Person? No. People? Yes. The "average person" has one vote; "average people" have enough votes to make or break the career of a politician.
All that's needed to beat the RIAA at its own political game is a demonstration that "average people" take this issue seriously enough to commit their votes to it. Politicians don't directly care about letters, but they do care very much about their approval ratings, which they monitor based on things like letters.
>Politicians are ALL bought in some way, by >someone with more money and power than me.
That's one of the most disappointing attitudes I've read on/. in a while. Your vote isn't just one; it's one of many that may need that *last little oomph* to generate some political action.
Look: You have exactly as much voting power as Hilary Rosen! If you want to see this issue change for the better, have at least as much commitment to the issue as she does.
>If it utimately happens that all devices will >only play DRM enabled content, than I just will >stop buying all produced content.
You're throwing the baby out witht he bathwater. Contrary to the typical/. view ("all commercial music is crap"), I think there's a decent amount of good produced music out there among the crap. Just takes looking, that's all.
And you're not just boycotting a single business by boycotting the RIAA - you're walking away from a huge chunk of an industry. Far better to work within the system for meaningful reform than to just throw up your hands in frustration.
It's not a requirement for today's technology, no. But where is technology headed? There are too many indicators that the next generation of technology will not play unprotected content.
This is the core of the most restrictive version of DRM that the RIAA supports. It was even proposed in legislation by the odios Fritz Hollings.
A boycott isn't the way to go, for two reasons:
First: It's not going to last. We "technorati" are a tiny portion of the audio market. The rest of the public, as a rule, really sucks at balancing today's desires against tomorrow's possible harm. Your average teeny-bopper gets bored by talk of "antitrust" and "digital rights" and "fair use" - they just want their damn Justin Timerlake CD. They won't be boycotting.
Second, and worse: Boycott = decreased sales = more data for the RIAA to use in arguing that the current state of technology is hurting their cash flow and must be leashed. It's self-destructive.
The better tack is political action. Write your representative. Better still, vote against those reps who aren't serving your interests.
>You know, I've come to wonder what issues people really honestly have with DRM.
I'll tell you.
First, a recap: Technology has provided so many cool new uses of content: mixing/playlisting, archiving, porting to and playing on a wide range of devices (PDA, car stereo, notebook, etc.), sampling within fair-use rights, bundling to other forms of media (e.g., displaying lyrics synced to music), even having Winamp/WMP/whatever display graphics based on the audio spectrum. "Previewing content in non-crippled form before paying for it" as a very important right.
But here's the problem, from the RIAA's perspective. A customer in 1990 bought a CD for $15 and listened to it on a crappy home CD player. A customer in 2003 buys the same CD for the same price and can do a lot more with it. But the RIAA does own the content, and they want to leverage that for their financial gain. This means getting paid for consumers' extra uses of their content.
As a result, the RIAA wants to control (read: limit) consumers' rights to use their content. If you want to mix that DRM-protected track with others, pay them. If you want to use that track on another device, you'll have to re-purchase it. And while they're at it, why not get rid of that pesky used-music market, too? Your DRM rights are not transferable as are used CDs.
Sounds great, if you're an RIAA executive. Sounds egregiously offensive, if you're a consumer.
The clearest reason why we're offended is simple: The RIAA paid nothing to develop these technologies - we developed them, often despite the RIAA's resistance. They didn't fund Winamp's development of visual plug-ins; they didn't fund the tech industry's creation of MP3 players; they didn't fund CD-Rs that allow the creation of compilation CDs. We, the "technorati," spent long hours developing these legitimate uses of media for the public good. And now, the RIAA wants to seize it, and charge us for our own technical marvels.
That's bogus.
The war against "piracy" is a pretext. The RIAA's real goal is to move society toward a model where you have to pay them, over and over and over again, for using the same content in a variety of ways. It's our job to stop them.
You want to know why we're against DRM? Here are two predictable visions of the near future:
The Future
Without DRM -or-
With DRM
Play on multiple devices
Transfer to portable media or over network -or-
Pay device-transference fee
Archive purchased music
Rip to MP3; save to hard drive, CD-R, DVD-R -or-
Not possible; must re-purchase
Mix with other tracks
Rip to MP3; create Winamp playlist or burn CD-R -or-
Pay fee (e.g., $2.99 + $0.50/track) for creation of DRM playlist
Sampling of music, screenshots of video for "fair use" purposes (reviews, parodies, incorporation into other works)
Use music editor or screen grabber -or-
Not permitted without expensive license
Streaming over the Internet
Shoutcast -or-
Not permitted outside of commercial-laden, content-controlled "authorized broadcasters"
Content-added uses (showing lyrics or graphics synced to music; making Dance Dance Revolution tracks based on music)
>While we in the US can keep crying about this >(and will) don't you think it is a good move >for the globe? This is practical wealth >redistibution.
