on important issues people care to look up the most, you're virtually guaranteed a balanced article.
Is that like how the Slashdot moderation results in a balanced set of views?
Anyway, I'm off to use my KILLER Apple dual G5 (which can totally blow away anything Intel makes) with OS X (the best, prettiest OS ever) to share the latest movies and music with everyone in the world. Then perhaps I'll use my iPod for a while.
It's still not feasible yet. As a note, I work doing streaming media. Actual streaming media will saturate most pipes with little effort - we use 250K as our lowest useful quality setting, and 50 connections at that speed works out to 10MegaBytes per second. And streaming is still very prone to glitches. Most of it uses UDP, so any kind of network problem can cause large amounts of loss.
Downloading a ~700MB file has its own problems. I don't know how most people interact with movies, but for me it tends to be a spur of the moment decision rather than something planned out in advance. Even with a reasonably good cable modem connection, I can drive to the video store, watch it, and return it in less time than it takes to download a Linux ISO. And while bandwidth is increasing, it still can't match the bandwidth of mini-dishes, albeit with the limitation of everyone getting the same content.
When I visited the Canadian Rockies, one thing that I noticed was that all of the informational displays in the parks were bi-lingual. On average, they were about the same size as what I'm used to in.us, meaning that they also contained about half as much information.
The easiest solution I see to this is to limit players to one character, per account, per credit card.
It's a nice idea, but replace it with billing name and mailing address rather than CC number - most big CC companies let you generate new numbers at will for online purchases.
What pre-knowledge do people have of mouse buttons? None. You know that right-clicking brings up options specific to the item the mouse is pointing to, not because it's obvious, but because you learned it.
As a 8 year old in 1985, I had no problem grasping the concept of two mice buttons on an Atari ST. Not everything in life is or should be intuitive. Ever drive a stick shift? The shifts in Izuzu trucks (as in the 20 foot box trucks you see everywhere) are *very* different than the stick you'll find on American cars. They aren't designed for particularly smart people (many light garbage trucks are built on the same frame) and yet all of the drivers manage to use them.
Control-click brings up a contextual menu
Control-click is no more (and quite possibly less) intuitive than right click - it's just a matter of what *you're* used to.
Many applications in many operating systems offer options only reachable from a right-click. These options are not visible on the screen, nor do they descend from anything marked as a menu. They're magical.
HUI guidlines show that humans work best with 7+/-2 options, and as such they recomend having no more than 7 options in each menu. Given how many things a computer can do, you quickly run out of menu space. Some things it makes sense to duplicate in many ways. For example, to go back in Mozilla, I can hit click and drag down to back, I can use the back button, I can choose back from the Go pull down menu, and even a few other ways. But some things make sense to only make available at certain times, and many people agree with Tog that mysterious greyed out options in menus is a bad thing. Right clicking on an image and being able to save it makes sense. Highlighting a few words and right clicking and being able to pop it right into a search menu makes sense. Having an option in a pull down menu that is greyed out most of the time is more likely to confuse people than not. Some things make sense to abstract out into limited use functions for specific uses or power users.
It means my Mom never has to call me to ask how to do something that's apparently a "secret" only for people who use computers on a daily basis.
One thing to keep in mind (from a narrow minded perspective of "The United States == everyone") is that the population that don't use computers on a daily basis is shrinking. The way that college students use computers as a integral part of their lives is completely different than 10 years ago. And even the ones who aren't technical manage to figure out how to use two mice buttons.
It's likely that this is a matter that we can just disagree on, but the core of my argument is this: Steve won't let me buy a 2+ button mouse with a Mac. Using the right button on a Mac brings up the context menu, so the built in support is there. 95% of the Mac owners I know have replaced their mice with multi-button/scroll wheel mice. And yet, Steve won't let his computers ship with them, wasting money and creating unneeded trash in landfills. And I'm a heavy laptop user who doesn't want to travel with a billion parts, so not having two buttons on my powerbooks (I have a 12" and a 17") is a real annoyance. Having two buttons means that you can map both of them to be the same. You can't map a single button to work as two.
It's symptomatic of the Steve idea that you should use the computer the way he tells you to, which is part of why I can't stand OS X for the most part. Apple deliberately broke the ability of third party apps to make Alt(or shall I say the key just to the left of shift)-Tab to work the way that 95%+ of the computers work. You could get addons up until 10.2.5 to change that, until they were broken. As someone who uses other platforms extensively, breaking my muscle memory is a really bad thing, and part of the reason that my Mac usage has dropped tremendously since that change.
The real question is this: if you need a second button on your mouse to
And if you were using a military system, you would have their private certificate authorities installed in your list of CAs. Why would the government pay large sums of money for certs (and place their reliability at the mercy of a private company) for their private systems when their intended audience for free? Many large enterprise environments use their own CAs for internal applications. Of course those CAs aren't going to be bundled in by MS or Mozilla.
I have no firsthand experience with Finns. I do have fairly extensive experience with the 17-23 set in the US both in college environments and in the workplace. I've watched them slack off in classes, destroy things out of idle boredom, and drop trash on the ground because they're too lazy to walk an extra 15 feet out of their way to the trash can. I also see Indian and Chinese students excelling in the classes that many US citizens don't take because they're too hard/require too much effort, and in general, treat the education they're offered as a real priviledge. But the US students still expect to graduate and land a $40K+/year job.
It has mearly made it easier for individuals to become crimminals than previously available.
Like I said, people will often do what they think they can get away with, particularly if they don't have to see it hurt individuals.
As far as the other AC's comments on digital enabling artists to get away from the big companies, that's very true. However, from what I've seen, the vast majority of what goes on P2P networks is the same old stuff that the major companies have made. Run a search on a P2P network of choice and tell me how many results are returned for Usher, Maroon 5, and Nelly. Then tell me how many are returned for The Renderers, Spacetime Continuum, and Robert Fripp.
I think you'll also find that it's a very common human value to be far more tolerant of other people's problems if they don't see them. For example, if most people saw someone who was literally starving to death in their neighborhood, they would be likely to take some kind of action to try to save them. Starving Africans halfway around the world don't get the same consideration. Granted, there are contributions to various aid charities and awful music you can buy to support them, but when it comes down to it, most people spend *far* more on their personal comfort than on improving the world. How many thousands of people could have been granted life for the cost of the Nintendo DSes and Sony PSPs that have been sold this year?
There's also a large sense of empathy only with a group that you associate yourself with, which is why an earthquake that kills three US citizens gets far more coverage than one that kills thousands someplace else and why the Holocaust is far more known in the US than the Rape of Nanjing, which per day killed as many if not more.
The vast majority of file sharers that I've talked with use this to their advantage, by abstracting the damage they do as "just hurting big companies or rich people." Most of them are motivated by greed, pure and simple, by the concept of "I want therefore I deserve," and because they don't see the little person getting hurt, the human empathy doesn't kick in. The overwhelming sense of "deserving" is part of why the United States is going to be in a world of hurt in a few years, because the vast majority of today's youth/early adults have it and have been nothing but coddled since birth.
There are some universal values which everyone the world over would agree furthers humanity.
You'll find that virtually every major religion agrees that murder is bad, but that hasn't stopped people from going to war time and time again for the past couple thousand years.
Most religions and cultures have prohibitions against having sex with someone else's spouse, but that happens time and time again as well.
Humans are inherently weak (what's often termed original sin) and will very often do what they think they can get away with, hence rampant file "sharing."
People like to share, to spread what little wealth and happiness they have around.
