For whatever it is worth, there actually is a reason why the money goes to specifically to owners of copyrighted music.
The tariff is supposed to compensate owners for legal fair use (private copying) of their works. The software industry is not entitled to a compensation because private copying of software is not legal fair use.
Inefficiency is not the problem. The protocol is, as I understand it, not inefficient at all.
The problem is complexity. The Freenet protocol is more complex by orders of magnitude than protocols such as gnutella, FastTrack, edonkey, etc. Complex software is hard to write. Complex software that cannot be tested before release is almost impossible to write.
Like Turing machines, computers are universal devices. You cannot make a "work computer" that cannot convert a divx into video signals or an mp3 into audio signals. A device without these capabilities is not a computer and will not be able to run your "work programs" either.
Movie posters on newsgroups typically split a movie into a number of rar-files, say moviexy.part001.rar thru moviexy.part050.rar and then add a few parity files (known as par files) for recovery of lost rar's, say moviexy.p01 thru moviexy.p05.
In this setup, each file contains exactly as much information about moviexy as any other. This is witnessed by the fact that a downloader is able to perfectly reconstruct the entire movie from any 50-file subset of this 55-file post (using a nifty program called smartpar which is based on the Reed-Solomon error correction algorithm). So, obviously, they are all equally infringing.
I have only listed the famous results, but things that can't be known or done are everywhere and more are discovered all the time. So far, all those negative results are in the hardest sciences (math, physics, logic and computing) but I expect other disciplines will find their own limitations in time. The next results could well be about intelligence and complexity. We might, for example, find that the intelligence of any man or machine is always inferior to its complexity, making self-understanding and strong AI inherently impossible.
Instead of bringing the cable down to earth.. or putting it atop a very high tower, why not create a platform 50-80,000 feet up for planes to land on. This would save very large amounts of cable from being created, the satellite wouldn't have to be nearly as far out either to compensate for the gravitational pull from the cable below.
Maybe you got confused my the measurement units? 50,000 feet is less than 0.1% of 22,000 km.
This is why we are searching for users who are willing to insert small amounts of money in exchange for the chance to make much more.
It seems to me that this will count as a "game of chance" (and rightly so) with the consequence that it will be either completely illegal or requiring special licenses in many countries.
Can anybody possibly justify taking property that doesn't belong to you?
Yes, in many cases. Some legal, some illegal. Anyone who can't think of a single case where taking property from someone else is justified must be a moron.
The VCR was the best thing that ever happened to Hollywood. Recording and sharing _increases_ interest in the entertainment industry's products. Why can't they see that?
Because it is not true. If VHS tapes were read-only (like DVDs), movies would make more money, not less.
Mind you, I am not excusing any of the RIAA/MPAA's sleazy behaviour. I just don't buy the oft-uttered myth that movie studios will somehow benefit from copying and sharing.
From the looks of the things you'll need almost as many of those little driverless cabs as you do cars in a given urban area.
Wrong. A more sensible estimate is the peak number of cars being used simultaneously. Since most cars are parked most of the time, that is going to be an order of magnitude less.
First off, I agree with most posters here that Napster's service as it stands is worthless. But three major disadvantages might be eliminated:
1. Downloaded music is in.nap format. Someone will write nap2mp3.exe.
2. Only 50 downloads per month. Given that incomplete downloads don't count , modify the Napster client so that it stops a few bytes before the end. Losing a millisecond at the end of a song will usually not hurt.
3. Users can only share files that Napster has a license for. This is, I believe, enforced by computing a checksum, or hash, and comparing it to the set of allowed checksums. Again, modifying the client so that it reports false checksums should not be too hard.
Maybe the RIAA will succeed in destroying Kazaa/Morpheus. Then a hacked Napster may suddenly look quite attractive.
Jesus christ, they aren't sending Federal Marshalls storming into a business for no reason. That could not happen without some sort of precident. I don't believe that the BSA has ever done this and not uncovered mountains of software license violations.
Did you read in the article that the BSA were sending like 700.000 of these threats at a time?
Obviously, all the evidence they need for sending someone a letter is that they run a business.
OK, now suppose your business has a clear policy of never using pirated software. So what can you do?
1. You run the self-audit software. It is closed-source spyware, you have no idea what it will report, and you cannot expect any compensation if it breaks your mission-critical machine. This is an ugly option and there is no good reason why a honest businessman should be subjected to it. And nobody, guilty or innocent, would subject themselves to this voluntarily.
