Did Stan escape from Dallas University's, locked room, infinite monkeys on typewriters experiment ?
This just in... it seems Stan Liebowitz is not really a University of Dallas professor, he just plays one on a television show called "Dallas." He's the one in the cowboy hat.
University of Dallas economist Stan Liebowitz, author of an upcoming book (set for publication Sept. 7) titled "Rethinking the Network Economy," is digging hard for quantitative answers.
In May, Liebowitz published a paper suggesting that the record industry would soon be seriously harmed by MP3s. But in June, by the time Salon caught up with him, he was questioning his own conclusions after having examined the numbers and finding little solid proof that file sharing was hurting CD sales.
Two months later, he's changed his mind again.
As an economist, Liebowitz knows as well as anyone how to sell a book:
Examine a controversial issue the perspective of your expertise (it helps if one side of the issue is backed by a very wealthy cast of characters who will do anything to promote their side)
Announce that you will be writing the book
Announce that you have found "evidence" in favor of one side
Announce you were wrong and that you now have evidence to support the other side
Change your mind again, announcing that further information has revealed that your first conclusions were correct, just two weeks before the book is published.
Now everyone wants to read your book to find out if they've been vindicated.
He studied 30 years of record sales data, and in the three months prior to the publishing of his book, he has found "new evidence" that caused him to fundamentally reverse himself twice? If this guy publishes a book on how to sell books, I might read it, but I won't be reading this one. Who's to say he won't change his mind again in October when he needs the cas^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H finds new evidence?
The difference is that SBC paid the owners of the San Antonio stadium to put their name on the building. With your cell phone/pager/PDA, you paid for ownership of the device and you pay for each viewing of their material. By forcing you to pay their bill, they are effectively stealing from you.
IANAL, but I imagine a court would ultimately find that greater harm is done to consumers by SMS advertising than by FAX spamming. That is why SMS advertising and campaigning will ultimately fail if they become widespread.
I think people have been critical of iChat because Apple has been playing it up as though it's one of the major features that makes Jaguar "worth" the $129 even though there are excellent open source messaging clients already available:
It's good to hear from someone outside Apple that the extra VRAM is not really required for a speed boost. I've been somewhat miffed by the idea that my "professional" TiBook 500/1GB might not see much benefit from the upgrade. Thanks.
I was about to launch my diabolical scheme to claim ownership of all hyperlinks so I could hold them hostage unless the world pays me a hefty ransom of... one million shares in every dot com in the world.
Slashdot has just saved me a lot of embarrassment. It's truly an indispensable resource for people in my line of work. Now I can devote all my efforts to my father's claim that he invented the question mark.
They should not be turned into roaming, vibrating billboards...
On the other hand... people do some strange things with wireless devices. A portable, wireless, vibrating billboard could send just the right message to some people, but might rub others the wrong way.
The Slashdot summary is somewhat misleading. Anonymous SMS messages are already permitted, but election laws prohibit campaigns from posting messages without proper disclosure. That way there is some accountability in the campaign to inform voters. The FEC's decision simply exempts the SMS medium from the ned for this disclosure, grouping them with buttons, bumper stickers and other mediums that are just too small for disclosure statements to be practical.
I can see why the FEC voted as it did. A standard disclosure statement like:
Paid for by Concerned Citizens to Re-Elect Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.
takes up 74 characters, nearly half the 160-character limit. That doesn't leave much room for a message. However, it raises a larger question: is SMS a useful medium for campaign messages to begin with?
You can't fit much of a political message into 160 characters. Those that will fit, like "I Like Ike," are generally only effective if presented by a human being. Seeing a person wear an "I Like Ike" button is a much more powerful message than receiving an anonymous "I Like Ike" message on your phone.
And as the article points out, wireless devices are a personal and private medium for most consumers. They should not be turned into roaming, vibrating billboards, especially since the owners of the devices will be forced to read the advertisements.
It's possible that the question is designed to help the employer keeps tabs on what open source projects the programmer contributes to (if any). If he is hired and makes any contributions during the period he is employed, the employer can swoop down and declare the project (or parts of it) company property.
So the smart answer may be, "I don't contribute to open source projects. I prefer to reserve all my time and effort for improving my employer's profits. By the way, do you give cubicles to programmers? At my last job I had to share a folding table in the hallway with four other guys."
