If everybody stops buying CDs from major labels then the RIAA will shrivel up and blow away. We'll still have plenty of musicians and plenty of music, just no record companies. CD sales have dropped 30% in about the last three years, so it looks like we're getting there.
Online fee and fine collection
on
Public Net-work
·
· Score: 1
That would be nice. I saw a pretty cool indie documentary called Startup.com about a a real startup trying to get into that business. Unfortunately this type of service is a long way from becoming universal.
I'm at work right now and don't have any music CDs, but if you have one at hand pick it up and examine it carefully for statements prohibiting resale. I'm pretty sure I've seen resale prohibited in the copyright notices in the front pages of some books, in spite of the fact that used book and record stores are thriving.
Whether resale is legal or not, various people in the content industry definitely don't like it. They have whined repeatedly that secondhand book and record sales hurt them. Control over redistribution is one feature of Palladium that has them drooling. They also hate being challenged in public. My hunch is that the guy on EBay has opened the door to a world of pain.
This article makes some good points, but as usual it is permeated with the false notions of copyright as property and copyright infringement as theft. Nobody "owns" copyright; there are only copyright "holders," who have certain temporary rights granted by the government. Infringing those rights is not "stealing" even though it can cause financial loss. Arson, drunk driving, physical assault and a host of other things can cause financial loss, but we don't mislabel them as theft.
This may seem like semantic nitpicking, but equating copyright with property makes it easier for RIAA members and others to miscast themselves as little old ladies chasing down purse snatchers. Purging those images is important if we ever hope to see the copyright system improved. The various arguments for copyright reform will get very little public sympathy if they are equated with legalizing stealing.
Whenever someone sends you a Word 2003 document you can't read, do what you do when someone sends you any other type of document you can't read. Reply that you can't read it and ask them to send you a non-protected format that you Can read, such as RTF.
This article didn't answer the question that immediately occurred to me when I started reading it, namely:
What's the difference between a robot getting my job and some guy in India getting my job?
In spite of discussing the subject of cheap foreign labor, the author didn't explain why robots are fundamentally different. I also had a big problem with her scenario in which the workers are taken out of the picture and all of the money flows to the executives. If robots were to take away all the minimum wage jobs, I predict that the worst impact will be on those very same businesses. In my own experience the people who work at the low-paying jobs tend to also buy the most cheap crap. It doesn't make sense that companies like WalMart will be doing business as usual after putting a lot of their best customers out of work.
But then along comes the magic wand of handing everybody $25,000 to spend. I'll admit her ideas for raising that kind of money with things like advertising and lotteries are creative, but does she really believe that something which is basically a gigantic welfare scheme would fly in a country where we can't even get a national health system?
While we are fantasizing about saving the economy, let's look at a saner approach based on historical experience. The economic boom of the 1950's came about because of the shortages created during WWII. The government diverted industrial production to the military and bought enormous quantities of everything, which simultaneously created lots of jobs but also widespread shortages of consumer goods. They paid for it by selling War Bonds, in effect borrowing back the money. People had jobs and good incomes and not much to buy other than the necessities, so they throttled back their lives for a few years and either saved their money or invested it. The government managed all this strictly, by rationing goods and selling War Bonds. It was Big Brother to the extreme. But when the war ended and production switched back to consumer goods, people had tons of money to spend. The boom followed, and the ensuing taxation paid the tab for the war.
A war is only one way to create such a situation. Large, long-term public works projects might do the same trick, but the required ingredient is to create shortages and force people to save their money for a while. This wouldn't work unless the citizens were fully committed to the plan. For that they would have to be treated like Citizens as opposed to Consumers. The threat of terrorism comes to mind as a great driving factor, in fact it's almost tailor-made for the job. But our current government's approach so far has been, "Don't let terrorists keep you from shopping."
Sharing is caring
on
MIT Roofnet
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The last paragraph raises the business issue that will inevitably try to stand in the way of this technology. "Most Internet service providers don't want their users sharing their bandwidth." No more than RIAA companies want you to hear any sound you haven't paid them for. The business mentality of getting everybody to buy their own everything is deeply entrenched in our economy. There is little incentive for business people to interest the public in sharing anything.
