Why are they fighting Napser, even as their profits increase?
It's simple. They're control freaks.
More to the point, they recognize Napster as a long-term threat. They know that as long as they control the mainstream distribution channels, they can continue to make obscene profits. But Napster
Provides people access to independant artists and groups, who as they become more well known, become poised to seriously compete with the groups that RIAA memebers control. And as the armchair economists are all so happy to point out, more competition leads to slimmer profits.
Makes people seriously think twice before popping down $15 for a CD. Now, as long as bandwidth, mp3 quality, and hard drive space are issues, they're still going to buy the CD, which is why the RIAA's profits haven't been hurt yet. But those things are techincal issues which are becoming less and less of a problem every day. Soon enough, people will stop buying as many CD's, and the RIAA's sales will plummet.
So, in short, the RIAA's claims about lost revenue are FUD, but they know that if Napster survives long enough, they won't be.
Hey, I'm as much of a fan of Napster as anybody, and I agree that the RIAA's claims are consistently whacked, but everyone repeat after me:
You cannot declare that X has affected Y to degree Z, unless you can observe Y in the absence of X.
In other words, unless someone can open an interdimensional portal to some alternate universe in which Napster doesn't exist, all of these claims of revenue being up or down in particular areas are meaningless. There are a countless number of other factors that could be influencing sales of CDs, cassettes, music videos, etc. Saying that Napster is solely responsible for any of it is absurd.
Dammit, man, why couldn't you have posted this yesterday when I still had moderator points?
Shoeboy, you're my hero. You write well, you're consistenly funny, and I couldn't agree more about the women's feet thing. Are you going to burn off karma by posting more erotica any time soon?
Also, what's your position on painted toenails? Sexy, or is au naturale better?
Sure, a corporate sponsor could save Ogg Vorbis from patent infringement lawsuits, but where would we go from there?
Any company that makes an investment in Ogg is going to want to get something in return, and they're going to want more than just a freely available audio compression format. They're going to want control.
This isn't just some idle prediction. This sort of thing has happened before, and it's happening right now with other Open Source projects. Look at Mozilla. Netscape/AOL invested their codebase, and their staff programmers in an open source project, and now that it's just about ready for prime time, AOL forks the code, and retakes control of the Nescape browser, which is the only browser that the mainstream public is likely to use. How many people's mothers and bosses have even heard of "Mozilla"?
And look at GNOME. What started out as a response to the concern that KDE wasn't free enough, is rapidly turning corporate, with strategic alliances with other big business interests under the guise of the "Gnome Foundation", and the rebranding to the trademarked "Helix Gnome".
Realize, people, that unless we act to keep our Free Software free of commercial control, it will be Free in name only.
Is anyone else bothered by the fact that, given the opportunity to create anything at all with this wonderous technology, these people chose to do a wineglass? What kind of message is this sending to todays youth? Among college students, the more technically inclined ("geeks", if you will) are probably the only social group who don't binge drink on a regular basis. And here we, the "responsible adults" of the world, are telling them "Drinking is good".
But drinking is not good. And drinking to excess is even worse. The Bible says drunkenness is a sin (Gal. 5:21), and even those here who aren't Christians will still agree that getting intoxicated can lead to a variety of unhealthy activities.
For shame, NEC. Next time, try to consider the social consequences of your actions.
The DoD has quite possibly the most secure networks in the world (of those that are actually connected to the internet, of course). This makes them a target for anyone who wants a challenge.
Lots of script kiddie type "hackers" have been indoctrinated with the mass media image of a "leet haxor" who discovers important confidential information while poking around the DoD, and they figure it could happen to them.
Actual agents of foriegn powers are probably trying to gain access to secret information... Though traditional methods of gaining access are probably still effective.
Consequently, this sort of statistic shouldn't suprise anybody.
I think you're serious, so here's my answer: It is more important to me to protect myself from having FBI agents (not bureaucrats, agents)
They may be "agents" in name, but that doesn't mean they're not bureaucrats in reality. Honestly, you think the guys that took down the Montana Freemen or those cult memebers in Waco are the same guys who sit in a lab deciphering the output of little elecronic devices? Really.
reading my shopping list,
It's a flipping shopping list. Who cares?
my political manifestos,
This is America! You aren't going to be persecuted for harboring seditious ideas.
my notes on how to protect myself from script kiddies (proof positive that I'm a hacker, after all),
Again, you're being paranoid. If you haven't done anything illegal, you have nothing to hide.
and my (probably) fictional account of Dubya and Jim Baker exchanging bodily fluids (not intended for publication).
