That's been an open forum for e-prints for at least 10 years, and most scientists get their e-prints from there, at least in the disciplines which are covered. The curious thing is they've no comparable features which allow editing. I don't know why this can't be organized over the net, since few editors actually live in a centralized place even now. Perhaps there hasn't been a large enough demand for "moderation" at Los Alamos.
Hmm. How easy it is for you to call on the gods of white guilt as a substitute to studying history.
Two bit psychology aside, let me clarify my point, which has less to do with guilt than with a practical desire not to see more people killed.
The biggest hole in the "Vietnam, Iran, Iraq, etc..." guilt trips has been if America really did set them up as their puppet government then they would have no need to bite the hand that fed them.
In most cases they don't "bite the hand" that feeds them. During the height of Sukarno's purges, when that 500,000 were killed, the U.S. was ecstatic. The victims were mostly leftists, or the poor living in regions politically opposed to Sukarno's program. Indeed, we (the CIA) supplied him with lists of people to kill, and the US govt. sent sufficient military aid to make sure the job was done. No hand was bitten, except that of the Indonesian opposition parties, which were destroyed.
The dictatorship of Marcos in the phillipines also posed no problems for US, as (vice-president) Bush toasted him, saying "The U.S. admires your democratic values." No hand was bit there, either.
In Vietnam, we overthrew the regime because we wanted someone who would be more tough than Diem. His successors indeed took a harder line, halting land reform, executing political enemies, and raping the countryside in a way which guaranteed victory to the north. Do you really think the trouble was that we weren't involved enough in Vietnam?
In Iran, we brought back the hated Shah and imposed such a brutal regime on the hapless country that the Islamic revolt is still bearing bitter fruits. Since all democratic opposition was killed, it was natural that the only institution strong enough to challenge the shah was the Islamic church. Not a foregone eventuality, but certainly a likely one.
Let me spell it out for you. Our interventions were not altruistic. They were done to support unpopular regimes through terror. When the terror succeeded (as in Indonesia), we cheered. When our terror regimes failed (as in vietnam and iran), a more radical govt. (often, not always) took over. The reason is that by killing or scaring off legitimate political opposition, the only ones left to replace the unpopular regime are the most fanatical elements of the opposition. In the phillipines, when our strong man was ousted in a fairly bloodless way, a decent regime replaced it. In afghanistan, after 10 years of fighting, the only ones left standing were fanatics. this is why your self-righteous argument is so dangerous. By calling for more aggressive intervention you are significantly increasing the likelihood of creating another monster after whatever puppet we put into place will fall. The pattern is the same wether we send in massive troops or wage war covertly. The distinction of covert/open intervention is irrelevent. What matters most is the level of force used and how many public institutions are destroyed.
And so the outcome of the "tough-line" is almost never good. Slaughter if we succeed, slaughter if we fail. That's why some of us are motivated to call for restraint instead of recklessly bombing and occupying a destitute nation.
Also, I can add some context to the quote. Hearken back to WWI. Here was America, with as many or more citizens of german descent than british, and we were generally wary of taking sides in European wars. Then, within a very short time, all of the elites in the U.S. and most of the populace becomes raving warmongers, renaming hamburgers to "victory burgers" -- or some such, to avoid the name "Hamburg". Picturs of Kaiser Wilhelm with fangs, slobbering green ooze posted on public buildings. It was a masterpiece of British propagnda which whipped the nation into a frenzy and brought us into the war. This made an impression on a lot of people, including Hitler, who realized the power of p.r. and vowed that the next war would not be lost because Germany's propaganda was inferior to that of Britain.
It think this quote should be trotted out and paraded next to all of the presidentail platitudes about good and evil, "america is a shining beacon of light, and the darkness hates the light", etc. Let people decide which quote seems more truthful.
Like Germany and Japan after wwII? They are allies now, but we didn't need to set up our own Government. We also advised in the setting up governments in Mexico, Panama, Niceragua and the Phillipines.
We also set up our own governments in Iran (The Shah--remember S.A.V.A.K.?), Chile (Pinochet--He who made "Mothers of the dissappeared" possible), Guatemala (a couple of times, beneficent dictator killed 200,000), El Salvador, Columbia, Cuba (twice, last time creating the stable government of Batista), Mexico, Haiti (three times), Argentina, Indonesia (Sukarno --killed 500,000), Vietnam (while the fun lasted), carved a piece from China, Panama (we created that country, then invaded it later), Liberia, and that bastion of peace and plenty known as Namibia.
