I'm not too worried. PLA plastics are already pretty viable, if not cheap, and increasing oil prices means they'll seem more and more useful.
And thanks to lax recycling practices, we've got tons of raw materials sitting in landfills. If costs increase high enough, it'll be cost effective to mine these.
I mean, when steel started to get expensive, we moved to plastic and aluminum. As plastic gets expensive, we'll move on from there. Like many environmentalists, you seem to imply that a reduction in a single resource means a complete loss of options. Usually, the big picture is somewhere in between murals painted by amateur ecologists and the wallet sized version held by industrialists.
Yes, but: fair use does not mean you can do anything with anything merely because you want to. Fair use is defined loosely, and is based on four fundamental factors, of which the purpose and intent of use is but one. If a technology would enable uninhibited personal use of an expression, but would in turn destroy the free market viability of the work, then no judge would ever mark that use as "fair."
With MP3, there was a gray area: the same technology that awakened new uses like microjukeboxing and streaming also awakened a massive potential attack on market viability. With FairPlay, there is no such gray area: the technology to permit these personal uses is built in. PlayFair permits a very tiny segment of the population to expand their usability by a slim amount that's already permitted by the rip-from-a-burnt-CD use. It also permits anybody who wants to to invalidate Apple's business model by making their $.99 downloads available for free and without restriction. That unbalances the scale in favor of pirates.
The difference is that oil consumption numbers have gone UP since 1992 while oil supply numbers have gone DOWN -- and the cost of extraction has nearly doubled.
See? We what you just did a straw man argument, and outside of right wing talk shows it's generally considered poor forensic practice.. Just because one statistic was wrong doesn't mean others, which aren't dependent on it, are wrong as well.
The purpose of the DMCA is to prevent people from making so called PURE DIGITAL copies -- to force them back into generationally degradable analog methods of reproduction (thus helping in some small way to allay bootlegging). Just because it's helpful to corporations with copyright interest doesn't mean that it's inherently bad. Small artists and businesses are protected by copyright and patent law, too.
Yes, the DMCA represents a rather naive interpretation of what "digital" means (I can, after all, make an analog version of a recording that is of higher resolution than a CD). But this is not necessarily a Bad Thing. So long as there is a method to fairly use the audio, really we don't have a complaint with the DMCA other than that it makes it more difficult for us. I've ripped mp3s from records and reel to reel and off a damn mini tape player, because I really wanted them. And people are boohooing about the degratation of converting an AAC file to CD and then to MP3?
Shit, man. The "Fair" in fair use goes both ways. I think that a content provider asking you not to bootleg your shit by adding a digital version of generational degredation is fair. But then again, I'm not a free-information communist...
You've got two forces operating here, and they're not necessarily the same shit.
Copyright law gives you fair use of the audio. Which you have. Burn it on a CD, use it to your heart's content. It's yours. There's not even any copy prot on the disc.
However, the AAC file itself it not audio. It's an encrypted data representation of audio -- but it doesn't become audio until you decrypt it. And the encryption is protected under the DMCA. Say what you will about the DMCA, it's the law, and breaking it is not guaranteed by copyright law any more than owning a copy of the White Album gives you the right to the original magnetic tapes it was recorded on.
After all, the artist didn't make the AAC file. They made audio. Apple made the AAC file, and sold you the rights to make CDs with it.
Wait -- so just because something WILL be ours in 75 years, that means we own it now?
Shit, I better go tell grandad to give me my inheritance. After all, it'll be mine eventually, right? Why should I be cheated just because his life keeps getting extended?
Because a nice, juicy negligent breach of contract is surely brewing if Apple doesn't put it's foot squarely in the ass of PlayFair. It's be the same even without the DMCA -- if I sell you a security system, and somebody posts the backdoor password, I'd be in a world of shit if I didn't try my hardest to make it better.
Wow, so posting a link to illegal material is +2, Informative?
