Seems to me we are about to be dragged into a consumer privacy Cold War that will make SPAM and computer viruses look like idle fun. How do you want to live?
a) Get used to having your every move recorded in a giant marketing/antiterrorism/conformity database. Ignore little annoyances like being IRS audited every year because you checked the wrong books out of the library.
b) Buy and continuously upgrade your array of privacy-protection technology.
c) Live in a shack in the hills and deal only through barter.
I think those of us who are still alive half a century from now will look back on this period of time as the end of a Golden Age, before The Few Who Must Own Every God Damn Thing took the world back, and the rest of us resumed our roles as peasants. Or I guess it's "consumers" now.
I can hear the naysayers now, spurning the idea of micro-entrepreneurs with minimal training providing cheap eyecare. No, they will say, you're foisting substandard goods and services on third world people! These are the same people who close down homeless employment centers for failing to provide a health care plan.
Maybe the eyecare won't be the same quality that highly educated optometrists and opthalmologists could provide. People might occasionally get the wrong glasses! But for the vast numbers of people who put up with bad eyesight because by industrialized standards they are effectively living in the 19th Century or earlier, this could be a great thing.
This is one of those stories that make me wonder how people's hopes and aspirations work. Does anybody wake up in the morning thinking, "What utterly useless bit of technology do I want to be remembered for?"
Strictly speaking, those words belong to Chris Knight, the character, not Val Kilmer, the actor. (If Kilmer played President Kennedy, you wouldn't give Kilmer credit for saying, "Ask not what your country can do for you...")
Makes me wonder what beings might have perished on planets orbiting that star, and also if any other creatures were on hand to measure and observe the phenomenon, say from the safety of a spaceship or by remote probe. Was the event broadcast to an audience on thousands of planets? And most importantly, is some sort of intergalactic recording industry persecuting whole species of aliens for transmitting illegal copies of the event?
In my 25 years of programming I've lived through many business SNAFUs, some of which are reflected on my resume. It has never been a problemn. Sounds like you are handling it just right. Simply state the facts if they ask, keep your mouth shut if they don't. The people interviewing you should know that the whims of business often throw a monkey wrench into people's careers. If they don't, you probably don't want to work for them anyway.
As government agencies become more and more invasive in the name of collecting taxes, it's always a good time to think of cheaper, fairer and less intrusive ways to fund the government. A few years ago there was a bill in the House, I think it was #2050, to abolish all income tax and disband the IRS, replacing it with a 20% federal retail sales tax. To counteract the inherent regressiveness of a sales tax (places a greater burden on the poor, since they spend a higher percentage of their income) there would also be an annual flat refund to every taxpayer. The refund amount would be the sales tax rate times the federally defined poverty level income, with a slight variation for marital status and number of children.
For example, if poverty level is defined as $15,000/year everybody would get a check for $3000. So would Donald Trump. Someone making about $15,000/year and spending every penny would get back all the sales tax they paid. Donald Trump would also get $3000 even though he pays far more sales tax because he buys more.
Last I heard, this proposal was tied up in the House Finance committee. It must have died there. One of the things I liked about it was that it would have eliminated the 105,000-employee IRS, replacing it with a much smaller bureau whose job would be to collect the tax from the existing 50 state revenue depts. But another plus is that it would eliminate most of the enforcement, including indirect surveillance of citizens through their financial records.
I was hoping that once the sales tax was implemented at the federal level it would catch on in the states, and we would be free of notifying the government of our every financial move. Our taxes would be paid at the cash register when we made purchases. We would know exactly how much tax we were paying, since corporate taxes (a hidden part of the cost of every product) would also be eliminated. Best of all, a tax system this simple would be extremely difficult for Congress to abuse behind closed doors.
I can't imagine the Supreme Court upholding a law that restricts people's right to political expression, the heart of what the framers intenced to protect, based on the reasoning that people find deleting the messages annoying.
Really? The idea of the First Amendment was to protect people's right to express themselves publicly without fear of persecution, not to give them license to demand other people's attention in their own homes. There is a big difference between making information available and inflicting it on people. I doubt that the framers of the Constitution would have had any trouble making that distinction, had they anticipated email or even cheap mass postal mail.
You hit it on the head. If people would actually read through the site they would see that the company's goal is to add layers of real-world commercialization to online game worlds. They specifically mention out-of-game trading of virtual goods, in-game ad placement, and sponsorship of "high profile" gamers who would get paid to play to attract other players.