There's nothing inherently wrong or evil with saying something is nice and wanting other people to experience the same pleasure. The problem is that many things that are worth sharing involve some kind of cost (this can include time - it's not just financial) to create. So I do my best to share with the world - I share with my friends through gifts, hosting dinners, taking them on trips, and so on. I share with the world through supporting charities. In both cases, I am limited in my sharing because I have a finite amount of time and money. Unauthorized file duplication, on the other hand, breaks the model because it still costs *someone* money and time to create but doesn't cost the "sharers" other than whatever their bandwidth costs.
Naturally those somebodies fight back just like a car dealership would fight back if someone tried to "share" the dealer's cars with their friends. And before someone jumps in to complain that intellectual and physical property are not the same, the ultimate point is that both someone that earns their living creating intellectual property and someone that creates physical property are just as broke at the end of the day if people take it without paying for it.
Chances are, the majority of the people that read this site make their living through intellectual property. It's just that they don't have to worry about people taking their work without permission because it's so specialized to their purpose that the world at large has no interest in it. Media makers aren't so lucky.
The bottom line is that when it ceases to be profitable, the quality content will go away and we'll be left with the pop-mass-marke
That, and there's a chance he installed a keylogger and/or fed the password file into a cracker, so now you have to determine which other systems might be tainted as well and do an analysis of each one as well. Not what most IT staff want to spend their weekends doing.
What a waste, every call on the land line is a telemarketer...about 6-10 a day.
At the very least, use it for some fun. Just get an answering machine without a ringer. Here's some ideas to get you started:
1. Record the little error tone that the phone company uses and get a woman to do a really pinched voice, "The number you have called, 555-1234, has been changed. The new number is 555-1234. Please note this change."
2. Get someone to do the voice of an elderly person, "Hello? Hello? You're goana have to speak up sonny, I'm a little hard of hearing. What? You're calling from who?" It helps if you can get a really long recording time.
3. I'm going to assume from your username that you're down in Texas. Just record something really unpleasant happening on a farm to a cow.
4. Fax handshake. For added style points, record a message and record a 300 baud modem sending it in plaintext ala Information Society.
5. Amusing excerpts - for a while I had bits of Deliverence or the introduction to Jesus Built My Hotrod as my message.
6. Same concept as 2, but get an actual little kid. "No, Daddy doesn't want to talk to you. I have blocks. I like them. I make..."
At the end of the month, play back the messages and see if you got any amusing responses. It would be more amusing to hack up a Linux telephony box so you could record their responses as the message plays, but that might be a little too much effort.
Slow season, if you really want to know. I do college oriented stuff for the most part and the kids have all gone home and ski season hasn't started up yet. Live sound also has a lot of "hurry up and wait" stuff - you have to load in at X hour but can't soundcheck until Y and the show's at Z, leaving lots of dead time. Better venues now offer wireless or an ethernet drop.
Combine that with the girlfriend being out of town, and I spend a whole lot more time on/.;)
What is the arbitrary selection of a year?
Publish or perish. If you don't put out new stuff, people tend to forget you.
Reduce it to 20-30 cents a track, see that half that (minimum) goes to the artist
You do realize that given a 10 song average, you're proposing to pay the artists less than the labels you claim are so evil pay per CD, don't you?
This would be an excellent incentive not to distribute "filler", as it would just never get sold.
Again, bands generally don't set out to create filler. Some songs are better than others, sometimes the magic happens and sometimes it doesn't.
Getting great drum sounds is one of the things that sucks up massive amounts of studio time. Let's say getting the perfect general sound takes 8 hours of work - that can generally be used for all of the songs on an album. So if you do two songs, you need each to recoup four hours' worth of time. If you do twelve songs, it's only 30 minutes.
The "Everything must be a single!!!1!!" philosophy actually works against deeper artists as well. I have tons of music (that I bought because I liked the artist) that I didn't like at first, but further listens opened up the listener to the meaning. Sometimes that's taken months of listening. Pushing for the uber-single will just mean more Britneys and Backstreet Boys, not less.
If we move to a collective license/automatic builtin royalty tax model
Please list the national-level politicians who sucessfully push for higher taxes. Further, the only thing left to tax is bandwidth - physical media is largely obsolete. You'll get plenty of people such as my father who have no inclination to subsidize other people's taste in media. Most people will accept taxes subsidizing actual *needs* - police, health care, roads. Things such as music should be left to individuals to select an appropriate commercial enterprise that's appropriate for their level of use.
Creating one giant pool of money that's the same size despite usage (as compared to one that scales depending on use) only begs for problems. The moment you create some big pool, some scammer can bang out some noise, publish it as music, and then write a trojan that causes people's computers to "listen" to it.
I sure don't see "the masses" moving away from the current free methods voluntarily
The legal challenges have droped P2P use, and there's more and more legislation coming down the pipe. This is a *bad* thing, but it's what the consumers have brought upon themselves. In general, I favour less laws but more draconian enforcement of those that do exist.
me: Except that all of those plans always fail to work out reasonable ways to insure the artists get paid that don't either actually decrease indy artist's chances of getting paid
you: Actually, the builtin royalty model on cassette decks and VCR's worked just fine, so can you explain why it -wouldn't- work on CD burners?
It worked for the big corporations. The indys didn't do very well from it.
The reason it doesn't work well for indies is that if you do EFF proposed "Neilson ratings" to divy up income, you have a large chance of missing the smaller artists. Let's say you track 1 out of every thousand listeners for your income breakdown. Let's say 50 of those users are listen to Britney -
/var/db/netinfo/local.nidb/ holds the netinfo db in what is definitely not an easy to manipulate state. Witness this mess that used to be required just to change the IP of OS X Server 10.2. (Follow the background information link on that page for even more details of what the problem was.) And the text plist files still tend to have gobs of non-readable information in fields. For example, my dock settings have 6 different data fields filled with "AAAAAAFcAAIAAQdTdnI3QjMzAAAAAAAAAAAA" (and so on).
And some of the "traditional" unix configuration files in/etc/ are actually created at boot time from other configuration files, overwriting any changes you might have made to the/etc/ files. I suppose this is tolerable, if it's at least documented in each file so you know what's going on. (ie #WARNING! smb.conf will be overwritten with settings in/foo/baz at boot. Use bar to configure samba)
I can't argue that the current system (of everything, not just movies) isn't broken, but I find your cavalier attitude that economic disparity should be adjusted by illegal and unethical activity.
I love the way that right-wingers love to tar anybody who doesn't agree with their particular narrow brand of capitalism as (ominous background music) A COMMUNIST.
Gosh, that would be almost like labeling anyone who disagreed with you as a "right-winger," wouldn't it?
Unless their contribution is extreme they should not be paid so much that it endangers the democratic process.
Perhaps, but such a change should be across the board (not just targeting the movie industry), and because you suggest guerilla actions are reasonable until your planned utopia goes into effect, you must be willing to accept possible consequences upon yourself as well.
Me:never mind that the people on the lower rung are the ones who suffer, not the people at the top.
You:That will happen in any system but it is usually possible to create a more fair and just society.
Again, you suggested that piracy is a good way of evening the score. So let's oversimplify everything, and go to a magical world where piracy has reduced movie revenue by 1/3 and it's been applied across the board to everyone's salaries.
So Jane Doe, a big name star, goes from making $3 million per movie to $2 million per movie. John Gaffer goes from making $15,000 per movie to $10,000 per movie. They both make 3 movies each year. Jane now makes $3 million less per year, but still lives a lavish lifestyle with millions of dollars still coming in each year.