2. You "refuse to cooperate". Then you will get a visit from law enforcement, probably greatly disrupting your operation. Moreover, if they find anything wrong - your sysadmin made a mistake, or some stupid employee downloaded a serial number for Winzip - then you will have to pay for the exercise. Even if everything is actually perfect, something may be construed against you and you will face further expenses defending yourself.
Yet the study mentioned by the original poster flies in the face of this simple logic.
The reason for this is, most likely, that the original poster lied. Normal persons don't behave like that.
Maybe if this experiment happened inside a game where the goal was not so much getting rich yourself as beating the other group. In a game of monopoly it would normally be foolish to accept $3 on the condition that everybody else gets $4.
As a matter of fact she doesn't. Millions of people enjoy Madonna, ok. But without her, they would simply enjoy something else instead. Here is a formal argument why she may indeed be getting too much money.
Assume, for simplicity, that I buy exactly one album each year. Let's also assume that every album costs $10 and that my favourite album of this year happens to be Madonna's latest.
Say I get pleasure worth $20 out of it. Does that seem like a good and fair bargain to you? Then I ask you to think again.
If Madonna had not made her album, I would have bought the next best on my list of personal favourites, say an album of Susanna Medley, also costing $10. It is not quite so good, giving me only listening pleasure for $19.
Now what is the net effect? Madonna created $1 of value (she increased my listening pleasure by $1), but she raked in $10.
This is the injustice of a system where the entire prize goes to to the winner.
I am, of course, aware that my economic model is far removed from reality, so don't flame me for it. I simply wish to point out that the economic principles which apply to material goods do not transfer to IP. The fact that Madonna has made x million dollars in no way implies that she has created > x million dollars worth of enjoyment.
Exercise for the reader: repeat the argument with software in place of music.
Do you believe in life after death? No, but I do believe in death after life.
DrinkOrDie is (or maybe was) actually a pretty minor warez group. A search on www.newscheck.cc reveals there were 40865 warez releases in the last 7 months, of which only 411 were by DoD.
Even if DoD is knocked out completely, every application and every game will still be cracked and distributed within 48 hours of release.
Do you believe in life after death? - No, I believe in death after life.
Is there some way to protect my Win2000 installation in such a way that someone who steals (ok, confiscates) my computer will not be able to read the registry?
that MS gets months every time they have to prepare a statement but the states are now asked to make their most important decision in just a couple of days?
When Tom tested Atlon 1800 XP vs Intel 2 GHz he used lots of different benchmarks, including quake, unreal torunament, dronez, evolva, 3DMark 2000, 3DMark 2001, Sisoft Sandra, and Cinema4D.
Seems very thorough to me. Also he concluded the Athlon was better than then Pentium.
What Ati appears to have done is changing their drivers so that it will pretend to run in high quality mode while actually running in lower quality mode. The effect is unfair comparison with other cards in benchmarks. I feel this is clearly fraudulent.
For details and damning screenshots go visit
http://firingsquad.gamers.com/news/newsarticle.asp ?searchid=3456
Slashdot Mirror
The tariff is supposed to compensate owners for legal fair use (private copying) of their works. The software industry is not entitled to a compensation because private copying of software is not legal fair use.
Do you believe in death after life?
The problem is complexity. The Freenet protocol is more complex by orders of magnitude than protocols such as gnutella, FastTrack, edonkey, etc. Complex software is hard to write. Complex software that cannot be tested before release is almost impossible to write.
Do you believe in death after life?
Do you believe in death after life?
Movie posters on newsgroups typically split a movie into a number of rar-files, say moviexy.part001.rar thru moviexy.part050.rar and then add a few parity files (known as par files) for recovery of lost rar's, say moviexy.p01 thru moviexy.p05.
In this setup, each file contains exactly as much information about moviexy as any other. This is witnessed by the fact that a downloader is able to perfectly reconstruct the entire movie from any 50-file subset of this 55-file post (using a nifty program called smartpar which is based on the Reed-Solomon error correction algorithm). So, obviously, they are all equally infringing.
I have only listed the famous results, but things that can't be known or done are everywhere and more are discovered all the time. So far, all those negative results are in the hardest sciences (math, physics, logic and computing) but I expect other disciplines will find their own limitations in time. The next results could well be about intelligence and complexity. We might, for example, find that the intelligence of any man or machine is always inferior to its complexity, making self-understanding and strong AI inherently impossible.
do you believe in death after life?