We also played proxy war games in Laos (The Plain of Jars comes to mind), Russia (which we invaded in 1918), Greece (succeeded in killing tens of thousands and delayed democracy there until the 70's), Peru, Cambodia, and of course, Israel.
So, trolling your comment might be but it has a correct point mixed with an incorrect point. Namely, some countries (namely those which were already developed before tasting our goodness) have turned out ok after our interventions, while most nations don't fare so well. Which category do you think Afghanistan would fall into? Do you think they might have a reason to be wary of our generosity?
Great work, moderator(s). If it's not banging the drums for war, it's flamebait. The above post is a well-articulated call for moderation. Too bad it didn't get the moderation it deserved.
uh..but why are you posting and surfing to slashdot? What did you expect to see here, in this thread? I can understand a person in mourning, but your emotion-fascism is offtopic and hypocritical.
..looking at the latest levels of consumer debt, and from what I know of college-age persons' spending patterns, they're milking this demographic for about all it's worth. The music industry is still a huge market. There's no clouds on the horizon..
unless they were to suddenly stop investing in developing their artists, and turn to the latest marketing virus to sell low shelf life songs (unlimited free listening is a good quality filter: no need to buy that song you so easily sicken of hearing)
unless they were to start mistreating or pissing of their artists, thereby encouraging them to search for other, more independent distribution channels..
unless they were to, say, sit on their hands for a decade and produce inferior firmware music formats, thereby lessening the quality differential of physical vs. available free media...
unless they, due to consolidation or collusion keep prices for their firmware products artificially high, decreasing the incenstive to pay..
hmm.. The whole business plan changes, when technology obviates a monopoly.
attacking someone for misusing a word, without evidence, and then clearly misusing the same word yourself does not make that mensa card shine any brighter.
Though a self avowed "student of human nature," you obviously fail to anticipate the inevitable howls of laughter resulting from your protests of mensa membership. Rather, you apparently think it (along with a crude ad hominem) will add to your credibility.
I think I speak for many here who view Mensa with somewhat less respect than The Book of the Month Club. More on the level of The Daughters of the American Revolution.
A lot of people don't buy the software they use. It comes bundled, or pre-installed on their workstation. Decision makers often buy entire packages for price benefit, or because of corporate alliances. Or maybe they don't feel that they have an alternative in choosing which software to buy. Often the software they use is legacy code for which few updates are available. Maybe they don't know better (but, when infected, can still launch an attack on someone else's machine).
It's like buying a house. Maybe you think you should hire an independent structural engineer to assess the stress-tolerance of your beams. And someone else to take soil samples from your lawn. But people expect a certain amount of functionality and safety implicit in most products they buy. They spend their time focusing on things like location, # of rooms, (i.e. features) and assume that, say, the copper plumbing isn't polluting their drinking water.
How software makers, unique among all industries, excuse themselves from these types of "implied warrantees" is beyond me.
Said in a different way, if one script kiddie in Bantustan-Land can wreck billions of dollars in damage and make life hell for tens of thousands of sysadmins, then you have a system where an end user can type rm -r. Sure, they're to blame for pressing a button and blowing up the world. But it's still a design flaw.
But it's sorta like outfitting a group of 8 year olds with scissors and spray cans, and then letting them loose in the Louvre. Sure, you can punish 'em after the fact, but you can't punish them enough. Not for something like a worldwide virus.
I think it's time we rebel against this UCITA crap, and start demanding some security in our software products. It's like safety, there are some things you can't disclaim with a shrinkwrap license. Here in California, there are minimum standards that buildings must satisfy in case of earthquakes. Becasue the earthquakes are gonna happen, and it's kinda hollow looking for someone to sue after the fact. Why not have some minimal security standards which software vendors cannot exclude themselves from? I agree it's a bit hairy and needs to be done right, but I think it's a much better way to go then the route of arresting people for scanning ports or owning mutli-use software.
First, I think Salon is pretty cool. I frequently surf to the front page. Less frequently to the articles. I like it, but not enough to contribute. Why? Because the portal I *do* contribute to is znet. I actually feel passionately about the material on there, and I want them to succeed. Even though they have never had any ads. But zmag is a niche market, with about a million hits a month. Big enough, but not in the Salon category. I think this is Salon's problem: they want to be both a mass media portal, as well as sufficiently "alternative" to convince their advocates to pay. But you can't be both. I think Salon has recruited about as many paying subscribers as they're gonna get, which is quite a lot for a niche player, but not enough for a major media franchise. They want to be both. They want to be the "New Yorker" of the net. But even the New Yorker has been bleeding red ink, and I don't the economics of the net can sustain this.