Jeez, would it be alright for people just to have fun, without getting pimped to every minute? I guess not.
A seemingly minor point, but one that should be made over and over again: copyright infringement is NOT THEFT, because nobody "owns" copyrighted material. There are only copyright HOLDERS, who are granted certain rights by the government for a limited time, much like being able to drive in the carpool lane. You can't steal copyrighted material by distributing it any more than you can steal the carpool lane by driving in it alone.
Infringement may cause financial losses. So do a host of other things, but we don't call them theft. Arson is not theft of firewood. Murder is not theft of metabolism.
The reason it's important to keep making this point is that copyright holders, usually corporations that did nothing to create the actual material, use the false notion of infringement to cast themselves in the sympathetic role of the little old lady running after a purse-snatcher, or the outraged homeowner chasing down a drug addict who ran off with the TV. The public can identify with the idea of property theft much more easily than it can understand the ethical and social issues that surround copyright and the public domain. Businesses built on the control of copyright want the public to have a simplified, inaccurate picture of copyright as property. It makes it easier for them to get away with things like paying legislators to shape copyright law to their advantage.
Speaking of which, last time I checked we had a law against bribing federal employees to perform official services. I'd rather see the FBI raiding the offices of senators and representatives who write laws in exchange for campaign money, than shaking down ISPs to find out who posted some buggy OS source code.
We all see further by standing on the soldiers of giants. I think EMI in this case could acknowledge that and be a little less heavy handed.
Me too. But wishing that the people running a big record company had the slightest sense of cultural responsibility, instead of being driven entirely by money, is like wishing all the assholes in the world would go away somewhere and leave the rest of us alone. It would be nice, but it will never happen.
EMI and the surviving Beatles are well beyond any reasonable need to profit from songs of the 1960s. There's no justification for letting EMI continue to control music that is nearly 40 years old. What I wish is that people relentlessly tell legislators that we will vote against them until they stop taking bribes from the creative work rights ownership industry, and reform copyright law to serve the interests of creators themselves and the public.
I didn't read the article. I just love the name Sir Cameron Mackintosh. Sounds like he's either right out of a Blackadder episode or is somehow connected with Spinal Tap.
Reading through the associated articles I was interested in the concept of a Brightnet. Briefly, it is a theoretical idea that involves encoding songs as combinations of mathematical formulas. Since each individual formula would apply to many songs by many artists, none of the formulas would infringe on copyright. So in theory people could exchange these formulas out in the open, hence the term "Brightnet" as opposed to existing p2p "darknets."
The problem I see with this approach is that if it's valid it should work for compressed music files. An MP3 isn't a song, it's the output of a compression algorithm. The song you hear is the result of the decompression algorithm. But it's sort of like dehydrating Coca-Cola and distributing it with just-add-water instructions. Legally it would still be Coke.
Still, the idea of a Brightnet is appealing to me. Does anybody know a reason why their theory might stand up against the legal system?
This is not an elitist thing. If wealthier people are the only ones receiving this personalized treatment right now, it's only because high-end stores are the early adopters. Retailers do whatever they can afford to increase sales, and they know that treating Joe Sixpack like a big spender can induce him act like one. Personalization is already happening. When I use my Safeway card, the clerks always look at the receipt and thank my by name. As RFID costs come down, expect lower-end businesses to think of creative ways to make you feel elite.
Almost everything in the mainstream press regarding the effects of technology on the music business is written with the built-in assumption that it's vitally important to preserve the recording industry's income stream. Everybody who proposes a future model for distributing music is supposed to do it in a way that keeps record companies in business. Yet when record stores go out of business, they are just normal casualties of competition and progress. No biggie. We'll get over it.
Of course we will. But we'll also get over not having record companies between musicians and the public, filtering what gets copied and distributed and controlling what buyers (and even the musicians themselves) are allowed to do with the copies. I don't know when I last read any mainstream article suggesting that the whole recording industry should go the way of record stores. But it should.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems to me we are about to be dragged into a consumer privacy Cold War that will make SPAM and computer viruses look like idle fun. How do you want to live?
a) Get used to having your every move recorded in a giant marketing/antiterrorism/conformity database. Ignore little annoyances like being IRS audited every year because you checked the wrong books out of the library.
b) Buy and continuously upgrade your array of privacy-protection technology.
c) Live in a shack in the hills and deal only through barter.
d) Armed revolt.
I don't personally find any of these attractive.
