No, slashdot starts a boycott, the nerds stop buying, it has an impact, and the media attention gets people talking and interviewing and does the rest.
By no means a sure thing, but it's the best shot we've got in getting people to care and evaluate the value of the content industries.
I don't know how many people noticed this part of the article at the end, but Mike Godwin at law.com clearly has a pretty poor opinion of the Hollings bill. And he's challenging us to take notice and do something. Are slashdot and the EFF going to bark all day like little doggies, or are they gonna bite?
What gets lost in the debate is the voice of consumers -- whatever they are called. Maybe they are willing to trade away open, robust, relatively simple digital tools for a more constrained digital world in which they have more content choices. But maybe they aren't. The Hollings bill is unlikely to attract them to the debate, pitched as a "security standard" rather than as a new copyright law.
Like the larger philosophical war that is raging around the world in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, the looming war between these two sides has the potential to be a long, difficult fight without a foreseeable conclusion. And if and when peace talks begin between the two sides, there's no guarantee that the rest of us will have a seat at the table.
There is no satisfying ebook program/device, and there may not be one for some time. Books (at least the good ones) will be available in print forever anyway, because there will always be literary fans. Books will always be written because many people write for the prestige, not the money (how many rich authors do you know of?), and because good writers will have people pay them to continue writing. Visual artists and photographers will continue to do work for other media on commission or sell their art in galleries in the usual way. Magazines will continue to be supported by advertising, and probably remain in print for some time since monitors and bandwidth do not yet support such high resolution images. Analysts will continue to gather and analyze information, because it's tedious work and that's what people pay them for (same for reporters and any number of jobs). Poets don't make any money anyway, except through patronage and books. Software will go increasingly open source, and tools will evolve to make programming easier for prosumers.
People give a damn about these things - that's why they pay money for them. But even if you take much or all of the money away they will still stick around, albeit in a less commercialized form.
Even if such movies as LOTR were made freely available for anyone to watch via copying, there's no substitute for seeing such big-budget special-effects-laden films in the theaters. Less fancy productions are getting cheaper and cheaper to make all the time - the most expensive part is hiring the stars at millions apiece (a dubious value). Either way, films make much money on the big screens. Musicians make much money on concerts. Books don't make the transition to electronic media well, art requires higher resolution than a monitor will support, comics are entirely the bastion of collectors, and TV and print are supported by advertising anyway. The circumstances may change in the future, but the fact is that at this moment in time all the major media could still make money even if copies were freely available to everyone - just less of it. What shortages there are could easily be supported by a widespread patronage system.
Slashdot should sponsor a boycott in protest of these changes, just to remind the industry that the consumer is king.
Slashdot has a quite a bit of influence among the technically inclined, who buy a lot of stuff. The admins could break this site out of the news and bitching mode and into a proactive force... if they wanted to. I think a TV boycott would be hard to pull off - but a music or theater or DVD boycott wouldn't. Hell, if we got enough momentum we might actually be able to kill the incredibly corrupt music and radio industries off, and then see to it that it was rebuilt around the artists instead of parasitic companies. And once you've scarred one industry the rest will think twice before screwing the consumer.
We should be allowed to copy, distribute, and especially modify TV and movies as we choose. If such a new paradigm means that the only way the producers can be compensated for their productions is pay-per-view and per-use billing, that's fine with me - so long as that billing is a fair price, it's low enough for everyone to afford (and it's WAY higher than it should be at the moment), and it passes into the public domain in a reasonable time.
Why am I saying this? Because the biggest problem with the media today is that the producers, and the government, and especially the distributors exert entirely too much control over how and where their products are used, which is precisely the reason the US constitution was so specific regarding copyright and patenting. There is nothing inherently wrong with copying someone's idea or work, despite people's territorial urge to the contrary. Art and invention rest on foundations of previous ideas and works laid down over the years, to the benefit of everyone. The free dissemination of ideas enriches all involved and in turn allows further improvement and better understanding. Governments (or at least the US government) and companies have no business telling you whether and how you use that information - that's censorship. This is why allowing people to modify works is so important. Excerpting clips, commenting (via additional media tracks in the case of video), parodying, and most importantly translating (as in the case of fansubs) works allows people to fully utilize them.
