The fundamental premise of this article is flawed. The situations between iPods and eBooks are simply not analagous, and the reasons are so obvious that any editor who wasn't totally befuddled by their technophile tendencies would have sent this dog back for a serious rewrite, or preferrably sent it to the digital circular file where it belongs.
Everyone buying an iPod has an existing bank of media playable on that device as mediated through their computer: to whit, their CD collection. Nobody would buy a 10,000 song iPod if they had to then buy 10,000 songs at the iTunes music store to fill it up.
Because the computer allowed the conversion of any legacy CD to a portable-playable compressed format, there was generally a huge library of music instantly available when the first MP3 player hit the market. Any music conventionally "in print" since the 80s was available. Every album from any major music publication's top whatever list of whatever was available. Every hit from every chart was available. Every serious popular classic of every genre was available. Many were even available at a significant discount at your local used CD store or on eBay. (And don't talk to me about project Gutenberg. While not an insignificant factor, it is still, in terms of driving a popular market for a new medium, roughly equivalent to starting your product base with access to all music that was released on wax cylinders and 78 discs)
Apple did not invent the portable player. They put iTunes together with an idea (a vast library of music in your pocket) with a handy and slick form factor and a clever one-handed interface. While the total product was innovative, the basic idea (a small music player with headphones) was fully embedded in culture already. People knew why a music portable was a good thing to have. Apple simply sold the idea that this is that, but even better. It scored over the current top product, the portable CD player, in many respects. There was no need to carry media, let alone the impossibility of anyone with a healthy collection of carrying more than a token component of their media. It allowed easy transition between various albums. It allowed the individual to mix and match customized presentations of their music that they could later access through the device. It was small enough to slip into most any pocket.
Most of these functional gains are of drastically reduced if not eliminated in the eBook. Nobody needs to have 10,000 books at their fingertips. A neat trick, but most people read one book at a time, and even freaks like myself rarely are working on more than four or five. Reading is not a "do anywhere" activity. You don't read while you jog or drive or work out or work, so portability in general is simply not of an equal value with reading. Furthermore, the primary issue of form factor in music portables, size, is in many respects a moot point with books because you need the thing to be big enough to give you a good page view. Barring some fantastic unfolding screen technology an e-Book that slips into your pocket is a non-starter. And remember the last time you went down to Kinkos with a stack of books, copied 20 or 30 of your favorite sections, and threw together a fun mix-book to read on the bus?
Finally, with regards to "if publishers stop wanting DRM, it's the end of popular creative arts. Not as we know them, but period." This numbnuts idea has been argued so much I won't even bother, except to say: 1) None of the DRM out there works: it is basically a pacifier for a paranoid industry, and 2) DRM may have made the iTunes Music Store possible from a sheerly pragmatic perspective of what it took for publishers to allow their music to be sold in that format, but the iTunes Music Store did not make the iPod possible. A lack of DRM on the vast majority of available media made the iPod possible.
I don't say the eBook will not come. There are possible benefits (full text searching of any book would be a great thing, an on-board dictionary,
12 songs? like an... album? what do they got in their, a hamster? it can't possibly be that hard to find somewhere to stuff a couple more MP3s in a cell phone. why so stingy?
Unfortunately there seem to be a lot of corporate lawyers who think that provided you are big and famous, it doesn't matter who "came first" or "branded a unique identity" or any crazy dumb little thing like that. And too often they win on that logic - either because the smaller fish simply can't afford litigation or simply because the infringement claims of a big name just seem more credible. This is the right decision, and google should just eat it. Try changing it to frugal.froogle.com, like it matters. It's not like its some tradition, like they call news noogle and the groups groopgle or anything, so why get uptight about it?
Pity the winning website is such intensely boring placeholder glop, though.
Hmm, some interesting uses of this I hadn't thought of (thesis - I shoulda thought of that, I work in online higher education!) Food for thought indeed.
As I said, the core technology - although technically there is nothing that "new" about it - just putting various elements together in a new way... is really interesting to me... and when one shows up in Minneapolis I'll certainly be making myself a book or two if only to see it in action (and what the finished product is)... but I'm curious to see whether the technology has a difficult time finding its market.
Nevertheless... I've been working with copiers of all sorts for ten years and they all jam. As this has to collate, align, bind it strikes me that the problems will come more in the copier vein than the printer. Not that this makes it unuseable... but I'm guessing if it gets adopted it will start in places like Kinkos where they're used to dealing with machines like this all the time. Otherwise (if the office copiers I know and love are any indication) the consistent downtime waiting for the repairman to come deal with it will serve as a source of frustration for potential customers...
The real question is, given its operating costs, what does it cost to produce a book? There are reasonable people who hold that Print on Demand options available today are nothing more than the modern vanity press. I've been tracking these things for a couple years, it's cool there seems to be a commerical product out, but I'll have to reserve judgement on whether it's significant or not - print on demand is an odd market and I don't know if it's really making that much of an impact on book sales overall or not.