I think those of us who are still alive half a century from now will look back on this period of time as the end of a Golden Age, before The Few Who Must Own Every God Damn Thing took the world back, and the rest of us resumed our roles as peasants. Or I guess it's "consumers" now.
Army of rogue super-snails occupies Paris. Restauranteurs publicly executed. France surrenders. Allied liberation forces mired in slime trail.
I can hear the naysayers now, spurning the idea of micro-entrepreneurs with minimal training providing cheap eyecare. No, they will say, you're foisting substandard goods and services on third world people! These are the same people who close down homeless employment centers for failing to provide a health care plan.
Maybe the eyecare won't be the same quality that highly educated optometrists and opthalmologists could provide. People might occasionally get the wrong glasses! But for the vast numbers of people who put up with bad eyesight because by industrialized standards they are effectively living in the 19th Century or earlier, this could be a great thing.
This is one of those stories that make me wonder how people's hopes and aspirations work. Does anybody wake up in the morning thinking, "What utterly useless bit of technology do I want to be remembered for?"
Strictly speaking, those words belong to Chris Knight, the character, not Val Kilmer, the actor. (If Kilmer played President Kennedy, you wouldn't give Kilmer credit for saying, "Ask not what your country can do for you...")
Not forgetting of course that it has been shown that nearly 80% of illegal movie copies come from film industry insiders, not "pirates."
But the size of a problem has never stopped the government from pretending to accomplish something with a gung-ho, high-visibility campaign.
How many emails have you deleted that started out just like that?
In this case it should be: Found this wonderful site on the net and thought, "Why not turn its server into a smoldering heap of slag!"
Makes me wonder what beings might have perished on planets orbiting that star, and also if any other creatures were on hand to measure and observe the phenomenon, say from the safety of a spaceship or by remote probe. Was the event broadcast to an audience on thousands of planets? And most importantly, is some sort of intergalactic recording industry persecuting whole species of aliens for transmitting illegal copies of the event?
In my 25 years of programming I've lived through many business SNAFUs, some of which are reflected on my resume. It has never been a problemn. Sounds like you are handling it just right. Simply state the facts if they ask, keep your mouth shut if they don't. The people interviewing you should know that the whims of business often throw a monkey wrench into people's careers. If they don't, you probably don't want to work for them anyway.
With my luck it'll be me they sue.
I sure hope they don't lose the Blue Alert bulb.
As government agencies become more and more invasive in the name of collecting taxes, it's always a good time to think of cheaper, fairer and less intrusive ways to fund the government. A few years ago there was a bill in the House, I think it was #2050, to abolish all income tax and disband the IRS, replacing it with a 20% federal retail sales tax. To counteract the inherent regressiveness of a sales tax (places a greater burden on the poor, since they spend a higher percentage of their income) there would also be an annual flat refund to every taxpayer. The refund amount would be the sales tax rate times the federally defined poverty level income, with a slight variation for marital status and number of children.
For example, if poverty level is defined as $15,000/year everybody would get a check for $3000. So would Donald Trump. Someone making about $15,000/year and spending every penny would get back all the sales tax they paid. Donald Trump would also get $3000 even though he pays far more sales tax because he buys more.
Last I heard, this proposal was tied up in the House Finance committee. It must have died there. One of the things I liked about it was that it would have eliminated the 105,000-employee IRS, replacing it with a much smaller bureau whose job would be to collect the tax from the existing 50 state revenue depts. But another plus is that it would eliminate most of the enforcement, including indirect surveillance of citizens through their financial records.
I was hoping that once the sales tax was implemented at the federal level it would catch on in the states, and we would be free of notifying the government of our every financial move. Our taxes would be paid at the cash register when we made purchases. We would know exactly how much tax we were paying, since corporate taxes (a hidden part of the cost of every product) would also be eliminated. Best of all, a tax system this simple would be extremely difficult for Congress to abuse behind closed doors.
I can't imagine the Supreme Court upholding a law that restricts people's right to political expression, the heart of what the framers intenced to protect, based on the reasoning that people find deleting the messages annoying.
Really? The idea of the First Amendment was to protect people's right to express themselves publicly without fear of persecution, not to give them license to demand other people's attention in their own homes. There is a big difference between making information available and inflicting it on people. I doubt that the framers of the Constitution would have had any trouble making that distinction, had they anticipated email or even cheap mass postal mail.
