not emotional damage or whatever it is Americans call all that legal-lottery money.
Actually, we call it "punitive damages." It's money essentially intended to deter multi-billion dollar companies from taking/repeating actions that cause grave harm to individuals. So if a car manufacturer injures a bunch of people as a result of cost-cutting, rather than paying worst-case damages of a few million (which may be eclipsed by what they saved cutting costs), they pay enough to deter them from repeating the mistake. As many people have said, corporations are obligated to their stockholders to make a profit, not to do the right thing. If the penalities for their mistakes don't impact their bottom line, then they're quite meaningless.
The Canadian courts may not have adjusted to the reality of a world where multinational corporations can practically pay 'actual' damages out of petty cash. This isn't to say that the American courts make any more sense, but it won't make that guy feel any better (after spending his savings and years of his life) if Monsanto walks away laughing.
The other great nugget in The Hacker Crackdown was the bit about how (BSP) 660-225-104SV (the $75,000 document) was publicly available for a few bucks from BellCore. Oops.
The US and other countries spent vast sums of money to build the station. One would assume that they/we should demand a return on our investment. However, the return I'm talking about is not a financial one. For the sums of taxpayer money our gov'ts spent to build the thing, we should be getting scientific knowledge and spacefaring expertise that will someday be of use to all of us. If the ISS had been intended for tourism, it would have been built by a private company with that goal in mind.
Tito is certainly capable of paying the expense of his trip. NASA and the Russians could probably make a few bucks off of this, maybe even offset operating costs a little bit. But Tito and every tourist who follows him will essentially be taking up space that could be occupied by someone who is doing useful work.
There is also the issue of who will be paying for the resources he consumes. As far as I know, the Russians' major contribution to the effort is equipment and hauling. Is Russia going to give NASA a share of the money they make off of Tito? Considering how much money the other nations put into the ISS, presumably not for the purpose of promoting tourism, they should have some say in how the station is used. Just my $.02.
If enough people trust it (and if this is really backed by gold there are no reasons not to) then paper money will become less standard
There were lots of reasons why we got off of the Gold Standard. For one, the price of gold is relatively volatile, and you don't want to base a currency on something with so much speculation. Of course, with governmental support you can control the price of gold, but that has problems as well.
In any case, these companies may say they're backing it with gold, but can you absolutely trust them?
From the article: The first interesting thing that I noticed was that, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't squeeze out more than about 4 Mbits.
I have noticed this as well, and with various types of equipment. At the time I wasn't sure if this was a limitation of the cards with respect to TCP connections, or just due to a lot of collisions. Does anybody have explanations or similar experience?
It would seem that this is relatively unimportant, considering a lot of people can't get 4 megabits to the net anyway. However, as this bandwidth is shared in a peer-to-peer network, I would worry that things would start to get ugly when the number of peers is > 2.
It was about them introducing a type of seed that could not produce seeds once it germinated
It begs the question:
If the genetics companies are so concerned about people replanting this seed (accidentally, as it would seem in this case, or deliberately), then why is it not their responsibility to sell only plants that cannot produce seeds? It would seem to be gross negligence on their part, allowing their plants to seed other farmers properties, and contaminate the seed collected there.
Really, this guy should win his countersuit against Monsanto for contaminating his crops. He should be awarded enormous damages. Unless there is specific evidence that he went out of his way to steal and cultivate this seed, this decision should not go any other way.
He harvested seed from all of his plants, not just the ones that were genetically modified. Unfortunately, the contamination of his seed with the genetically modified seed makes all of the seed unusable, even though the vast majority of it is non-genetically-modified canola.
Essentially, the message of this ruling is "if any of the genetically modified plants get into your crops, you're at the mercy of Monsanto et al."
Well, don't forget how many million more users run IE/Windows than wu-ftp. BIND holes are a big problem, but they get good coverage (despite the fact that the actual BIND-running community is small, and they all have their own listservs.)
Really, if Coke announced that there was Benzine in their 2-litre bottles, and Moxie did the same, which do you think should make the biggest splash?