John, on the other hand, only makes $15,000 less per year, but is now barely able to scrape by (assuming he can even pay the bills at all at that point) because $30K/year doesn't go very far most places where movies are made.
It's mainly dictated by mindshare advertising where the studio oligopoly simply crowd out alternatives by the sheer quantity of advertising they put out.
The general public has always noted to not have overly impressive taste. Remember the quote about bread and circus? With today's alternative media, I can reach hundreds of thousands to millions of viewers through ads on likeminded websites and zines for the same budget as one big network primetime ad or a spread [so to speak] in Maxim. This has gotten *better*, not worse in the past few years.
People have only a limited number of hours in the day... and go with what they know.
From what I can tell (haven't had TV signal in years and have limited exposure to mass media), the biggest [money making] films with the big stars actually spend less money on advertising than the ones without the big stars. Titanic spread by word of mouth, not constant advertising. Advertising generally only pays off on the first weekend of a movie's showing - witness how truly terrible films can have a good opening weekend but rapidly drop off compared to movies that people enjoy and tell their friends about. The problem is that most people have terrible taste, hence the Mummy films and Survivor's popularity.
Fact is, my government is democratically elected. I have no problem with them modifying the copyright law they, as my representative, created in the first place to make a more just society, simply because it is assigning too many rewards to one small section of society for little return to the rest of society.
First [in your initial reply to me] you stated that individuals should violate those laws in order to even the balance, and now you start trumpeting the glory of democracy. Do you only view "democracy" as good when it agrees with your viewpoints? You seem to be arguing that individuals can disregard laws that they don't believe are right (which, granted, is a very common view in the US), but is a very unpleasant moral state to live in.
Why is it that only some users will get a PHP that tries to defend against attacks?
One of the things that PHP has going for it is that it's easy to write. The downside is that it's easy for people who don't know programming or security designs to write code, and that they've written some big, popular applications which Hardened-PHP breaks, hence why it hasn't been merged in.
I must correct myself - in the past few months they fixed softwareupdate to allow full remote access. My rep had assured me that such a change would not happen until 10.4. My apologies.
Yeah, get back to me when it displays the click through license agreement in the shell rather than sitting there on some co-loed screen miles away. What makes it even better is that the softwareupdate client doesn't give any indication of what it's waiting for, so if you don't know what's going on you think the application's hung.
Yeah, I also work with TeraBytes of data, walk through a data center with at least a dozen XServeRAIDs on a regular basis, and my Apple rep has asked if I'd like to evaluate sometime in the Spring.
Whether or not Apple makes a nice piece of storage kit doesn't have much to with whether or not they have some poor practices with their software.
Right, they issued a bad point release, so that makes the OS a non-datacenter-OS?
No, they refused to release important security updates that are key to many datacenter applications (SSH and SSL) in any form other than the point release. Forcing someone to upgrade hundreds to thousands of things around the entire OS in order to fix critical security flaws is begging for problems and is a very_bad_idea (tm). And as it happens, a number of people got bitten by that. If my server does foo, I don't care if applications bar and baz have been improved nor do I want the latest version of Safari (now with better whatever). I expect to put a server into the rack and update only what is necessary to the task it does until the point it get decomissioned because every unneeded change to other software and library has the potential to cause problems.
Have you ever done patch validation for a government agency or major financial institute?
The magic is in what the vendors *do* about it.
I'm not impressed by fanboyism any more than I am by bouncy icons. After 10.2.8 Mark I, myself and a number of other people took them to task over the bundling of security updates to the bundling issue and they actually changed. But it took a lot of discussion to find people that could even appreciate the point. Apple is a cult of personality that's driven by marketing rather than engineering.
You *still* can't update a system via ssh. I don't like having to have a Mac with the remote desktop software to update my co-loed servers. I'm always within an arm's reach of SSH. Nor can you fully automate updating.
You can't integrate XServes in with many existing datacenters because the KVMs don't support USB. When you have KVM infrastructure that spans several floors and costs in the tens of thousands, you don't have the option of ripping it all because Steve decided legacy ports were bad.
Nor can you fit them in some existing racks, because marketing decided that 1 rackspace would be the only size they build, which means it's quite deep compared to other units. Most 1 rackspace Opterons are that deep as well, but I have the option of getting a shallower 2+ rackspace unit. Let's not forget the "brush against them and the pop out" ejectable drives of the G4 Xserves.
The entire idea of using binary configuration files is one that I consider to be another really bad one as well.
Wow. It's kind of like reading the Communist Manifesto, if Karl Marx had been dropped on his head a lot as a baby.
To summarize, you feel that it's economically unfair for some people to get paid more than others, so the solution is for unrelated people to screw over everyone in the industry, never mind that the people on the lower rung are the ones who suffer, not the people at the top.
Riiiiiggghhhhttttttttt.....
It is simply not reasonable that that a small number of people (in particular, the actors) should get millions of dollars for a few hours of at best semi-skilled work.
Why not? That's dictated by the public, not by the studios. They certainly don't want to pay $BIGNAME $20 Mil. per movie, but the public shows time and time again that they'll go to any piece of drek with said $BIGNAME in it. That's a failure of public taste, not of the industry. I'd say there are actually more quality movies being created now compared to anytime in the past. It's easy to look at the past and think that their movies were better, but that's because the bad ones have faded from history and use and only the decent to good ones remain. Cable, the internet, and high quality, low cost video equipment actually mean that film makers can do more with less and get better exposure than anytime before.
Most actors don't get paid anywhere near that though, and given that an actor might get one good part every two or three years, getting $150,000 for a part isn't that unreasonable if they're a good actor. And trust me, a good (or great) actor spends far more than "a few hours" on the part.
In these circumstances I don't have much problem with people evening the score.
I would say that the economic disparity that the first world visits upon the third world is a far worse situation. Would you be cool with the third world looting your town to "even the score?"
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
So you want to punish sucess? Do you support this pseudo-communistic theory across the board, or just in things that don't affect you?
Just for the record, how much do you make per year?
Because, again, they are selling a lousy product (CD's which might contain one or two "radio songs" and the rest filler, and 45 minutes worth of music on a CD which we well know can hold about 80), at an inflated price.
You don't think the rapid decline in CD sales since 1999 has *anything* to do with mp3s? I live in a college town, and I've witnessed both CD stores shrink, despite the fact that both of them carry high quality, off the beaten path CDs, and know for a fact that most of the students have gigabyte after gigabyte of mp3s. (In case you're wondering, I work full time for the networking department at a major college and full time in the music industry as well.)
Which way do you want it? Most bands can't write 80 minutes of great music in one year. To be honest, there are some bands that just write some fluff songs, but very few of the big-but-not-huge bands set out to write _bad_ songs to record. What turns out to be a hit or popular can be a surprise to the band and the label.
Again, what I listen to is off the beaten path, but my current favourite recent CD is Flogging Molly's Within a Mile of Home, which I suspect is released by an RIAA member. There's a couple songs on it that I'm not wild about, but I wouldn't call it filler, just personal taste. And I find it cool that an album that prominantly features the accordian is getting promoted in places like Target and Walmart.
If you only want one or two songs, are you willing to pay more for them than you would per track for a full CD? Economy of scale comes in on recording too. It's more expensive (per track) to record one song than five than ten. Are you willing to take that into account?
Would you rather a band put together a really good 45 minute CD or put out an 80 minute CD with 35 minutes of filler? Just because there's space doesn't mean it *has* to be used. The Flogging Molly seems just about right at ~54 minutes - there's only so much punk-irish that I want in a given stretch. And increasingly, bands *are* using that extra space to throw in multimedia extras and the like.