The only argument (besides matters of national security like nuclear technology, or products of criminal acts like child porn) against allowing people to copy freely is that it would remove the profit motive (and how strongly the profit motive is relative to other factors is a matter of some controversy), thus encouraging secrecy or discouraging people from innovating altogether. Thus patents and copyrights are granted for only a set period of time to allow their makers to recoup their expenses. They are a bargain created to serve the public good by encouraging innovation and dissemination of those innovations. People used to understand that, but greedy companies and their lawyers have obscured that through intimidation (as in the case of Disney) and legal loopholes (as in the double whammy of restrictive software licensing and anti-circumvention legislation) to devastating effect.
(I apologize, this is a repeat of an earlier post I made on a story that was already off the front page - so I decided to reuse it)
We should be allowed to copy, distribute, and especially modify TV and movies as we choose. If such a new paradigm means that the only way the producers can be compensated for their productions is pay-per-view and per-use billing, that's fine with me - so long as that billing is a fair price, it's low enough for everyone to afford (and it's WAY higher than it should be at the moment), and it passes into the public domain in a reasonable time.
Why am I saying this? Because the biggest problem with the media today is that the producers, and the government, and especially the distributors exert entirely too much control over how and where their products are used, which is precisely the reason the US constitution was so specific regarding copyright and patenting. There is nothing inherently wrong with copying someone's idea or work, despite people's territorial urge to the contrary. Art and invention rest on foundations of previous ideas and works laid down over the years, to the benefit of everyone. The free dissemination of ideas enriches all involved and in turn allows further improvement and better understanding. Governments (or at least the US government) and companies have no business telling you whether and how you use that information - that's censorship. This is why allowing people to modify works is so important. Excerpting clips, commenting (via additional media tracks in the case of video), parodying, and most importantly translating (as in the case of fansubs) works allows people to fully utilize them.
The only argument (besides matters of national security like nuclear technology, or products of criminal acts like child porn) against allowing people to copy freely is that it would remove the profit motive (and how strongly the profit motive is relative to other factors is a matter of some controversy), thus encouraging secrecy or discouraging people from innovating altogether. Thus patents and copyrights are granted for only a set period of time to allow their makers to recoup their expenses. They are a bargain created to serve the public good by encouraging innovation and dissemination of those innovations. People used to understand that, but greedy companies and their lawyers have obscured that through intimidation (as in the case of Disney) and legal loopholes (as in the double whammy of restrictive software licensing and anti-circumvention legislation) to devastating effect.
The US, unlike all of europe, is and has always been big and spread out. This is why air travel is in chronic overdemand, and rail travel can't make a profit anywhere outside the northeast corridor. The same is true of cities. If people are traveling from urban to urban locations, they don't need cars. But hardly anyone outside of the biggest and oldest of cities is doing that in America. I'd guess 99% of the trips in this country are made to and/or from rural or suburban areas. This is partly the result of the ascendance of the car in America, and partly the cause of it.
How "great" his improvements were, particularly as they concerned the car, is a matter of much debate with most folks agreeing he made a lot of terrible decisions. Razing neighborhoods to make way for instantly-congested city-splitting highways and horrific modernist superblocks, and forcing poor New Yorkers (particularly blacks) out of said neighborhoods and into said superblocks while reserving use of the parkways to the rich is but one of the controversies of his career.
...Except that buses are susceptible to all the problems of cars, namely traffic slowing and halting at high road capacity, as well as having their own problems, namely no privacy and non-user determined routes. The only advantage they have is lower cost to the user and relative to other public transport systems. They may look good on paper and useful in situations that absolutely require a public transit system, but buses are absolutely no solution to the car problem.
'Round here folks mostly live in the suburbs and spend much time in their cars. To get from your home to work involves equal parts side streets, highway, and city streets. People are too spread out for trams and buses (You may have noticed rail doesn't work here either).
My favorite link for this sort of thing is this PRT page. (And on a side note, I think hanging the cars makes more sense than riding on top of the rails). It's a good idea but it will take some getting used to, and will require mass-production to become truly cheap.
A finite resource will always be completely consumed so long as there are no limitations on the consumption of that resource. A resource in short supply becomes expensive, while a resource in good supply becomes cheap, and a resource in oversupply is still snapped up by anyone who thinks they can use it.
