Once upon a time a messenger service discovered that by having all their messengers wear rocket powered roller skates they could deliver things in record time, beating their competitors into the dust. Soon every messenger service relied on rocket powered roller skates, the original company went broke and a few larger companies dominated the delivery business. People hardly shopped or went to the bank any more. Everything was handled by messengers wearing rocket powered roller skates. Commerce doubled and the economy briefly soared.
Then some asshole discovered that by dropping pencils on the sidewalk you could cause spectacular crashes. Packages were lost, messengers and pedstrians were killed, and commerce was interrupted. All manner of security precautions were invented. Radar-equipped skates appeared. The sidewalk hackers used hair-fine tripwires. Police and private guards patrolled the streets. The hackers went through the sewer system.
Congress passed some laws making it a crime to possess anything that could be placed on a sidewalk to trip up a rocket powered roller skater. Civil libertarians were outraged, but what else could be done?
Doing away with rocket powered roller skates was unthinkable, because everything would go back to being unbearably slow. Banning non-messengers from the sidewalk was similarly unthinkable. Building special secure sidewalks just for rocket powered roller skaters would be too expensive. The whole beauty of rocket powered roller skates was that they could use existing sidewalks.
The real problem was that the messenger companies had all jumped into relying on rocket powered roller skates without anticipating their weaknesses. They never really came up with a solution, just ways to stay one step behind the problem. But who could blame them? They had to stay competetive. It was always the hackers' fault. Maybe if enough of them got thrown into prison they would learn their lesson. If ordinary people had to live their lives differently, well... they were the ones who insisted on fast deliveries weren't they? The industry was just responding to demand.
Eventually ordinary people just didn't use the sidewalk anymore. It would expose them to too much danger and litigation. For all their communications and physical needs they relied exclusively on messengers on rocket powered roller skates, never leaving their homes. And they lived happily ever after.
EMI just announced that they and other record companies want to get paid every time anybody in the world hears any musical sound anywhere. Said RIAA spokeswoman Hilary Rosen, "Record companies invented music. Without us making the deals, you wouldn't hear a thing. It's always been about us. Hearing any sound whatsoever without paying a record company is theft of physics."
At last here is the story line for the new Galactica movie:
A solar storm has rendered space flight and related special effects impossible. Commanded by Manuel "El Guapo" Adama, a ragtag fugitive fleet of carts and wagons cannibalized from supply ships and damaged vipers plods across the western prairie of a faroff planet, dragging the ponderous Battlestar on skids through the punishing dust. In hot pursuit behind them are the leather-clad Cylon clones, grotesquely painted, pierced and feathered but with perfect teeth, riding their armada of heavily armored motorcycles and dune buggies.
Apollo - the commander's idealistic son. An ace fighter pilot, his true love is the accordion.
Francine Starbuck - once a champion triad player and college roommate of Apollo, he underwent a sex change and is now the lesbian lover of Boomer.
Belinda "Boomer" McNeil - beer drinking squadron commander and Starbuck's special friend.
Baltar - a tragic figure, was negotiating a peace treaty between the Cylones and the regular humans when a sudden unexpected solar eclipse fulfilled the ancient prophecy and started a bitter war of extermination. Hailed by the Cylones as their supreme leader, he's really just a nice guy in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Boxie - a robot boy with a real dog. Surrogate son of Apollo and Serena, Boxie accidentally killed his mom with a freak short circuit while handing her the soap. Apollo constantly fights the urge to dismantle him.
Theft of Marketing Strategy Outcome! For God's Sake, we must be sure the definition of "intellectual property" prevents individuals from doing anything that disrupts a business plan. Come to think of it, it should be a crime to buy an advertised sale item without also buying two items at regular price. Theft of bait! Damn freeloaders.
I don't know how many times I heard that expression as a kid during the 60's. Whenever someone criticized anything about American government or society, someone else invariably asked if they would rather live in Russia, which we all knew was an oppressive police state. I even read about apartment buildings over there being constructed with microphones built right in, so the evil commie government could listen for subversive activities. No, I didn't want to live in Russia.
Every telephone switch installed in the U.S. since 1995 is supposed to have this surveillance capability...