And going to a new distribution and marketing business model will simply shift the jobs, not destroy them.
Please demonstrate why you think that the masses will shift to a new business model rather than continuing to use "free" methods that exist now.
"Gandhi didn't take British salt, he made his own." You equate an act of theft (stealing salt) with an act of copying (online sharing of music/movies). You do that again in your current post with the comparison of chop shops (theft) to copying.
Some of the people that do the copying at least admit that they're simply greedy. Others attempt to claim that they're part of some noble struggle. If Ghandi had used violent means within the system, he'd simply have been crushed and forgotten. He *won* by going outside the system without hurting anyone, and that's what he's remembered for. No matter how you choose to dress is up, illegal copying hurts artists. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter if a man is broke because someone refused to pay for physical services rendered (we'll say mowing the lawn with the homeowner's own equipment to make it simple) than if someone refused to pay for intellectual services rendered - the growling in their stomach doesn't care.
While I will grant you that most employees do not work this way
You didn't actually answer my question, so I'll take that as a no.
If I own a business, customers will come into my store, look at my stuff, and decide if it's worth buying. If they purchase it and find out it looked good but was really a turd, they'll request their money back.
In some cases. Some businesses will not accept returns that have been used, some will only exchange them for identical items in the case of defect. If I buy a bathing suit and decide after wearing it that red just really isn't my colour, most stores shouldn't take it back, nor wo
"Intellectual property" can be a fraud without copyright being illegitimate.
You're the one that made inflamatory statements using what you define as a "catch-all phrase" without ever defining it.
"Intellectual property" is a catch-all phrase that confounds several separate and distinct concepts into a single muddled idea and then attempts to shoehorn in existing thinking about real property by using confusing terminology.
Part of this is because we are facing a rapidly changing world where there are no established rules because technology is changing what we do and what we value in a way that's unprecendented by anything in the past.
I am saying that the "taking" analogy does not belong here.
My analogy was partially inspired by yesterday's Ghandi quote, and was aimed at the legions of pirates (oh oops, there's another loaded word. Would you prefer the equally unloaded "sharers"?) that equate their taking (look it up at dictionary.com if you really want to see a list of different emotional values the term can carry) advantage of other peoples' work. There's nothing revolutionary there - greed is an old, old value.
The analogy is this: If Ghandi had simply stolen the salt that his people needed, he'd have lost the war that he won. He completely went around the system and created his own (copying is *not* creation) and that's why he won. And that's what will win against the *IA - making your own *authorized* distributions of independent media.
There is a substantial difference, both in the underlying real actions and in terms of the law and morality. It disturbs me to see the penalties for copying becoming more like those for shoplifting.
You can dress up the actions of those that make unauthorized copies (unloaded enough for you?) in whatever sematic games you want, but trust me on this, it doesn't matter to the person who is disadvantaged by either action. A shopkeeper who is the victim of shoplifting is just as unable to feed his/her family as the musician who looses sales due to copying. No amount of word games that you play take away the fact that someone is gaining benefit from someone else's work without compensation. It doesn't matter if the copier would have bought the work if copying doesn't exist. They're still taking advantage of someone else.
Suppose I hire you to [insert some physical craft that you can do] that creates some custom physical object that would only be of interest to me that took two weeks of hard work to complete. Alternatively, suppose I hire you to do an analysis of my database that takes you two weeks to complete. In either case, would refusing to pay you for it leave you in a good position? Let's say the physical object was an intricately engraved version of my family tree that no one else would ever buy.
Whether you like it or not, the world is becoming increasingly abstract. IIRC, there's not enough paper money printed to cover what would happen if everyone wanted to convert their savings into a physical object. Do you view manipulation of the data that represents an individual's "wealth" as being a lesser crime than taking money out of their wallet? I personally think that many of the white collar criminals should be treated as harshly as if they mugged someone on the street - in many cases the damage they inflict is far greater than having your wallet taken. And yet, they never touch a physical object in the process of their crime.
attempting to go after me personally rather than stick to the issues is distracting...
So providing specific examples of my real world clients while showing that you support the forms of intellectual property that *you* believe in is distracting?
those of us who wish to share creative works more freely would do well to use "share and share alike" licenses
When it comes down to it, there really is no such thing as rights or property. The only thing that keeps someon
10.2.8 Mark I, if you care. It's part of why arrogant bastards such as myself dismiss Apple as being more of a toy rather than serious datacenter OS. Apple bundled several key patches (SSH and SSL IIRC) in the package update without providing them for 10.2.7.
I'm a relatively small fry in the computer world, but when my systems are even moderately heavy use, my bandwidth can be measured in 10s of MegeBytes per second. Having to accept a big patch that tweaks things all over the system (and as it turned out, happened to kill some people's ethernet drivers, amoung other serious problems) just to get key security software updated is unacceptable. Yes, I *could* compile the secured versions myself, but why should I pay $1K/unit for software support per year and have to compile mundane updates?
It also managed to modify something about 12" Powerbooks that caused Linux 2.4.19 on up to stop working, and Apple never could figure out what caused that. They swore up and down to me that nothing firmwarewise should have been modified.
SP2 broke a lot of poorly written software and confused some people because it automatically turned on the firewall. The companies that wrote the bad code (including MS with Office and the like) should be ashamed, but SP2 overall wasn't bad, and they released preview versions long ahead so that professionals could test their setups.
there is no legitimate option for me to throw my wallet behind Why should the entire creative corpus of our generation be controlled by a few companies
Would you care for a list of independent artists that are worth supporting? If you have the bandwidth to download media, there's tons of fantastic stuff that's not hard to find. Heck, E-music's gathered together hundreds of thousands of songs in high quality, DRM-free format that you can get for $0.25 each. ($10/month for 40 songs.) That doesn't seem outrageous to me.
Or RealRhapsody/Napster Pro (and others) will let you listen to any of 500,000+ songs on demand as much as you like for $10/month. (Granted, you need broadband to do so.) $0.33 cents per day to listen to as much music as your internet connection will handle is too unreasonable?
Why should... something as culturally pervasive as music be traded on a quid pro quo basis?
Because being a really good musician takes a good deal of time. Because the lifestyle of touring generally doesn't allow for a "real job" that provides things like a sustainable salary or health benefits. If you want something that's simply culturally pervasive and non-quid pro quo, chances are there's a bookstore somewhere near you where someone will play and sing to you just for the pleasure of it. They may do a fantastic job or they may not.
If your only measure of worth is pervasiveness, why should anything be compensated for? Food is certainly cultural pervasive and medical insurance is societally pervasive in many countries. The health insurance companies don't actually produce any physical goods - should the people that work for them not get paid?
Would you acccept a situation where you worked for someone for a year, and at the end of the year they decided if they felt your work was worth paying for [for the already completed tasks]?
I am greatly dissatisfied with the current state of affairs, there is no legitimate option for me to throw my wallet behind, so I am choosing the option which will, most likely, force the issue at some point and change the status quo
Supporting those that produce quality products outside of the "oligopoly" will send a far better message to the powers that be than ripping them off and will leave you with better music as well.
Slashdot Mirror
on important issues people care to look up the most, you're virtually guaranteed a balanced article.
Is that like how the Slashdot moderation results in a balanced set of views?
Anyway, I'm off to use my KILLER Apple dual G5 (which can totally blow away anything Intel makes) with OS X (the best, prettiest OS ever) to share the latest movies and music with everyone in the world. Then perhaps I'll use my iPod for a while.