Can we hear from someone who has installed OS X on a machine with the 32 megs of VRAM Apple recommends and another machine with, say, 8 megs of VRAM? Most Macs (owned by people who are not technophiles or gaming addicts and people who bought anything other than a tower over a year ago) are not going to have more than 8 megs of VRAM, because until Jaguar's astounding requirement (which probably has something to do with the astronomical VRAM needs of Jaguar -- what other window manager needs 32 megs of VRAM) the only people who needed more than that were people who:
Were willing to spend the extra money on a G4 tower to gain the ability to upgrade the video card
Were so committed to their gaming addiction they were willing to buy and install the extra hardware
Apple shocked the users when it subtly announced that 32 megs is "recommended" for optimum performance on Jaguar, but it will run with less. Can anyone give us some non-hyped, non-"Jaguar-freaking-makes-EVERYTHING-better" information about how much of a difference the extra VRAM makes, and what kind of performance the majority of us can expect?
...the internet can lower the costs for candidates, potentially opening the doors to some who would not run.
Lowering the costs for candidates is not a good thing. The cost of running for office exists to weed out people who:
Do not have the level of commitment needed to do basic fundraising. If you're not willing to put the time or thought into fundraising, you're probably not going to work very hard for the people.
Do not have sufficient support from the voters. If you can't convince voters to give up X dollars of their own hard-earned money to support your candidacy, it's unlikely you'll have their support in office.
If it costs an individual virtually nothing to spam a million people with a pitch he wrote in five minutes while sitting on the toilet this morning, the voters will be overwhelmed with hundreds or thousands of nameless/faceless/reputationless bids for office. The vast majority of those bids will not be serious, but a significant number of them will be "fishing expeditions."
Joe Shmoe, the guy who has been sending you penis-enlargement spam for the last five years, doesn't think anyone would really put him in Congress, but since you don't know him he can fabricate a plausible story about himself and his intentions and see if it flies. He's got nothing to lose. But if he's careful, he might just get himself elected by the millions of idiots who think he's a serious candidate and write him in on their ballots.
Spammers have proven that email campaigns are a great way to shirk accountability, which makes an email campaign the last thing you want in an election. You want to know everything about the person who is asking to represent you and write your laws. Everything from their history to their opinions. But you know nothing about the faceless demon who sends you daily ads for Viagra.
It is unfortunate that wealthy individuals like Ross Perot (who often obtained their wealth by squeezing it out of the people they're now courting for votes) have a much easier road to candidacy, but removing the cost requirement will only make things worse.
Lowering the bar would be like removing the requirement that candidates obtain a minimum number of signatures to get their name on the ballot. The burden must be on candidates to work to let the voters know who they are and what they intend to do in office. Politicians are not convenience-store items you pick up on a 3 a.m. trip to Seven Eleven; they're long-term investments you research before you buy. Would you buy a car from Seven Eleven?
You may want to re-address your letter to letters@latimes.com. Or mail it to:
Letter to the Editor
Los Angeles Times
202 W. 1st St.
Los Angeles, CA 90012
Letters to the Editor must also include your full name, city and daytime phone number (your number will not be published). Please keep your Letter under 250 words.
The "article" is actually an opinion piece written for and published in The Los Angeles Times on August 15 (free registration req., etc.). Since The San Jose Mercury News lacks the "prestige" of The LA Times, it had to settle for reprinting the piece five days later.
In case there's any confusion on the backgrounds of the authors, McCurry was President Clinton's press secretary Purpuro was deputy chief of staff of the Republican National Committee (in other words, they're both veterans of the political misinformation game) .
The response, clever in its audacity, is to complement the previous anticompetitive strategy, documented so well in Judge Jackson's Findings of Face, of employing the financial largesse acquired through its "private" international computer taxation powers to "dump" product on the market for free (but only in terms of immediate financial cost, of course).
I could, but I personally don't believe it would do much good. The people who I worry the article was intended for are not going to read the Ombudsman's column.
I have no idea how newspapers operate in this regard.