This is true of transportation as well. No matter how much road you build, someone will always find a way to use it. The only limiting factor is that people don't like to travel for more than an hour. When highways are built suburbia springs up around them. When the Long Island Railroad was built, the areas around the stations w/in an hour's travel quickly became heavily developed. Building roads does not make travel easier - it just enables more of it. Thus the most important factor in a transportation system is not how much it can carry, but how well it performs at peak capacity. Railroads, and presumably PRT, may become crowded the traffic continues to flow. But auto roads perform miserably above a certain traffic level - some sort of breakdown always occurs and brings huge chunks of the system to a standstill.
The first key to making PRT a reality is to make it effective enough and cheap enough to allow near door-to-door travel as fast or faster than cars. If people have to take a car to get to the PRT station, they will figure that they might as well drive all the way to their destination. The second key is to make the system strong and flexible enough to allow changes in how it is used (like cargo transport, and automatic delivery).
The competitive aspects of the market are generally a great way to drive innovation and ensure that individual companies within an industry offer good value for the price. But at the same time, if such companies have any sort of monopoly (and in the telcom business they most certainly do have local ones) they always overcharge, and that same competitiveness can cause balkanization of the market where those monopolies are granted, and thus holding back innovation and usefullness of the industry. Therefore, the government should always consider setting standards where monopolies are granted. And they out to step in now and take action. The US has fallen embarrassingly far behind other countries in the usefullness of high tech.
The broadband market is a good example - companies were allowed to merge with wild abandon, and the quality of service only went down. Users have little or no choice of service, and it's expensive. The other key example is the mobile, wireless, and broadcasting markets - several companies with incompatible systems (so that even SMS won't work together), including legacy systems that are no longer desirable but are kept around for backwards compatibility, using up the fundamentally limited resource of EM bandwidth with gross inefficiency. It would be far more efficient might actually be CHEAPER if the government were to step in, set up a couple of modern standards for local and long-range one-way and two-way communication (perhaps using 802.11 or UWB, and satellites, Metropolitan Area Networks, and ad-hoc adaptive wireless networks using directional antenna), and subsidize the transition for all households. Just think how much bandwidth you could free up for communication if you eliminated the TV and radio bands and delivered those via satellite instead.
You've missed my point - there is no reliable way for you, as a person, to prove that you are who you say you are. This is a disadvantage to you when you required to do so, or when people impersonate you for various illegal purposes (particularly where it comes to taking your money). It is a disadvantage to others, when they NEED to know who you are for whatever reason. And when you're going somewhere that makes a tempting target, or doing something that could cause great harm to many people, they NEED to know whether you'd do such a thing.
My second point is that you already have a number. What is the difference between being forced to show your driver's license (or social-security-number, or credit card) at every traffic stop or stadium event you frequent or for every purchase you make (as if you actually have had to do that) and presenting a National ID? Do you think "They" are incapable of cross-referencing some data? Guess what? They can but they probably don't, because unless you or someone you're associated with has committed a crime worth prosecuting you for (which is expensive), in all likelyhood they don't care about you. They have only so much time and money and resources. The only reason you have any privacy is because your boring life isn't worth the effort to investigate it.
You don't have to go to (or live in) places and events that require ID if you don't want to, and traffic stops are a rarity reserved to catch dangerous criminals or prevent some drunk moron from driving into something or somebody. In both cases the decision to check ID is a matter of expense. As for shopping, there's this thing called "cash" which doesn't require you to present an ID at a store. The only trouble with it is that it's a pain to carry around.
And guess what - unless you happen to live alone in the middle of nowhere, people are watching you. Some of them even work for the government. It may be a few, or it may be thousands, but they all have got their own agendas - some of which may even involve you. People like your mom, or your boss, or the guy next door whose yard your dog keeps crapping in. Did you know that police officer in the 7-11 gets coffee for FREE?! And that in the very same store the guy behind the register wants to take your money?!
Some people are sure that only they are wise enough to see the insidious machinations of nerfarious agencies while the rest of the world remains ignorant. Ironically enough, these measures are becoming necessary mainly because of people who are sure that only they are wise enough to see the insidious machinations of nerfarious agencies while the rest of the world remains ignorant, and that the appropriate course of action is killing a bunch of people.