Anybody who has an inkling of interest in tinkering with the possibilities of alternative distribution of media should be thrilled like this. In a few months I'll be launching my first experiment in home-brew DIY music downloading and I'm so thrilled the RIAA will continue to give me regular opportunities to market it by reminding everyone just how stupid and corrupt the current "market" is.
More than this - for me part of the attraction of an HDD player is it can double as a portable hard drive. I actually own a minidisc portable - I use it for exactly one thing, as a one-button live recorder, and it works really pretty good at that (for battery life, size and ease, compared to others I've tried). But because of Sony's blinkered insistence on confounding the potential of their hardware, it is fundamentally just an analog recording device for my purposes. Post recording basically all I can do is output analog via the headphone jack - sorta stupid, IMHO. As I said, at the time I bought it it came out best comparing price point, sound quality, size/weight, battery life, media capacity, and simplicity. It beats microtape recorders hands down. I imagine HDD based recorders that write (I would hope) straight to WAV files will come around price wise.
But if I'm going to drop a fair piece of change on an HDD recorder (and I'm not yet convinced I need one) I want to be able to put data OF WHATEVER FORMAT I WANT on it. I can at least sort of justify the price then.
Maybe I'll get pasted for being hopelessly naive (oh wait... this discussion is days old, nobody'll read this. Such a free feeling), but I think Disney is a lot like America itself - is it the evil empire or the most wonderful thing? Freedom... wealth... power... humans... put 'em together and you won't get an easy answer. I recently watched the documentary Control Room (which is really worth it, BTW - comically with a trailer for Disney's feel-good psuedodoc America's Heart and Soul prior to the show) and there was a very telling scene where an Al-Jazeera producer talks aobut how if Fox news asked him to come work for them in America tomorrow, he'd go, and his aspiration to have his children study in America, and then stay there. Disney can be evil, no question. I think they tend to be less so in the theme park world for a very simple reason - it is a business that takes you very close to your constituents. They are not at the end of some long media spoon. They are right there in your little world and if that world is twisted and sick they'll know it. Hell of a world huh? You can't pin anything down.
MPAA/RIAA/et al: We must impose DRM technology to prevent piracy which is ruining our business!
Everyone else: Well, you can put whatever information you want on a disk and try to sell it, but you know DRM doesn't really work so it's sort of pointless. Isn't your only option to work on interdicting commercial bootlegging, the only place you're likely to recoup a reasonable recompense without alienating your consumer base and the only real source of your legitimate copyright-violation problems anyway?
MPAA/RIAA/et al: Crap! DRM doesn't really work anyway! I know, we'll pay off congress to have a special case exception of innocent until proven guilty written into the law! DRM still doesn't work but now it's illegal to prove that in the real world! That'll show those rotten pirates!
Adobe: Arrest that durn Ruskie! He is giving a talk which is embarassing to us! Pirates, ARRRR!
Everyone else: Geez, that new legislation seems kinda excessive. It's already illegal to duplicate and distribute copyrighted materials without permission. So what good does banning tools that MIGHT be used for that purpose do? Plus, it doesn't work. DeCSS might be illegal under the DMCA, and it's one of the most ubiquitous pieces of code on the internet. It's redundant, violates the spirit of the constitution, inneffective, frequently unenforceable, and it alienates legitimate consumers of your products who want the freedom to legally use them in the way and on the equipment that is best for them!
MPAA/RIAA/et al: Oh, so you want some free music do you, you little thirteen-year-old tramp? Well here's a subpeona for you! And one for you, and you, and your little dog too! We have five dollars for each of you!
Everyone else: wow, these people are out of control. Hey, massive electronics and telecommunications business, can you give us a hand here? We spend a lot more money on you. These people are obsessed with killing innovation to protect technologies that don't work to prevent violations that don't matter and don't prevent the bootlegging that actually hurts them anyway.
Intel, Sun Microsystems, Verizon Communications, SBC, Qwest, Gateway and BellSouth, Philips Consumer Electronics North America, the Consumer Electronics Association, the American Library Association, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Consumers Union, the Consumer Federation of America, Public Knowledge, the American Foundation for the Blind, the United States Telecom Association, the Computer and Communications Industry Association...:well gosh, this situation seems non-ideal...
MPAA/RIAA/et al: Noooo! If we lose the red herring of our brave fight against piracy our shareholders might finally figure out we're just screw-ups who have been squandering their money with our insane business strategy of screwing all our customers AND the actual producers of our products at the same time!
Hello? Venture Capitalists? Have I got a deal for you...
nanojath declaims how he won't buy stupid corporate music any more and it rocks because the indie stuff is a lot more interesting (I'm listening to some right now). Record Industry: Ow! Ow! Ow! my foot!