Sure. But I was only responding to the shortcut suggested in the previous post, which was roughly: "AOL will only generate so many hashes per day, therefore your community server can cache them, and probably won't have to recompute the hash each time it gets a request (and this will save a lot of cycles.)"
If the AIM community is huge and the open source community is small, I would think things would be even worse in that respect (in terms of caching.) In other words, if AOL has two trillion users, they can afford to compute zillions of unique hashes every day (as this would require relatively little investment per user.) If the GAIM user pool is small, that only increases the likelyhood that each hit on the open-source community's server is going to be unique, thereby requiring the server to compute the hash. Which equals lots of work for the server if the community gets even reasonably sized.
Not to mention that any client could simply lie about the content it has: "Yes, I've got slashdot.org-- ok, it may look like a bunch of porn links, but..."
The only way to solve that is to have some way of verifying content, maybe a signature or something, but then you've got to have a third party signing everything. This is all aside from the problem of a publisher needing to modify a web page once released (a big one.)
And of course, uplink bandwidth is very limited on the majority of DSL/Cable systems.
This is exactly what Akamai does, only the ISPs don't actually get to run the servers (thus eliminating the mess that would invariably result) and providing powerful revenue opportunities to a plucky little Boston startup.
Clearly Akamai was high on stock when they built that place. I'd be willing to bet that if they had it to do all over again (with a $10 and falling stock price), that room would consist of a large pull-down atlas, three DECStations and an old Mac Plus.
It'll be really interesing to see all the startups and ideas that bubble up from the froth in the next 6-12 months.
I don't know. These are the folks who brought us pet-food on the web and electronic birthday reminders. Maybe they should just look for nice jobs in middle management like their predecessors did.
AOL has been ordered to open the protocol and their servers to either "server-to-server interoperability" or direct retrieval of information by competing clients
I believe their traditional response has been "yes, but we offer an 'open' protocol for those clients to use." Unfortunately, they have also been making changes in that protocol-- most recently, they seem to have changed the required port for connections.
This obviously breaks all existing clients, and while they can generally be quickly fixed and rebuilt, it pretty much wipes out the possibility of competitors writing reliable clients for AIM, unless their customers/users get used to downloading a new version every couple of months.
Your server has to do as much hash-generation as AOL is willing to do, and then serve an enormous number of requests. As AOL has a lot more money and processing power than an open-source solution will probably have, it's a war I doubt you'll enjoy fighting.
Incidentally, if most artists are not members of the RIAA, then how exactly does downloading their music without paying for it hurt the RIAA?
A very small minority of musicians make money off of CD/tape sales. Those that don't have a record company to do their distribution for them can either sell their CDs at concerts, via the mail, or via the web (very little actual money is made this way.) For the most part, those artists who are trying to distribute their own CDs aren't particularly hurt by Napster/Gnutella, as such distribution massively increases their audience, bringing more opportunities to perform, more interest from people who are now interested in ordering the whole CD, and taking very little away from their local sales.
A lot of musicians make money performing, something that Napster/Gnutella isn't likely to threaten (unless someone finds a p2p system for transmitting the experience of live performance.) These artists benefit materially from free distribution. In fact, even moderately successful major-label-signed bands rarely see much from their CD/Tape sales royalties, as the record companies make them pay expenses up front. Those bands rely heavily on performance revenues, with CD distribution largely serving to build them an audience. And don't forget that under the current system, the vast majority of musicians simply starve or take day jobs while they pray for the labels to throw them a contract (which they will accept regardless of terms, because the labels have so far had a monopoly on the channels that reach large numbers of listeners.)
Also, it should be pointed out that any time you discover a band that isn't controlled by the RIAA labels you are doing them damage. The labels maintain the control they have by owning nearly all the work that people want to listen to. Prior to MP3s and the net, every band's dream was to get signed. This is still true for many bands, but alternative distribution channels give them some options.
For the applications most people have for portable recorders (using them in places with moderate background noise), 128k MP3 is pretty good. Those people who listen to their music in quiet rooms but still don't have access to non-portable players (computers, stereos), may just have to buy a portable CD player and deal with its size and foibles.