Nike contracting with third-world sweat-shops didn't constitute a very effective redistribution of wealth.
More likely, the companies will not pass this savings on to consumers and will keep the excess profits. This prospect is economically horrifying for the same reason as many other developments in today's economy: concentration of wealth.
Increasingly, wealth is being locked up in two places:
(A) enormous corporate coffers, and
(B) the enormous estates of the shrinking body of elite individuals who run them.
Companies have succeeded in improving profits by getting fewer people to work harder and for lower wages. On the other end, companies have pushed lower-quality goods on consumers at higher prices. By sidestepping antitrust laws and engaging in regulatory capture, companies have shattered the usual free-market barricades to such behavior, to the detriment of customers who have no adequate alternatives.
The result is obvious: Corporations are bathing in money and providing as little as possible to employees or consumers.
Taking this a step further: Is it any surprise that our professional markets are getting hosed? If you have 100 people sharing $1 billion, each of them has a strong incentive to get rid of as many conspirators as possible. It's a standard zero-sum game, people. Better still, it's a food chain: we've decimated blue-collar workers as much as possible; now it's time to thin the next class up the ladder...
When we/.ers talk about our fears for the future, we talk about techie things: asteroids, global warming, weapons of mass destruction, artificial-intelligence singularities. Very exciting, very Michael-Bay. But what's resoundingly missing from our discussion is the of concentration of wealth. With each passing year, we find power - money, government sway, media control, information - increasingly held by a shrinking group of people and companies. It's succeeding because it's mundane and low-profile.
I'm concerned that, in a hundred years, historians will look back at this time as the beginning of a very bad period for America - a long, dark period of population control by a few terrifically powerful individuals that might be broken only by something as radical, and horrific, as the French revolution.
I especially like this quote from the article, implicitly attributed to one of Berman's aides/cronies: "The law is meant to keep up with changing technology."
Presumably, the law "keeps up" with technology by crushing technological advances into teeny tiny pieces, thus slowing technological change to the glacial pace at which the law moves.
(I think I have a good perspective on the relative speed of each... I'm an attorney pursuing an MCIS degree.)
(I'm not affiliated with the site in any way - just a fan.)
These guys have been struggling for years to put together a 100%-complete, fully catalogued and documented games package for the C64. Due for release soon.
YOU CAN HELP! - if you have any of the games on the Missing list, or any games that they don't have yet (e.g., stuff you wrote!), you can preserve them for posterity by getting them into the archives.
>What's going to impress you? Someone who just >knows MS Office 2k, and gets hysterical when >you give them Office 97 or Office XP. Or >someone who has a good grounding in something a >little different. "Have you ever used >Word?" "No, but I've used Writer, Abiword, >Islandwrite, and Emacs."
Two comments - one you'll sort of like, and one you won't.
Bitter pill first: Familiarity counts. Any application beyond Calculator or Solitaire requires a learning curve - regardless of platform. Even if you know Writer, Abiword, Islandwrite, Emacs, StarOffice, and MS Word, using mail-merge in WordPerfect will still be harder for you (the first few times) than for someone who's only used WordPerfect.
Now here's a helpful suggestion, though rarely-seen on Slashdot: It's most impressive to have as broad a background as possible.
Which of the following candidates would you choose for web admin: 1) The stodgy Microsoft guy who insists on using IIS because that's all he knows; or 2) The wild-haired Linux guy who launches into a tirade when you mention not using Apache; or 3) The guy who has solid experience with both, knows their relative strengths and weaknesses, can provide an expert opinion on which is better suited to your needs, and is comfortable developing for the platform that you choose?
Oh, great. I just started an MCIS program on Monday, and the drop-with-refund option is now closed. Thanks a lot, punk slashdot reporters! Any more salt you want to rub into my career wounds?
Fortunately, I'm not in it for the money. I'm in it for accredited recognition of what I've taught myself over the past decade, in order to bolster a career in software patents. More importantly, I'm in it because I have this native love of software development and curiosity about technologies I've had insufficient reason to study in-depth.