Thanks for this post - I wish people would discuss the bible in a rational way more often. Although I don't think you can completely discount the eschatological content of Revelation completely, its meaning as a piece of political commentary is unquestionable. My dad, a minister, has often said that the thing most people forget is that all prophecies in the bible were written first for the people in the time they were written, about the events of the times they were written in (this is true of the whole bible in fact). Some will argue that the historical perspective is somehow "unspiritual," as an active Christian I find it adds greatly to the value I find in studying scripture.
The only thing I actually object to in all this furor is elements of the DMCA - because I think the idea of making a legal activity illegal because it might be involved in an illegal activity goes against the spirit of the constitution.
If companies want to trash up their CDs with all sorts of worthless gack, more power to them. Because the DRM trend is the best thing that ever happened to my music collection. When I found out that the artist-screwing, mediocrity-championing, price-fixing cockroaches in the mainstream music biz were now proposing to charge me the same thing for a less useful product I made a simple decision: I would not support them any more. Now I buy legacy content used and new content from indies - true indies, not major label shills. And my music collection has never been more interesting.
There's a genius guitar player who charges me a flat subscription rate. A couple dozen times a year a CD shows up in the mail - hand-decorated, with hand-crafted packaging, frequently a one-off live recording, the only one in the world. I pay less than $5 on average per CD.
The other night I went to Bitpass' Mperia.com and started browsing the downloadable music, some available as low as $.25 per track. A couple of hours and about $14 later I had well over thirty new songs on my hard drive with no restrictions whatsoever.
I buy more things at concerts by local artists. I buy more from CD Baby. I get a fair amount of content totally free and legal off the internet... and often end up supporting an independently produced artist with a CD purchase on the strength of what they gave away freely.
And it all has two things in common. It's less expensive and more interesting than what I'm likely to find on the shelves at Walmart or Sam Goody. I would estimate my music budget dollars are nearly twice as effective with this strategy as they were when I mainly bought new major-label-produced content.
Now, I'm rather a stickler about it, but there's no reason you would have to be; if you wanted to replace 20 or 50 or 90% of your purchases but still buy your favorite artists or whatever - nothing to stop you. The point is - just because some mainstream junk with DRM is topping the charts doesn't mean they're winning. We all oughta know by now that chart-toppers or not, the music industry is not doing well financially. Me, I registered my feelings on DRM with all the major labels years ago. They didn't listen so I took my dollar away. I don't want to stop them doing what they're doing - that's freedom of speech, as messed up of an example as it is - artists has the right to sell out their freedom of speech for a terrible record deal, publisher has the right to hawk their overpriced content purchases gacked up with DRM. Every artist has the right to produce and sell their stuff exactly how they want and I have the right to choose.
I wonder at that as well as his decision not to give a complete listing of all the merchandise. Based on other comments here though, it sounds like he's counting on the value of a handful of really valuable items (like the developers kits) to affirm the value, and starting with a exceptionally high starting bid to keep any dilletantes out of the picture. It's a fair bet this guy wholly understands this market and I imagine there must be a small group of individuals with the money and inclination to make it worth his while. Running separate auctions on it would be a LOT of work and chances form many, many bad or fraudulent transactions. This way he can focus on vetting a handful of participants (most of whom he probably already knows) instead of thousands of random yahoos.
I've never gotten the huge partisanship either way... and I never know if it's how I use computers or other people just have bad karma with this or that system. Apples always seem like home to me - other than the TRS 80 I had on long-term loan from a friend I started with IICs in grade school, mainly classic Macs in college, one of the pizza boxes at my first job at a nonprofit. When I started taking more conventional office jobs I needed to learn windows and did so. It's mostly worked fine for me. I have some basic box with Windows 2K at work, it doesn't crash, it works fine.
However I've known some true lemons in my day on the PC side. I think one issue is you may not get a consistent product like with Apple: it all depends on what else the manufacturer has loaded up on it. A clean install of just Windows from 98 on has never given me many problems.
On the other hand... up until a couple of years ago, the only computer I had at home was a Mac LCIII. It's battery was fried so everything constantly reset, it was slow and weak... yet I worked productively on it, even surfed the internet at 56K. I'm not sure a Windows box of similar provenance would manage to still be functional. Now I have a new iMac with OSX and I'm very happy with it. I've been using Safari, and there are little things I like - essentially, that it is more or less an Explorer clone with more privacy-centered presets, one step cache/history/forms clearing, and effective pop-up blocking on a top-level menu. The fact that MS doesn't get these kinds of features after so long says a lot about the failures of their software. Also, without a whole lot of knowledge of the nuts and bolts of digital music - the first time I put a CD into the iMac, stuff happened. iTunes was clear, easy, before I knew it I went from "never listened to an MP3" (seriously) to deep into ripping my whole collection and fiddling with playlists within a couple hours. I'd put CDs into a dozen Windows boxes at work and it never did anything but momentarily turn my computer into a (not very interesting) CD player. Now that I think about it, before the iMac and OSX I was less partisan... particularly after getting Jaguar, and hooking it to a broadband connection and my stereo, for the first time in my life there it's like I really get the point of having a computer.