There used to be a TV commercial showing a guy effortlessly breezing through all his home painting chores with his new Wagner Power Painter. As he puts the thing away in his garage he yells at his forlorn, brush-wielding neighbor, "Get a Wagner!" I remember thinking, "You asshole. Let the poor guy borrow your freakin' spray painter." But that kind of behavior would be bad for business. A large chunk of our economy is based on unused Power Painters hanging on their hooks in the garage.
For community networks to catch on, someone is going to have to do some seed projects like Roofnet, that not only work technically in the real world but work business-ly in the REAL real world. I mean the world where somebody is formally, legally responsible for maintaining the Big Pipe between your local net and the Internet. The world of people who yell for lawyers because their service goes down, or is slow, or their specific oddball problem doesn't get fixed Right Now! The world of insurance issues, fee collection issues, disconnection and banning issues, tax issues, responsibilities, liabilities and so forth. In other words, it has to work in the steaming shitpile that the world outside of college often turns out to be.
When I was a kid in the late 1950's and early 60's the post-WWII Japanese economy had been reconstructed to the point where their factories were using cheap labor to produce mediocre goods for sale in the US. The phrase "made in Japan" was synonymous with cheap crap. But Americans bought plenty of that cheap crap, and over the years Japanese companies successfully made the transition from providing labor to creating products of their own. I remember when the first Japanese cars came over (Datsun, now Nissan). The intrepid and/or curious folks who bought them were surprised to find that they used less gas, took less maintenance and lasted longer than American cars. The revolution had begun.
Nowadays Mexico, China and other countries are transitioning from providing cheap labor to doing their own engineering and creating their own products. They've been shown the way by Japan, and the process is taking less and less time. In a few years the majority of programmers in India who are currently doing outsource work will be doing original development for Indian companies, competing with the likes of Adobe and Microsoft. Already some Indian firms are themselves outsourcing to other countries where developers work even cheaper.
The world is not infinitely big, and eventually this evolution will be complete. The world economy will be homogeneous enough that there won't be any places where people live on a scale 50 years different from other people. That's the only thing that will stop outsourcing. Not tariffs or angry protests. So learn to be a blacksmith and ride the wave as long as you can.
Telemarketers are in court right now contending that the national do not call list violates their freedom of speech. Here's my two cents.
Freedom of speech is the right to express yourself in public, not the right to demand that anyone pay attention to you. Your freedom of speech doesn't exist in someone else's house, which is where their end of the phone line is.
That's why I believe the telemarketing association will lose their court challenge. They simply don't have the rights they claim to have.
One time I asked for one of those hooks that snap onto the top of a cubicle wall, so I would have a place to hang my jacket. What they got me instead was a really nice padded coat hanger, like for a suit jacket, with a small clip-on hook to hang the coat-hanger on. It came in a special triangular box labelled "Garment Management System". So I cut the name off the box and stuck it on the wall next to the hanger. Just so people wouldn't mistake my Garment Management System for a mere coat hanger.
I wonder what kind of punitive litigation, if any, would be possible against PanIP. Assuming their patent claims get discredited, could the plaintiffs convince a court to treat PanIP like modern-day pirates? The phrase "hoist them by their nards" sounds good to me.
I read that article about deBeers quite a while back and then forgot where it was. Recently I wanted to get a friend to read it, and I spent a whole evening looking on the net before giving up in frustration. Thanks a lot for the reference!
As most people know, it's normal for companies to add design features according to a plan that evolves their products a stage at a time. The ideal product cycle introduces the new version after every potential customer has bought the previous version. Part of the sales pitch for the new version is that it fixes the flaws in the old version.
Some Windows security holes seem like they could closed so easily, for example making a security screen part of the setup wizard instead of just leaving the ports open and the firewall turned off. So here's my paranoid interpretation of this article: Are these holes truly left in place "by design" in order to motivate customers to upgrade when Longhorn goes on the market? Is their strategy to do the patch dance and keep blabbing about Trustworthy Computing until they are ready ride in on a white horse and save the day?