There are simply too many other destinations which offer poeple exactly what they want in the way of their own personal hot button issues. It's these issues that make people excited enough to fork out the dough. But by definition, all of those sites are small.
The shortage of choice and a more uniform culture which allowed publications like the Atlantic and The New Yorker to thrive in the past will not be repeated on the net.
Although it's probably best not taking an ethical standpoint when the so-called protest against 15c for artists usually seems to involve not giving them even that. Live performances are certainly better, though sadly it's most often expressed as "it's okay to steal music because they don't make much off CDs anyway, and they all make their money in live performances which I don't plan on seeing but if I wanted to I might, and the ones who don't tour just aren't good enough anyway."
Well, this is a straw man argument. In all actuality, it requires a good deal of gall to be an apologist for the expansion of the record labels' powers, especially if one does so in the name of the musicians they have been cheating for years. But in all fairness, this is not your argument. Your argument, as I see it, is as follows:
1. listening to music in an "unlicensed" manner is theft.
2. If people do this, musicians will not get paid.
ergo,
3. Napster users are selfish individuals who are screwing artists out of their livelihoods.
My argument, which you don't seem to understand, or at least refuse to address:
The limited rights afforded copyright owners (who are generally *not* musicians) are too broad. They were not designed to apply to individuals, rather to large publishers. They should not apply to individuals engaged in non-commercial activities at all.
The second sentence is a historical fact. Enter the internet. Now we have before us two possibilities. Record companies specialize in providing marketing services, and selling high-quality physical reproductions of music/video for profits. Their income is derived from their distribution/promotional network, as well the actual physical media that enthusiasts will buy. This is still, for the most part, the world we live in today. No artists are starving because of napster. Britney spears still gets to shit on a solid gold toilet even though her mp3's have filled millions of hard drives. Music survives just fine, with the possibility of
*some* (as yet, unnoticed) decrease in revenue due to the presence of free lower quality reproductions. You get to keep linux, your unencumbered hard drive, and contract rights. You are not monitored. When you buy something you own it. Millions get to enjoy music they could otherwise not afford (yes, there will still be good music. If there are fewer mega-mega stars, there might be room enough for even more good music. REM will make a million a year instead of 20. Most musicians will still get 0 dollars from record sales.).
Here is option 2. The media companies see napster and think "people are enjoying *our* music without paying us! We are being robbed!" IP rights continue to mushroom. Enough zealots cry "theft" enough times that they actually come to believe making a copy of something is the moral equivalent of stealing it. Or at least those in power do so. Hard drives, operating systems, telephone lines are installed with monitoring equipment. The traditional rights of first sale, limits on contract law, free speech rights are strongly curtailed. You see, people have a very strong desire to share with others something which is, to them at least free. And they'll do it unless extreme pressures are applied to them. It's this love of music thing. But if you get your way, the measures applied will be extreme indeed. They already are extreme. Unlike your doomsday scenario, my scenario is unfolding before us. People no longer "buy" they "license" for a limited time, the enjoyment of music, books, videos. UCITA is passed. Mandatory "copy-protection" is installed. People are monitored. Then comes the strong price discrimination, which will require the undermining of more civil rights.
Now, there are some of us who think the second option is not worth it. Especially since the record companies have a sorry history of supporting musicians in the past, and, finally, no song is worth the kind of legislation outlined in Clinton's whitepaper and now coming in the form of the WIPO treaties, DMCA, UCITA and other acts. The most ironic thing is that option 2, which is blatantly a power/cash grab by the content owners, is being justified in the name of musicians By apparantly intelligent people such as yourself. This scares me to no end. And you guys, with your digital police and cries of "theft!" "law and order" actually think you are on some moral high ground. Why not spend a little time thinking about the consequences of your rhetoric? Either it's theft, or its not. If it is, then the content owners will get federal remedies. Why not read the legislation and whitepapers which have been passed or are about to pass? For more info about the economic and legal analysis of your presupposition, look here (http://www.vanderbilt.edu/Law/lawreview/vol536/bo yle.pdf).
So, I hope I've made my point. The most important issue of the coming decade is to what degree the AOL/Time-Warner/bertelsmannAG/megaCorp crowd can impose restrictions on the praiseworthy, human, healthy desire to share with others a good with 0 marginal cost. On the one side are those who want to be able to write free software, those who wish to let others have a copy of their music, librarians, and those who believe in privacy. On the other is the megacorps who are not trying to survive or "pay their bills", but rather they seek to capture a market which does not yet belong to them. Not by offering a cheaper, more convenient alternative, but with the whip of government decrees. You're on the worng side of this one.