So all Napster users who pirate MP3s are deliberately breaking copyright law in order to knock the RIAA down a step
No, they're doing it to get free music from the world's largest catalogs of downloadable music.
and thereby helping the smaller artists?
As a side effect, yes.
If it will give you some perspective on the issue, I spent a couple of years working for a large company that was trying to achieve exactly what the record companies would ostensibly like to see. A secure music delivery system that protects both the rights of the artists and the rights of the recording companies. The intent was to let the record companies do the intelligent thing and create a legal channel for distribution. In the back of our heads, we thought-- hey, this would be a good thing. Maybe this will help smaller labels and independent artists too.
Of course it didn't work out, not that we didn't spend a huge amount of money in the process. Along the way we spoke to a lot of artists, many of whom expressed intense frustration with their labels-- but they were bound by their contracts. Attempts to market unknown bands met even less success. Unfortunately, a few millions of dollars later, we were no nearer a solution, and we gave up. Knowing how difficult it is for a company with a significant budget to change things, I wish it were possible for the artists to rectify the situation on their own, but such a possibility is wishful thinking when the RIAA studios control the radio stations, distribution and vast amounts of promotion.
Napster and its ilk are certainly not legal or even ethical, but they do light a fire under the recording industry, and give artists new means of distribution. As it's unlikely that the record companies are actually going to start offering competitive prices, or allowing artists to shop around for the best deal, this is unfortunately the best chance there is for the situation to change.
The vast majority of artists don't get signed by the cartel that comprises the RIAA. Those fortunate enough to get the labels' contracts (they are binding and non-negotiable) often find themselves a few years down the road owing money to the label. Courtney Love wrote a surprisingly coherent article on the subject a while back. There are even more detailed accounts if you look around a little bit.
You'll note that the artists agitating against Napster and 'piracy' are mostly at the top, members of the very exclusive club of recording-industry success stories. The truth is, the vast majority of artists would be better off if there were an alternative to the record labels. Maybe knocking the RIAA on its ass will open the industry up a little bit, even if it does mean that artists' ways of making money will have to change.
In fact, I'm suprised that the RIAA hasn't hired consultants to start polluting the Napster and Gnutella services with junk files, broken links, and anything else they can think of to make the systems unreliable and hard to use
Why bother? Gnutella has all of these features built in.
No, what we will see is a bare minimum of 'competition' in two dimensions.
1. We'll have more than one big RBOC. Instead, we'll have two or three. They will 'compete' in a limited sense, but will still mostly have a geographic monopoly. Verizon is on its way to being the east-coast megatelco, we'll just have to see what happens to the rest of them.
2. We'll have two or three providers bringing data/phone/TV to your house. Satellites and wireless will fail to provide the 100Mbps+ connections that people will eventually need to their homes, so these companies will have limited competition.
US corporations have learned that you don't need to mess with antitrust laws to get most of the benefits of a monopoly. Simply splitting the market up with one or two other equally large (and essentially unkillable) other companies guarantees you freedom from the Justice Dept., and precludes serious competition (why start a price war if everyone stands to lose?) This is what the airline business is currently attempting to achieve.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, we call it "punitive damages." It's money essentially intended to deter multi-billion dollar companies from taking/repeating actions that cause grave harm to individuals. So if a car manufacturer injures a bunch of people as a result of cost-cutting, rather than paying worst-case damages of a few million (which may be eclipsed by what they saved cutting costs), they pay enough to deter them from repeating the mistake. As many people have said, corporations are obligated to their stockholders to make a profit, not to do the right thing. If the penalities for their mistakes don't impact their bottom line, then they're quite meaningless.
The Canadian courts may not have adjusted to the reality of a world where multinational corporations can practically pay 'actual' damages out of petty cash. This isn't to say that the American courts make any more sense, but it won't make that guy feel any better (after spending his savings and years of his life) if Monsanto walks away laughing.
How about his legal costs?
The other great nugget in The Hacker Crackdown was the bit about how (BSP) 660-225-104SV (the $75,000 document) was publicly available for a few bucks from BellCore. Oops.
Tito is certainly capable of paying the expense of his trip. NASA and the Russians could probably make a few bucks off of this, maybe even offset operating costs a little bit. But Tito and every tourist who follows him will essentially be taking up space that could be occupied by someone who is doing useful work.