>Bottom line, if the market doesn't want DRM >(and I dont think informed people do), then >the market won't buy DRM. Period.
Markets like this only work if choices are fluid. But they break down when you bundle a sure-fire YES to a less important, I'd-rather-not decision.
The public didn't want region encoding or Macrovision for DVDs. The public didn't want the broadcast flag for their TiVo. And the public REALLY didn't want Windows Product Activation. But we're stuck with all of them, aren't we?
Microsoft, the brazen monopolist, knows this well: it's the king of bundling. Bundle IE to Win98 - kill the competition dead today, maybe pay for it in some obscure fashion in the future. Expect history to repeat itself.
>But the common theory is that if people could >get these things online at a reasonable price, >then they would buy them, and the only reason >people are stealing them is that they are not >available from the content owners...
Availability isn't the issue - it's the value of what we'd be buying.
With DRM, you're paying for a very limited right. In theory, you can only play it on one machine that's connected to the Internet. You can't sell it to anyone else; you can't burn it on a CDA to play in your car; you can't transfer it to another machine. And if your computer dies or the server goes down, you lose all of your DRM keys and have to re-purchase the music. Of course, that's the whole point: sell that Britney Spears single to the same teenager 20 times.
This should hardly be surprising. We're talking about the RIAA. They sell CDs at monopoly-inflated prices with the self-righeous claim of needing to pay musicians; and then they provide a paltry fraction back to the artists. The RIAA a huge, money-sucking blight on the music scene. Do you really want them to develop the next-gen standard for music?
>And then when this MS bumble fails like so many >other MS things have, everyone will see it for >what it is. Is passport used the way MS said it >would be? No.
That doesn't always happen. Microsoft is inserting more and more "creeping featuritis" into Windows. Do you really want to trust MS's assertions that they won't use it? Remember Amazon's privacy policy changes? (Today: Give us your personal information; we PROMISE not to sell it to spammers. Tomorrow: We changed our minds, and we're sure you'll love these eight trillion emails from bukkake.com.)
Let's say we all roll over and accept DRM as a harmless, unusued feature. Who's to say that buried in some EULA for Windows 2006 XP won't be a clause that using Windows Update authorizes MS to turn on DRM? With the flip of a switch (well, the toggle of a BOOL), MS becomes Hollywood's bestest pal.
I don't want to let MS embed a bomb in my system. Thanks, no.
>TIP: The world is revolving around the US less >and less every day.
TIP: Network effects are powerful forces. Sure, we can switch, if we don't ever want to access our old Word documents or run 90% of the software that's commercially available.
The ideal device for this sort of things involves four components:
1) A holding mechanism for the player. In my view, this part is the bottleneck for the development process: There are lots of MP3 players on the market; aside from the iPod, none has the market size that would justify creating such a device. And you can't create a universal one, because no two MP3 devices have even remotely the same shape/size.
2) A method of transmitting sound to your car speakers. This could go through the radio/changer, either through a line input cable, an FM caster, or a cassette adapter; or it could be a replacement. Each of these has serious problems.
The *ideal* solution - indeed, the DREAM solution, for many reasons - is an 802.11b adapter in both the radio and the player, or less preferably, Bluetooth adapters. I probably don't need to elaborate, save saying that I'm just astounded that the MP3 market has fallen flat in this regard.
3) A power charging mechanism. Either adapt from the DC power/lighter jack, or wire directly to the car's electric system. Both solutions have issues.
4) A way of providing I/O without requiring the driver to futz with an MP3 player. This is real pie-in-the-sky stuff; but even when I take the time to hook my Jukebox to my car adapter and FM caster, I find this to be a serious problem.
I always have to chuckle when I see these analogies. "If you printed all of the data on a CD-ROM, it would reach Mars!"... that's super.
There are at least two problems with such analogies:
1) People use them to comment on the marvelous efficiency of technology - but in reality, it's only a comment on the hideous inefficiency of print. It doesn't say much at all about technology. It might be useful to convince people to digitize/OCR their printed matter - but is anyone *not* doing this? Even the Library of Congress is scanning its texts now.
2) In this case it's a particularly bad analogy, because it assumes that all data is printed as hex. Example: images, which are obviously a huge, huge chunk of the Wayback archive. Virtually all website images are small enough to print on a printed page at full resolution. But consider a 500x500-pixel image, at 16 bits (2 bytes per pixel, 2 chars to represent each byte)... that's 1,000,000 characters, or 1,000 pages!