An excerpt from "The Role of the Ombudsman" in The Washington Post Deskbook on Style:
Most ombudsmen and "reader advocates," for example, publish columns explaining why and how certain decisions are made, expressing contrition for errors and, on occasion, taking the institution to task for clumsiness, incompetence or other frailties.
...
Ombudsmen at The Post and elsewhere act, for the most part, in the public interest as best they perceive it. Their triumphs are modest, not revolutionary. For the reader, they often serve the function of the Army chaplain: I may not solve your problem but I'll listen to you talk about it and try to make you feel better.
An ombudsman does not have any real power -- he can't even print corrections. He simply listens to the concerns of readers, brings those concerns that he is concerned about to the editorial staff, and prints a modest column on the subject from time to time.
It would be better to recognize that your Congressman is the target audience of this article, and that you should write to him/her directly about your views to offset the effects of the article.
Print that message out and mail it to the post. It would make an excellent letter to the editor, I bet you would get published.
Me? No. I would get an email or phone call from a Post colleague demanding: "what the hell do you think you are doing?!" However, if someone else would like to paraphrase and contact the Post's Obudsman, you're more than welcome to do so.
In case anyone in the Washington area missed the story, the author spent several minutes this morning discussing the highlights of his article -- omitting any semblance of fairness -- on a local cable television news channel ("News Channel 8"). Here's the RealVideo file.
Segal: The world of pirated online music is still alive-- Channel 8 Talking Head: Like huge! Segal: Yeah, huge.
News Channel 8 runs several ABC (Disney, whose music holdings include Buena Vista Music Group, Hollywood Records, Lyric Street Records, Mammoth Records and Walt Disney Records) programs including ABC World News Tonight, Nightline, and 20/20, but is owned by a company called ALLNEWSCO.
The Washington Post has an extensive content deal with NBC (General Electric) and Microsoft, but is owned primarily by the Graham family and Warren Buffet.
(I wrote this last night when I saw the article. I decided the Post article wasn't worth submitting to Slashdot, but since someone would inevitably, this was worth writing. Contextual disclaimer: I used to work for The Post.)
I honestly have to wonder whether the music industry paid to put propaganda on the front page of The Washington Post, because David Segal has been around long enough to know better than to write a piece like "A New Tactic in the Download War" (8/21/02).
Segal repeatedly points to falling sales of CDs and implies that piracy is the cause:
"The record labels have been spurred to action by figures they find terrifying: The number of 'units shipped' -- CDs sent to record stores or directly to consumers -- fell by more than 6 percent last year, and it's widely expected to fall 6 to 10 percent more by the end of 2002. Those drops are already hitting the industry hard. Labels are laying off employees, ditching artists, slashing budgets for tours and videos, and combing their back catalogues for reissues that cost almost nothing to release."
Yet he neglects to mention that every industry has been hit hard and is laying off people -- even the news media. If CD sales fell 6 percent last year, I'd say the music industry is doing extremely well, because the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell about 9 percent in that same period (including the post-9-11 recovery).
Segal goes on to say sales are "widely expected to fall 6 to 10 percent more by the end of 2002." Guess what? The Dow has fallen over 10 percent since the beginning of the year, on top of last year's 9 percent loss, and the economy is widely expected to get worse. Could it be that people are spending less money on trivial things like CDs because they have less money in their pockets? Or because their retirement savings have been wiped out? We would all like to be patriotic and buy an album a day, but one must have priorities. At least until CDs become edible and wholesome.
"There's evidence, though, that Americans are spending more time than ever listening to CDs," Segal continues.
What is Segal's evidence?
"Market surveys suggest that more blank CDs (CD-Rs) than recorded CDs are now sold in the United States."
Perhaps Segal could explain how an increase in CD-R sales constitutes evidence "that Americans are spending more time than ever listening to CDs."
CD-Rs are also facilitate fair-use activities. The 40-something who has just discovered CD-Rs decides to put his deteriorating record collection on CDs so he can listen to them for years to come. The 20-something creates a custom mix of his favorite songs from several CDs so he doesn't have to take his eyes off the road to change discs on his way to work.
CD-Rs are also used to archive data. We live in an age where the data repositories we depend on, from the computers in our homes to the physical documents in the World Trade Center, are no longer safe. They can disappear in an instant when anything from a software glitch to a terrorist attack occurs. It stands to reason that people look to the CD format to archive their tax documents, emails, family photos, scans of their kids' artwork and anything else that's important to them.