I'm sad for America because I do love this country. I dread the inevitable day when the rest of the world is forced to band together, at tremendous loss, to dismantle it like the USSR.
Say you point your cell phone at a person you see in public, and you get a readout of their social status and a rating of the match between your stored profiles. If you make the cut then you get the chance to place a call and have a brief conversation before waving like an idiot and meeting face to face.
I've read enough raving by pundits and columnists about the stupidity of granting patents on business methods, and personally I agree wholeheartedly. Unfortunately I don't work for the patent office, and I don't know how all this discussion is going to change their behavior. As pointed out in the article, they think their mission is to grant patents, and since they deal more with patent seekers than with anyone else they are more sympathetic to patent seekers' needs than to the general public. Okay, well, so how do we stick the patent office's nose in the coffee and make them inhale?
Funny how these articles always take it for granted that fort-building is the only path to security. Another way to get there is to give people fewer reasons to go ballistic. Sure, there will always be lunatics who think they have to destroy a city to please Jesus or Allah or whatever. But they tend to recruit their legions of selfless followers from the ranks of ordinary people who legitimately feel they are getting squashed. If the greedy, shortsighted bastards who seem to make most of the big decisions in our world didn't see the rest of us as trash to be walked on, we might not have to be so scared that the points of vulnerability in the system are so accessible.
You obviously missed the point. If they have to screw up major public resources to do their business, they ought to do more for innocent bystanders than simply notify them when it's going to happen.
If you stood out on the freeway and caused a spectacle of some sort that snarled up traffic, you would get arrested for disturbing the peace. But a baseball team gets to do the same thing on a regular basis, no problem.
Notice that the device has a "Home Game" symbol that alerts you to major events. Good feature! In my 15 years of commuting around the Seattle area, the commercial activities of the Mariners, Sonics and Seahawks have collectively added hundreds of hours of commute time to my life and have never compensated me in any way. How about if sports teams in a metropolitan area provide these gadgets free of charge to anyone who wants one?
Russian space food comes in CANS?
on
Space Blog
·
· Score: 1
In the entry about eating aboard the ISS, I was stunned to read that much of the Russian space food comes in cans, which they open with a can opener. Cans?? The Russians haul food up to a space station in CANS??? My American preconception of the Russian space program as somewhat clunky (re: the cigarette-smoking fuel station attendant in Armageddon) just did an Olympic triple back-flip.
If you're not paranoid of the government using a surveillance system like this to completely repress dissent and freedom, I would like to hear the argument against that ever happening. The trite idea that innocent people have nothing to hide doesn't hold up. A government with this level of omniscience would be invulnerable to its own citizens, which would be a bad thing. No government should be invulnerable to revolt because no government is infallible.
Let me see if I get this right. You don't own your own face, because somebody can make a copy of it with a camera and sell copies of the copy without your permission. However, that person owns that copy of your face and can sue anybody else for selling copies of their copy, and you don't get a nickel out of it.
The intent to compensate artists and copyright holders may be a good one, but like almost every argument over the music sharing issue it assumes that the 20th century profit model established by the music copy making industry should be perpetuated. This isn't necessarily true.
Before recording technology, musicians made money only by performing. Recording technology could have changed that but it didn't. Because record companies were in a position to dictate how the system would work, they set it up to give themselves all the profits. Standard ecording contracts are written such that all the expenses of producing and distributing a record are paid out of the musician's percentage, usually leaving zero. What musicians get out of a recording contract is exposure, which leads to them getting more and more lucrative gigs. They make a living by performing, just like in the days before records were invented. And that's the ones who have recording contracts. The vast majority of working musicians don't.
File sharing gives musicians exposure just like record sales do, and they make the same amount of money from it. The people who might stand to lose something from file sharing are the copymakers, whose role in the system is becoming obsolete. It's not at all clear to me why an obsolete industry should be kept on life support, or why the replacement system should try to implement the mythical concept of musicians being compensated when copies of their work are distributed. It didn't use to work that way and it doesn't work that way now. Why should it suddenly be a priority?
Let musicians benefit from the exposure afforded by file-sharing, the same way they have always benefited by the exposure from record sales, and they will continue to make money from live performances. Why can't we leave it at that???