Well, now, that could be libelous... but again, if you don't acutally publish it, you're perfectly safe.
The FBI has proven that it is not above using its power for political purposes.
Details instead of vague accusations, please?
If the FBI were not free to violate the 4th amendment, we wouldn't have anarchy -- we'd simply have a tolerable FBI. Do you really believe they'd have (your words) no power if they had to respect the 4th amendment?
Read the Fscking article, man! They did respect the 4th amendment. They had a court order!
Actually, the Hoover administration got something of a bad rap. Admittedly, it's somewhat arguable that they did get a bit overzealous at times, but those were generally isolated incidents, blown way out of proportion by the "yellow journalism" that was so prevalent at the time.
What's more, I saw some very interesting statistics just the other day (Of course, I can't find the link now!), that showed a very dramatic reduction in certain types of violent crimes that began shortly after Hoover took charge, and ended again just as he left. So, it's pretty clear that in the end, government nosiness is a good thing. Think about it.
Now, I know that a lot of people around here are going to go off and start screaming about having your rights violated, but the fact of the matter is that the FBI had a court order here! They had every right to tap this guy's computer.
If the FBI couldn't do things like this, they'd have no power to enforce the laws of this country, we'd have total anarchy, and having someone monitor your keystrokes would be the least of your problems!
So ask yourself, which is more important to you, seeing mob bosses, terrorists, and child pornographers get caught before they can hurt anybody, or protecting yourself from having some FBI bureaucrat reading over your shopping list?
JonKatz actually followed up on one of his "first in a series" articles! The world as we know it is over!
Seriously, I think Katz is overstating both the severity of the "moral panic" that society has supposedly created over gaming, and the importance of gaming as a cultural force.
They're just games, people! Sure there are a few oddballs who are covinced that Doom et. al. are a tool of Satan, but most reasonable people recognize that games are just games.
Now, that isn't to say that there's no legitimate concern over things like desensitization to violence, couch potatoism, and
other alleged societal ills that people associate with games. But a society that questions itself is the only healthy kind of society.
You're forgetting an important fact. Children have much less disposable income than adults.
What you need to do is market your gun collection to the parent as the thing that every kid wants for Christmas. Then wait for scarcity of the "Official Autographed Shoeboy Handgun(tm)" to drive the price up to outrageous levels.
None of the big name console manufacturere make more than a small percentage of the games for their platforms. What they do is charge the games' developers for the SDK[?], and/or charge them a royalty on games sold.
What Indrema will be doing, according to the article, is making the SDK available for free, charging developers for a "technical certification", and charging royalties on non-freeware games.
Actually, it's much, much more likely that the x-ray machine is not the culprit at all. Remember that hard drives are magnetic in nature. X-rays are no more magnetically charged than the light from the light bulbs in your house. X-rays will erase highly sensitive photographic film, but that's about the sum total of damage that they could ever do to any of your stuff.
However, in close proximity to the X-ray machine is a device that makes use of strong magnetic fields: the metal detector. Carrying a laptop though one would almost certainly mess with the data on it (note that it wouldn't totally wipe the drive beyond recovery. If you think it'd do that, put down the Neal Stepenson book and take a break).
Now, metal detectors are supposed to be shielded from interfering with devices not going through them, but, needless to say, that's not always the case. It's more than possible a more sensitive than usual hard drive could be corrupted by just passing next to one.
Re:Canadians don't have the free world counting on
on
Hemos The Iron Chef
·
· Score: 2
No, he's right. A person can be vice president, and become president due to the current president's death, impeachement, etc. If less than two years was left in the old president's term, the new president is still eligible for two full terms as the elected president. Thus, 10 years.
As far as technical reasons go, there is the potential for the root nameservers to become overloaded, both in terms of number of hits, and in terms of memory needed to store all the TLD's. However, the COM nameservers are already very stressed out as it is, so the odds are that things will get better rather than worse.
The real reason we don't have infinite TLD's though is that we'd just be moving the problem up a level. Instead of fighting over "foo.com", Foo Inc. and Joe's Foo Emporium will fighto over ownership of the "dot foo" namespace. And now, they'll have to compete with the Foo Foundation (formerly foo.org) and Foo University (formerly foo.edu).