There is also the issue of who will be paying for the resources he consumes. As far as I know, the Russians' major contribution to the effort is equipment and hauling. Is Russia going to give NASA a share of the money they make off of Tito? Considering how much money the other nations put into the ISS, presumably not for the purpose of promoting tourism, they should have some say in how the station is used. Just my $.02.
There were lots of reasons why we got off of the Gold Standard. For one, the price of gold is relatively volatile, and you don't want to base a currency on something with so much speculation. Of course, with governmental support you can control the price of gold, but that has problems as well.
In any case, these companies may say they're backing it with gold, but can you absolutely trust them?
I have noticed this as well, and with various types of equipment. At the time I wasn't sure if this was a limitation of the cards with respect to TCP connections, or just due to a lot of collisions. Does anybody have explanations or similar experience?
It would seem that this is relatively unimportant, considering a lot of people can't get 4 megabits to the net anyway. However, as this bandwidth is shared in a peer-to-peer network, I would worry that things would start to get ugly when the number of peers is > 2.
Yes, but can you imagine the benefits to the corn-cob pipe industry?
He is countersuing them. I hope it works out for him.
It begs the question:
If the genetics companies are so concerned about people replanting this seed (accidentally, as it would seem in this case, or deliberately), then why is it not their responsibility to sell only plants that cannot produce seeds? It would seem to be gross negligence on their part, allowing their plants to seed other farmers properties, and contaminate the seed collected there.
Really, this guy should win his countersuit against Monsanto for contaminating his crops. He should be awarded enormous damages. Unless there is specific evidence that he went out of his way to steal and cultivate this seed, this decision should not go any other way.
Essentially, the message of this ruling is "if any of the genetically modified plants get into your crops, you're at the mercy of Monsanto et al."
Really, if Coke announced that there was Benzine in their 2-litre bottles, and Moxie did the same, which do you think should make the biggest splash?
If the AIM community is huge and the open source community is small, I would think things would be even worse in that respect (in terms of caching.) In other words, if AOL has two trillion users, they can afford to compute zillions of unique hashes every day (as this would require relatively little investment per user.) If the GAIM user pool is small, that only increases the likelyhood that each hit on the open-source community's server is going to be unique, thereby requiring the server to compute the hash. Which equals lots of work for the server if the community gets even reasonably sized.
The only way to solve that is to have some way of verifying content, maybe a signature or something, but then you've got to have a third party signing everything. This is all aside from the problem of a publisher needing to modify a web page once released (a big one.)
And of course, uplink bandwidth is very limited on the majority of DSL/Cable systems.
This is exactly what Akamai does, only the ISPs don't actually get to run the servers (thus eliminating the mess that would invariably result) and providing powerful revenue opportunities to a plucky little Boston startup.
Clearly Akamai was high on stock when they built that place. I'd be willing to bet that if they had it to do all over again (with a $10 and falling stock price), that room would consist of a large pull-down atlas, three DECStations and an old Mac Plus.
I don't know. These are the folks who brought us pet-food on the web and electronic birthday reminders. Maybe they should just look for nice jobs in middle management like their predecessors did.
I believe their traditional response has been "yes, but we offer an 'open' protocol for those clients to use." Unfortunately, they have also been making changes in that protocol-- most recently, they seem to have changed the required port for connections.
This obviously breaks all existing clients, and while they can generally be quickly fixed and rebuilt, it pretty much wipes out the possibility of competitors writing reliable clients for AIM, unless their customers/users get used to downloading a new version every couple of months.
Your server has to do as much hash-generation as AOL is willing to do, and then serve an enormous number of requests. As AOL has a lot more money and processing power than an open-source solution will probably have, it's a war I doubt you'll enjoy fighting.
A very small minority of musicians make money off of CD/tape sales. Those that don't have a record company to do their distribution for them can either sell their CDs at concerts, via the mail, or via the web (very little actual money is made this way.) For the most part, those artists who are trying to distribute their own CDs aren't particularly hurt by Napster/Gnutella, as such distribution massively increases their audience, bringing more opportunities to perform, more interest from people who are now interested in ordering the whole CD, and taking very little away from their local sales.