It's still not feasible yet. As a note, I work doing streaming media. Actual streaming media will saturate most pipes with little effort - we use 250K as our lowest useful quality setting, and 50 connections at that speed works out to 10MegaBytes per second. And streaming is still very prone to glitches. Most of it uses UDP, so any kind of network problem can cause large amounts of loss.
Downloading a ~700MB file has its own problems. I don't know how most people interact with movies, but for me it tends to be a spur of the moment decision rather than something planned out in advance. Even with a reasonably good cable modem connection, I can drive to the video store, watch it, and return it in less time than it takes to download a Linux ISO. And while bandwidth is increasing, it still can't match the bandwidth of mini-dishes, albeit with the limitation of everyone getting the same content.
But it's getting there.
When I visited the Canadian Rockies, one thing that I noticed was that all of the informational displays in the parks were bi-lingual. On average, they were about the same size as what I'm used to in .us, meaning that they also contained about half as much information.
The easiest solution I see to this is to limit players to one character, per account, per credit card.
It's a nice idea, but replace it with billing name and mailing address rather than CC number - most big CC companies let you generate new numbers at will for online purchases.
What pre-knowledge do people have of mouse buttons? None. You know that right-clicking brings up options specific to the item the mouse is pointing to, not because it's obvious, but because you learned it.
As a 8 year old in 1985, I had no problem grasping the concept of two mice buttons on an Atari ST. Not everything in life is or should be intuitive. Ever drive a stick shift? The shifts in Izuzu trucks (as in the 20 foot box trucks you see everywhere) are *very* different than the stick you'll find on American cars. They aren't designed for particularly smart people (many light garbage trucks are built on the same frame) and yet all of the drivers manage to use them.
Control-click brings up a contextual menu
Control-click is no more (and quite possibly less) intuitive than right click - it's just a matter of what *you're* used to.
Many applications in many operating systems offer options only reachable from a right-click. These options are not visible on the screen, nor do they descend from anything marked as a menu. They're magical.
HUI guidlines show that humans work best with 7+/-2 options, and as such they recomend having no more than 7 options in each menu. Given how many things a computer can do, you quickly run out of menu space. Some things it makes sense to duplicate in many ways. For example, to go back in Mozilla, I can hit click and drag down to back, I can use the back button, I can choose back from the Go pull down menu, and even a few other ways. But some things make sense to only make available at certain times, and many people agree with Tog that mysterious greyed out options in menus is a bad thing. Right clicking on an image and being able to save it makes sense. Highlighting a few words and right clicking and being able to pop it right into a search menu makes sense. Having an option in a pull down menu that is greyed out most of the time is more likely to confuse people than not. Some things make sense to abstract out into limited use functions for specific uses or power users.
It means my Mom never has to call me to ask how to do something that's apparently a "secret" only for people who use computers on a daily basis.
One thing to keep in mind (from a narrow minded perspective of "The United States == everyone") is that the population that don't use computers on a daily basis is shrinking. The way that college students use computers as a integral part of their lives is completely different than 10 years ago. And even the ones who aren't technical manage to figure out how to use two mice buttons.
It's likely that this is a matter that we can just disagree on, but the core of my argument is this: Steve won't let me buy a 2+ button mouse with a Mac. Using the right button on a Mac brings up the context menu, so the built in support is there. 95% of the Mac owners I know have replaced their mice with multi-button/scroll wheel mice. And yet, Steve won't let his computers ship with them, wasting money and creating unneeded trash in landfills. And I'm a heavy laptop user who doesn't want to travel with a billion parts, so not having two buttons on my powerbooks (I have a 12" and a 17") is a real annoyance. Having two buttons means that you can map both of them to be the same. You can't map a single button to work as two.
It's symptomatic of the Steve idea that you should use the computer the way he tells you to, which is part of why I can't stand OS X for the most part. Apple deliberately broke the ability of third party apps to make Alt(or shall I say the key just to the left of shift)-Tab to work the way that 95%+ of the computers work. You could get addons up until 10.2.5 to change that, until they were broken. As someone who uses other platforms extensively, breaking my muscle memory is a really bad thing, and part of the reason that my Mac usage has dropped tremendously since that change.
The real question is this: if you need a second button on your mouse to
With the extra time they now had, they set about reorganizing their operation and making improvements that they had wanted to do for months.
Isn't it sad that today's generation of MBAs would see it as a good time to get rid of 10% of the workforce?
And if you were using a military system, you would have their private certificate authorities installed in your list of CAs. Why would the government pay large sums of money for certs (and place their reliability at the mercy of a private company) for their private systems when their intended audience for free? Many large enterprise environments use their own CAs for internal applications. Of course those CAs aren't going to be bundled in by MS or Mozilla.
And the assistance that's going on in Finland?
I have no firsthand experience with Finns. I do have fairly extensive experience with the 17-23 set in the US both in college environments and in the workplace. I've watched them slack off in classes, destroy things out of idle boredom, and drop trash on the ground because they're too lazy to walk an extra 15 feet out of their way to the trash can. I also see Indian and Chinese students excelling in the classes that many US citizens don't take because they're too hard/require too much effort, and in general, treat the education they're offered as a real priviledge. But the US students still expect to graduate and land a $40K+/year job.
It has mearly made it easier for individuals to become crimminals than previously available.
Like I said, people will often do what they think they can get away with, particularly if they don't have to see it hurt individuals.
As far as the other AC's comments on digital enabling artists to get away from the big companies, that's very true. However, from what I've seen, the vast majority of what goes on P2P networks is the same old stuff that the major companies have made. Run a search on a P2P network of choice and tell me how many results are returned for Usher, Maroon 5, and Nelly. Then tell me how many are returned for The Renderers, Spacetime Continuum, and Robert Fripp.
I think you'll also find that it's a very common human value to be far more tolerant of other people's problems if they don't see them. For example, if most people saw someone who was literally starving to death in their neighborhood, they would be likely to take some kind of action to try to save them. Starving Africans halfway around the world don't get the same consideration. Granted, there are contributions to various aid charities and awful music you can buy to support them, but when it comes down to it, most people spend *far* more on their personal comfort than on improving the world. How many thousands of people could have been granted life for the cost of the Nintendo DSes and Sony PSPs that have been sold this year?
There's also a large sense of empathy only with a group that you associate yourself with, which is why an earthquake that kills three US citizens gets far more coverage than one that kills thousands someplace else and why the Holocaust is far more known in the US than the Rape of Nanjing, which per day killed as many if not more.
The vast majority of file sharers that I've talked with use this to their advantage, by abstracting the damage they do as "just hurting big companies or rich people." Most of them are motivated by greed, pure and simple, by the concept of "I want therefore I deserve," and because they don't see the little person getting hurt, the human empathy doesn't kick in. The overwhelming sense of "deserving" is part of why the United States is going to be in a world of hurt in a few years, because the vast majority of today's youth/early adults have it and have been nothing but coddled since birth.
There are some universal values which everyone the world over would agree furthers humanity.
You'll find that virtually every major religion agrees that murder is bad, but that hasn't stopped people from going to war time and time again for the past couple thousand years.
Most religions and cultures have prohibitions against having sex with someone else's spouse, but that happens time and time again as well.
Humans are inherently weak (what's often termed original sin) and will very often do what they think they can get away with, hence rampant file "sharing."
People like to share, to spread what little wealth and happiness they have around.