Shit, maybe I should post my FTP information. I've got the new Dilated LP and some Star Trek: DS9 episodes. That should be worth at LEAST a +2.
Re:Java on top of OpenGL is happening...
on
The State of OpenGL
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Well, C# has many things I like a lot: delegates, properties, the ability to ignore exceptions (hey, i'm lazy, and i often want exceptions thrown all the way back to the original caller without having to declare each intermediate method's throw signature) and an assembly based approach to file layouts (as opposed to one class per file, which is nice for bookkeeping but sometimes an inefficient way to code when you need a three line helper class or something). Some of those -- okay, just delegates -- are a limitation of the JVM.
Delegates, BTW, are awesome. They're about as close to functional programming as we desktop programmers are going to get!
Uh, that's a great business model, and one that's alive and well in the neoconservative politics currently controlling our country.
But the impending bankrupcy of oil supplies is NOT a fairytale. I think it's obvious, or at least it should be, that getting power by burning or exploding several millions of barrels per day of a substance that exists only sparsely is not the sort of thing we can do forever. My relatively ecomoderate history professor liked to quote that oil supplies will start to run out around 2040, using 1992's numbers. And our consumption has increased vastly since then...not due to the SUV as some will tell you, but due to increased petroleum usage in the industrial development of second and third wave nations, as well as increased reliance by first wave nations.
Personally, I'm not too worried, because right around the time that oil gets really scarce, all of the hundreds of alternative solutions that are already fairly mature will suddenly become viable. At that point, whoever has the best, most efficient way to use the elements to make juice will stand pretty strong against the backdrop of nations scrambling to gather their their oil money.
Europe has these regulations to decrease the potential effects of oil greed. When the oil crunch comes, they're half way to neutrality. If the US had regulations and incentives, or rather, more of them (NY does offer tax credits for alternative fuel sources but they're break-even deals, not something to bank on), we wouldn't have to worry either. "Let the Arabs fight over their oil, we've got solar farms!" Unfortunately, America's caught between myopic politicians and a still strong petroleum industry trying to squeeze as much as possible out of their remaining power. The end result is -- well, war, high fuel prices and an intense media driven hatred of "green" politics.
Well, they'll never be able to track you via your slashdot account.
Seriously, there's a rather supernatural school of thought that says we'll never hear interviews from the "best hackers," because they'll never get caught. I don't believe in superhackers -- but you have to wonder, with these guys catching interview with Lamo right before his latch, if an ego is REALLY the best thing for any criminal to possess. I mean, you need respect and renown to make it in a world without structure, but it seems having the blackhats known your name makes it easier for it to fall in the laps of the whitehats.
Re:Java on top of OpenGL is happening...
on
The State of OpenGL
·
· Score: 1
Java and OGL would be an incredible combo. Basically, it's be.NET, only crossplatform and without the kludge of Mono's reliance on Wine for P/Invoke. And without C# (shame there, C# is the bomb, but who knows...maybe it can be compiled for the JVM!).
It's an okay movie...follows a very difficult plot line so it's hard to watch. But at two points in that film, the director includes car crashes. Not spectacular, hollywood crashes, but very realistic ones. Unbelted bodys flopping out of windows like mannequins, and then just dying.
Those films scared the shit out of me. I have seen hundreds of car crash films, and it wasn't until "Adaptation" that I was scared enough to really slow the fuck down and start driving safe.
My point is, viewing films that illustrate the real consequences of violence is so much more worthwhile than viewing realistic violence that paints a gung-ho story. It doesn't desenitize us because it is harder to ignore the consequences or right them off as just a story. I don't think there's anything "sick" about being curious or even interested in so-called morbid video. Death is what happens at the end of each of our lives...and to ignore that is far worse than wanting to see a desperate man's final moments.
why do I have to pay for all that when I'm buying an old Pink Floyd Album where they aren't paying for anything they haven't already recouped 100x over
Because you're paying for them to keep producing that album in small batches and to keep it in stock on their shelves where it might not sell (because everybody has it_. This is why when an album first comes out, it sells for $8-10 and after a few months goes up to $13 and then $18. There's risk invovled with keeping older records on the shelves (when that space could be used by any of 100s of thousands of other records), and you end up paying for that.