Quit worrying about whether people want to know what you're doing, and get on with your life. Society is a messy business of competing interests - that's why we have laws. Your real concern should be whether the laws of our society are good and their execution fair, and if not you should try to change that by voting your conscience and convincing others to your case.
So what if you're being identified by a number. You're already identified by hundreds of numbers - this just gives you a nationwide one. And so what if "They" could use this to track you - you already are. Weren't you ever bothered that just by having your supposedly-secret (and obviously not) social security number that someone could steal your identity? We've never had a way of proving to someone with certainty that we are who we say we are without jumping through hoops - and even then identity theft can still be committed. With a biometric-labeled national ID we can finally have a good way of authenticating ourselves, provided they develop the system right (dual-key encryption of biometrics, for starters). It beats some unlaminated blue card with no picture.
I agree... it doesn't necessarily have to be firewire (high speed ethernet would be acceptable too, even preferable in the current environment), but USB is way too slow for video transfer. Audio, peripherals, and some data would be pretty much ALL you could do with USB
And QT6 should be coming out pretty soon... I'm not sure exactly how they will distinguish quicktime versus other MPEG4 solutions (not that I've heard of any), but the potential for doing great things with quicktime is obviously there. Of course it remains to be seen whether a robust, standards-based architecture can stand up to less-functional proprietary formats with that have negotiated control over content and distribution.
I realize that the law in question is the AUDIO Home Recording Act, but how are other entertainment recordings (namely videos and DVDs) qualitatively different? Either the same (or similar) laws should apply to both, or be prepared to watch the RIAA sqeeze through those loopholes. DVD audio is already starting to catch on... and all it takes is one little video file on a music disc for them to call it a movie and sell it under those different standards. (I much prefer the converse, allowing us to copy DVDs for personal use)
Yes, NASA is always chronically underfunded for it's intended missions, but fortunately they aren't the only ones working on it. The military invests a lot of money in R&D, including pretty far-out projects (thanks to DARPA), and there's a long, long list of technology transfers. So if the Navy develops this one for carriers, it won't be long before someone applies it to space.
Not everybody realizes it, but it's not just the videos that are animated... the band doesn't actually exist. It's the brainchild of Tank Girl creator Jamie Hewlett and Blur's Damon Alburn, plus a lot of other people. The whole idea is that if you can accept Marilyn Manson or Eminem or Michael Jackson as stars, you can accept anything. Why not? Virtual pop stars have already been thought up (Sharon Apple) and tried (Kyoko Date), it's just a matter of time before they become accurate enough to be a significant force. Hell, I think an animated band has a better chance than a CG one - more style, less fussing over detail.
It's a hacked codec that doesn't work with macs. Not well, and in the case of the confusingly-named DivX 4, not at all. And there is still much room for improvement in all aspects of the codec. You have a real edge over most other codecs in that yours is cross platform - so your main competition is RealPlayer, VP3, and 3ivX for now. If you go commercial you have to beat both of them, if you're going open source you just have to do better than VP3 and 3ivX in at least one respect.
Of course if Quicktime ever officially goes Linux (I doubt WMP ever will) you'll have many more codecs to contend with. And you need to either promote it, or make it so incredibly good everyone switches. DivX sucks compared to newer open source and cross platform codecs but it's very popular because of the name.
Excellent Point! You put it quite clearly, although you wrote too much. However, your argument does fail for channels that don't do advertising, i.e. HBO and the sirius network. And you also didn't mention that satellite broadcasting is far more efficient than cable or broadcast for every type of content except local news and entertainment.
So let me propose a hybrid approach - satellites distribute advertising supported channels for free (users pay only the cost for recievers, which could be subsidized, and they do need to improve their reliability). Using the existing subscription-verification methods they have in place, they charge extra for the premium channels. Local broadcasters and cable companies either go out of business, change their business model, or operate with the satellite providers for local content (news, entertainment, and particularly advertising inserted into the other channels), broadband internet (particularly upstream, since satellite can handle downstream), and on-demand TV (especially via PVRs). It's that simple.
Slashdot Mirror
The same thing college students need it for - doing some decent photo editing.
No, slashdot starts a boycott, the nerds stop buying, it has an impact, and the media attention gets people talking and interviewing and does the rest.