What mother couldn't turn up enough content to fill a spindle-full of CD-Rs a month? And as she realizes the potential for storing memories and documents, she begins to collect even more. She takes more digital photos and more video of her family. She starts scanning in old family photos and scanning the catalogues for a moderately-priced DVD-R burner because she needs more space.
CD-Rs are also quickly replacing the floppy disk. Floppy disks wear out, they are susceptible to magnetic fields, they don't mail very well, they're slow, and they only hold 1.4 megabytes of data. A DSL user can download 1.4 megabytes of data from the Internet faster than he can read 1.4 megabytes of data from his own floppy drive. CD-Rs will not wear out in your lifetime (unless you microwave them), they are impervious to magnetic fields, AOL has proven that you can transport them in many creative, inexpensive ways, they offer fast data transfer rates and they hold at least 650 megabytes of data. There is also evidence of a growing market for CD-Rs to be used as frisbees, travel mirrors, cetrifuge shrapnel and kid-safe Chinese throwing stars.
However, Segal's "evidence" proves nothing about American listening trends.
Segal also mentions the music industry's support of a bill that would make it legal to "impair the operation of peer-to-peer" networks and follows it up with a quote from RIAA chairwoman Hilary Rosen in which she announces that the industry has a "history" of being "generous with consumers," and that it is simply looking to enforce its existing rights.
Segal tries to present the appearance of a balanaced story by noting that the bill's "strategy has generated plenty of skepticism." This is true. However, the only skepticism he cites is the industry concern that "foolproof locks... don't exist in the digital realm."
He neglects to mention the larger concern: that the wording of the supported bill would make it legal for the music industry to attack any network it "suspects" may contain pirated files. It allows big business to engage in unrestrained vigilante justice on the digital frontier with the kind of attacks that have brought down major Internet services like Yahoo and ETrade in the past. These attacks are currently federal crimes, for good reason. The bill would give the music industry the legal authority to shut down any service on the Internet indefinitely, without a court order or subsequent review. The Washington Post may want to bear this in mind the next time it publishes an unfavorable review of a music album.
This shoddy journalism smacks of the kind of factually incorrect propaganda corporations distribute in their press releases.
Segal's article fits well with the music industry's propaganda campaign. At a time when the bill is being considered in Congress, a front-page story in the only Washington paper that ends up in every Congressman and Senator's office highlighting the alleged need for legislation to save the industry and combat lawlessness is worth its weight in gold.
I find it exceptionally difficult to believe that the music industry could "buy" this story. I also find it hard to believe that a seasoned reporter like Segal could be lazy enough to write this article and that a front-page story would not undergo the scrutiny necessary to uncover its deep holes and steep slant. The most plausible explanation I can find is that The Post is so genuinely concerned about the implications of the bill it wants to secure its place on the industry's alleged "generous" side.
Maybe we can just replace the human Board with a little script that trundles the web automatically..
I don't know how I feel about shell script suffrage. Perhaps we could just stick these all over their cars while they're busy plotting in the next meeting. And hope they choose to go away.
Interesting acronym. I think we should avail ourselves of this fine opportunity. Henceforth, ISOC's BoT shall be known as "the ISOC ROBOT" -- the ISOC Remotely-Owned Board of Trustees.
Or would you really rather call it ISOC BOT (I suck butt... "We leave it in your capable hands, ISOC BOT," "Thank goodness ISOC BOT," "I am sick and tired of dealing with ISOC BOT," "Ever since ICANN recognized that ISOC BOT, the.org TLDs have been in the toilet," etc.)?
TLD's should be controlled by a non-profit organization that is not run by individuals who work for big business for the same reason the airwaves are controlled by the FCC. For the same reason that traffic cops are not employed by big business.
A person who works for a major corporation has a responsibility to the interests of that corporation, not the other 99% of the entities who use the Internet. A group run by a consortium of these goons (goon. a man hired to terrorize or eliminate opponents. Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary) will always act in the interest of their companies, and against the interest of everyone else. The result is an official establishment of a tyrannical structure that exists for the purpose of prying money out of the fingers of the many and stuffing it into the pockets of the few. Very few.