Of course, on the Internet, we don't have that problem. Warehousing of data is cheap. So everything has about the same cost.
DVDs... Kill Bill on amazon: $19.49, "Rum Sodomy & the Lash" (cd) by the Pogues is $18.99 from amazon. So a movie is a dollar more than a dvd.
And I guarantee you Kill Bill will sell more than the album, therein making more money overall. Plus, the film has already recoup'd the initial investment with its theatrical release. The DVD is a chance to make even more money with hardly any overhead. I'll bet if you look into the work that goes in to producing a DVD for a film that already exists, vs making a brand new CD, the DVD will be less than a quarter of the cost.
Holy shit! This is such a great idea, I can't believe it was posted to slashdot!
I'm not a serious runner, but I do have a fairly geeky workout. I have shoes tailored to my feet from roadrunnersports.com, a pretty serious ride computer on my bike, and I used to record my workouts on a PocketPC (I stopped when I reached a "stasis" point, when I adjustment my workout to the point that my lifting and endurance graphs intersected).
It's great to see somebody bucking the stereotypes that claims all geeks are fat and lazy. A lot of us are outdoorsy types in better shape than our peers.
The whitebox has been in power for thousands of years. Isn't it time that the disenfranchised boxes of the world had their chance? I mean, it's not like there's a box quota or anything.
Slashdot Mirror
Or how about you just learn to tolerate an alternative fucking viewpoint, huh, chuckles?
Not everybody wants to bask in your Open Source Society. Some of us are here for the money.
I'm not too worried. PLA plastics are already pretty viable, if not cheap, and increasing oil prices means they'll seem more and more useful.
And thanks to lax recycling practices, we've got tons of raw materials sitting in landfills. If costs increase high enough, it'll be cost effective to mine these.
I mean, when steel started to get expensive, we moved to plastic and aluminum. As plastic gets expensive, we'll move on from there. Like many environmentalists, you seem to imply that a reduction in a single resource means a complete loss of options. Usually, the big picture is somewhere in between murals painted by amateur ecologists and the wallet sized version held by industrialists.
Yes, but: fair use does not mean you can do anything with anything merely because you want to. Fair use is defined loosely, and is based on four fundamental factors, of which the purpose and intent of use is but one. If a technology would enable uninhibited personal use of an expression, but would in turn destroy the free market viability of the work, then no judge would ever mark that use as "fair."
With MP3, there was a gray area: the same technology that awakened new uses like microjukeboxing and streaming also awakened a massive potential attack on market viability. With FairPlay, there is no such gray area: the technology to permit these personal uses is built in. PlayFair permits a very tiny segment of the population to expand their usability by a slim amount that's already permitted by the rip-from-a-burnt-CD use. It also permits anybody who wants to to invalidate Apple's business model by making their $.99 downloads available for free and without restriction. That unbalances the scale in favor of pirates.
The difference is that oil consumption numbers have gone UP since 1992 while oil supply numbers have gone DOWN -- and the cost of extraction has nearly doubled.
See? We what you just did a straw man argument, and outside of right wing talk shows it's generally considered poor forensic practice.. Just because one statistic was wrong doesn't mean others, which aren't dependent on it, are wrong as well.
The purpose of the DMCA is to prevent people from making so called PURE DIGITAL copies -- to force them back into generationally degradable analog methods of reproduction (thus helping in some small way to allay bootlegging). Just because it's helpful to corporations with copyright interest doesn't mean that it's inherently bad. Small artists and businesses are protected by copyright and patent law, too.