By no means a sure thing, but it's the best shot we've got in getting people to care and evaluate the value of the content industries.
I don't know how many people noticed this part of the article at the end, but Mike Godwin at law.com clearly has a pretty poor opinion of the Hollings bill. And he's challenging us to take notice and do something. Are slashdot and the EFF going to bark all day like little doggies, or are they gonna bite?
What gets lost in the debate is the voice of consumers -- whatever they are called. Maybe they are willing to trade away open, robust, relatively simple digital tools for a more constrained digital world in which they have more content choices. But maybe they aren't. The Hollings bill is unlikely to attract them to the debate, pitched as a "security standard" rather than as a new copyright law.
Like the larger philosophical war that is raging around the world in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, the looming war between these two sides has the potential to be a long, difficult fight without a foreseeable conclusion. And if and when peace talks begin between the two sides, there's no guarantee that the rest of us will have a seat at the table.
How dare they not pay for software like Photoshop, especially when it's at the eminently reasonable price of $600! The nerve!
There is no satisfying ebook program/device, and there may not be one for some time. Books (at least the good ones) will be available in print forever anyway, because there will always be literary fans. Books will always be written because many people write for the prestige, not the money (how many rich authors do you know of?), and because good writers will have people pay them to continue writing. Visual artists and photographers will continue to do work for other media on commission or sell their art in galleries in the usual way. Magazines will continue to be supported by advertising, and probably remain in print for some time since monitors and bandwidth do not yet support such high resolution images. Analysts will continue to gather and analyze information, because it's tedious work and that's what people pay them for (same for reporters and any number of jobs). Poets don't make any money anyway, except through patronage and books. Software will go increasingly open source, and tools will evolve to make programming easier for prosumers.
People give a damn about these things - that's why they pay money for them. But even if you take much or all of the money away they will still stick around, albeit in a less commercialized form.
Even if such movies as LOTR were made freely available for anyone to watch via copying, there's no substitute for seeing such big-budget special-effects-laden films in the theaters. Less fancy productions are getting cheaper and cheaper to make all the time - the most expensive part is hiring the stars at millions apiece (a dubious value). Either way, films make much money on the big screens. Musicians make much money on concerts. Books don't make the transition to electronic media well, art requires higher resolution than a monitor will support, comics are entirely the bastion of collectors, and TV and print are supported by advertising anyway. The circumstances may change in the future, but the fact is that at this moment in time all the major media could still make money even if copies were freely available to everyone - just less of it. What shortages there are could easily be supported by a widespread patronage system.
Slashdot should sponsor a boycott in protest of these changes, just to remind the industry that the consumer is king.
Slashdot has a quite a bit of influence among the technically inclined, who buy a lot of stuff. The admins could break this site out of the news and bitching mode and into a proactive force... if they wanted to. I think a TV boycott would be hard to pull off - but a music or theater or DVD boycott wouldn't. Hell, if we got enough momentum we might actually be able to kill the incredibly corrupt music and radio industries off, and then see to it that it was rebuilt around the artists instead of parasitic companies. And once you've scarred one industry the rest will think twice before screwing the consumer.
We should be allowed to copy, distribute, and especially modify TV and movies as we choose. If such a new paradigm means that the only way the producers can be compensated for their productions is pay-per-view and per-use billing, that's fine with me - so long as that billing is a fair price, it's low enough for everyone to afford (and it's WAY higher than it should be at the moment), and it passes into the public domain in a reasonable time.
Why am I saying this? Because the biggest problem with the media today is that the producers, and the government, and especially the distributors exert entirely too much control over how and where their products are used, which is precisely the reason the US constitution was so specific regarding copyright and patenting. There is nothing inherently wrong with copying someone's idea or work, despite people's territorial urge to the contrary. Art and invention rest on foundations of previous ideas and works laid down over the years, to the benefit of everyone. The free dissemination of ideas enriches all involved and in turn allows further improvement and better understanding. Governments (or at least the US government) and companies have no business telling you whether and how you use that information - that's censorship. This is why allowing people to modify works is so important. Excerpting clips, commenting (via additional media tracks in the case of video), parodying, and most importantly translating (as in the case of fansubs) works allows people to fully utilize them.