Why should someone buy a CD if they don't need a CD?
If I buy a CD, My $15 is divided up as follows:
$6.00 to retail store
$1.00 to manufacturer
$2.00 for a lot of shipping
$3.00 for marketing
$3.85 for the record company
$0.15 for the musician
(All figures yanked from my somewhat informed ass)
This is what you call "supporting the musician"? I'd rather spend my music dollar on a live performance, thank you, which is what I do now.
Again, why should I buy the cd if I don't want it?
It seems you'd rather resort to name calling, since you are unable to think of a rational reason to justify such a transaction. I don't blame you. With such an insane business model, you have been reduced to attacking the ethics of those who don't want to spend $15, in order to give 15 cents to an artist. It's like the saddlegear makers attacking the automakers, claiming the wellfare of the horses will be endangered if people stop buying their spurs. $15 for good sound quality may make sense, but to support the artist? Please.
You are missing a great deal. That's ok, though, since 19th Century music is pretty good. So is painting, and you need not venture out into the world of Kokoschka and Chagall if you don't want to.
I once asked a musician friend of mine whether he kept up with the newer stuff (he was in his early thirties at the time, circa 1995). He said yes, that it required more work as he got older, but that he still found enough gems to make it worthwhile. He said that recently -- remember this was 5 yrs ago - he "discovered" Radiohead's The Bends, Talk-Talk's laughingstock, and Girls Against Boy's Venus Luxor No. 9, Baby. At the time, I was too broke to take a chance on unknown CD's, but if Napster would have been around, I could have enjoyed these bands for an even longer time.
Perhaps you should be glad for Napster and it's successors. They make the task of discovering new music easier for those of us who are now getting older. I know that it, as well as gnutella, has certainly added great pleasure to my life.
This is what the record companies didn't count on. As we gaze at Napster's latest thrashing about, let's remember that it wasn't "selfishness" or "criminal hacking" which gave us file sharing. It was sheer love of music.
What you've just said is true, obvious, and irrelevent to the discussion at hand. In fact, it misses the whole point of the GPL, which does not envision a society consisting only of hackers who compile and modify code. In my experience, this is the biggest misconception of the GPL among the slashdot-type crowd.
The main harm committed here is to prevent another business from taking Microtest's (and now Xstore's) software, modifying it (say by improving the GUI, fixing bugs, getting a newer version of Apache) and then selling this version in their own embedded device. By taking GPL software, conceiling the fact that they've done so, and aparently shoddily throwing it together, Microtest managed to gain an advantage in time-to-market or development costs over possible competitors -- competitors who decided to "play fair" and develop their own technology or pay licensing fees.
You, as a purchaser of turn-key products, are hurt only indirectly.
More generally, the free software movement is hurt, in that one of it's core arguments is that software should be freely improved and reused, and that this is ultimately a more efficient and better way of doing business. By violating the GPL, distributors of proprietary software show they want these benefits but are not willing to extend them to others. If they are not forced to share their modifications, then there will be less free software for others to use.
Finally, there are some who might want to make changes to Microtest code themselves (say the company goes out business, or is bought by a parent firm with lousy tech support, or are late in providing a patch, or their manuals are crap, etc.) You might argue that they can do this even now, but they wont be able to share their improvements with anyone else for fear of being sued by Xstore for IP violations. These people are also hurt.
They may own the transmitter and physical plant, but they don't own the airways. Exclusive licenses (not deeds) to use the airways were given away by the government to businesses which pledged to use them for the public good.
The airways are a public asset, and without a government enforced monopoly, clear channel would find its physical properties pretty much worthless.
Because of that, I think this is censorship, and may be illegal (if we had any decent courts left). Especially the part about banning anti-war songs. That's political speech and should enjoy the highest protections. Especially and primarily when we are deciding wether or not to take military action.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder how many times he gets called a communist/socialist/radical/luddite for advocating for the public domain..
Also, anyone know of any newsletters, good websites to keep track of IP stuff? The best place I've found is james-boyle.com.
If they pull this off, hopefully others will follow the example.
Have you ever surfed to xxx.lanl.gov?