This is why ISOC's corporate affiliation is important and unacceptable.
Take advantage of our introductory offer of 10.org DNS lookups for only $5! That's less than $1 per lookup! Yes, that's right! Access any 10 great sites of your choice, with millions to chose from! Learn more...
So, like, when should we start going to slashdot.com instead of slashdot.org?
Slashdot Mirror
- Examine a controversial issue the perspective of your expertise (it helps if one side of the issue is backed by a very wealthy cast of characters who will do anything to promote their side)
- Announce that you will be writing the book
- Announce that you have found "evidence" in favor of one side
- Announce you were wrong and that you now have evidence to support the other side
- Change your mind again, announcing that further information has revealed that your first conclusions were correct, just two weeks before the book is published.
- Now everyone wants to read your book to find out if they've been vindicated.
He studied 30 years of record sales data, and in the three months prior to the publishing of his book, he has found "new evidence" that caused him to fundamentally reverse himself twice? If this guy publishes a book on how to sell books, I might read it, but I won't be reading this one. Who's to say he won't change his mind again in October when he needs the cas^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H finds new evidence?IANAL, but I imagine a court would ultimately find that greater harm is done to consumers by SMS advertising than by FAX spamming. That is why SMS advertising and campaigning will ultimately fail if they become widespread.
I really have to remember to use the markup in the future. :o)
- Adium (my preference)
- Fire
It's good to hear from someone outside Apple that the extra VRAM is not really required for a speed boost. I've been somewhat miffed by the idea that my "professional" TiBook 500/1GB might not see much benefit from the upgrade. Thanks.Slashdot has just saved me a lot of embarrassment. It's truly an indispensable resource for people in my line of work. Now I can devote all my efforts to my father's claim that he invented the question mark.
At the very least, a name would be useful. That way the voter knows who he's supposed to be voting for... or forwarding the SMS bill to.
<grumble>stupid submit button next to the preview button...</grumble>
I can see why the FEC voted as it did. A standard disclosure statement like:
takes up 74 characters, nearly half the 160-character limit. That doesn't leave much room for a message. However, it raises a larger question: is SMS a useful medium for campaign messages to begin with?You can't fit much of a political message into 160 characters. Those that will fit, like "I Like Ike," are generally only effective if presented by a human being. Seeing a person wear an "I Like Ike" button is a much more powerful message than receiving an anonymous "I Like Ike" message on your phone.
And as the article points out, wireless devices are a personal and private medium for most consumers. They should not be turned into roaming, vibrating billboards, especially since the owners of the devices will be forced to read the advertisements.
So the smart answer may be, "I don't contribute to open source projects. I prefer to reserve all my time and effort for improving my employer's profits. By the way, do you give cubicles to programmers? At my last job I had to share a folding table in the hallway with four other guys."
- Were willing to spend the extra money on a G4 tower to gain the ability to upgrade the video card
- Were so committed to their gaming addiction they were willing to buy and install the extra hardware
Apple shocked the users when it subtly announced that 32 megs is "recommended" for optimum performance on Jaguar, but it will run with less. Can anyone give us some non-hyped, non-"Jaguar-freaking-makes-EVERYTHING-better" information about how much of a difference the extra VRAM makes, and what kind of performance the majority of us can expect?So if I have a 2-pixel by 2-pixel screen whose pixels display either black (on) or white (off), I can claim my screen supports 5 color combinations:
- Black (4 black pixels)
- Dark Grey (3 black, 1 white)
- Quasi Grey (2 black, 2 white) -- The Margarine of Grey, not Grey enough
- Light Grey (1 black, 3 white)
- White (4 white)
That makes sense, if I've gone cross-eyed and can see only a big blur of the average of colors.- Do not have the level of commitment needed to do basic fundraising. If you're not willing to put the time or thought into fundraising, you're probably not going to work very hard for the people.
- Do not have sufficient support from the voters. If you can't convince voters to give up X dollars of their own hard-earned money to support your candidacy, it's unlikely you'll have their support in office.