I have been wondering how Microsoft expects to convince millions of intelligent people to shell out for all new DRM-laden hardware in order to upgrade Windows. Maybe one of their levers is to let worm-writers run rampant for awhile. The bigger and badder the boogie man gets, the more willing people might be to swallow the big blue pill.
This article was pretty short and skimpy, certainly no earthshaking insights. Whether Buckminster Fuller or anybody else proposed it first, of course there will be a worldwide power grid eventually. Lots of things are evolving into worldwide nets, for example all the stock markets will be linked eventually. So the discussion veers into the merits of solar energy, living in a log cabin in the desert, etc.
Ok, how about this: what would it take for the distribution systems of various utilities, not just electricity but things we all need at some level -- food, water, medicine, communication -- to evolve into networks with uniform, demand-driven price structures? And if that happens why not collect a uniform payment from everyone, eliminating all the effort spent moving individual beans around between individual piles? I'm not talking about socialism, I'm talking about a 100% efficient market. Is that possible?
Networking spreads information uniformly. Could the business world as we know it even exist without the scarcity of information that enables one person to find a better deal than someone else?
Computer usage in classrooms is very different from computer usage in offices. It's nice from a management point of view to have one set of maintenance skills, but consolidating functions doesn't always make sense to do that. You have facilities people who work on heating systems and you have facilities people who work on landscaping. You might be able to find people to do both things, but you don't manipulate the heating system or the landscaping just to make that possible.
Or maybe a better example would be that school district HR departments don't handle student discipline and tardiness problems, even though they do handle those problems with employees.
Tools like this are a good idea if used as directed, but then they always fall victim to mediocre management mentality. Anybody who fails the voice stress test will be presumed to be lying. The people asking the followup questions will be judged on how well they confirm that assumption, and so the second stage will be tailored to do only that.
Here we have a clear demonstration of What People Want. So how are we handling this in the free USA? Telcos are lobbying their legislative hirelings state by state, getting laws passed that will allow them to forbid customers using VoIP, or any other function that threatens profit.
Slashdot Mirror
If everybody stops buying CDs from major labels then the RIAA will shrivel up and blow away. We'll still have plenty of musicians and plenty of music, just no record companies. CD sales have dropped 30% in about the last three years, so it looks like we're getting there.
That would be nice. I saw a pretty cool indie documentary called Startup.com about a a real startup trying to get into that business. Unfortunately this type of service is a long way from becoming universal.
Will it be the first high school with free beverages?
I'm at work right now and don't have any music CDs, but if you have one at hand pick it up and examine it carefully for statements prohibiting resale. I'm pretty sure I've seen resale prohibited in the copyright notices in the front pages of some books, in spite of the fact that used book and record stores are thriving.
Whether resale is legal or not, various people in the content industry definitely don't like it. They have whined repeatedly that secondhand book and record sales hurt them. Control over redistribution is one feature of Palladium that has them drooling. They also hate being challenged in public. My hunch is that the guy on EBay has opened the door to a world of pain.
This article makes some good points, but as usual it is permeated with the false notions of copyright as property and copyright infringement as theft. Nobody "owns" copyright; there are only copyright "holders," who have certain temporary rights granted by the government. Infringing those rights is not "stealing" even though it can cause financial loss. Arson, drunk driving, physical assault and a host of other things can cause financial loss, but we don't mislabel them as theft.
This may seem like semantic nitpicking, but equating copyright with property makes it easier for RIAA members and others to miscast themselves as little old ladies chasing down purse snatchers. Purging those images is important if we ever hope to see the copyright system improved. The various arguments for copyright reform will get very little public sympathy if they are equated with legalizing stealing.
They're "Freedom Disks".
Whenever someone sends you a Word 2003 document you can't read, do what you do when someone sends you any other type of document you can't read. Reply that you can't read it and ask them to send you a non-protected format that you Can read, such as RTF.
I heard they are already recruiting orbital fuel station attendants who chainsmoke.
The competition just made itself more expensive. Thanks, Bill!
This article didn't answer the question that immediately occurred to me when I started reading it, namely:
What's the difference between a robot getting my job and some guy in India getting my job?