Basically the analogy is good for wildly inflating some numbers to stun the 0.00001% of the population that doesn't already realize these things.
I just submitted the following reply to Ilana Mercer's article. Maybe the National Post will print it as an editorial... who knows?
----- : cut here : ---------- : cut here : ---------- : cut here : -----
Ms. Mercer recently wrote an article on her predictions of a copyright-free society, ostensibly drawn from the difficulty the music industry has faced in their attempt to shut down Napster. While I largely agree with Ms. Mercer's comments about the weakening of copyright protection - and the potential consequences and benefits of this development - I contest her comments about the patent system.
(My background: I'm a third-year law student at Case Western Reserve University School of Law, in Cleveland, Ohio. I've been studying patent law and clerking for a patent firm for about a year, and I recently passed the patent bar exam. I recently conducted several months of extensive research to write a treatise chapter on the history and development of patent law throughout the world, and my comments are based on this research.)
Ms. Mercer calls the patent monopoly "egregious" because of the potential unfairness to competitors, and even noncompetitors, of enforcing a monopoly against them. She applauds the court's rejection of the Prozac patent, recently stricken down to the benefit of consumers and the detriment of investors - ostensibly for the benefit of the free market. "Clearly," Ms. Mercer concludes, "to sanction state-granted, exclusive monopoly privileges on the central planning grounds that this redistribution of wealth promotes prosperity in society is not an enduring basis for principled legislation."
Ms. Mercer's comments, however, miss the central principle of the patent system: In a free market, Prozac would never have been invented without the protection promised by the patent system.
Regardless of their value to society, complex inventions typically aren't created unless they may be commercially exploited. The reasons behind this are obvious: the inventive process is very expensive and very risky. Private investors don't like sinking huge amounts of money into projects that hold little promise of profit. Complex inventions - those that can't simply be knocked together in a garage in one's free time - need a source of funding, in the form of investors, who obviously want their money back at some point. That's just how the free market works.
But one of the biggest challenges to the profitability of an invention in a patent-free market is that even if you A) attract funds from investors, B) succeed in your inventive efforts, and C) find a way to make your invention profitable - your competitors can simply cobble together their version of your product and sell it. So all the risks you took and resources you spent inventing this great new product are wasted! What greater unjustice can there be in a free market? What greater challenge to a necessary element of a free market - innovation - is in greater need of strict measures to overcome it?
More specifically: What investor would dump billions of dollars into the planning, creation, evaluation, clinical trials, FDA approval efforts, and marketing of Prozac, without some assurance that their investment may be rewarded?
The free market, which Ms. Mercer so highly prizes, has a few inherent problems recognized for centuries, and this is one of them. Like the class cheater in fourth grade who copied everyone else's answers, it makes more sense in the modern business world to sit back and copy your competitors' ideas than go through the expensive and uncertain efforts of deriving your own ideas. By unburdening themselves of the costs of invention, the sharks can outcompete inventors.
Granted, at first blush - which seems to be the extent of thought Ms. Mercer has given to this system - a patent monopoly may seem unjust. Basically, someone who expends the effort of inventing something on their own and trying to produce it may be barred by the government from doing so, simply because someone else invented and patented it earlier. This might seem monumentally unfair to the inventor. But bear this in mind: Would it be better to let this second inventor practice the same invention, simply because he claims to have invented it independently? If so, then how can you distinguish between an honest "later inventor" and a competitor who just reverse engineers the inventor's invention (or, worse still, just follows the steps laid out in the patent) and claims to have invented it independently? It's simply impossible. Again, the sharks will rule the fountain of invention.
In closing, I'd like to point out that the governmental protection of invention dates back even to the Greeks and Romans, and our current patent systems were born in ancient Venice and cultivated by Queen Elizabeth. Surely, if patents were such a great hindrance to the free market as Ms. Mercer implies, the system would not have survived several hundred years of development.
Slashdot Mirror
>Politicians don't listen to the average person.
/. in a while. Your vote isn't just one; it's one of many that may need that *last little oomph* to generate some political action.
/. view ("all commercial music is crap"), I think there's a decent amount of good produced music out there among the crap. Just takes looking, that's all.
Person? No. People? Yes. The "average person" has one vote; "average people" have enough votes to make or break the career of a politician.
All that's needed to beat the RIAA at its own political game is a demonstration that "average people" take this issue seriously enough to commit their votes to it. Politicians don't directly care about letters, but they do care very much about their approval ratings, which they monitor based on things like letters.