I agree 100%, but I think America's progress toward being a police state has only just begun. The put-em-in-jail mentality is the prevailing attitude among the haves. Personal rights have only begun to take a back seat to business rights. The general population has become so accustomed to convenience and not getting involved, things will have to get a hell of a lot worse before the public gets mad enough and makes enough noise to command the attention of lawmakers. I don't think the people Congress are going to change their lapdog ways until they have a genuine fear of an imminent popular revolution.
Listen to bands that offer their music for free download, tell your friends about the ones you like, and when you can, buy tickets and go to their concerts. That's how the system is going to work in the future.
There are lot more musicians wanting to be famous than there are marketing slots in record company catalogs. The only thing stopping these bands from using the Internet to completely bypass the record companies is that most of them don't understand how to do it yet. 10 years ago that was the only thing stopping businesses from having websites.
timmyf - I read through your entire HOWTO -- very well written, I must say! Maybe I missed something crucial, but how do you navigate through your music files with only a remote and no visual UI?
According to the article, 3 million people are illegally receiving satellite tv, costing the industry $4 billion/year. That's about $1,333 a year per person, or about $111/month. Such a grand claim assumes that all 3 million people would spend $111/month for the highest-end entertainment package available if they couldn't get it for free. To me this is a patently ridiculous assumption, but in courtroom logic maybe it makes sense.
Highly convincing proof of DirecTV's damage claim might be available if we look back a couple years, to when DirecTV pulled off a successful and ingenious anti-hacker operation. In essence, they tricked people into installing software into their control cards that would permanently disable the cards. At the time, DirecTV estimated that the ruse destroyed more than 100,000 illicit cards in one fell swoop. So, a pat on the back goes to the DirecTV programmers for being smarter than the hackers. But what was the result?
The people using spoofed cards were already DirecTV customers with basic service, which they were merely throttling up to the max. According to DirecTV's rules of human behavior, the anti-hack should have resulted in 100,000 customers suddenly switching from basic to maximum service, and coincidentally requesting replacement cards because of mysterious, unknown problems.
Did such a result occur? If it had, no doubt DirecTV would have made it as public as the anti-hack itself. Having read many articles about this episode I haven't been able to find any mention of such a change in subscribership. So I don't believe it happened, and if I were on the Frazier jury I would seriously question the validity of DirecTV's damage claims. My uneducated guess is that most of those 100,000 people either went out and found some other way around the security, signed up for lesser service, got cable rather than DirecTV, or went back to rabbit ears. That would mean that the anti-hack had no immediate financial payoff.
The real payoff would be that a successful, highly publicized enforcement effort would help prevent the card-hacking phenomenon from growing to a point where it actually did have an impact. The payoff in the Frazier case is probably exactly the same. But it is kind of a pity that in our system somebody can be punished by a lifetime of indentured service in order to set an example.
For one, I think this article is a pretty clear and convincing call for copyright reform, not a disguised one, and I personally agree with it wholeheartedly.
The fast-food reference has eerie connotations: "You could say that Burger King and Wendy's stole the idea of a fun, plastic burger joint from McDonald's and are unfairly profiting from their evil deed." Well, yes you could say that, and under today's American patent system the courts would probably rule in your favor. If McDonalds were a new business they could call dibs on the idea of a fun, plastic burger joint, and those other entrepreneurs, --oops, I mean "Pirates", would have to pay hefty licensing fees and huge settlements.
Finally, it probably isn't fair to attach Rowling to the international slapdown of Potter clones. Since Time Warner owns the rights to the franchise, it's a pretty good bet that their legal dept is entirely responsible and Rowling herself is completely out of that loop. But like the Deatheaters in Rowling's books, brave little boys in suits like to hide in the shadows.
I'm sorry but this mod looks like, well, a pile of components with a plastic pyramid on top of them. Maybe if he had covered the pyramid with something more interesting, like dirty laundry or a stack of Twinkies or SPAM cans...
Slashdot Mirror
Once upon a time a messenger service discovered that by having all their messengers wear rocket powered roller skates they could deliver things in record time, beating their competitors into the dust. Soon every messenger service relied on rocket powered roller skates, the original company went broke and a few larger companies dominated the delivery business. People hardly shopped or went to the bank any more. Everything was handled by messengers wearing rocket powered roller skates. Commerce doubled and the economy briefly soared.