In spite of discussing the subject of cheap foreign labor, the author didn't explain why robots are fundamentally different. I also had a big problem with her scenario in which the workers are taken out of the picture and all of the money flows to the executives. If robots were to take away all the minimum wage jobs, I predict that the worst impact will be on those very same businesses. In my own experience the people who work at the low-paying jobs tend to also buy the most cheap crap. It doesn't make sense that companies like WalMart will be doing business as usual after putting a lot of their best customers out of work.
But then along comes the magic wand of handing everybody $25,000 to spend. I'll admit her ideas for raising that kind of money with things like advertising and lotteries are creative, but does she really believe that something which is basically a gigantic welfare scheme would fly in a country where we can't even get a national health system?
While we are fantasizing about saving the economy, let's look at a saner approach based on historical experience. The economic boom of the 1950's came about because of the shortages created during WWII. The government diverted industrial production to the military and bought enormous quantities of everything, which simultaneously created lots of jobs but also widespread shortages of consumer goods. They paid for it by selling War Bonds, in effect borrowing back the money. People had jobs and good incomes and not much to buy other than the necessities, so they throttled back their lives for a few years and either saved their money or invested it. The government managed all this strictly, by rationing goods and selling War Bonds. It was Big Brother to the extreme. But when the war ended and production switched back to consumer goods, people had tons of money to spend. The boom followed, and the ensuing taxation paid the tab for the war.
A war is only one way to create such a situation. Large, long-term public works projects might do the same trick, but the required ingredient is to create shortages and force people to save their money for a while. This wouldn't work unless the citizens were fully committed to the plan. For that they would have to be treated like Citizens as opposed to Consumers. The threat of terrorism comes to mind as a great driving factor, in fact it's almost tailor-made for the job. But our current government's approach so far has been, "Don't let terrorists keep you from shopping."
The last paragraph raises the business issue that will inevitably try to stand in the way of this technology. "Most Internet service providers don't want their users sharing their bandwidth." No more than RIAA companies want you to hear any sound you haven't paid them for. The business mentality of getting everybody to buy their own everything is deeply entrenched in our economy. There is little incentive for business people to interest the public in sharing anything.
There used to be a TV commercial showing a guy effortlessly breezing through all his home painting chores with his new Wagner Power Painter. As he puts the thing away in his garage he yells at his forlorn, brush-wielding neighbor, "Get a Wagner!" I remember thinking, "You asshole. Let the poor guy borrow your freakin' spray painter." But that kind of behavior would be bad for business. A large chunk of our economy is based on unused Power Painters hanging on their hooks in the garage.
For community networks to catch on, someone is going to have to do some seed projects like Roofnet, that not only work technically in the real world but work business-ly in the REAL real world. I mean the world where somebody is formally, legally responsible for maintaining the Big Pipe between your local net and the Internet. The world of people who yell for lawyers because their service goes down, or is slow, or their specific oddball problem doesn't get fixed Right Now! The world of insurance issues, fee collection issues, disconnection and banning issues, tax issues, responsibilities, liabilities and so forth. In other words, it has to work in the steaming shitpile that the world outside of college often turns out to be.
When I was a kid in the late 1950's and early 60's the post-WWII Japanese economy had been reconstructed to the point where their factories were using cheap labor to produce mediocre goods for sale in the US. The phrase "made in Japan" was synonymous with cheap crap. But Americans bought plenty of that cheap crap, and over the years Japanese companies successfully made the transition from providing labor to creating products of their own. I remember when the first Japanese cars came over (Datsun, now Nissan). The intrepid and/or curious folks who bought them were surprised to find that they used less gas, took less maintenance and lasted longer than American cars. The revolution had begun.
Nowadays Mexico, China and other countries are transitioning from providing cheap labor to doing their own engineering and creating their own products. They've been shown the way by Japan, and the process is taking less and less time. In a few years the majority of programmers in India who are currently doing outsource work will be doing original development for Indian companies, competing with the likes of Adobe and Microsoft. Already some Indian firms are themselves outsourcing to other countries where developers work even cheaper.
The world is not infinitely big, and eventually this evolution will be complete. The world economy will be homogeneous enough that there won't be any places where people live on a scale 50 years different from other people. That's the only thing that will stop outsourcing. Not tariffs or angry protests. So learn to be a blacksmith and ride the wave as long as you can.