>Politicians are ALL bought in some way, by
>someone with more money and power than me.
That's one of the most disappointing attitudes I've read on
Look: You have exactly as much voting power as Hilary Rosen! If you want to see this issue change for the better, have at least as much commitment to the issue as she does.
>If it utimately happens that all devices will
>only play DRM enabled content, than I just will
>stop buying all produced content.
You're throwing the baby out witht he bathwater. Contrary to the typical
And you're not just boycotting a single business by boycotting the RIAA - you're walking away from a huge chunk of an industry. Far better to work within the system for meaningful reform than to just throw up your hands in frustration.
David Stein, Esq.
Yeah, I think the UK should adopt DRM right away.
David Stein, Esq.
It's not a requirement for today's technology, no. But where is technology headed? There are too many indicators that the next generation of technology will not play unprotected content.
This is the core of the most restrictive version of DRM that the RIAA supports. It was even proposed in legislation by the odios Fritz Hollings.
A boycott isn't the way to go, for two reasons:
First: It's not going to last. We "technorati" are a tiny portion of the audio market. The rest of the public, as a rule, really sucks at balancing today's desires against tomorrow's possible harm. Your average teeny-bopper gets bored by talk of "antitrust" and "digital rights" and "fair use" - they just want their damn Justin Timerlake CD. They won't be boycotting.
Second, and worse: Boycott = decreased sales = more data for the RIAA to use in arguing that the current state of technology is hurting their cash flow and must be leashed. It's self-destructive.
The better tack is political action. Write your representative. Better still, vote against those reps who aren't serving your interests.
David Stein, Esq.
I'll tell you.
First, a recap: Technology has provided so many cool new uses of content: mixing/playlisting, archiving, porting to and playing on a wide range of devices (PDA, car stereo, notebook, etc.), sampling within fair-use rights, bundling to other forms of media (e.g., displaying lyrics synced to music), even having Winamp/WMP/whatever display graphics based on the audio spectrum. "Previewing content in non-crippled form before paying for it" as a very important right.
But here's the problem, from the RIAA's perspective. A customer in 1990 bought a CD for $15 and listened to it on a crappy home CD player. A customer in 2003 buys the same CD for the same price and can do a lot more with it. But the RIAA does own the content, and they want to leverage that for their financial gain. This means getting paid for consumers' extra uses of their content.
As a result, the RIAA wants to control (read: limit) consumers' rights to use their content. If you want to mix that DRM-protected track with others, pay them. If you want to use that track on another device, you'll have to re-purchase it. And while they're at it, why not get rid of that pesky used-music market, too? Your DRM rights are not transferable as are used CDs.
Sounds great, if you're an RIAA executive. Sounds egregiously offensive, if you're a consumer.
The clearest reason why we're offended is simple: The RIAA paid nothing to develop these technologies - we developed them, often despite the RIAA's resistance. They didn't fund Winamp's development of visual plug-ins; they didn't fund the tech industry's creation of MP3 players; they didn't fund CD-Rs that allow the creation of compilation CDs. We, the "technorati," spent long hours developing these legitimate uses of media for the public good. And now, the RIAA wants to seize it, and charge us for our own technical marvels.
That's bogus.
The war against "piracy" is a pretext. The RIAA's real goal is to move society toward a model where you have to pay them, over and over and over again, for using the same content in a variety of ways. It's our job to stop them.
You want to know why we're against DRM? Here are two predictable visions of the near future:
- The Future
- Without DRM -or-
- With DRM
- Play on multiple devices
- Transfer to portable media or over network -or-
- Pay device-transference fee
- Archive purchased music
- Rip to MP3; save to hard drive, CD-R, DVD-R -or-
- Not possible; must re-purchase
- Mix with other tracks
- Rip to MP3; create Winamp playlist or burn CD-R -or-
- Pay fee (e.g., $2.99 + $0.50/track) for creation of DRM playlist
- Sampling of music, screenshots of video for "fair use" purposes (reviews, parodies, incorporation into other works)
- Use music editor or screen grabber -or-
- Not permitted without expensive license
- Streaming over the Internet
- Shoutcast -or-
- Not permitted outside of commercial-laden, content-controlled "authorized broadcasters"
- Content-added uses (showing lyrics or graphics synced to music; making Dance Dance Revolution tracks based on music)
- Application (Winamp, Stepmania) plus metadata (lyrics text, DDR step files) -or-
- Buy enhanced versions of tracks with extra content added and approved by content producers
- Sell purchased music to another user
- Sell CD on eBay, used record shop, etc. -or-
- Not permitted; DRM rights non-transferable
- Preview content before purchase
- Download; listen; purchase or delete -or-
- Make decision to buy $15 CD based on 20-second snippet of music
David Stein, Esq.I can't believe I got modded down as a troll. Maybe Michael Bay had some mod points to squander...? ;)
Or maybe the "Esq" at the end of my title automatically puts me in the "troll" bin. You could even set up an auto-mod script that way...