That's been an open forum for e-prints for at least 10 years, and most scientists get their e-prints from there, at least in the disciplines which are covered. The curious thing is they've no comparable features which allow editing. I don't know why this can't be organized over the net, since few editors actually live in a centralized place even now. Perhaps there hasn't been a large enough demand for "moderation" at Los Alamos.
Hmm. How easy it is for you to call on the gods of white guilt as a substitute to studying history.
Two bit psychology aside, let me clarify my point, which has less to do with guilt than with a practical desire not to see more people killed.
The biggest hole in the "Vietnam, Iran, Iraq, etc..." guilt trips has been if America really did set them up as their puppet government then they would have no need to bite the hand that fed them.
In most cases they don't "bite the hand" that feeds them. During the height of Sukarno's purges, when that 500,000 were killed, the U.S. was ecstatic. The victims were mostly leftists, or the poor living in regions politically opposed to Sukarno's program. Indeed, we (the CIA) supplied him with lists of people to kill, and the US govt. sent sufficient military aid to make sure the job was done. No hand was bitten, except that of the Indonesian opposition parties, which were destroyed.
The dictatorship of Marcos in the phillipines also posed no problems for US, as (vice-president) Bush toasted him, saying "The U.S. admires your democratic values." No hand was bit there, either.
In Vietnam, we overthrew the regime because we wanted someone who would be more tough than Diem. His successors indeed took a harder line, halting land reform, executing political enemies, and raping the countryside in a way which guaranteed victory to the north. Do you really think the trouble was that we weren't involved enough in Vietnam?
In Iran, we brought back the hated Shah and imposed such a brutal regime on the hapless country that the Islamic revolt is still bearing bitter fruits. Since all democratic opposition was killed, it was natural that the only institution strong enough to challenge the shah was the Islamic church. Not a foregone eventuality, but certainly a likely one.
Let me spell it out for you. Our interventions were not altruistic. They were done to support unpopular regimes through terror. When the terror succeeded (as in Indonesia), we cheered. When our terror regimes failed (as in vietnam and iran), a more radical govt. (often, not always) took over. The reason is that by killing or scaring off legitimate political opposition, the only ones left to replace the unpopular regime are the most fanatical elements of the opposition. In the phillipines, when our strong man was ousted in a fairly bloodless way, a decent regime replaced it. In afghanistan, after 10 years of fighting, the only ones left standing were fanatics. this is why your self-righteous argument is so dangerous. By calling for more aggressive intervention you are significantly increasing the likelihood of creating another monster after whatever puppet we put into place will fall. The pattern is the same wether we send in massive troops or wage war covertly. The distinction of covert/open intervention is irrelevent. What matters most is the level of force used and how many public institutions are destroyed.
And so the outcome of the "tough-line" is almost never good. Slaughter if we succeed, slaughter if we fail. That's why some of us are motivated to call for restraint instead of recklessly bombing and occupying a destitute nation.
..it can't be "overrated" with a score of 0.
Also, I can add some context to the quote. Hearken back to WWI. Here was America, with as many or more citizens of german descent than british, and we were generally wary of taking sides in European wars. Then, within a very short time, all of the elites in the U.S. and most of the populace becomes raving warmongers, renaming hamburgers to "victory burgers" -- or some such, to avoid the name "Hamburg". Picturs of Kaiser Wilhelm with fangs, slobbering green ooze posted on public buildings. It was a masterpiece of British propagnda which whipped the nation into a frenzy and brought us into the war. This made an impression on a lot of people, including Hitler, who realized the power of p.r. and vowed that the next war would not be lost because Germany's propaganda was inferior to that of Britain.
It think this quote should be trotted out and paraded next to all of the presidentail platitudes about good and evil, "america is a shining beacon of light, and the darkness hates the light", etc. Let people decide which quote seems more truthful.
Like Germany and Japan after wwII? They are allies now, but we didn't need to set up our own Government. We also advised in the setting up governments in Mexico, Panama, Niceragua and the Phillipines.
We also set up our own governments in Iran (The Shah--remember S.A.V.A.K.?), Chile (Pinochet--He who made "Mothers of the dissappeared" possible), Guatemala (a couple of times, beneficent dictator killed 200,000), El Salvador, Columbia, Cuba (twice, last time creating the stable government of Batista), Mexico, Haiti (three times), Argentina, Indonesia (Sukarno --killed 500,000), Vietnam (while the fun lasted), carved a piece from China, Panama (we created that country, then invaded it later), Liberia, and that bastion of peace and plenty known as Namibia.