There's nothing inherently wrong or evil with saying something is nice and wanting other people to experience the same pleasure. The problem is that many things that are worth sharing involve some kind of cost (this can include time - it's not just financial) to create. So I do my best to share with the world - I share with my friends through gifts, hosting dinners, taking them on trips, and so on. I share with the world through supporting charities. In both cases, I am limited in my sharing because I have a finite amount of time and money. Unauthorized file duplication, on the other hand, breaks the model because it still costs *someone* money and time to create but doesn't cost the "sharers" other than whatever their bandwidth costs.
Naturally those somebodies fight back just like a car dealership would fight back if someone tried to "share" the dealer's cars with their friends. And before someone jumps in to complain that intellectual and physical property are not the same, the ultimate point is that both someone that earns their living creating intellectual property and someone that creates physical property are just as broke at the end of the day if people take it without paying for it.
Chances are, the majority of the people that read this site make their living through intellectual property. It's just that they don't have to worry about people taking their work without permission because it's so specialized to their purpose that the world at large has no interest in it. Media makers aren't so lucky.
The bottom line is that when it ceases to be profitable, the quality content will go away and we'll be left with the pop-mass-marke
That, and there's a chance he installed a keylogger and/or fed the password file into a cracker, so now you have to determine which other systems might be tainted as well and do an analysis of each one as well. Not what most IT staff want to spend their weekends doing.
What a waste, every call on the land line is a telemarketer...about 6-10 a day.
At the very least, use it for some fun. Just get an answering machine without a ringer. Here's some ideas to get you started:
1. Record the little error tone that the phone company uses and get a woman to do a really pinched voice, "The number you have called, 555-1234, has been changed. The new number is 555-1234. Please note this change."
2. Get someone to do the voice of an elderly person, "Hello? Hello? You're goana have to speak up sonny, I'm a little hard of hearing. What? You're calling from who?" It helps if you can get a really long recording time.
3. I'm going to assume from your username that you're down in Texas. Just record something really unpleasant happening on a farm to a cow.
4. Fax handshake. For added style points, record a message and record a 300 baud modem sending it in plaintext ala Information Society.
5. Amusing excerpts - for a while I had bits of Deliverence or the introduction to Jesus Built My Hotrod as my message.
6. Same concept as 2, but get an actual little kid. "No, Daddy doesn't want to talk to you. I have blocks. I like them. I make..."
At the end of the month, play back the messages and see if you got any amusing responses. It would be more amusing to hack up a Linux telephony box so you could record their responses as the message plays, but that might be a little too much effort.
And you have the time to post on /.? Impressive.
/. ;)
Slow season, if you really want to know. I do college oriented stuff for the most part and the kids have all gone home and ski season hasn't started up yet. Live sound also has a lot of "hurry up and wait" stuff - you have to load in at X hour but can't soundcheck until Y and the show's at Z, leaving lots of dead time. Better venues now offer wireless or an ethernet drop.
Combine that with the girlfriend being out of town, and I spend a whole lot more time on
What is the arbitrary selection of a year?
Publish or perish. If you don't put out new stuff, people tend to forget you.
Reduce it to 20-30 cents a track, see that half that (minimum) goes to the artist
You do realize that given a 10 song average, you're proposing to pay the artists less than the labels you claim are so evil pay per CD, don't you?
This would be an excellent incentive not to distribute "filler", as it would just never get sold.
Again, bands generally don't set out to create filler. Some songs are better than others, sometimes the magic happens and sometimes it doesn't.
Getting great drum sounds is one of the things that sucks up massive amounts of studio time. Let's say getting the perfect general sound takes 8 hours of work - that can generally be used for all of the songs on an album. So if you do two songs, you need each to recoup four hours' worth of time. If you do twelve songs, it's only 30 minutes.
The "Everything must be a single!!!1!!" philosophy actually works against deeper artists as well. I have tons of music (that I bought because I liked the artist) that I didn't like at first, but further listens opened up the listener to the meaning. Sometimes that's taken months of listening. Pushing for the uber-single will just mean more Britneys and Backstreet Boys, not less.
If we move to a collective license/automatic builtin royalty tax model
Please list the national-level politicians who sucessfully push for higher taxes. Further, the only thing left to tax is bandwidth - physical media is largely obsolete. You'll get plenty of people such as my father who have no inclination to subsidize other people's taste in media. Most people will accept taxes subsidizing actual *needs* - police, health care, roads. Things such as music should be left to individuals to select an appropriate commercial enterprise that's appropriate for their level of use.
Creating one giant pool of money that's the same size despite usage (as compared to one that scales depending on use) only begs for problems. The moment you create some big pool, some scammer can bang out some noise, publish it as music, and then write a trojan that causes people's computers to "listen" to it.
I sure don't see "the masses" moving away from the current free methods voluntarily
The legal challenges have droped P2P use, and there's more and more legislation coming down the pipe. This is a *bad* thing, but it's what the consumers have brought upon themselves. In general, I favour less laws but more draconian enforcement of those that do exist.
me: Except that all of those plans always fail to work out reasonable ways to insure the artists get paid that don't either actually decrease indy artist's chances of getting paid
you: Actually, the builtin royalty model on cassette decks and VCR's worked just fine, so can you explain why it -wouldn't- work on CD burners?
It worked for the big corporations. The indys didn't do very well from it.
The reason it doesn't work well for indies is that if you do EFF proposed "Neilson ratings" to divy up income, you have a large chance of missing the smaller artists. Let's say you track 1 out of every thousand listeners for your income breakdown. Let's say 50 of those users are listen to Britney -
/var/db/netinfo/local.nidb/ holds the netinfo db in what is definitely not an easy to manipulate state. Witness this mess that used to be required just to change the IP of OS X Server 10.2. (Follow the background information link on that page for even more details of what the problem was.) And the text plist files still tend to have gobs of non-readable information in fields. For example, my dock settings have 6 different data fields filled with "AAAAAAFcAAIAAQdTdnI3QjMzAAAAAAAAAAAA" (and so on).
/etc/ are actually created at boot time from other configuration files, overwriting any changes you might have made to the /etc/ files. I suppose this is tolerable, if it's at least documented in each file so you know what's going on. (ie #WARNING! smb.conf will be overwritten with settings in /foo/baz at boot. Use bar to configure samba)
And some of the "traditional" unix configuration files in
I can't argue that the current system (of everything, not just movies) isn't broken, but I find your cavalier attitude that economic disparity should be adjusted by illegal and unethical activity.
... and go with what they know.
I love the way that right-wingers love to tar anybody who doesn't agree with their particular narrow brand of capitalism as (ominous background music) A COMMUNIST.
Gosh, that would be almost like labeling anyone who disagreed with you as a "right-winger," wouldn't it?
Unless their contribution is extreme they should not be paid so much that it endangers the democratic process.
Perhaps, but such a change should be across the board (not just targeting the movie industry), and because you suggest guerilla actions are reasonable until your planned utopia goes into effect, you must be willing to accept possible consequences upon yourself as well.
Me: never mind that the people on the lower rung are the ones who suffer, not the people at the top.
You: That will happen in any system but it is usually possible to create a more fair and just society.
Again, you suggested that piracy is a good way of evening the score. So let's oversimplify everything, and go to a magical world where piracy has reduced movie revenue by 1/3 and it's been applied across the board to everyone's salaries.
So Jane Doe, a big name star, goes from making $3 million per movie to $2 million per movie. John Gaffer goes from making $15,000 per movie to $10,000 per movie. They both make 3 movies each year. Jane now makes $3 million less per year, but still lives a lavish lifestyle with millions of dollars still coming in each year.