David Stein, Esq.
>While we in the US can keep crying about this
/.ers talk about our fears for the future, we talk about techie things: asteroids, global warming, weapons of mass destruction, artificial-intelligence singularities. Very exciting, very Michael-Bay. But what's resoundingly missing from our discussion is the of concentration of wealth. With each passing year, we find power - money, government sway, media control, information - increasingly held by a shrinking group of people and companies. It's succeeding because it's mundane and low-profile.
>(and will) don't you think it is a good move
>for the globe? This is practical wealth
>redistibution.
Nike contracting with third-world sweat-shops didn't constitute a very effective redistribution of wealth.
More likely, the companies will not pass this savings on to consumers and will keep the excess profits. This prospect is economically horrifying for the same reason as many other developments in today's economy: concentration of wealth.
Increasingly, wealth is being locked up in two places:
(A) enormous corporate coffers, and
(B) the enormous estates of the shrinking body of elite individuals who run them.
Companies have succeeded in improving profits by getting fewer people to work harder and for lower wages. On the other end, companies have pushed lower-quality goods on consumers at higher prices. By sidestepping antitrust laws and engaging in regulatory capture, companies have shattered the usual free-market barricades to such behavior, to the detriment of customers who have no adequate alternatives.
The result is obvious: Corporations are bathing in money and providing as little as possible to employees or consumers.
Taking this a step further: Is it any surprise that our professional markets are getting hosed? If you have 100 people sharing $1 billion, each of them has a strong incentive to get rid of as many conspirators as possible. It's a standard zero-sum game, people. Better still, it's a food chain: we've decimated blue-collar workers as much as possible; now it's time to thin the next class up the ladder...
When we
I'm concerned that, in a hundred years, historians will look back at this time as the beginning of a very bad period for America - a long, dark period of population control by a few terrifically powerful individuals that might be broken only by something as radical, and horrific, as the French revolution.
David Stein, Esq.
I especially like this quote from the article, implicitly attributed to one of Berman's aides/cronies: "The law is meant to keep up with changing technology."
Presumably, the law "keeps up" with technology by crushing technological advances into teeny tiny pieces, thus slowing technological change to the glacial pace at which the law moves.
(I think I have a good perspective on the relative speed of each... I'm an attorney pursuing an MCIS degree.)
David Stein, Esq.
http://www.gamebase64.com
(I'm not affiliated with the site in any way - just a fan.)
These guys have been struggling for years to put together a 100%-complete, fully catalogued and documented games package for the C64. Due for release soon.
YOU CAN HELP! - if you have any of the games on the Missing list, or any games that they don't have yet (e.g., stuff you wrote!), you can preserve them for posterity by getting them into the archives.
David Stein, Esq.
>knows MS Office 2k, and gets hysterical when
>you give them Office 97 or Office XP. Or
>someone who has a good grounding in something a
>little different. "Have you ever used
>Word?" "No, but I've used Writer, Abiword,
>Islandwrite, and Emacs."
Two comments - one you'll sort of like, and one you won't.
Bitter pill first: Familiarity counts. Any application beyond Calculator or Solitaire requires a learning curve - regardless of platform. Even if you know Writer, Abiword, Islandwrite, Emacs, StarOffice, and MS Word, using mail-merge in WordPerfect will still be harder for you (the first few times) than for someone who's only used WordPerfect.
Now here's a helpful suggestion, though rarely-seen on Slashdot: It's most impressive to have as broad a background as possible.
Which of the following candidates would you choose for web admin:
1) The stodgy Microsoft guy who insists on using IIS because that's all he knows; or
2) The wild-haired Linux guy who launches into a tirade when you mention not using Apache; or
3) The guy who has solid experience with both, knows their relative strengths and weaknesses, can provide an expert opinion on which is better suited to your needs, and is comfortable developing for the platform that you choose?
David Stein, Esq.