We also played proxy war games in Laos (The Plain of Jars comes to mind), Russia (which we invaded in 1918), Greece (succeeded in killing tens of thousands and delayed democracy there until the 70's), Peru, Cambodia, and of course, Israel.
So, trolling your comment might be but it has a correct point mixed with an incorrect point. Namely, some countries (namely those which were already developed before tasting our goodness) have turned out ok after our interventions, while most nations don't fare so well. Which category do you think Afghanistan would fall into? Do you think they might have a reason to be wary of our generosity?
Great work, moderator(s). If it's not banging the drums for war, it's flamebait. The above post is a well-articulated call for moderation. Too bad it didn't get the moderation it deserved.
If the existence of the RIAA isn't enough evidence of collusion, I was thinking of this article (about the MAP program).
uh..but why are you posting and surfing to slashdot? What did you expect to see here, in this thread? I can understand a person in mourning, but your emotion-fascism is offtopic and hypocritical.
..which is powered by my own hot-air.
How many people can claim to have taken on both Microsoft and Intel??
What's not to like?
..looking at the latest levels of consumer debt, and from what I know of college-age persons' spending patterns, they're milking this demographic for about all it's worth. The music industry is still a huge market. There's no clouds on the horizon..
unless they were to suddenly stop investing in developing their artists, and turn to the latest marketing virus to sell low shelf life songs (unlimited free listening is a good quality filter: no need to buy that song you so easily sicken of hearing)
unless they were to start mistreating or pissing of their artists, thereby encouraging them to search for other, more independent distribution channels..
unless they were to, say, sit on their hands for a decade and produce inferior firmware music formats, thereby lessening the quality differential of physical vs. available free media...
unless they, due to consolidation or collusion keep prices for their firmware products artificially high, decreasing the incenstive to pay..
hmm.. The whole business plan changes, when technology obviates a monopoly.
attacking someone for misusing a word, without evidence, and then clearly misusing the same word yourself does not make that mensa card shine any brighter.
Though a self avowed "student of human nature," you obviously fail to anticipate the inevitable howls of laughter resulting from your protests of mensa membership. Rather, you apparently think it (along with a crude ad hominem) will add to your credibility.
I think I speak for many here who view Mensa with somewhat less respect than The Book of the Month Club. More on the level of The Daughters of the American Revolution.
1. Apple's look and feel is pretty general, and there is tons of prior art for it. (pick your favorite shiny, transluscent, pretty image/skin)
2.
3.
4.
so that no one else can make a shiny transluscent pretty skin.
A lot of people don't buy the software they use. It comes bundled, or pre-installed on their workstation. Decision makers often buy entire packages for price benefit, or because of corporate alliances. Or maybe they don't feel that they have an alternative in choosing which software to buy. Often the software they use is legacy code for which few updates are available. Maybe they don't know better (but, when infected, can still launch an attack on someone else's machine).
It's like buying a house. Maybe you think you should hire an independent structural engineer to assess the stress-tolerance of your beams. And someone else to take soil samples from your lawn. But people expect a certain amount of functionality and safety implicit in most products they buy. They spend their time focusing on things like location, # of rooms, (i.e. features) and assume that, say, the copper plumbing isn't polluting their drinking water.
How software makers, unique among all industries, excuse themselves from these types of "implied warrantees" is beyond me.
Said in a different way, if one script kiddie in Bantustan-Land can wreck billions of dollars in damage and make life hell for tens of thousands of sysadmins, then you have a system where an end user can type rm -r. Sure, they're to blame for pressing a button and blowing up the world. But it's still a design flaw.
I agree.
But it's sorta like outfitting a group of 8 year olds with scissors and spray cans, and then letting them loose in the Louvre. Sure, you can punish 'em after the fact, but you can't punish them enough. Not for something like a worldwide virus.
I think it's time we rebel against this UCITA crap, and start demanding some security in our software products. It's like safety, there are some things you can't disclaim with a shrinkwrap license. Here in California, there are minimum standards that buildings must satisfy in case of earthquakes. Becasue the earthquakes are gonna happen, and it's kinda hollow looking for someone to sue after the fact. Why not have some minimal security standards which software vendors cannot exclude themselves from? I agree it's a bit hairy and needs to be done right, but I think it's a much better way to go then the route of arresting people for scanning ports or owning mutli-use software.