Ditto, I haven't seen an unwanted pop-up add since I started using Safari.
Dunno if you'll see this but I'm curious of your opinion: is there any reason to keep Internet Explorer on my computer anymore? I'd love to erase it entirely as I don't really see the point.
Lending doesn't even go that far, it's just among the rights you have as an owner of a licensed copy. You can lend out (I thinkn technically it would have to be the original), you can make personal copies under broad circumstances. But that's the trick of the DMCA. It doesn't make fair use illegal, it just makes certain applications of it impossible. Example: say you had a perfectly protected CD: you could still pulg a tape deck into the analog outputs and make a copy, heck, you could plug them into your computer (using a bit of circuitry in between for a better sound) and convert that analog signal into a WAV file and make THAT into an MP3 or Ogg file, all perfectly legal if it's for personal use. But you can't use some handy dandy cracker program to rip the actual WAV file by goinjg around the protection because you're breaking the DMCA. That's the thing - fair use tells you what you're allowed to do with copyrighted material you buy - but it provides NO guarantees of what you are ABLE to do. So yes, the music industry could create a format that prevented you from giving you friends music - from anyone in fact using what you buy but you. Nowhere is it written you family must be able to use your stuff when you die.
And you are absolutely correct - if this is true (and I sort of question it, it sounds pretty out there and the Register sometimes gets a bit ahead of it's facts...) it is a stupid waste of time. People reformat for a perceived benefit. I won't buy music in ANY digital rights managed format (sorry iTunes) because there is NOTHING in it for me. Hell, I wouldnt let my bank do their little thumbprint check ID thing on me. Luckily for some poor inncocent teller I do everything electronically because my bank will get a pretty earful if the ever try to demand a fingerprint from me.
And you know what? Giving up on mainstream BS is making me love music again anyway. I buy locals, indies, weirdos on the internet via BitPass. I'm finding stuff I never woulda known existed. There are simply tons of CD players and burners, from the ultra-portable to the industrial scale, and this format is not going away anytime soon. More power to the record industry. Keep making yourself more hated, obtuse and irrelevant. It's not as if you need a million dollars to produce a great album. All you need are some great musicians, some time in a studio which ANYONE can rent, and a good engineer who knows the musicians' sound and one of the tens of thousands of independent bulk CD burners out there. The majors' main talent at this point as far as the studio goes seems to be polishing turds (i.e. Britney Spears' voice), so if they want to only record their garbage on the retinal scanning walkman or whatever, more power to you. Despite what some have suggested they will not succeed in making it illegal to put out your own material in the format of your choice because it is a clear violation of freedom of speech... which is why all the really silly laws trying to impose crazy restraints for the sake of copyright protection have died on the vine. The day they tell me I can't burn a CD of my own material (i.e. stuff I wrote and recorded) and distribute it however the hell I want is the day that I leave this country.
I wish I could mod my own thread so I could mod you funny. And insightful. Related entry - those who respond with a comment about how they have patented something ridiculous and everybody owes them a fee. Yes, very funny and original, boys. Nothing changes society like a bunch of uninformed yahoos. "Hey, I patented a glass of water" (then sits wondering why they are not getting modded up funny).
funny responses all used up (darn) so here's the informative one...
"patent troll (PAT.unt trohl) n. A company that purchases a patent, often from a bankrupt firm, and then sues another company by claiming that one of its products infringes on the purchased patent.. --adj."
Via The Word Spy http://www.wordspy.com/words/patenttroll.asp
Another indignity to be heaped on the Administrative Assistant... "Nanojath, I really need to work on this report, so you better log in and drive me to work..." Then again, the trust might not extend that far... to quote Homer Simpson, "Kill my boss? Do I dare live out the American Dream?"
So, if I crash someone's car driving it remotely, am I liable? Does my insurance go up? Will hackers be the wireless car thieves of the future?
global warming alarmist, nuclear proponent... man I'm ticked I came in late on this one...
I'm a big conservationist/environmentalist, I think the hypothesis that current trends in global temperatures are caused by human activities is a decent one, worth worrying about and taking seriously. I'm not automatically opposed to nuclear. I live in Minneapolis and I get a LOT of my electricity from nuclear. But there are a few serious issues with nuclear. First and foremost is the waste. It's dangerous in several different ways and NOBODY wants it in their backyard, or indeed within several hundred miles of their backyard. Anybody wanting to say there is a simple solution to this can just shut up right now. There ain't. A look at the whole Yucca Mountain fiasco about sums it up. The waste casking issue from MN's Monticello plant is just a constant, constant source of political dust-ups. Dealing with waste (a problem that jumps by an order of magnitude when you eventually have to decommission a plant) is THE unsolved problem of nuclear. There is also the issue, still present in all active nuclear plants, of the possibility of catastrophic failure. Finally, producing masses of CO2 free electricity is not an automatic solution even if we assume the greenhouse gas issue is the major contributing factor of short-term global warming. You have to consider all the massive infrastructure that results in greenhouse gas point sources - namely, internal combustion vehicles and buildings that burn fuel for climate control (like my house. Who's gonna pay to replace my gas furnace with an electric one. I'm not made of freaking money, you know).