Oh, great. I just started an MCIS program on Monday, and the drop-with-refund option is now closed. Thanks a lot, punk slashdot reporters! Any more salt you want to rub into my career wounds?
Fortunately, I'm not in it for the money. I'm in it for accredited recognition of what I've taught myself over the past decade, in order to bolster a career in software patents. More importantly, I'm in it because I have this native love of software development and curiosity about technologies I've had insufficient reason to study in-depth.
David Stein, Esq.
>Bottom line, if the market doesn't want DRM
>(and I dont think informed people do), then
>the market won't buy DRM. Period.
Markets like this only work if choices are fluid. But they break down when you bundle a sure-fire YES to a less important, I'd-rather-not decision.
The public didn't want region encoding or Macrovision for DVDs. The public didn't want the broadcast flag for their TiVo. And the public REALLY didn't want Windows Product Activation. But we're stuck with all of them, aren't we?
Microsoft, the brazen monopolist, knows this well: it's the king of bundling. Bundle IE to Win98 - kill the competition dead today, maybe pay for it in some obscure fashion in the future. Expect history to repeat itself.
David Stein, Esq.
>But the common theory is that if people could
>get these things online at a reasonable price,
>then they would buy them, and the only reason
>people are stealing them is that they are not
>available from the content owners...
Availability isn't the issue - it's the value of what we'd be buying.
With DRM, you're paying for a very limited right. In theory, you can only play it on one machine that's connected to the Internet. You can't sell it to anyone else; you can't burn it on a CDA to play in your car; you can't transfer it to another machine. And if your computer dies or the server goes down, you lose all of your DRM keys and have to re-purchase the music. Of course, that's the whole point: sell that Britney Spears single to the same teenager 20 times.
This should hardly be surprising. We're talking about the RIAA. They sell CDs at monopoly-inflated prices with the self-righeous claim of needing to pay musicians; and then they provide a paltry fraction back to the artists. The RIAA a huge, money-sucking blight on the music scene. Do you really want them to develop the next-gen standard for music?
David Stein, Esq.
>And then when this MS bumble fails like so many
>other MS things have, everyone will see it for
>what it is. Is passport used the way MS said it
>would be? No.
That doesn't always happen. Microsoft is inserting more and more "creeping featuritis" into Windows. Do you really want to trust MS's assertions that they won't use it? Remember Amazon's privacy policy changes? (Today: Give us your personal information; we PROMISE not to sell it to spammers. Tomorrow: We changed our minds, and we're sure you'll love these eight trillion emails from bukkake.com.)
Let's say we all roll over and accept DRM as a harmless, unusued feature. Who's to say that buried in some EULA for Windows 2006 XP won't be a clause that using Windows Update authorizes MS to turn on DRM? With the flip of a switch (well, the toggle of a BOOL), MS becomes Hollywood's bestest pal.
I don't want to let MS embed a bomb in my system. Thanks, no.
>TIP: The world is revolving around the US less
>and less every day.
TIP: Network effects are powerful forces. Sure, we can switch, if we don't ever want to access our old Word documents or run 90% of the software that's commercially available.
David Stein, Esq.
The ideal device for this sort of things involves four components:
1) A holding mechanism for the player. In my view, this part is the bottleneck for the development process: There are lots of MP3 players on the market; aside from the iPod, none has the market size that would justify creating such a device. And you can't create a universal one, because no two MP3 devices have even remotely the same shape/size.
2) A method of transmitting sound to your car speakers. This could go through the radio/changer, either through a line input cable, an FM caster, or a cassette adapter; or it could be a replacement. Each of these has serious problems.
The *ideal* solution - indeed, the DREAM solution, for many reasons - is an 802.11b adapter in both the radio and the player, or less preferably, Bluetooth adapters. I probably don't need to elaborate, save saying that I'm just astounded that the MP3 market has fallen flat in this regard.
3) A power charging mechanism. Either adapt from the DC power/lighter jack, or wire directly to the car's electric system. Both solutions have issues.
4) A way of providing I/O without requiring the driver to futz with an MP3 player. This is real pie-in-the-sky stuff; but even when I take the time to hook my Jukebox to my car adapter and FM caster, I find this to be a serious problem.
- David Stein, Esq.
I always have to chuckle when I see these analogies. "If you printed all of the data on a CD-ROM, it would reach Mars!"... that's super.
