. Apple is taking steps to downgrade it in the non-pro sphere. That's demonstrable fact. It's not because of Intel, it's something they were already doing well before the MacBook Pro.
DV cameras are migrating to USB. Firewire support can always be provided in terms of a plug-in card for the minority that (a) use DV, (b) want to import it into their computers, and (c) use non-USB version. That minority is relatively large right now but it's going to get smaller. Firewire's other applications are relatively obsolete too. Sure, it's a better way of doing much of this stuff, but it's redundant against good-enough technologies that have to be included anyway. USB2 is on all Windows PCs because it's good-enough, Firewire is usually optional because it's a little bit better.
With Apple no longer including Firewire cables with iPods, with the nano and shuffle being USB only, with Apple actually going backwards in terms of support (800 replaced with the older USB2-speed 400), it's relatively clear they're not seeing this as a technology they're fully behind any more. I would be unsurprised if their consumer Macs drop Firewire support completely (but available via a plug-in card) next year.
It's clear Apple is downplaying Firewire, quite possibly planning to drop it as a standard feature some time in the next few years, but they haven't gone the whole way yet.