Yes, the DMCA represents a rather naive interpretation of what "digital" means (I can, after all, make an analog version of a recording that is of higher resolution than a CD). But this is not necessarily a Bad Thing. So long as there is a method to fairly use the audio, really we don't have a complaint with the DMCA other than that it makes it more difficult for us. I've ripped mp3s from records and reel to reel and off a damn mini tape player, because I really wanted them. And people are boohooing about the degratation of converting an AAC file to CD and then to MP3?
Shit, man. The "Fair" in fair use goes both ways. I think that a content provider asking you not to bootleg your shit by adding a digital version of generational degredation is fair. But then again, I'm not a free-information communist...
Here's a list of hardware AAC players. There's a lot more of them that you think.
You've got two forces operating here, and they're not necessarily the same shit.
Copyright law gives you fair use of the audio. Which you have. Burn it on a CD, use it to your heart's content. It's yours. There's not even any copy prot on the disc.
However, the AAC file itself it not audio. It's an encrypted data representation of audio -- but it doesn't become audio until you decrypt it. And the encryption is protected under the DMCA. Say what you will about the DMCA, it's the law, and breaking it is not guaranteed by copyright law any more than owning a copy of the White Album gives you the right to the original magnetic tapes it was recorded on.
After all, the artist didn't make the AAC file. They made audio. Apple made the AAC file, and sold you the rights to make CDs with it.
Wait -- so just because something WILL be ours in 75 years, that means we own it now?
Shit, I better go tell grandad to give me my inheritance. After all, it'll be mine eventually, right? Why should I be cheated just because his life keeps getting extended?
Is a lawsuit a "conniption fit?"
Because a nice, juicy negligent breach of contract is surely brewing if Apple doesn't put it's foot squarely in the ass of PlayFair. It's be the same even without the DMCA -- if I sell you a security system, and somebody posts the backdoor password, I'd be in a world of shit if I didn't try my hardest to make it better.
Wow, so posting a link to illegal material is +2, Informative?
Shit, maybe I should post my FTP information. I've got the new Dilated LP and some Star Trek: DS9 episodes. That should be worth at LEAST a +2.
Well, C# has many things I like a lot: delegates, properties, the ability to ignore exceptions (hey, i'm lazy, and i often want exceptions thrown all the way back to the original caller without having to declare each intermediate method's throw signature) and an assembly based approach to file layouts (as opposed to one class per file, which is nice for bookkeeping but sometimes an inefficient way to code when you need a three line helper class or something). Some of those -- okay, just delegates -- are a limitation of the JVM.
Delegates, BTW, are awesome. They're about as close to functional programming as we desktop programmers are going to get!
Uh, that's a great business model, and one that's alive and well in the neoconservative politics currently controlling our country.
But the impending bankrupcy of oil supplies is NOT a fairytale. I think it's obvious, or at least it should be, that getting power by burning or exploding several millions of barrels per day of a substance that exists only sparsely is not the sort of thing we can do forever. My relatively ecomoderate history professor liked to quote that oil supplies will start to run out around 2040, using 1992's numbers. And our consumption has increased vastly since then...not due to the SUV as some will tell you, but due to increased petroleum usage in the industrial development of second and third wave nations, as well as increased reliance by first wave nations.
Personally, I'm not too worried, because right around the time that oil gets really scarce, all of the hundreds of alternative solutions that are already fairly mature will suddenly become viable. At that point, whoever has the best, most efficient way to use the elements to make juice will stand pretty strong against the backdrop of nations scrambling to gather their their oil money.
Europe has these regulations to decrease the potential effects of oil greed. When the oil crunch comes, they're half way to neutrality. If the US had regulations and incentives, or rather, more of them (NY does offer tax credits for alternative fuel sources but they're break-even deals, not something to bank on), we wouldn't have to worry either. "Let the Arabs fight over their oil, we've got solar farms!" Unfortunately, America's caught between myopic politicians and a still strong petroleum industry trying to squeeze as much as possible out of their remaining power. The end result is -- well, war, high fuel prices and an intense media driven hatred of "green" politics.