The only argument (besides matters of national security like nuclear technology, or products of criminal acts like child porn) against allowing people to copy freely is that it would remove the profit motive (and how strongly the profit motive is relative to other factors is a matter of some controversy), thus encouraging secrecy or discouraging people from innovating altogether. Thus patents and copyrights are granted for only a set period of time to allow their makers to recoup their expenses. They are a bargain created to serve the public good by encouraging innovation and dissemination of those innovations. People used to understand that, but greedy companies and their lawyers have obscured that through intimidation (as in the case of Disney) and legal loopholes (as in the double whammy of restrictive software licensing and anti-circumvention legislation) to devastating effect.
(I apologize, this is a repeat of an earlier post I made on a story that was already off the front page - so I decided to reuse it)
We should be allowed to copy, distribute, and especially modify TV and movies as we choose. If such a new paradigm means that the only way the producers can be compensated for their productions is pay-per-view and per-use billing, that's fine with me - so long as that billing is a fair price, it's low enough for everyone to afford (and it's WAY higher than it should be at the moment), and it passes into the public domain in a reasonable time.
Why am I saying this? Because the biggest problem with the media today is that the producers, and the government, and especially the distributors exert entirely too much control over how and where their products are used, which is precisely the reason the US constitution was so specific regarding copyright and patenting. There is nothing inherently wrong with copying someone's idea or work, despite people's territorial urge to the contrary. Art and invention rest on foundations of previous ideas and works laid down over the years, to the benefit of everyone. The free dissemination of ideas enriches all involved and in turn allows further improvement and better understanding. Governments (or at least the US government) and companies have no business telling you whether and how you use that information - that's censorship. This is why allowing people to modify works is so important. Excerpting clips, commenting (via additional media tracks in the case of video), parodying, and most importantly translating (as in the case of fansubs) works allows people to fully utilize them.
The only argument (besides matters of national security like nuclear technology, or products of criminal acts like child porn) against allowing people to copy freely is that it would remove the profit motive (and how strongly the profit motive is relative to other factors is a matter of some controversy), thus encouraging secrecy or discouraging people from innovating altogether. Thus patents and copyrights are granted for only a set period of time to allow their makers to recoup their expenses. They are a bargain created to serve the public good by encouraging innovation and dissemination of those innovations. People used to understand that, but greedy companies and their lawyers have obscured that through intimidation (as in the case of Disney) and legal loopholes (as in the double whammy of restrictive software licensing and anti-circumvention legislation) to devastating effect.
The US, unlike all of europe, is and has always been big and spread out. This is why air travel is in chronic overdemand, and rail travel can't make a profit anywhere outside the northeast corridor. The same is true of cities. If people are traveling from urban to urban locations, they don't need cars. But hardly anyone outside of the biggest and oldest of cities is doing that in America. I'd guess 99% of the trips in this country are made to and/or from rural or suburban areas. This is partly the result of the ascendance of the car in America, and partly the cause of it.
How "great" his improvements were, particularly as they concerned the car, is a matter of much debate with most folks agreeing he made a lot of terrible decisions. Razing neighborhoods to make way for instantly-congested city-splitting highways and horrific modernist superblocks, and forcing poor New Yorkers (particularly blacks) out of said neighborhoods and into said superblocks while reserving use of the parkways to the rich is but one of the controversies of his career.
...Except that buses are susceptible to all the problems of cars, namely traffic slowing and halting at high road capacity, as well as having their own problems, namely no privacy and non-user determined routes. The only advantage they have is lower cost to the user and relative to other public transport systems. They may look good on paper and useful in situations that absolutely require a public transit system, but buses are absolutely no solution to the car problem.
Mmm... I can just imagine the effect when some poorly-restrained top heavy or overloaded car flips off the rail system on a curve at 125mph...
'Round here folks mostly live in the suburbs and spend much time in their cars. To get from your home to work involves equal parts side streets, highway, and city streets. People are too spread out for trams and buses (You may have noticed rail doesn't work here either).
My favorite link for this sort of thing is this PRT page. (And on a side note, I think hanging the cars makes more sense than riding on top of the rails). It's a good idea but it will take some getting used to, and will require mass-production to become truly cheap.