It's easy to say, oh, nuclear is the answer. Having any kind of a plan would help. But having a hugely simplistic one that glosses the details and underestimates the infrastructure intertia factor could be worse than just bumbling along.
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The fundamental premise of this article is flawed. The situations between iPods and eBooks are simply not analagous, and the reasons are so obvious that any editor who wasn't totally befuddled by their technophile tendencies would have sent this dog back for a serious rewrite, or preferrably sent it to the digital circular file where it belongs.
Everyone buying an iPod has an existing bank of media playable on that device as mediated through their computer: to whit, their CD collection. Nobody would buy a 10,000 song iPod if they had to then buy 10,000 songs at the iTunes music store to fill it up.
Because the computer allowed the conversion of any legacy CD to a portable-playable compressed format, there was generally a huge library of music instantly available when the first MP3 player hit the market. Any music conventionally "in print" since the 80s was available. Every album from any major music publication's top whatever list of whatever was available. Every hit from every chart was available. Every serious popular classic of every genre was available. Many were even available at a significant discount at your local used CD store or on eBay. (And don't talk to me about project Gutenberg. While not an insignificant factor, it is still, in terms of driving a popular market for a new medium, roughly equivalent to starting your product base with access to all music that was released on wax cylinders and 78 discs)
Apple did not invent the portable player. They put iTunes together with an idea (a vast library of music in your pocket) with a handy and slick form factor and a clever one-handed interface. While the total product was innovative, the basic idea (a small music player with headphones) was fully embedded in culture already. People knew why a music portable was a good thing to have. Apple simply sold the idea that this is that, but even better. It scored over the current top product, the portable CD player, in many respects. There was no need to carry media, let alone the impossibility of anyone with a healthy collection of carrying more than a token component of their media. It allowed easy transition between various albums. It allowed the individual to mix and match customized presentations of their music that they could later access through the device. It was small enough to slip into most any pocket.
Most of these functional gains are of drastically reduced if not eliminated in the eBook. Nobody needs to have 10,000 books at their fingertips. A neat trick, but most people read one book at a time, and even freaks like myself rarely are working on more than four or five. Reading is not a "do anywhere" activity. You don't read while you jog or drive or work out or work, so portability in general is simply not of an equal value with reading. Furthermore, the primary issue of form factor in music portables, size, is in many respects a moot point with books because you need the thing to be big enough to give you a good page view. Barring some fantastic unfolding screen technology an e-Book that slips into your pocket is a non-starter. And remember the last time you went down to Kinkos with a stack of books, copied 20 or 30 of your favorite sections, and threw together a fun mix-book to read on the bus?
Finally, with regards to "if publishers stop wanting DRM, it's the end of popular creative arts. Not as we know them, but period." This numbnuts idea has been argued so much I won't even bother, except to say: 1) None of the DRM out there works: it is basically a pacifier for a paranoid industry, and 2) DRM may have made the iTunes Music Store possible from a sheerly pragmatic perspective of what it took for publishers to allow their music to be sold in that format, but the iTunes Music Store did not make the iPod possible. A lack of DRM on the vast majority of available media made the iPod possible.
I don't say the eBook will not come. There are possible benefits (full text searching of any book would be a great thing, an on-board dictionary,
That's really interesting, thanks, I would not have guessed...
12 songs? like an... album? what do they got in their, a hamster? it can't possibly be that hard to find somewhere to stuff a couple more MP3s in a cell phone. why so stingy?
frugal.google.com rather. It has a good ring, I think.
Unfortunately there seem to be a lot of corporate lawyers who think that provided you are big and famous, it doesn't matter who "came first" or "branded a unique identity" or any crazy dumb little thing like that. And too often they win on that logic - either because the smaller fish simply can't afford litigation or simply because the infringement claims of a big name just seem more credible. This is the right decision, and google should just eat it. Try changing it to frugal.froogle.com, like it matters. It's not like its some tradition, like they call news noogle and the groups groopgle or anything, so why get uptight about it?
Pity the winning website is such intensely boring placeholder glop, though.
Hmm, some interesting uses of this I hadn't thought of (thesis - I shoulda thought of that, I work in online higher education!) Food for thought indeed.
As I said, the core technology - although technically there is nothing that "new" about it - just putting various elements together in a new way... is really interesting to me... and when one shows up in Minneapolis I'll certainly be making myself a book or two if only to see it in action (and what the finished product is)... but I'm curious to see whether the technology has a difficult time finding its market.
Nevertheless... I've been working with copiers of all sorts for ten years and they all jam. As this has to collate, align, bind it strikes me that the problems will come more in the copier vein than the printer. Not that this makes it unuseable... but I'm guessing if it gets adopted it will start in places like Kinkos where they're used to dealing with machines like this all the time. Otherwise (if the office copiers I know and love are any indication) the consistent downtime waiting for the repairman to come deal with it will serve as a source of frustration for potential customers...