A lot of musicians make money performing, something that Napster/Gnutella isn't likely to threaten (unless someone finds a p2p system for transmitting the experience of live performance.) These artists benefit materially from free distribution. In fact, even moderately successful major-label-signed bands rarely see much from their CD/Tape sales royalties, as the record companies make them pay expenses up front. Those bands rely heavily on performance revenues, with CD distribution largely serving to build them an audience. And don't forget that under the current system, the vast majority of musicians simply starve or take day jobs while they pray for the labels to throw them a contract (which they will accept regardless of terms, because the labels have so far had a monopoly on the channels that reach large numbers of listeners.)
Also, it should be pointed out that any time you discover a band that isn't controlled by the RIAA labels you are doing them damage. The labels maintain the control they have by owning nearly all the work that people want to listen to. Prior to MP3s and the net, every band's dream was to get signed. This is still true for many bands, but alternative distribution channels give them some options.
For the applications most people have for portable recorders (using them in places with moderate background noise), 128k MP3 is pretty good. Those people who listen to their music in quiet rooms but still don't have access to non-portable players (computers, stereos), may just have to buy a portable CD player and deal with its size and foibles.
Then rip them at 256k. What's the difference between 6MB and 12MB when you've got a 20GB drive in every new mid-range PC?
No, they're doing it to get free music from the world's largest catalogs of downloadable music.
and thereby helping the smaller artists?
As a side effect, yes.
If it will give you some perspective on the issue, I spent a couple of years working for a large company that was trying to achieve exactly what the record companies would ostensibly like to see. A secure music delivery system that protects both the rights of the artists and the rights of the recording companies. The intent was to let the record companies do the intelligent thing and create a legal channel for distribution. In the back of our heads, we thought-- hey, this would be a good thing. Maybe this will help smaller labels and independent artists too.
Of course it didn't work out, not that we didn't spend a huge amount of money in the process. Along the way we spoke to a lot of artists, many of whom expressed intense frustration with their labels-- but they were bound by their contracts. Attempts to market unknown bands met even less success. Unfortunately, a few millions of dollars later, we were no nearer a solution, and we gave up. Knowing how difficult it is for a company with a significant budget to change things, I wish it were possible for the artists to rectify the situation on their own, but such a possibility is wishful thinking when the RIAA studios control the radio stations, distribution and vast amounts of promotion.
Napster and its ilk are certainly not legal or even ethical, but they do light a fire under the recording industry, and give artists new means of distribution. As it's unlikely that the record companies are actually going to start offering competitive prices, or allowing artists to shop around for the best deal, this is unfortunately the best chance there is for the situation to change.
The vast majority of artists don't get signed by the cartel that comprises the RIAA. Those fortunate enough to get the labels' contracts (they are binding and non-negotiable) often find themselves a few years down the road owing money to the label. Courtney Love wrote a surprisingly coherent article on the subject a while back. There are even more detailed accounts if you look around a little bit.
You'll note that the artists agitating against Napster and 'piracy' are mostly at the top, members of the very exclusive club of recording-industry success stories. The truth is, the vast majority of artists would be better off if there were an alternative to the record labels. Maybe knocking the RIAA on its ass will open the industry up a little bit, even if it does mean that artists' ways of making money will have to change.
Why bother? Gnutella has all of these features built in.
1. We'll have more than one big RBOC. Instead, we'll have two or three. They will 'compete' in a limited sense, but will still mostly have a geographic monopoly. Verizon is on its way to being the east-coast megatelco, we'll just have to see what happens to the rest of them.
2. We'll have two or three providers bringing data/phone/TV to your house. Satellites and wireless will fail to provide the 100Mbps+ connections that people will eventually need to their homes, so these companies will have limited competition.
US corporations have learned that you don't need to mess with antitrust laws to get most of the benefits of a monopoly. Simply splitting the market up with one or two other equally large (and essentially unkillable) other companies guarantees you freedom from the Justice Dept., and precludes serious competition (why start a price war if everyone stands to lose?) This is what the airline business is currently attempting to achieve.