You hit it on the head. If people would actually read through the site they would see that the company's goal is to add layers of real-world commercialization to online game worlds. They specifically mention out-of-game trading of virtual goods, in-game ad placement, and sponsorship of "high profile" gamers who would get paid to play to attract other players.
Jeez, would it be alright for people just to have fun, without getting pimped to every minute? I guess not.
We may lose Maori dialects, but as long as software dev is outsourced to India, Panini's tradition will live on!
It wouldn't have been any use because it wasn't Y0K compliant.
A seemingly minor point, but one that should be made over and over again: copyright infringement is NOT THEFT, because nobody "owns" copyrighted material. There are only copyright HOLDERS, who are granted certain rights by the government for a limited time, much like being able to drive in the carpool lane. You can't steal copyrighted material by distributing it any more than you can steal the carpool lane by driving in it alone.
Infringement may cause financial losses. So do a host of other things, but we don't call them theft. Arson is not theft of firewood. Murder is not theft of metabolism.
The reason it's important to keep making this point is that copyright holders, usually corporations that did nothing to create the actual material, use the false notion of infringement to cast themselves in the sympathetic role of the little old lady running after a purse-snatcher, or the outraged homeowner chasing down a drug addict who ran off with the TV. The public can identify with the idea of property theft much more easily than it can understand the ethical and social issues that surround copyright and the public domain. Businesses built on the control of copyright want the public to have a simplified, inaccurate picture of copyright as property. It makes it easier for them to get away with things like paying legislators to shape copyright law to their advantage.
Speaking of which, last time I checked we had a law against bribing federal employees to perform official services. I'd rather see the FBI raiding the offices of senators and representatives who write laws in exchange for campaign money, than shaking down ISPs to find out who posted some buggy OS source code.
It's just the lawsuit fairy tanking up on carbos for this one.
The Diamond Age will be nothing compared to the Al Franken Diamond Age.
We all see further by standing on the soldiers of giants. I think EMI in this case could acknowledge that and be a little less heavy handed.
Me too. But wishing that the people running a big record company had the slightest sense of cultural responsibility, instead of being driven entirely by money, is like wishing all the assholes in the world would go away somewhere and leave the rest of us alone. It would be nice, but it will never happen.
EMI and the surviving Beatles are well beyond any reasonable need to profit from songs of the 1960s. There's no justification for letting EMI continue to control music that is nearly 40 years old. What I wish is that people relentlessly tell legislators that we will vote against them until they stop taking bribes from the creative work rights ownership industry, and reform copyright law to serve the interests of creators themselves and the public.
I didn't read the article. I just love the name Sir Cameron Mackintosh. Sounds like he's either right out of a Blackadder episode or is somehow connected with Spinal Tap.
Reading through the associated articles I was interested in the concept of a Brightnet. Briefly, it is a theoretical idea that involves encoding songs as combinations of mathematical formulas. Since each individual formula would apply to many songs by many artists, none of the formulas would infringe on copyright. So in theory people could exchange these formulas out in the open, hence the term "Brightnet" as opposed to existing p2p "darknets."
The problem I see with this approach is that if it's valid it should work for compressed music files. An MP3 isn't a song, it's the output of a compression algorithm. The song you hear is the result of the decompression algorithm. But it's sort of like dehydrating Coca-Cola and distributing it with just-add-water instructions. Legally it would still be Coke.
Still, the idea of a Brightnet is appealing to me. Does anybody know a reason why their theory might stand up against the legal system?
This is not an elitist thing. If wealthier people are the only ones receiving this personalized treatment right now, it's only because high-end stores are the early adopters. Retailers do whatever they can afford to increase sales, and they know that treating Joe Sixpack like a big spender can induce him act like one. Personalization is already happening. When I use my Safeway card, the clerks always look at the receipt and thank my by name. As RFID costs come down, expect lower-end businesses to think of creative ways to make you feel elite.
Almost everything in the mainstream press regarding the effects of technology on the music business is written with the built-in assumption that it's vitally important to preserve the recording industry's income stream. Everybody who proposes a future model for distributing music is supposed to do it in a way that keeps record companies in business. Yet when record stores go out of business, they are just normal casualties of competition and progress. No biggie. We'll get over it.
Of course we will. But we'll also get over not having record companies between musicians and the public, filtering what gets copied and distributed and controlling what buyers (and even the musicians themselves) are allowed to do with the copies. I don't know when I last read any mainstream article suggesting that the whole recording industry should go the way of record stores. But it should.