Then some asshole discovered that by dropping pencils on the sidewalk you could cause spectacular crashes. Packages were lost, messengers and pedstrians were killed, and commerce was interrupted. All manner of security precautions were invented. Radar-equipped skates appeared. The sidewalk hackers used hair-fine tripwires. Police and private guards patrolled the streets. The hackers went through the sewer system.
Congress passed some laws making it a crime to possess anything that could be placed on a sidewalk to trip up a rocket powered roller skater. Civil libertarians were outraged, but what else could be done?
Doing away with rocket powered roller skates was unthinkable, because everything would go back to being unbearably slow. Banning non-messengers from the sidewalk was similarly unthinkable. Building special secure sidewalks just for rocket powered roller skaters would be too expensive. The whole beauty of rocket powered roller skates was that they could use existing sidewalks.
The real problem was that the messenger companies had all jumped into relying on rocket powered roller skates without anticipating their weaknesses. They never really came up with a solution, just ways to stay one step behind the problem. But who could blame them? They had to stay competetive. It was always the hackers' fault. Maybe if enough of them got thrown into prison they would learn their lesson. If ordinary people had to live their lives differently, well... they were the ones who insisted on fast deliveries weren't they? The industry was just responding to demand.
Eventually ordinary people just didn't use the sidewalk anymore. It would expose them to too much danger and litigation. For all their communications and physical needs they relied exclusively on messengers on rocket powered roller skates, never leaving their homes. And they lived happily ever after.
... would be to ask him to explain how comet tails form. Doh! I have to admit not even thinking of that when I read Gold's article.
... a record company would still want to get paid for it.
EMI just announced that they and other record companies want to get paid every time anybody in the world hears any musical sound anywhere. Said RIAA spokeswoman Hilary Rosen, "Record companies invented music. Without us making the deals, you wouldn't hear a thing. It's always been about us. Hearing any sound whatsoever without paying a record company is theft of physics."
At last here is the story line for the new Galactica movie:
A solar storm has rendered space flight and related special effects impossible. Commanded by Manuel "El Guapo" Adama, a ragtag fugitive fleet of carts and wagons cannibalized from supply ships and damaged vipers plods across the western prairie of a faroff planet, dragging the ponderous Battlestar on skids through the punishing dust. In hot pursuit behind them are the leather-clad Cylon clones, grotesquely painted, pierced and feathered but with perfect teeth, riding their armada of heavily armored motorcycles and dune buggies.
Apollo - the commander's idealistic son. An ace fighter pilot, his true love is the accordion.
Francine Starbuck - once a champion triad player and college roommate of Apollo, he underwent a sex change and is now the lesbian lover of Boomer.
Belinda "Boomer" McNeil - beer drinking squadron commander and Starbuck's special friend.
Baltar - a tragic figure, was negotiating a peace treaty between the Cylones and the regular humans when a sudden unexpected solar eclipse fulfilled the ancient prophecy and started a bitter war of extermination. Hailed by the Cylones as their supreme leader, he's really just a nice guy in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Boxie - a robot boy with a real dog. Surrogate son of Apollo and Serena, Boxie accidentally killed his mom with a freak short circuit while handing her the soap. Apollo constantly fights the urge to dismantle him.
Theft of Marketing Strategy Outcome! For God's Sake, we must be sure the definition of "intellectual property" prevents individuals from doing anything that disrupts a business plan. Come to think of it, it should be a crime to buy an advertised sale item without also buying two items at regular price. Theft of bait! Damn freeloaders.
I don't know how many times I heard that expression as a kid during the 60's. Whenever someone criticized anything about American government or society, someone else invariably asked if they would rather live in Russia, which we all knew was an oppressive police state. I even read about apartment buildings over there being constructed with microphones built right in, so the evil commie government could listen for subversive activities. No, I didn't want to live in Russia.
Every telephone switch installed in the U.S. since 1995 is supposed to have this surveillance capability...
I'm sad for America because I do love this country. I dread the inevitable day when the rest of the world is forced to band together, at tremendous loss, to dismantle it like the USSR.