No, the real solution here is twofold. We need
A Usenet style hierarchy By polluting the top level namespace with ".biz" et. al., we're actually moving away from this goal.
A Product/Concept/Keyword matching system. Search engines and things like Real Names(tm) are helpful, but the former aren't precise enough, and for the latter, I'd prefer an open system.
Freenet is not intended to be an eternal archive. Because the system is completely democratic, it does not inherently distinguish between the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights and my kindergarten drawings -- documents are scored solely by requests. It is anticipated, however, that the current low cost of storage will make enough storage available to Freenet that documents will only rarely have to be discarded.
This is a good thing, and not just because we all enjoy bashing Microsoft. (Not that there's anything wrong with bashing Microsoft;)
Why is this good? It's because, just like the Usenet Death Penalty, if MAPS takes on one of the "big boys", and wins (by forcing them to back down), it will be a great stride forward in the public's perception of MAPS as a legitimate system. MAPS needs public recognition, and standing firm on a legitimate dispute with a major player is just the way to get it.
On the long-term damage issue...
the article on CNN mentions that "One of the monkeys had as many as 96 electrodes implanted in its brain for two years", and quotes one of the scientists as saying "The reliability of this system and the long-term viability of the electrodes lead us to believe that this paradigm could eventually be used to help paralyzed people restore some motor function,".
Slashdot Mirror
It's simple. They're control freaks.
More to the point, they recognize Napster as a long-term threat. They know that as long as they control the mainstream distribution channels, they can continue to make obscene profits. But Napster
- Provides people access to independant artists and groups, who as they become more well known, become poised to seriously compete with the groups that RIAA memebers control. And as the armchair economists are all so happy to point out, more competition leads to slimmer profits.
- Makes people seriously think twice before popping down $15 for a CD. Now, as long as bandwidth, mp3 quality, and hard drive space are issues, they're still going to buy the CD, which is why the RIAA's profits haven't been hurt yet. But those things are techincal issues which are becoming less and less of a problem every day. Soon enough, people will stop buying as many CD's, and the RIAA's sales will plummet.
So, in short, the RIAA's claims about lost revenue are FUD, but they know that if Napster survives long enough, they won't be.--
You cannot declare that X has affected Y to degree Z, unless you can observe Y in the absence of X.
In other words, unless someone can open an interdimensional portal to some alternate universe in which Napster doesn't exist, all of these claims of revenue being up or down in particular areas are meaningless. There are a countless number of other factors that could be influencing sales of CDs, cassettes, music videos, etc. Saying that Napster is solely responsible for any of it is absurd.
--
Shoeboy, you're my hero. You write well, you're consistenly funny, and I couldn't agree more about the women's feet thing. Are you going to burn off karma by posting more erotica any time soon?
Also, what's your position on painted toenails? Sexy, or is au naturale better?
--
Any company that makes an investment in Ogg is going to want to get something in return, and they're going to want more than just a freely available audio compression format. They're going to want control.
This isn't just some idle prediction. This sort of thing has happened before, and it's happening right now with other Open Source projects. Look at Mozilla. Netscape/AOL invested their codebase, and their staff programmers in an open source project, and now that it's just about ready for prime time, AOL forks the code, and retakes control of the Nescape browser, which is the only browser that the mainstream public is likely to use. How many people's mothers and bosses have even heard of "Mozilla"?
And look at GNOME. What started out as a response to the concern that KDE wasn't free enough, is rapidly turning corporate, with strategic alliances with other big business interests under the guise of the "Gnome Foundation", and the rebranding to the trademarked "Helix Gnome".
Realize, people, that unless we act to keep our Free Software free of commercial control, it will be Free in name only.
--
But drinking is not good. And drinking to excess is even worse. The Bible says drunkenness is a sin (Gal. 5:21), and even those here who aren't Christians will still agree that getting intoxicated can lead to a variety of unhealthy activities.
For shame, NEC. Next time, try to consider the social consequences of your actions.
--
- The DoD has quite possibly the most secure networks in the world (of those that are actually connected to the internet, of course). This makes them a target for anyone who wants a challenge.
- Lots of script kiddie type "hackers" have been indoctrinated with the mass media image of a "leet haxor" who discovers important confidential information while poking around the DoD, and they figure it could happen to them.