John, on the other hand, only makes $15,000 less per year, but is now barely able to scrape by (assuming he can even pay the bills at all at that point) because $30K/year doesn't go very far most places where movies are made.
It's mainly dictated by mindshare advertising where the studio oligopoly simply crowd out alternatives by the sheer quantity of advertising they put out.
The general public has always noted to not have overly impressive taste. Remember the quote about bread and circus? With today's alternative media, I can reach hundreds of thousands to millions of viewers through ads on likeminded websites and zines for the same budget as one big network primetime ad or a spread [so to speak] in Maxim. This has gotten *better*, not worse in the past few years.
People have only a limited number of hours in the day
From what I can tell (haven't had TV signal in years and have limited exposure to mass media), the biggest [money making] films with the big stars actually spend less money on advertising than the ones without the big stars. Titanic spread by word of mouth, not constant advertising. Advertising generally only pays off on the first weekend of a movie's showing - witness how truly terrible films can have a good opening weekend but rapidly drop off compared to movies that people enjoy and tell their friends about. The problem is that most people have terrible taste, hence the Mummy films and Survivor's popularity.
Fact is, my government is democratically elected. I have no problem with them modifying the copyright law they, as my representative, created in the first place to make a more just society, simply because it is assigning too many rewards to one small section of society for little return to the rest of society.
First [in your initial reply to me] you stated that individuals should violate those laws in order to even the balance, and now you start trumpeting the glory of democracy. Do you only view "democracy" as good when it agrees with your viewpoints? You seem to be arguing that individuals can disregard laws that they don't believe are right (which, granted, is a very common view in the US), but is a very unpleasant moral state to live in.
The fact is,
Why is it that only some users will get a PHP that tries to defend against attacks?
One of the things that PHP has going for it is that it's easy to write. The downside is that it's easy for people who don't know programming or security designs to write code, and that they've written some big, popular applications which Hardened-PHP breaks, hence why it hasn't been merged in.
I must correct myself - in the past few months they fixed softwareupdate to allow full remote access. My rep had assured me that such a change would not happen until 10.4. My apologies.
Yeah, get back to me when it displays the click through license agreement in the shell rather than sitting there on some co-loed screen miles away. What makes it even better is that the softwareupdate client doesn't give any indication of what it's waiting for, so if you don't know what's going on you think the application's hung.
Yeah, I also work with TeraBytes of data, walk through a data center with at least a dozen XServeRAIDs on a regular basis, and my Apple rep has asked if I'd like to evaluate sometime in the Spring.
Whether or not Apple makes a nice piece of storage kit doesn't have much to with whether or not they have some poor practices with their software.
Which OS is Oracle using with their XServe RAIDs?
Right, they issued a bad point release, so that makes the OS a non-datacenter-OS?
No, they refused to release important security updates that are key to many datacenter applications (SSH and SSL) in any form other than the point release. Forcing someone to upgrade hundreds to thousands of things around the entire OS in order to fix critical security flaws is begging for problems and is a very_bad_idea (tm). And as it happens, a number of people got bitten by that. If my server does foo, I don't care if applications bar and baz have been improved nor do I want the latest version of Safari (now with better whatever). I expect to put a server into the rack and update only what is necessary to the task it does until the point it get decomissioned because every unneeded change to other software and library has the potential to cause problems.
Have you ever done patch validation for a government agency or major financial institute?
The magic is in what the vendors *do* about it.
I'm not impressed by fanboyism any more than I am by bouncy icons. After 10.2.8 Mark I, myself and a number of other people took them to task over the bundling of security updates to the bundling issue and they actually changed. But it took a lot of discussion to find people that could even appreciate the point. Apple is a cult of personality that's driven by marketing rather than engineering.
You *still* can't update a system via ssh. I don't like having to have a Mac with the remote desktop software to update my co-loed servers. I'm always within an arm's reach of SSH. Nor can you fully automate updating.
You can't integrate XServes in with many existing datacenters because the KVMs don't support USB. When you have KVM infrastructure that spans several floors and costs in the tens of thousands, you don't have the option of ripping it all because Steve decided legacy ports were bad.
Nor can you fit them in some existing racks, because marketing decided that 1 rackspace would be the only size they build, which means it's quite deep compared to other units. Most 1 rackspace Opterons are that deep as well, but I have the option of getting a shallower 2+ rackspace unit. Let's not forget the "brush against them and the pop out" ejectable drives of the G4 Xserves.
The entire idea of using binary configuration files is one that I consider to be another really bad one as well.
Wow. It's kind of like reading the Communist Manifesto, if Karl Marx had been dropped on his head a lot as a baby.
To summarize, you feel that it's economically unfair for some people to get paid more than others, so the solution is for unrelated people to screw over everyone in the industry, never mind that the people on the lower rung are the ones who suffer, not the people at the top.
Riiiiiggghhhhttttttttt.....
It is simply not reasonable that that a small number of people (in particular, the actors) should get millions of dollars for a few hours of at best semi-skilled work.
Why not? That's dictated by the public, not by the studios. They certainly don't want to pay $BIGNAME $20 Mil. per movie, but the public shows time and time again that they'll go to any piece of drek with said $BIGNAME in it. That's a failure of public taste, not of the industry. I'd say there are actually more quality movies being created now compared to anytime in the past. It's easy to look at the past and think that their movies were better, but that's because the bad ones have faded from history and use and only the decent to good ones remain. Cable, the internet, and high quality, low cost video equipment actually mean that film makers can do more with less and get better exposure than anytime before.
Most actors don't get paid anywhere near that though, and given that an actor might get one good part every two or three years, getting $150,000 for a part isn't that unreasonable if they're a good actor. And trust me, a good (or great) actor spends far more than "a few hours" on the part.
In these circumstances I don't have much problem with people evening the score.
I would say that the economic disparity that the first world visits upon the third world is a far worse situation. Would you be cool with the third world looting your town to "even the score?"
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
So you want to punish sucess? Do you support this pseudo-communistic theory across the board, or just in things that don't affect you?
Just for the record, how much do you make per year?
Because, again, they are selling a lousy product (CD's which might contain one or two "radio songs" and the rest filler, and 45 minutes worth of music on a CD which we well know can hold about 80), at an inflated price.
You don't think the rapid decline in CD sales since 1999 has *anything* to do with mp3s? I live in a college town, and I've witnessed both CD stores shrink, despite the fact that both of them carry high quality, off the beaten path CDs, and know for a fact that most of the students have gigabyte after gigabyte of mp3s. (In case you're wondering, I work full time for the networking department at a major college and full time in the music industry as well.)
Which way do you want it? Most bands can't write 80 minutes of great music in one year. To be honest, there are some bands that just write some fluff songs, but very few of the big-but-not-huge bands set out to write _bad_ songs to record. What turns out to be a hit or popular can be a surprise to the band and the label.
Again, what I listen to is off the beaten path, but my current favourite recent CD is Flogging Molly's Within a Mile of Home, which I suspect is released by an RIAA member. There's a couple songs on it that I'm not wild about, but I wouldn't call it filler, just personal taste. And I find it cool that an album that prominantly features the accordian is getting promoted in places like Target and Walmart.
If you only want one or two songs, are you willing to pay more for them than you would per track for a full CD? Economy of scale comes in on recording too. It's more expensive (per track) to record one song than five than ten. Are you willing to take that into account?