First, I think Salon is pretty cool. I frequently surf to the front page. Less frequently to the articles. I like it, but not enough to contribute. Why? Because the portal I *do* contribute to is znet. I actually feel passionately about the material on there, and I want them to succeed. Even though they have never had any ads. But zmag is a niche market, with about a million hits a month. Big enough, but not in the Salon category. I think this is Salon's problem: they want to be both a mass media portal, as well as sufficiently "alternative" to convince their advocates to pay. But you can't be both. I think Salon has recruited about as many paying subscribers as they're gonna get, which is quite a lot for a niche player, but not enough for a major media franchise. They want to be both. They want to be the "New Yorker" of the net. But even the New Yorker has been bleeding red ink, and I don't the economics of the net can sustain this.
There are simply too many other destinations which offer poeple exactly what they want in the way of their own personal hot button issues. It's these issues that make people excited enough to fork out the dough. But by definition, all of those sites are small.
The shortage of choice and a more uniform culture which allowed publications like the Atlantic and The New Yorker to thrive in the past will not be repeated on the net.
Well, this is a straw man argument. In all actuality, it requires a good deal of gall to be an apologist for the expansion of the record labels' powers, especially if one does so in the name of the musicians they have been cheating for years. But in all fairness, this is not your argument. Your argument, as I see it, is as follows:
1. listening to music in an "unlicensed" manner is theft.
2. If people do this, musicians will not get paid.
ergo,
3. Napster users are selfish individuals who are screwing artists out of their livelihoods.
My argument, which you don't seem to understand, or at least refuse to address:
The limited rights afforded copyright owners (who are generally *not* musicians) are too broad. They were not designed to apply to individuals, rather to large publishers. They should not apply to individuals engaged in non-commercial activities at all.
The second sentence is a historical fact. Enter the internet. Now we have before us two possibilities. Record companies specialize in providing marketing services, and selling high-quality physical reproductions of music/video for profits. Their income is derived from their distribution/promotional network, as well the actual physical media that enthusiasts will buy. This is still, for the most part, the world we live in today. No artists are starving because of napster. Britney spears still gets to shit on a solid gold toilet even though her mp3's have filled millions of hard drives. Music survives just fine, with the possibility of
*some* (as yet, unnoticed) decrease in revenue due to the presence of free lower quality reproductions. You get to keep linux, your unencumbered hard drive, and contract rights. You are not monitored. When you buy something you own it. Millions get to enjoy music they could otherwise not afford (yes, there will still be good music. If there are fewer mega-mega stars, there might be room enough for even more good music. REM will make a million a year instead of 20. Most musicians will still get 0 dollars from record sales.).
Here is option 2. The media companies see napster and think "people are enjoying *our* music without paying us! We are being robbed!" IP rights continue to mushroom. Enough zealots cry "theft" enough times that they actually come to believe making a copy of something is the moral equivalent of stealing it. Or at least those in power do so. Hard drives, operating systems, telephone lines are installed with monitoring equipment. The traditional rights of first sale, limits on contract law, free speech rights are strongly curtailed. You see, people have a very strong desire to share with others something which is, to them at least free. And they'll do it unless extreme pressures are applied to them. It's this love of music thing. But if you get your way, the measures applied will be extreme indeed. They already are extreme. Unlike your doomsday scenario, my scenario is unfolding before us. People no longer "buy" they "license" for a limited time, the enjoyment of music, books, videos. UCITA is passed. Mandatory "copy-protection" is installed. People are monitored. Then comes the strong price discrimination, which will require the undermining of more civil rights.
Now, there are some of us who think the second option is not worth it. Especially since the record companies have a sorry history of supporting musicians in the past, and, finally, no song is worth the kind of legislation outlined in Clinton's whitepaper and now coming in the form of the WIPO treaties, DMCA, UCITA and other acts. The most ironic thing is that option 2, which is blatantly a power/cash grab by the content owners, is being justified in the name of musicians By apparantly intelligent people such as yourself. This scares me to no end. And you guys, with your digital police and cries of "theft!" "law and order" actually think you are on some moral high ground. Why not spend a little time thinking about the consequences of your rhetoric? Either it's theft, or its not. If it is, then the content owners will get federal remedies. Why not read the legislation and whitepapers which have been passed or are about to pass? For more info about the economic and legal analysis of your presupposition, look here (http://www.vanderbilt.edu/Law/lawreview/vol536/b
So, I hope I've made my point. The most important issue of the coming decade is to what degree the AOL/Time-Warner/bertelsmannAG/megaCorp crowd can impose restrictions on the praiseworthy, human, healthy desire to share with others a good with 0 marginal cost. On the one side are those who want to be able to write free software, those who wish to let others have a copy of their music, librarians, and those who believe in privacy. On the other is the megacorps who are not trying to survive or "pay their bills", but rather they seek to capture a market which does not yet belong to them. Not by offering a cheaper, more convenient alternative, but with the whip of government decrees. You're on the worng side of this one.