There are at least two problems with such analogies:
1) People use them to comment on the marvelous efficiency of technology - but in reality, it's only a comment on the hideous inefficiency of print. It doesn't say much at all about technology. It might be useful to convince people to digitize/OCR their printed matter - but is anyone *not* doing this? Even the Library of Congress is scanning its texts now.
2) In this case it's a particularly bad analogy, because it assumes that all data is printed as hex. Example: images, which are obviously a huge, huge chunk of the Wayback archive. Virtually all website images are small enough to print on a printed page at full resolution. But consider a 500x500-pixel image, at 16 bits (2 bytes per pixel, 2 chars to represent each byte)... that's 1,000,000 characters, or 1,000 pages!
Basically the analogy is good for wildly inflating some numbers to stun the 0.00001% of the population that doesn't already realize these things.
- David Stein
I just submitted the following reply to Ilana Mercer's article. Maybe the National Post will print it as an editorial... who knows?
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Ms. Mercer recently wrote an article on her predictions of a copyright-free society, ostensibly drawn from the difficulty the music industry has faced in their attempt to shut down Napster. While I largely agree with Ms. Mercer's comments about the weakening of copyright protection - and the potential consequences and benefits of this development - I contest her comments about the patent system.
(My background: I'm a third-year law student at Case Western Reserve University School of Law, in Cleveland, Ohio. I've been studying patent law and clerking for a patent firm for about a year, and I recently passed the patent bar exam. I recently conducted several months of extensive research to write a treatise chapter on the history and development of patent law throughout the world, and my comments are based on this research.)
Ms. Mercer calls the patent monopoly "egregious" because of the potential unfairness to competitors, and even noncompetitors, of enforcing a monopoly against them. She applauds the court's rejection of the Prozac patent, recently stricken down to the benefit of consumers and the detriment of investors - ostensibly for the benefit of the free market. "Clearly," Ms. Mercer concludes, "to sanction state-granted, exclusive monopoly privileges on the central planning grounds that this redistribution of wealth promotes prosperity in society is not an enduring basis for principled legislation."
Ms. Mercer's comments, however, miss the central principle of the patent system: In a free market, Prozac would never have been invented without the protection promised by the patent system.
Regardless of their value to society, complex inventions typically aren't created unless they may be commercially exploited. The reasons behind this are obvious: the inventive process is very expensive and very risky. Private investors don't like sinking huge amounts of money into projects that hold little promise of profit. Complex inventions - those that can't simply be knocked together in a garage in one's free time - need a source of funding, in the form of investors, who obviously want their money back at some point. That's just how the free market works.
But one of the biggest challenges to the profitability of an invention in a patent-free market is that even if you A) attract funds from investors, B) succeed in your inventive efforts, and C) find a way to make your invention profitable - your competitors can simply cobble together their version of your product and sell it. So all the risks you took and resources you spent inventing this great new product are wasted! What greater unjustice can there be in a free market? What greater challenge to a necessary element of a free market - innovation - is in greater need of strict measures to overcome it?
More specifically: What investor would dump billions of dollars into the planning, creation, evaluation, clinical trials, FDA approval efforts, and marketing of Prozac, without some assurance that their investment may be rewarded?
The free market, which Ms. Mercer so highly prizes, has a few inherent problems recognized for centuries, and this is one of them. Like the class cheater in fourth grade who copied everyone else's answers, it makes more sense in the modern business world to sit back and copy your competitors' ideas than go through the expensive and uncertain efforts of deriving your own ideas. By unburdening themselves of the costs of invention, the sharks can outcompete inventors.
Granted, at first blush - which seems to be the extent of thought Ms. Mercer has given to this system - a patent monopoly may seem unjust. Basically, someone who expends the effort of inventing something on their own and trying to produce it may be barred by the government from doing so, simply because someone else invented and patented it earlier. This might seem monumentally unfair to the inventor. But bear this in mind: Would it be better to let this second inventor practice the same invention, simply because he claims to have invented it independently? If so, then how can you distinguish between an honest "later inventor" and a competitor who just reverse engineers the inventor's invention (or, worse still, just follows the steps laid out in the patent) and claims to have invented it independently? It's simply impossible. Again, the sharks will rule the fountain of invention.
In closing, I'd like to point out that the governmental protection of invention dates back even to the Greeks and Romans, and our current patent systems were born in ancient Venice and cultivated by Queen Elizabeth. Surely, if patents were such a great hindrance to the free market as Ms. Mercer implies, the system would not have survived several hundred years of development.
- David Stein