If it costs an individual virtually nothing to spam a million people with a pitch he wrote in five minutes while sitting on the toilet this morning, the voters will be overwhelmed with hundreds or thousands of nameless/faceless/reputationless bids for office. The vast majority of those bids will not be serious, but a significant number of them will be "fishing expeditions."Joe Shmoe, the guy who has been sending you penis-enlargement spam for the last five years, doesn't think anyone would really put him in Congress, but since you don't know him he can fabricate a plausible story about himself and his intentions and see if it flies. He's got nothing to lose. But if he's careful, he might just get himself elected by the millions of idiots who think he's a serious candidate and write him in on their ballots.
Spammers have proven that email campaigns are a great way to shirk accountability, which makes an email campaign the last thing you want in an election. You want to know everything about the person who is asking to represent you and write your laws. Everything from their history to their opinions. But you know nothing about the faceless demon who sends you daily ads for Viagra.
It is unfortunate that wealthy individuals like Ross Perot (who often obtained their wealth by squeezing it out of the people they're now courting for votes) have a much easier road to candidacy, but removing the cost requirement will only make things worse.
Lowering the bar would be like removing the requirement that candidates obtain a minimum number of signatures to get their name on the ballot. The burden must be on candidates to work to let the voters know who they are and what they intend to do in office. Politicians are not convenience-store items you pick up on a 3 a.m. trip to Seven Eleven; they're long-term investments you research before you buy. Would you buy a car from Seven Eleven?
In case there's any confusion on the backgrounds of the authors, McCurry was President Clinton's press secretary Purpuro was deputy chief of staff of the Republican National Committee (in other words, they're both veterans of the political misinformation game) .
It would be better to recognize that your Congressman is the target audience of this article, and that you should write to him/her directly about your views to offset the effects of the article.
In case anyone in the Washington area missed the story, the author spent several minutes this morning discussing the highlights of his article -- omitting any semblance of fairness -- on a local cable television news channel ("News Channel 8"). Here's the RealVideo file.
News Channel 8 runs several ABC (Disney, whose music holdings include Buena Vista Music Group, Hollywood Records, Lyric Street Records, Mammoth Records and Walt Disney Records) programs including ABC World News Tonight, Nightline, and 20/20, but is owned by a company called ALLNEWSCO.The Washington Post has an extensive content deal with NBC (General Electric) and Microsoft, but is owned primarily by the Graham family and Warren Buffet.
I honestly have to wonder whether the music industry paid to put propaganda on the front page of The Washington Post, because David Segal has been around long enough to know better than to write a piece like "A New Tactic in the Download War" (8/21/02).
Segal repeatedly points to falling sales of CDs and implies that piracy is the cause:
"The record labels have been spurred to action by figures they find terrifying: The number of 'units shipped' -- CDs sent to record stores or directly to consumers -- fell by more than 6 percent last year, and it's widely expected to fall 6 to 10 percent more by the end of 2002. Those drops are already hitting the industry hard. Labels are laying off employees, ditching artists, slashing budgets for tours and videos, and combing their back catalogues for reissues that cost almost nothing to release."
Yet he neglects to mention that every industry has been hit hard and is laying off people -- even the news media. If CD sales fell 6 percent last year, I'd say the music industry is doing extremely well, because the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell about 9 percent in that same period (including the post-9-11 recovery).
Segal goes on to say sales are "widely expected to fall 6 to 10 percent more by the end of 2002." Guess what? The Dow has fallen over 10 percent since the beginning of the year, on top of last year's 9 percent loss, and the economy is widely expected to get worse. Could it be that people are spending less money on trivial things like CDs because they have less money in their pockets? Or because their retirement savings have been wiped out? We would all like to be patriotic and buy an album a day, but one must have priorities. At least until CDs become edible and wholesome.
"There's evidence, though, that Americans are spending more time than ever listening to CDs," Segal continues.
What is Segal's evidence?
"Market surveys suggest that more blank CDs (CD-Rs) than recorded CDs are now sold in the United States."
Perhaps Segal could explain how an increase in CD-R sales constitutes evidence "that Americans are spending more time than ever listening to CDs."
CD-Rs are also facilitate fair-use activities. The 40-something who has just discovered CD-Rs decides to put his deteriorating record collection on CDs so he can listen to them for years to come. The 20-something creates a custom mix of his favorite songs from several CDs so he doesn't have to take his eyes off the road to change discs on his way to work.