Well, they'll never be able to track you via your slashdot account.
Seriously, there's a rather supernatural school of thought that says we'll never hear interviews from the "best hackers," because they'll never get caught. I don't believe in superhackers -- but you have to wonder, with these guys catching interview with Lamo right before his latch, if an ego is REALLY the best thing for any criminal to possess. I mean, you need respect and renown to make it in a world without structure, but it seems having the blackhats known your name makes it easier for it to fall in the laps of the whitehats.
Java and OGL would be an incredible combo. Basically, it's be .NET, only crossplatform and without the kludge of Mono's reliance on Wine for P/Invoke. And without C# (shame there, C# is the bomb, but who knows...maybe it can be compiled for the JVM!).
Unless I'm missing something in your post.
Nope. He's just another tech wiseass who prizes seeming smart over being accurate.
You host Voyeurweb?
Let me just say -- little Igor is impressed by your network funbags!
In our house, we don't edit our videos. We just play them start to finish on a projector.
It's a kind of subtle way to tell relatives they've overstayed their welcomes.
Must have been one HOT saveloy.
Ever see the film "Adaptation?"
It's an okay movie...follows a very difficult plot line so it's hard to watch. But at two points in that film, the director includes car crashes. Not spectacular, hollywood crashes, but very realistic ones. Unbelted bodys flopping out of windows like mannequins, and then just dying.
Those films scared the shit out of me. I have seen hundreds of car crash films, and it wasn't until "Adaptation" that I was scared enough to really slow the fuck down and start driving safe.
My point is, viewing films that illustrate the real consequences of violence is so much more worthwhile than viewing realistic violence that paints a gung-ho story. It doesn't desenitize us because it is harder to ignore the consequences or right them off as just a story. I don't think there's anything "sick" about being curious or even interested in so-called morbid video. Death is what happens at the end of each of our lives...and to ignore that is far worse than wanting to see a desperate man's final moments.
why do I have to pay for all that when I'm buying an old Pink Floyd Album where they aren't paying for anything they haven't already recouped 100x over
Because you're paying for them to keep producing that album in small batches and to keep it in stock on their shelves where it might not sell (because everybody has it_. This is why when an album first comes out, it sells for $8-10 and after a few months goes up to $13 and then $18. There's risk invovled with keeping older records on the shelves (when that space could be used by any of 100s of thousands of other records), and you end up paying for that.
Of course, on the Internet, we don't have that problem. Warehousing of data is cheap. So everything has about the same cost.
DVDs... Kill Bill on amazon: $19.49, "Rum Sodomy & the Lash" (cd) by the Pogues is $18.99 from amazon. So a movie is a dollar more than a dvd.
And I guarantee you Kill Bill will sell more than the album, therein making more money overall. Plus, the film has already recoup'd the initial investment with its theatrical release. The DVD is a chance to make even more money with hardly any overhead. I'll bet if you look into the work that goes in to producing a DVD for a film that already exists, vs making a brand new CD, the DVD will be less than a quarter of the cost.
Holy shit! This is such a great idea, I can't believe it was posted to slashdot!
I'm not a serious runner, but I do have a fairly geeky workout. I have shoes tailored to my feet from roadrunnersports.com, a pretty serious ride computer on my bike, and I used to record my workouts on a PocketPC (I stopped when I reached a "stasis" point, when I adjustment my workout to the point that my lifting and endurance graphs intersected).
It's great to see somebody bucking the stereotypes that claims all geeks are fat and lazy. A lot of us are outdoorsy types in better shape than our peers.
The whitebox has been in power for thousands of years. Isn't it time that the disenfranchised boxes of the world had their chance? I mean, it's not like there's a box quota or anything.
Dude, if you want to keep tabs on your daughter, just call my house...
So...you're saying it's a copy?
Finally, a win for the little guy!