A finite resource will always be completely consumed so long as there are no limitations on the consumption of that resource. A resource in short supply becomes expensive, while a resource in good supply becomes cheap, and a resource in oversupply is still snapped up by anyone who thinks they can use it.
This is true of transportation as well. No matter how much road you build, someone will always find a way to use it. The only limiting factor is that people don't like to travel for more than an hour. When highways are built suburbia springs up around them. When the Long Island Railroad was built, the areas around the stations w/in an hour's travel quickly became heavily developed. Building roads does not make travel easier - it just enables more of it. Thus the most important factor in a transportation system is not how much it can carry, but how well it performs at peak capacity. Railroads, and presumably PRT, may become crowded the traffic continues to flow. But auto roads perform miserably above a certain traffic level - some sort of breakdown always occurs and brings huge chunks of the system to a standstill.
The first key to making PRT a reality is to make it effective enough and cheap enough to allow near door-to-door travel as fast or faster than cars. If people have to take a car to get to the PRT station, they will figure that they might as well drive all the way to their destination. The second key is to make the system strong and flexible enough to allow changes in how it is used (like cargo transport, and automatic delivery).
The competitive aspects of the market are generally a great way to drive innovation and ensure that individual companies within an industry offer good value for the price. But at the same time, if such companies have any sort of monopoly (and in the telcom business they most certainly do have local ones) they always overcharge, and that same competitiveness can cause balkanization of the market where those monopolies are granted, and thus holding back innovation and usefullness of the industry. Therefore, the government should always consider setting standards where monopolies are granted. And they out to step in now and take action. The US has fallen embarrassingly far behind other countries in the usefullness of high tech.
The broadband market is a good example - companies were allowed to merge with wild abandon, and the quality of service only went down. Users have little or no choice of service, and it's expensive. The other key example is the mobile, wireless, and broadcasting markets - several companies with incompatible systems (so that even SMS won't work together), including legacy systems that are no longer desirable but are kept around for backwards compatibility, using up the fundamentally limited resource of EM bandwidth with gross inefficiency. It would be far more efficient might actually be CHEAPER if the government were to step in, set up a couple of modern standards for local and long-range one-way and two-way communication (perhaps using 802.11 or UWB, and satellites, Metropolitan Area Networks, and ad-hoc adaptive wireless networks using directional antenna), and subsidize the transition for all households. Just think how much bandwidth you could free up for communication if you eliminated the TV and radio bands and delivered those via satellite instead.
You've missed my point - there is no reliable way for you, as a person, to prove that you are who you say you are. This is a disadvantage to you when you required to do so, or when people impersonate you for various illegal purposes (particularly where it comes to taking your money). It is a disadvantage to others, when they NEED to know who you are for whatever reason. And when you're going somewhere that makes a tempting target, or doing something that could cause great harm to many people, they NEED to know whether you'd do such a thing.
My second point is that you already have a number. What is the difference between being forced to show your driver's license (or social-security-number, or credit card) at every traffic stop or stadium event you frequent or for every purchase you make (as if you actually have had to do that) and presenting a National ID? Do you think "They" are incapable of cross-referencing some data? Guess what? They can but they probably don't, because unless you or someone you're associated with has committed a crime worth prosecuting you for (which is expensive), in all likelyhood they don't care about you. They have only so much time and money and resources. The only reason you have any privacy is because your boring life isn't worth the effort to investigate it.
You don't have to go to (or live in) places and events that require ID if you don't want to, and traffic stops are a rarity reserved to catch dangerous criminals or prevent some drunk moron from driving into something or somebody. In both cases the decision to check ID is a matter of expense. As for shopping, there's this thing called "cash" which doesn't require you to present an ID at a store. The only trouble with it is that it's a pain to carry around.
And guess what - unless you happen to live alone in the middle of nowhere, people are watching you. Some of them even work for the government. It may be a few, or it may be thousands, but they all have got their own agendas - some of which may even involve you. People like your mom, or your boss, or the guy next door whose yard your dog keeps crapping in. Did you know that police officer in the 7-11 gets coffee for FREE?! And that in the very same store the guy behind the register wants to take your money?!