Would you rather a band put together a really good 45 minute CD or put out an 80 minute CD with 35 minutes of filler? Just because there's space doesn't mean it *has* to be used. The Flogging Molly seems just about right at ~54 minutes - there's only so much punk-irish that I want in a given stretch. And increasingly, bands *are* using that extra space to throw in multimedia extras and the like.
And going to a new distribution and marketing business model will simply shift the jobs, not destroy them.
Please demonstrate why you think that the masses will shift to a new business model rather than continuing to use "free" methods that exist now.
"Gandhi didn't take British salt, he made his own." You equate an act of theft (stealing salt) with an act of copying (online sharing of music/movies). You do that again in your current post with the comparison of chop shops (theft) to copying.
Some of the people that do the copying at least admit that they're simply greedy. Others attempt to claim that they're part of some noble struggle. If Ghandi had used violent means within the system, he'd simply have been crushed and forgotten. He *won* by going outside the system without hurting anyone, and that's what he's remembered for. No matter how you choose to dress is up, illegal copying hurts artists. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter if a man is broke because someone refused to pay for physical services rendered (we'll say mowing the lawn with the homeowner's own equipment to make it simple) than if someone refused to pay for intellectual services rendered - the growling in their stomach doesn't care.
While I will grant you that most employees do not work this way
You didn't actually answer my question, so I'll take that as a no.
If I own a business, customers will come into my store, look at my stuff, and decide if it's worth buying. If they purchase it and find out it looked good but was really a turd, they'll request their money back.
In some cases. Some businesses will not accept returns that have been used, some will only exchange them for identical items in the case of defect. If I buy a bathing suit and decide after wearing it that red just really isn't my colour, most stores shouldn't take it back, nor wo
"Intellectual property" can be a fraud without copyright being illegitimate.
You're the one that made inflamatory statements using what you define as a "catch-all phrase" without ever defining it.
"Intellectual property" is a catch-all phrase that confounds several separate and distinct concepts into a single muddled idea and then attempts to shoehorn in existing thinking about real property by using confusing terminology.
Part of this is because we are facing a rapidly changing world where there are no established rules because technology is changing what we do and what we value in a way that's unprecendented by anything in the past.
I am saying that the "taking" analogy does not belong here.
My analogy was partially inspired by yesterday's Ghandi quote, and was aimed at the legions of pirates (oh oops, there's another loaded word. Would you prefer the equally unloaded "sharers"?) that equate their taking (look it up at dictionary.com if you really want to see a list of different emotional values the term can carry) advantage of other peoples' work. There's nothing revolutionary there - greed is an old, old value.
The analogy is this: If Ghandi had simply stolen the salt that his people needed, he'd have lost the war that he won. He completely went around the system and created his own (copying is *not* creation) and that's why he won. And that's what will win against the *IA - making your own *authorized* distributions of independent media.
There is a substantial difference, both in the underlying real actions and in terms of the law and morality. It disturbs me to see the penalties for copying becoming more like those for shoplifting.
You can dress up the actions of those that make unauthorized copies (unloaded enough for you?) in whatever sematic games you want, but trust me on this, it doesn't matter to the person who is disadvantaged by either action. A shopkeeper who is the victim of shoplifting is just as unable to feed his/her family as the musician who looses sales due to copying. No amount of word games that you play take away the fact that someone is gaining benefit from someone else's work without compensation. It doesn't matter if the copier would have bought the work if copying doesn't exist. They're still taking advantage of someone else.
Suppose I hire you to [insert some physical craft that you can do] that creates some custom physical object that would only be of interest to me that took two weeks of hard work to complete. Alternatively, suppose I hire you to do an analysis of my database that takes you two weeks to complete. In either case, would refusing to pay you for it leave you in a good position? Let's say the physical object was an intricately engraved version of my family tree that no one else would ever buy.
Whether you like it or not, the world is becoming increasingly abstract. IIRC, there's not enough paper money printed to cover what would happen if everyone wanted to convert their savings into a physical object. Do you view manipulation of the data that represents an individual's "wealth" as being a lesser crime than taking money out of their wallet? I personally think that many of the white collar criminals should be treated as harshly as if they mugged someone on the street - in many cases the damage they inflict is far greater than having your wallet taken. And yet, they never touch a physical object in the process of their crime.
attempting to go after me personally rather than stick to the issues is distracting...
So providing specific examples of my real world clients while showing that you support the forms of intellectual property that *you* believe in is distracting?
those of us who wish to share creative works more freely would do well to use "share and share alike" licenses
When it comes down to it, there really is no such thing as rights or property. The only thing that keeps someon
where z=verbose and i=ignore case
FYI, -a=Process a binary file as if it were text.
I don't know which version of grep you were using, but under Cygwin, -z certainly isn't the verbose play.
10.2.8 Mark I, if you care. It's part of why arrogant bastards such as myself dismiss Apple as being more of a toy rather than serious datacenter OS. Apple bundled several key patches (SSH and SSL IIRC) in the package update without providing them for 10.2.7.
I'm a relatively small fry in the computer world, but when my systems are even moderately heavy use, my bandwidth can be measured in 10s of MegeBytes per second. Having to accept a big patch that tweaks things all over the system (and as it turned out, happened to kill some people's ethernet drivers, amoung other serious problems) just to get key security software updated is unacceptable. Yes, I *could* compile the secured versions myself, but why should I pay $1K/unit for software support per year and have to compile mundane updates?
It also managed to modify something about 12" Powerbooks that caused Linux 2.4.19 on up to stop working, and Apple never could figure out what caused that. They swore up and down to me that nothing firmwarewise should have been modified.
SP2 broke a lot of poorly written software and confused some people because it automatically turned on the firewall. The companies that wrote the bad code (including MS with Office and the like) should be ashamed, but SP2 overall wasn't bad, and they released preview versions long ahead so that professionals could test their setups.
there is no legitimate option for me to throw my wallet behind
... something as culturally pervasive as music be traded on a quid pro quo basis?
Why should the entire creative corpus of our generation be controlled by a few companies
Would you care for a list of independent artists that are worth supporting? If you have the bandwidth to download media, there's tons of fantastic stuff that's not hard to find. Heck, E-music's gathered together hundreds of thousands of songs in high quality, DRM-free format that you can get for $0.25 each. ($10/month for 40 songs.) That doesn't seem outrageous to me.
Or RealRhapsody/Napster Pro (and others) will let you listen to any of 500,000+ songs on demand as much as you like for $10/month. (Granted, you need broadband to do so.) $0.33 cents per day to listen to as much music as your internet connection will handle is too unreasonable?
Why should
Because being a really good musician takes a good deal of time. Because the lifestyle of touring generally doesn't allow for a "real job" that provides things like a sustainable salary or health benefits. If you want something that's simply culturally pervasive and non-quid pro quo, chances are there's a bookstore somewhere near you where someone will play and sing to you just for the pleasure of it. They may do a fantastic job or they may not.
If your only measure of worth is pervasiveness, why should anything be compensated for? Food is certainly cultural pervasive and medical insurance is societally pervasive in many countries. The health insurance companies don't actually produce any physical goods - should the people that work for them not get paid?
Would you acccept a situation where you worked for someone for a year, and at the end of the year they decided if they felt your work was worth paying for [for the already completed tasks]?
I am greatly dissatisfied with the current state of affairs, there is no legitimate option for me to throw my wallet behind, so I am choosing the option which will, most likely, force the issue at some point and change the status quo
Supporting those that produce quality products outside of the "oligopoly" will send a far better message to the powers that be than ripping them off and will leave you with better music as well.