CD-Rs are also used to archive data. We live in an age where the data repositories we depend on, from the computers in our homes to the physical documents in the World Trade Center, are no longer safe. They can disappear in an instant when anything from a software glitch to a terrorist attack occurs. It stands to reason that people look to the CD format to archive their tax documents, emails, family photos, scans of their kids' artwork and anything else that's important to them.
What mother couldn't turn up enough content to fill a spindle-full of CD-Rs a month? And as she realizes the potential for storing memories and documents, she begins to collect even more. She takes more digital photos and more video of her family. She starts scanning in old family photos and scanning the catalogues for a moderately-priced DVD-R burner because she needs more space.
CD-Rs are also quickly replacing the floppy disk. Floppy disks wear out, they are susceptible to magnetic fields, they don't mail very well, they're slow, and they only hold 1.4 megabytes of data. A DSL user can download 1.4 megabytes of data from the Internet faster than he can read 1.4 megabytes of data from his own floppy drive. CD-Rs will not wear out in your lifetime (unless you microwave them), they are impervious to magnetic fields, AOL has proven that you can transport them in many creative, inexpensive ways, they offer fast data transfer rates and they hold at least 650 megabytes of data. There is also evidence of a growing market for CD-Rs to be used as frisbees, travel mirrors, cetrifuge shrapnel and kid-safe Chinese throwing stars.
However, Segal's "evidence" proves nothing about American listening trends.
Segal also mentions the music industry's support of a bill that would make it legal to "impair the operation of peer-to-peer" networks and follows it up with a quote from RIAA chairwoman Hilary Rosen in which she announces that the industry has a "history" of being "generous with consumers," and that it is simply looking to enforce its existing rights.
Segal tries to present the appearance of a balanaced story by noting that the bill's "strategy has generated plenty of skepticism." This is true. However, the only skepticism he cites is the industry concern that "foolproof locks... don't exist in the digital realm."
He neglects to mention the larger concern: that the wording of the supported bill would make it legal for the music industry to attack any network it "suspects" may contain pirated files. It allows big business to engage in unrestrained vigilante justice on the digital frontier with the kind of attacks that have brought down major Internet services like Yahoo and ETrade in the past. These attacks are currently federal crimes, for good reason. The bill would give the music industry the legal authority to shut down any service on the Internet indefinitely, without a court order or subsequent review. The Washington Post may want to bear this in mind the next time it publishes an unfavorable review of a music album.
This shoddy journalism smacks of the kind of factually incorrect propaganda corporations distribute in their press releases.
Segal's article fits well with the music industry's propaganda campaign. At a time when the bill is being considered in Congress, a front-page story in the only Washington paper that ends up in every Congressman and Senator's office highlighting the alleged need for legislation to save the industry and combat lawlessness is worth its weight in gold.
I find it exceptionally difficult to believe that the music industry could "buy" this story. I also find it hard to believe that a seasoned reporter like Segal could be lazy enough to write this article and that a front-page story would not undergo the scrutiny necessary to uncover its deep holes and steep slant. The most plausible explanation I can find is that The Post is so genuinely concerned about the implications of the bill it wants to secure its place on the industry's alleged "generous" side.
Or would you really rather call it ISOC BOT (I suck butt... "We leave it in your capable hands, ISOC BOT," "Thank goodness ISOC BOT," "I am sick and tired of dealing with ISOC BOT," "Ever since ICANN recognized that ISOC BOT, the .org TLDs have been in the toilet," etc.)?
- I stopped buying CDs because I hate the RIAA's tactics.
- I didn't buy Madonna's latest album because I didn't like any of the CD's tracks.
I'm pointing this out because it drives me nuts when other people screw this up, and I can't believe I did it myself.A person who works for a major corporation has a responsibility to the interests of that corporation, not the other 99% of the entities who use the Internet. A group run by a consortium of these goons (goon. a man hired to terrorize or eliminate opponents. Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary) will always act in the interest of their companies, and against the interest of everyone else. The result is an official establishment of a tyrannical structure that exists for the purpose of prying money out of the fingers of the many and stuffing it into the pockets of the few. Very few.
This is why ISOC's corporate affiliation is important and unacceptable.
So, like, when should we start going to slashdot.com instead of slashdot.org?