The real question is, given its operating costs, what does it cost to produce a book? There are reasonable people who hold that Print on Demand options available today are nothing more than the modern vanity press. I've been tracking these things for a couple years, it's cool there seems to be a commerical product out, but I'll have to reserve judgement on whether it's significant or not - print on demand is an odd market and I don't know if it's really making that much of an impact on book sales overall or not.
Anybody who has an inkling of interest in tinkering with the possibilities of alternative distribution of media should be thrilled like this. In a few months I'll be launching my first experiment in home-brew DIY music downloading and I'm so thrilled the RIAA will continue to give me regular opportunities to market it by reminding everyone just how stupid and corrupt the current "market" is.
(let me just get my tongue out of my cheek...)
....
Actually I agreee with you... though frankly I fear we're at about maximum dilution at this point, it would just be a matter of stirring it around.
9/11 - herbal viagara - 9/11 - herbal viagara
Um, maybe you could promise an erection so robust that you could use it to batter down locked fire stairwell doors in the event of a terrorist attack?
If major governments can be convinced these are "terroristic threats" we might actually get some police action against these annoying criminals.
More than this - for me part of the attraction of an HDD player is it can double as a portable hard drive. I actually own a minidisc portable - I use it for exactly one thing, as a one-button live recorder, and it works really pretty good at that (for battery life, size and ease, compared to others I've tried). But because of Sony's blinkered insistence on confounding the potential of their hardware, it is fundamentally just an analog recording device for my purposes. Post recording basically all I can do is output analog via the headphone jack - sorta stupid, IMHO. As I said, at the time I bought it it came out best comparing price point, sound quality, size/weight, battery life, media capacity, and simplicity. It beats microtape recorders hands down. I imagine HDD based recorders that write (I would hope) straight to WAV files will come around price wise.
But if I'm going to drop a fair piece of change on an HDD recorder (and I'm not yet convinced I need one) I want to be able to put data OF WHATEVER FORMAT I WANT on it. I can at least sort of justify the price then.
Maybe I'll get pasted for being hopelessly naive (oh wait... this discussion is days old, nobody'll read this. Such a free feeling), but I think Disney is a lot like America itself - is it the evil empire or the most wonderful thing? Freedom... wealth... power... humans... put 'em together and you won't get an easy answer. I recently watched the documentary Control Room (which is really worth it, BTW - comically with a trailer for Disney's feel-good psuedodoc America's Heart and Soul prior to the show) and there was a very telling scene where an Al-Jazeera producer talks aobut how if Fox news asked him to come work for them in America tomorrow, he'd go, and his aspiration to have his children study in America, and then stay there. Disney can be evil, no question. I think they tend to be less so in the theme park world for a very simple reason - it is a business that takes you very close to your constituents. They are not at the end of some long media spoon. They are right there in your little world and if that world is twisted and sick they'll know it. Hell of a world huh? You can't pin anything down.
MPAA/RIAA/et al: We must impose DRM technology to prevent piracy which is ruining our business!
:well gosh, this situation seems non-ideal...
Everyone else: Well, you can put whatever information you want on a disk and try to sell it, but you know DRM doesn't really work so it's sort of pointless. Isn't your only option to work on interdicting commercial bootlegging, the only place you're likely to recoup a reasonable recompense without alienating your consumer base and the only real source of your legitimate copyright-violation problems anyway?
MPAA/RIAA/et al: Crap! DRM doesn't really work anyway! I know, we'll pay off congress to have a special case exception of innocent until proven guilty written into the law! DRM still doesn't work but now it's illegal to prove that in the real world! That'll show those rotten pirates!
Adobe: Arrest that durn Ruskie! He is giving a talk which is embarassing to us! Pirates, ARRRR!
Everyone else: Geez, that new legislation seems kinda excessive. It's already illegal to duplicate and distribute copyrighted materials without permission. So what good does banning tools that MIGHT be used for that purpose do? Plus, it doesn't work. DeCSS might be illegal under the DMCA, and it's one of the most ubiquitous pieces of code on the internet. It's redundant, violates the spirit of the constitution, inneffective, frequently unenforceable, and it alienates legitimate consumers of your products who want the freedom to legally use them in the way and on the equipment that is best for them!
MPAA/RIAA/et al: Oh, so you want some free music do you, you little thirteen-year-old tramp? Well here's a subpeona for you! And one for you, and you, and your little dog too! We have five dollars for each of you!
Everyone else: wow, these people are out of control. Hey, massive electronics and telecommunications business, can you give us a hand here? We spend a lot more money on you. These people are obsessed with killing innovation to protect technologies that don't work to prevent violations that don't matter and don't prevent the bootlegging that actually hurts them anyway.