Some people are sure that only they are wise enough to see the insidious machinations of nerfarious agencies while the rest of the world remains ignorant. Ironically enough, these measures are becoming necessary mainly because of people who are sure that only they are wise enough to see the insidious machinations of nerfarious agencies while the rest of the world remains ignorant, and that the appropriate course of action is killing a bunch of people.
Quit worrying about whether people want to know what you're doing, and get on with your life. Society is a messy business of competing interests - that's why we have laws. Your real concern should be whether the laws of our society are good and their execution fair, and if not you should try to change that by voting your conscience and convincing others to your case.
So what if you're being identified by a number. You're already identified by hundreds of numbers - this just gives you a nationwide one. And so what if "They" could use this to track you - you already are. Weren't you ever bothered that just by having your supposedly-secret (and obviously not) social security number that someone could steal your identity? We've never had a way of proving to someone with certainty that we are who we say we are without jumping through hoops - and even then identity theft can still be committed. With a biometric-labeled national ID we can finally have a good way of authenticating ourselves, provided they develop the system right (dual-key encryption of biometrics, for starters). It beats some unlaminated blue card with no picture.
I agree... it doesn't necessarily have to be firewire (high speed ethernet would be acceptable too, even preferable in the current environment), but USB is way too slow for video transfer. Audio, peripherals, and some data would be pretty much ALL you could do with USB
And QT6 should be coming out pretty soon... I'm not sure exactly how they will distinguish quicktime versus other MPEG4 solutions (not that I've heard of any), but the potential for doing great things with quicktime is obviously there. Of course it remains to be seen whether a robust, standards-based architecture can stand up to less-functional proprietary formats with that have negotiated control over content and distribution.
I realize that the law in question is the AUDIO Home Recording Act, but how are other entertainment recordings (namely videos and DVDs) qualitatively different? Either the same (or similar) laws should apply to both, or be prepared to watch the RIAA sqeeze through those loopholes. DVD audio is already starting to catch on... and all it takes is one little video file on a music disc for them to call it a movie and sell it under those different standards. (I much prefer the converse, allowing us to copy DVDs for personal use)
Yes, NASA is always chronically underfunded for it's intended missions, but fortunately they aren't the only ones working on it. The military invests a lot of money in R&D, including pretty far-out projects (thanks to DARPA), and there's a long, long list of technology transfers. So if the Navy develops this one for carriers, it won't be long before someone applies it to space.
Not everybody realizes it, but it's not just the videos that are animated... the band doesn't actually exist. It's the brainchild of Tank Girl creator Jamie Hewlett and Blur's Damon Alburn, plus a lot of other people. The whole idea is that if you can accept Marilyn Manson or Eminem or Michael Jackson as stars, you can accept anything. Why not? Virtual pop stars have already been thought up (Sharon Apple) and tried (Kyoko Date), it's just a matter of time before they become accurate enough to be a significant force. Hell, I think an animated band has a better chance than a CG one - more style, less fussing over detail.
It's a hacked codec that doesn't work with macs. Not well, and in the case of the confusingly-named DivX 4, not at all. And there is still much room for improvement in all aspects of the codec. You have a real edge over most other codecs in that yours is cross platform - so your main competition is RealPlayer, VP3, and 3ivX for now. If you go commercial you have to beat both of them, if you're going open source you just have to do better than VP3 and 3ivX in at least one respect.
Of course if Quicktime ever officially goes Linux (I doubt WMP ever will) you'll have many more codecs to contend with. And you need to either promote it, or make it so incredibly good everyone switches. DivX sucks compared to newer open source and cross platform codecs but it's very popular because of the name.
Excellent Point! You put it quite clearly, although you wrote too much. However, your argument does fail for channels that don't do advertising, i.e. HBO and the sirius network. And you also didn't mention that satellite broadcasting is far more efficient than cable or broadcast for every type of content except local news and entertainment.
So let me propose a hybrid approach - satellites distribute advertising supported channels for free (users pay only the cost for recievers, which could be subsidized, and they do need to improve their reliability). Using the existing subscription-verification methods they have in place, they charge extra for the premium channels. Local broadcasters and cable companies either go out of business, change their business model, or operate with the satellite providers for local content (news, entertainment, and particularly advertising inserted into the other channels), broadband internet (particularly upstream, since satellite can handle downstream), and on-demand TV (especially via PVRs). It's that simple.