Say you point your cell phone at a person you see in public, and you get a readout of their social status and a rating of the match between your stored profiles. If you make the cut then you get the chance to place a call and have a brief conversation before waving like an idiot and meeting face to face.
Or, I guess, you could just walk up and say Hi.
Once again, the DRM world prepares to provide the smart-people-with-spare-time world with more amusement. Woo-Hoo!!
I've read enough raving by pundits and columnists about the stupidity of granting patents on business methods, and personally I agree wholeheartedly. Unfortunately I don't work for the patent office, and I don't know how all this discussion is going to change their behavior. As pointed out in the article, they think their mission is to grant patents, and since they deal more with patent seekers than with anyone else they are more sympathetic to patent seekers' needs than to the general public. Okay, well, so how do we stick the patent office's nose in the coffee and make them inhale?
Funny how these articles always take it for granted that fort-building is the only path to security. Another way to get there is to give people fewer reasons to go ballistic. Sure, there will always be lunatics who think they have to destroy a city to please Jesus or Allah or whatever. But they tend to recruit their legions of selfless followers from the ranks of ordinary people who legitimately feel they are getting squashed. If the greedy, shortsighted bastards who seem to make most of the big decisions in our world didn't see the rest of us as trash to be walked on, we might not have to be so scared that the points of vulnerability in the system are so accessible.
You obviously missed the point. If they have to screw up major public resources to do their business, they ought to do more for innocent bystanders than simply notify them when it's going to happen.
If you stood out on the freeway and caused a spectacle of some sort that snarled up traffic, you would get arrested for disturbing the peace. But a baseball team gets to do the same thing on a regular basis, no problem.
Notice that the device has a "Home Game" symbol that alerts you to major events. Good feature! In my 15 years of commuting around the Seattle area, the commercial activities of the Mariners, Sonics and Seahawks have collectively added hundreds of hours of commute time to my life and have never compensated me in any way. How about if sports teams in a metropolitan area provide these gadgets free of charge to anyone who wants one?
In the entry about eating aboard the ISS, I was stunned to read that much of the Russian space food comes in cans, which they open with a can opener. Cans?? The Russians haul food up to a space station in CANS??? My American preconception of the Russian space program as somewhat clunky (re: the cigarette-smoking fuel station attendant in Armageddon) just did an Olympic triple back-flip.
If you're not paranoid of the government using a surveillance system like this to completely repress dissent and freedom, I would like to hear the argument against that ever happening. The trite idea that innocent people have nothing to hide doesn't hold up. A government with this level of omniscience would be invulnerable to its own citizens, which would be a bad thing. No government should be invulnerable to revolt because no government is infallible.
That's the message on the slashdotted Toshiba site. Yes, an error has indeed occurred.
Mod me down for nitpicking, but spelling mistakes in error messages are my pet peeve.
Let me see if I get this right. You don't own your own face, because somebody can make a copy of it with a camera and sell copies of the copy without your permission. However, that person owns that copy of your face and can sue anybody else for selling copies of their copy, and you don't get a nickel out of it.
Yeah okay, makes sense to me.
Up Next: Associations for the deaf start suing record companies for discrimination because they don't print song lyrics on CDs.
The intent to compensate artists and copyright holders may be a good one, but like almost every argument over the music sharing issue it assumes that the 20th century profit model established by the music copy making industry should be perpetuated. This isn't necessarily true.
Before recording technology, musicians made money only by performing. Recording technology could have changed that but it didn't. Because record companies were in a position to dictate how the system would work, they set it up to give themselves all the profits. Standard ecording contracts are written such that all the expenses of producing and distributing a record are paid out of the musician's percentage, usually leaving zero. What musicians get out of a recording contract is exposure, which leads to them getting more and more lucrative gigs. They make a living by performing, just like in the days before records were invented. And that's the ones who have recording contracts. The vast majority of working musicians don't.
File sharing gives musicians exposure just like record sales do, and they make the same amount of money from it. The people who might stand to lose something from file sharing are the copymakers, whose role in the system is becoming obsolete. It's not at all clear to me why an obsolete industry should be kept on life support, or why the replacement system should try to implement the mythical concept of musicians being compensated when copies of their work are distributed. It didn't use to work that way and it doesn't work that way now. Why should it suddenly be a priority?