- Actual agents of foriegn powers are probably trying to gain access to secret information... Though traditional methods of gaining access are probably still effective.
Consequently, this sort of statistic shouldn't suprise anybody.--
--
What's more, I saw some very interesting statistics just the other day (Of course, I can't find the link now!), that showed a very dramatic reduction in certain types of violent crimes that began shortly after Hoover took charge, and ended again just as he left. So, it's pretty clear that in the end, government nosiness is a good thing. Think about it.
--
Now, I know that a lot of people around here are going to go off and start screaming about having your rights violated, but the fact of the matter is that the FBI had a court order here! They had every right to tap this guy's computer.
If the FBI couldn't do things like this, they'd have no power to enforce the laws of this country, we'd have total anarchy, and having someone monitor your keystrokes would be the least of your problems!
So ask yourself, which is more important to you, seeing mob bosses, terrorists, and child pornographers get caught before they can hurt anybody, or protecting yourself from having some FBI bureaucrat reading over your shopping list?
--
Seriously, I think Katz is overstating both the severity of the "moral panic" that society has supposedly created over gaming, and the importance of gaming as a cultural force.
They're just games, people! Sure there are a few oddballs who are covinced that Doom et. al. are a tool of Satan, but most reasonable people recognize that games are just games.
Now, that isn't to say that there's no legitimate concern over things like desensitization to violence, couch potatoism, and other alleged societal ills that people associate with games. But a society that questions itself is the only healthy kind of society.
--
What you need to do is market your gun collection to the parent as the thing that every kid wants for Christmas. Then wait for scarcity of the "Official Autographed Shoeboy Handgun(tm)" to drive the price up to outrageous levels.
You'll be set for life!
--
What if I own a business that's losing money? Will they pay me to speed?
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Perhaps we can use it for the boiling.
--
Well, as far as graphics go, we do have OpenGL / Mesa.
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I think their main concern with hacking is that they're afraid that software piracy will become as commonplace as it is with PC games.
--
None of the big name console manufacturere make more than a small percentage of the games for their platforms. What they do is charge the games' developers for the SDK[?], and/or charge them a royalty on games sold.
What Indrema will be doing, according to the article, is making the SDK available for free, charging developers for a "technical certification", and charging royalties on non-freeware games.
--
That's amazing!
I'll bet he's in favor of motherhood and apple pie, and against cannibalism too!
--
Actually, it's much, much more likely that the x-ray machine is not the culprit at all. Remember that hard drives are magnetic in nature. X-rays are no more magnetically charged than the light from the light bulbs in your house. X-rays will erase highly sensitive photographic film, but that's about the sum total of damage that they could ever do to any of your stuff.
However, in close proximity to the X-ray machine is a device that makes use of strong magnetic fields: the metal detector. Carrying a laptop though one would almost certainly mess with the data on it (note that it wouldn't totally wipe the drive beyond recovery. If you think it'd do that, put down the Neal Stepenson book and take a break).
Now, metal detectors are supposed to be shielded from interfering with devices not going through them, but, needless to say, that's not always the case. It's more than possible a more sensitive than usual hard drive could be corrupted by just passing next to one.
For further reference, see Here, Here, and Here--
No, he's right. A person can be vice president, and become president due to the current president's death, impeachement, etc. If less than two years was left in the old president's term, the new president is still eligible for two full terms as the elected president. Thus, 10 years.
--
The real reason we don't have infinite TLD's though is that we'd just be moving the problem up a level. Instead of fighting over "foo.com", Foo Inc. and Joe's Foo Emporium will fighto over ownership of the "dot foo" namespace. And now, they'll have to compete with the Foo Foundation (formerly foo.org) and Foo University (formerly foo.edu).
No, the real solution here is twofold. We need
--
It doesnt!
From the Freenet FAQ:
--
Link to Google&l t;/a> ;)
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This is a good thing, and not just because we all enjoy bashing Microsoft. (Not that there's anything wrong with bashing Microsoft ;)
Why is this good? It's because, just like the Usenet Death Penalty, if MAPS takes on one of the "big boys", and wins (by forcing them to back down), it will be a great stride forward in the public's perception of MAPS as a legitimate system. MAPS needs public recognition, and standing firm on a legitimate dispute with a major player is just the way to get it.
--
Also, the login/password "slashdot2000" / "slashdot200" works fine at the NY times.
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I'd take that as a pretty good sign.
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