Intel, Sun Microsystems, Verizon Communications, SBC, Qwest, Gateway and BellSouth, Philips Consumer Electronics North America, the Consumer Electronics Association, the American Library Association, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Consumers Union, the Consumer Federation of America, Public Knowledge, the American Foundation for the Blind, the United States Telecom Association, the Computer and Communications Industry Association...
MPAA/RIAA/et al: Noooo! If we lose the red herring of our brave fight against piracy our shareholders might finally figure out we're just screw-ups who have been squandering their money with our insane business strategy of screwing all our customers AND the actual producers of our products at the same time!
Hello? Venture Capitalists? Have I got a deal for you...
nanojath declaims how he won't buy stupid corporate music any more and it rocks because the indie stuff is a lot more interesting (I'm listening to some right now). Record Industry: Ow! Ow! Ow! my foot!
http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/ senators_cfm.cfm
Let your senators know.
Thanks for this post - I wish people would discuss the bible in a rational way more often. Although I don't think you can completely discount the eschatological content of Revelation completely, its meaning as a piece of political commentary is unquestionable. My dad, a minister, has often said that the thing most people forget is that all prophecies in the bible were written first for the people in the time they were written, about the events of the times they were written in (this is true of the whole bible in fact). Some will argue that the historical perspective is somehow "unspiritual," as an active Christian I find it adds greatly to the value I find in studying scripture.
If companies want to trash up their CDs with all sorts of worthless gack, more power to them. Because the DRM trend is the best thing that ever happened to my music collection. When I found out that the artist-screwing, mediocrity-championing, price-fixing cockroaches in the mainstream music biz were now proposing to charge me the same thing for a less useful product I made a simple decision: I would not support them any more. Now I buy legacy content used and new content from indies - true indies, not major label shills. And my music collection has never been more interesting.
There's a genius guitar player who charges me a flat subscription rate. A couple dozen times a year a CD shows up in the mail - hand-decorated, with hand-crafted packaging, frequently a one-off live recording, the only one in the world. I pay less than $5 on average per CD.
The other night I went to Bitpass' Mperia.com and started browsing the downloadable music, some available as low as $.25 per track. A couple of hours and about $14 later I had well over thirty new songs on my hard drive with no restrictions whatsoever.
I buy more things at concerts by local artists. I buy more from CD Baby. I get a fair amount of content totally free and legal off the internet... and often end up supporting an independently produced artist with a CD purchase on the strength of what they gave away freely.
And it all has two things in common. It's less expensive and more interesting than what I'm likely to find on the shelves at Walmart or Sam Goody. I would estimate my music budget dollars are nearly twice as effective with this strategy as they were when I mainly bought new major-label-produced content.
Now, I'm rather a stickler about it, but there's no reason you would have to be; if you wanted to replace 20 or 50 or 90% of your purchases but still buy your favorite artists or whatever - nothing to stop you. The point is - just because some mainstream junk with DRM is topping the charts doesn't mean they're winning. We all oughta know by now that chart-toppers or not, the music industry is not doing well financially. Me, I registered my feelings on DRM with all the major labels years ago. They didn't listen so I took my dollar away. I don't want to stop them doing what they're doing - that's freedom of speech, as messed up of an example as it is - artists has the right to sell out their freedom of speech for a terrible record deal, publisher has the right to hawk their overpriced content purchases gacked up with DRM. Every artist has the right to produce and sell their stuff exactly how they want and I have the right to choose.
So choose!
I wonder at that as well as his decision not to give a complete listing of all the merchandise. Based on other comments here though, it sounds like he's counting on the value of a handful of really valuable items (like the developers kits) to affirm the value, and starting with a exceptionally high starting bid to keep any dilletantes out of the picture. It's a fair bet this guy wholly understands this market and I imagine there must be a small group of individuals with the money and inclination to make it worth his while. Running separate auctions on it would be a LOT of work and chances form many, many bad or fraudulent transactions. This way he can focus on vetting a handful of participants (most of whom he probably already knows) instead of thousands of random yahoos.
I've never gotten the huge partisanship either way... and I never know if it's how I use computers or other people just have bad karma with this or that system. Apples always seem like home to me - other than the TRS 80 I had on long-term loan from a friend I started with IICs in grade school, mainly classic Macs in college, one of the pizza boxes at my first job at a nonprofit. When I started taking more conventional office jobs I needed to learn windows and did so. It's mostly worked fine for me. I have some basic box with Windows 2K at work, it doesn't crash, it works fine.
However I've known some true lemons in my day on the PC side. I think one issue is you may not get a consistent product like with Apple: it all depends on what else the manufacturer has loaded up on it. A clean install of just Windows from 98 on has never given me many problems.