You don't get it, do you?
Why should someone buy a CD if they don't need a CD?
If I buy a CD, My $15 is divided up as follows:
$6.00 to retail store
$1.00 to manufacturer
$2.00 for a lot of shipping
$3.00 for marketing
$3.85 for the record company
$0.15 for the musician
(All figures yanked from my somewhat informed ass)
This is what you call "supporting the musician"? I'd rather spend my music dollar on a live performance, thank you, which is what I do now.
Again, why should I buy the cd if I don't want it?
It seems you'd rather resort to name calling, since you are unable to think of a rational reason to justify such a transaction. I don't blame you. With such an insane business model, you have been reduced to attacking the ethics of those who don't want to spend $15, in order to give 15 cents to an artist. It's like the saddlegear makers attacking the automakers, claiming the wellfare of the horses will be endangered if people stop buying their spurs. $15 for good sound quality may make sense, but to support the artist? Please.
Moderators!? That's not flamebait. It's good clean fun. Read the whole post, guys. It's only 2 lines long...
You are missing a great deal. That's ok, though, since 19th Century music is pretty good. So is painting, and you need not venture out into the world of Kokoschka and Chagall if you don't want to.
I once asked a musician friend of mine whether he kept up with the newer stuff (he was in his early thirties at the time, circa 1995). He said yes, that it required more work as he got older, but that he still found enough gems to make it worthwhile. He said that recently -- remember this was 5 yrs ago - he "discovered" Radiohead's The Bends, Talk-Talk's laughingstock, and Girls Against Boy's Venus Luxor No. 9, Baby. At the time, I was too broke to take a chance on unknown CD's, but if Napster would have been around, I could have enjoyed these bands for an even longer time.
Perhaps you should be glad for Napster and it's successors. They make the task of discovering new music easier for those of us who are now getting older. I know that it, as well as gnutella, has certainly added great pleasure to my life.
This is what the record companies didn't count on. As we gaze at Napster's latest thrashing about, let's remember that it wasn't "selfishness" or "criminal hacking" which gave us file sharing. It was sheer love of music.
What you've just said is true, obvious, and irrelevent to the discussion at hand. In fact, it misses the whole point of the GPL, which does not envision a society consisting only of hackers who compile and modify code. In my experience, this is the biggest misconception of the GPL among the slashdot-type crowd. The main harm committed here is to prevent another business from taking Microtest's (and now Xstore's) software, modifying it (say by improving the GUI, fixing bugs, getting a newer version of Apache) and then selling this version in their own embedded device. By taking GPL software, conceiling the fact that they've done so, and aparently shoddily throwing it together, Microtest managed to gain an advantage in time-to-market or development costs over possible competitors -- competitors who decided to "play fair" and develop their own technology or pay licensing fees. You, as a purchaser of turn-key products, are hurt only indirectly.
More generally, the free software movement is hurt, in that one of it's core arguments is that software should be freely improved and reused, and that this is ultimately a more efficient and better way of doing business. By violating the GPL, distributors of proprietary software show they want these benefits but are not willing to extend them to others. If they are not forced to share their modifications, then there will be less free software for others to use.
Finally, there are some who might want to make changes to Microtest code themselves (say the company goes out business, or is bought by a parent firm with lousy tech support, or are late in providing a patch, or their manuals are crap, etc.) You might argue that they can do this even now, but they wont be able to share their improvements with anyone else for fear of being sued by Xstore for IP violations. These people are also hurt.
Right, and in NY probably less than 25%, but...
What percentage of voters in Afghanistan are responsible for the Taliban's decision to give him safe haven? And it's still ok for us to bomb them?
Maybe they thought "Obla-di" would be confused with an Arabic name...
I though that was a Leonard Cohen song..
They may own the transmitter and physical plant, but they don't own the airways. Exclusive licenses (not deeds) to use the airways were given away by the government to businesses which pledged to use them for the public good.
The airways are a public asset, and without a government enforced monopoly, clear channel would find its physical properties pretty much worthless.
Because of that, I think this is censorship, and may be illegal (if we had any decent courts left). Especially the part about banning anti-war songs. That's political speech and should enjoy the highest protections. Especially and primarily when we are deciding wether or not to take military action.