Telemarketers are in court right now contending that the national do not call list violates their freedom of speech. Here's my two cents.
Freedom of speech is the right to express yourself in public, not the right to demand that anyone pay attention to you. Your freedom of speech doesn't exist in someone else's house, which is where their end of the phone line is.
That's why I believe the telemarketing association will lose their court challenge. They simply don't have the rights they claim to have.
One time I asked for one of those hooks that snap onto the top of a cubicle wall, so I would have a place to hang my jacket. What they got me instead was a really nice padded coat hanger, like for a suit jacket, with a small clip-on hook to hang the coat-hanger on. It came in a special triangular box labelled "Garment Management System". So I cut the name off the box and stuck it on the wall next to the hanger. Just so people wouldn't mistake my Garment Management System for a mere coat hanger.
I wonder what kind of punitive litigation, if any, would be possible against PanIP. Assuming their patent claims get discredited, could the plaintiffs convince a court to treat PanIP like modern-day pirates? The phrase "hoist them by their nards" sounds good to me.
I read that article about deBeers quite a while back and then forgot where it was. Recently I wanted to get a friend to read it, and I spent a whole evening looking on the net before giving up in frustration. Thanks a lot for the reference!
"Doesn't that single quote look more exciting than a whole porn site?"
Bite your tongue!
As most people know, it's normal for companies to add design features according to a plan that evolves their products a stage at a time. The ideal product cycle introduces the new version after every potential customer has bought the previous version. Part of the sales pitch for the new version is that it fixes the flaws in the old version.
Some Windows security holes seem like they could closed so easily, for example making a security screen part of the setup wizard instead of just leaving the ports open and the firewall turned off. So here's my paranoid interpretation of this article: Are these holes truly left in place "by design" in order to motivate customers to upgrade when Longhorn goes on the market? Is their strategy to do the patch dance and keep blabbing about Trustworthy Computing until they are ready ride in on a white horse and save the day?
I have been wondering how Microsoft expects to convince millions of intelligent people to shell out for all new DRM-laden hardware in order to upgrade Windows. Maybe one of their levers is to let worm-writers run rampant for awhile. The bigger and badder the boogie man gets, the more willing people might be to swallow the big blue pill.
"we will deliver interfaces that will find people who are debators"
Yes, but will you identify the master debators?
This article was pretty short and skimpy, certainly no earthshaking insights. Whether Buckminster Fuller or anybody else proposed it first, of course there will be a worldwide power grid eventually. Lots of things are evolving into worldwide nets, for example all the stock markets will be linked eventually. So the discussion veers into the merits of solar energy, living in a log cabin in the desert, etc.
Ok, how about this: what would it take for the distribution systems of various utilities, not just electricity but things we all need at some level -- food, water, medicine, communication -- to evolve into networks with uniform, demand-driven price structures? And if that happens why not collect a uniform payment from everyone, eliminating all the effort spent moving individual beans around between individual piles? I'm not talking about socialism, I'm talking about a 100% efficient market. Is that possible?
Networking spreads information uniformly. Could the business world as we know it even exist without the scarcity of information that enables one person to find a better deal than someone else?
Computer usage in classrooms is very different from computer usage in offices. It's nice from a management point of view to have one set of maintenance skills, but consolidating functions doesn't always make sense to do that. You have facilities people who work on heating systems and you have facilities people who work on landscaping. You might be able to find people to do both things, but you don't manipulate the heating system or the landscaping just to make that possible.
Or maybe a better example would be that school district HR departments don't handle student discipline and tardiness problems, even though they do handle those problems with employees.
Damnstraightium
Tools like this are a good idea if used as directed, but then they always fall victim to mediocre management mentality. Anybody who fails the voice stress test will be presumed to be lying. The people asking the followup questions will be judged on how well they confirm that assumption, and so the second stage will be tailored to do only that.
They are prosecuting people for downloading "Hotel California."
Here we have a clear demonstration of What People Want. So how are we handling this in the free USA? Telcos are lobbying their legislative hirelings state by state, getting laws passed that will allow them to forbid customers using VoIP, or any other function that threatens profit.