On the other hand... up until a couple of years ago, the only computer I had at home was a Mac LCIII. It's battery was fried so everything constantly reset, it was slow and weak... yet I worked productively on it, even surfed the internet at 56K. I'm not sure a Windows box of similar provenance would manage to still be functional. Now I have a new iMac with OSX and I'm very happy with it. I've been using Safari, and there are little things I like - essentially, that it is more or less an Explorer clone with more privacy-centered presets, one step cache/history/forms clearing, and effective pop-up blocking on a top-level menu. The fact that MS doesn't get these kinds of features after so long says a lot about the failures of their software. Also, without a whole lot of knowledge of the nuts and bolts of digital music - the first time I put a CD into the iMac, stuff happened. iTunes was clear, easy, before I knew it I went from "never listened to an MP3" (seriously) to deep into ripping my whole collection and fiddling with playlists within a couple hours. I'd put CDs into a dozen Windows boxes at work and it never did anything but momentarily turn my computer into a (not very interesting) CD player. Now that I think about it, before the iMac and OSX I was less partisan... particularly after getting Jaguar, and hooking it to a broadband connection and my stereo, for the first time in my life there it's like I really get the point of having a computer.
Dunno if you'll see this but I'm curious of your opinion: is there any reason to keep Internet Explorer on my computer anymore? I'd love to erase it entirely as I don't really see the point.
And you are absolutely correct - if this is true (and I sort of question it, it sounds pretty out there and the Register sometimes gets a bit ahead of it's facts...) it is a stupid waste of time. People reformat for a perceived benefit. I won't buy music in ANY digital rights managed format (sorry iTunes) because there is NOTHING in it for me. Hell, I wouldnt let my bank do their little thumbprint check ID thing on me. Luckily for some poor inncocent teller I do everything electronically because my bank will get a pretty earful if the ever try to demand a fingerprint from me.
And you know what? Giving up on mainstream BS is making me love music again anyway. I buy locals, indies, weirdos on the internet via BitPass. I'm finding stuff I never woulda known existed. There are simply tons of CD players and burners, from the ultra-portable to the industrial scale, and this format is not going away anytime soon. More power to the record industry. Keep making yourself more hated, obtuse and irrelevant. It's not as if you need a million dollars to produce a great album. All you need are some great musicians, some time in a studio which ANYONE can rent, and a good engineer who knows the musicians' sound and one of the tens of thousands of independent bulk CD burners out there. The majors' main talent at this point as far as the studio goes seems to be polishing turds (i.e. Britney Spears' voice), so if they want to only record their garbage on the retinal scanning walkman or whatever, more power to you. Despite what some have suggested they will not succeed in making it illegal to put out your own material in the format of your choice because it is a clear violation of freedom of speech... which is why all the really silly laws trying to impose crazy restraints for the sake of copyright protection have died on the vine. The day they tell me I can't burn a CD of my own material (i.e. stuff I wrote and recorded) and distribute it however the hell I want is the day that I leave this country.
I wish I could mod my own thread so I could mod you funny. And insightful. Related entry - those who respond with a comment about how they have patented something ridiculous and everybody owes them a fee. Yes, very funny and original, boys. Nothing changes society like a bunch of uninformed yahoos. "Hey, I patented a glass of water" (then sits wondering why they are not getting modded up funny).
funny responses all used up (darn) so here's the informative one...
"patent troll (PAT.unt trohl) n. A company that purchases a patent, often from a bankrupt firm, and then sues another company by claiming that one of its products infringes on the purchased patent.. --adj."
Via The Word Spy http://www.wordspy.com/words/patenttroll.asp
So, if I crash someone's car driving it remotely, am I liable? Does my insurance go up? Will hackers be the wireless car thieves of the future?
global warming alarmist, nuclear proponent... man I'm ticked I came in late on this one...
I'm a big conservationist/environmentalist, I think the hypothesis that current trends in global temperatures are caused by human activities is a decent one, worth worrying about and taking seriously. I'm not automatically opposed to nuclear. I live in Minneapolis and I get a LOT of my electricity from nuclear. But there are a few serious issues with nuclear. First and foremost is the waste. It's dangerous in several different ways and NOBODY wants it in their backyard, or indeed within several hundred miles of their backyard. Anybody wanting to say there is a simple solution to this can just shut up right now. There ain't. A look at the whole Yucca Mountain fiasco about sums it up. The waste casking issue from MN's Monticello plant is just a constant, constant source of political dust-ups. Dealing with waste (a problem that jumps by an order of magnitude when you eventually have to decommission a plant) is THE unsolved problem of nuclear. There is also the issue, still present in all active nuclear plants, of the possibility of catastrophic failure. Finally, producing masses of CO2 free electricity is not an automatic solution even if we assume the greenhouse gas issue is the major contributing factor of short-term global warming. You have to consider all the massive infrastructure that results in greenhouse gas point sources - namely, internal combustion vehicles and buildings that burn fuel for climate control (like my house. Who's gonna pay to replace my gas furnace with an electric one. I'm not made of freaking money, you know).
It's easy to say, oh, nuclear is the answer. Having any kind of a plan would help. But having a hugely simplistic one that glosses the details and underestimates the infrastructure intertia factor could be worse than just bumbling along.