Let musicians benefit from the exposure afforded by file-sharing, the same way they have always benefited by the exposure from record sales, and they will continue to make money from live performances. Why can't we leave it at that???
I agree 100%, but I think America's progress toward being a police state has only just begun. The put-em-in-jail mentality is the prevailing attitude among the haves. Personal rights have only begun to take a back seat to business rights. The general population has become so accustomed to convenience and not getting involved, things will have to get a hell of a lot worse before the public gets mad enough and makes enough noise to command the attention of lawmakers. I don't think the people Congress are going to change their lapdog ways until they have a genuine fear of an imminent popular revolution.
Listen to bands that offer their music for free download, tell your friends about the ones you like, and when you can, buy tickets and go to their concerts. That's how the system is going to work in the future.
There are lot more musicians wanting to be famous than there are marketing slots in record company catalogs. The only thing stopping these bands from using the Internet to completely bypass the record companies is that most of them don't understand how to do it yet. 10 years ago that was the only thing stopping businesses from having websites.
timmyf - I read through your entire HOWTO -- very well written, I must say! Maybe I missed something crucial, but how do you navigate through your music files with only a remote and no visual UI?
According to the article, 3 million people are illegally receiving satellite tv, costing the industry $4 billion/year. That's about $1,333 a year per person, or about $111/month. Such a grand claim assumes that all 3 million people would spend $111/month for the highest-end entertainment package available if they couldn't get it for free. To me this is a patently ridiculous assumption, but in courtroom logic maybe it makes sense.
Highly convincing proof of DirecTV's damage claim might be available if we look back a couple years, to when DirecTV pulled off a successful and ingenious anti-hacker operation . In essence, they tricked people into installing software into their control cards that would permanently disable the cards. At the time, DirecTV estimated that the ruse destroyed more than 100,000 illicit cards in one fell swoop. So, a pat on the back goes to the DirecTV programmers for being smarter than the hackers. But what was the result?
The people using spoofed cards were already DirecTV customers with basic service, which they were merely throttling up to the max. According to DirecTV's rules of human behavior, the anti-hack should have resulted in 100,000 customers suddenly switching from basic to maximum service, and coincidentally requesting replacement cards because of mysterious, unknown problems.
Did such a result occur? If it had, no doubt DirecTV would have made it as public as the anti-hack itself. Having read many articles about this episode I haven't been able to find any mention of such a change in subscribership. So I don't believe it happened, and if I were on the Frazier jury I would seriously question the validity of DirecTV's damage claims. My uneducated guess is that most of those 100,000 people either went out and found some other way around the security, signed up for lesser service, got cable rather than DirecTV, or went back to rabbit ears. That would mean that the anti-hack had no immediate financial payoff.
The real payoff would be that a successful, highly publicized enforcement effort would help prevent the card-hacking phenomenon from growing to a point where it actually did have an impact. The payoff in the Frazier case is probably exactly the same. But it is kind of a pity that in our system somebody can be punished by a lifetime of indentured service in order to set an example.
For one, I think this article is a pretty clear and convincing call for copyright reform, not a disguised one, and I personally agree with it wholeheartedly.
The fast-food reference has eerie connotations: "You could say that Burger King and Wendy's stole the idea of a fun, plastic burger joint from McDonald's and are unfairly profiting from their evil deed." Well, yes you could say that, and under today's American patent system the courts would probably rule in your favor. If McDonalds were a new business they could call dibs on the idea of a fun, plastic burger joint, and those other entrepreneurs, --oops, I mean "Pirates", would have to pay hefty licensing fees and huge settlements.
Finally, it probably isn't fair to attach Rowling to the international slapdown of Potter clones. Since Time Warner owns the rights to the franchise, it's a pretty good bet that their legal dept is entirely responsible and Rowling herself is completely out of that loop. But like the Deatheaters in Rowling's books, brave little boys in suits like to hide in the shadows.
I'm sorry but this mod looks like, well, a pile of components with a plastic pyramid on top of them. Maybe if he had covered the pyramid with something more interesting, like dirty laundry or a stack of Twinkies or SPAM cans...