Instead of bringing the cable down to earth.. or putting it atop a very high tower, why not create a platform 50-80,000 feet up for planes to land on. This would save very large amounts of cable from being created, the satellite wouldn't have to be nearly as far out either to compensate for the gravitational pull from the cable below.
Maybe you got confused my the measurement units? 50,000 feet is less than 0.1% of 22,000 km.
This is why we are searching for users who are willing to insert small amounts of money in exchange for the chance to make much more.
It seems to me that this will count as a "game of chance" (and rightly so) with the consequence that it will be either completely illegal or requiring special licenses in many countries.
Can anybody possibly justify taking property that doesn't belong to you?
Yes, in many cases. Some legal, some illegal. Anyone who can't think of a single case where taking property from someone else is justified must be a moron.
The VCR was the best thing that ever happened to Hollywood. Recording and sharing _increases_ interest in the entertainment industry's products. Why can't they see that?
Because it is not true. If VHS tapes were read-only (like DVDs), movies would make more money, not less.
Mind you, I am not excusing any of the RIAA/MPAA's sleazy behaviour. I just don't buy the oft-uttered myth that movie studios will somehow benefit from copying and sharing.
From the looks of the things you'll need almost as many of those little driverless cabs as you do cars in a given urban area.
Wrong. A more sensible estimate is the peak number of cars being used simultaneously. Since most cars are parked most of the time, that is going to be an order of magnitude less.
is the hacker community.
.nap format. Someone will write nap2mp3.exe.
First off, I agree with most posters here that Napster's service as it stands is worthless. But three major disadvantages might be eliminated:
1. Downloaded music is in
2. Only 50 downloads per month. Given that incomplete downloads don't count , modify the Napster client so that it stops a few bytes before the end. Losing a millisecond at the end of a song will usually not hurt.
3. Users can only share files that Napster has a license for. This is, I believe, enforced by computing a checksum, or hash, and comparing it to the set of allowed checksums. Again, modifying the client so that it reports false checksums should not be too hard.
Maybe the RIAA will succeed in destroying Kazaa/Morpheus. Then a hacked Napster may suddenly look quite attractive.
Jesus christ, they aren't sending Federal Marshalls storming into a business for no reason. That could not happen without some sort of precident. I don't believe that the BSA has ever done this and not uncovered mountains of software license violations.
Did you read in the article that the BSA were sending like 700.000 of these threats at a time?
Obviously, all the evidence they need for sending someone a letter is that they run a business.
OK, now suppose your business has a clear policy of never using pirated software. So what can you do?
1. You run the self-audit software. It is closed-source spyware, you have no idea what it will report, and you cannot expect any compensation if it breaks your mission-critical machine. This is an ugly option and there is no good reason why a honest businessman should be subjected to it. And nobody, guilty or innocent, would subject themselves to this voluntarily.
2. You "refuse to cooperate". Then you will get a visit from law enforcement, probably greatly disrupting your operation. Moreover, if they find anything wrong - your sysadmin made a mistake, or some stupid employee downloaded a serial number for Winzip - then you will have to pay for the exercise. Even if everything is actually perfect, something may be construed against you and you will face further expenses defending yourself.
Now tell me again that this is only fair.
The reason for this is, most likely, that the original poster lied. Normal persons don't behave like that.
Maybe if this experiment happened inside a game where the goal was not so much getting rich yourself as beating the other group. In a game of monopoly it would normally be foolish to accept $3 on the condition that everybody else gets $4.
It's happening already, didn't you notice?
Assume, for simplicity, that I buy exactly one album each year. Let's also assume that every album costs $10 and that my favourite album of this year happens to be Madonna's latest.
Say I get pleasure worth $20 out of it. Does that seem like a good and fair bargain to you? Then I ask you to think again.
If Madonna had not made her album, I would have bought the next best on my list of personal favourites, say an album of Susanna Medley, also costing $10. It is not quite so good, giving me only listening pleasure for $19.
Now what is the net effect? Madonna created $1 of value (she increased my listening pleasure by $1), but she raked in $10.
This is the injustice of a system where the entire prize goes to to the winner.
I am, of course, aware that my economic model is far removed from reality, so don't flame me for it. I simply wish to point out that the economic principles which apply to material goods do not transfer to IP. The fact that Madonna has made x million dollars in no way implies that she has created > x million dollars worth of enjoyment.
Exercise for the reader: repeat the argument with software in place of music.
Do you believe in life after death? No, but I do believe in death after life.
How can it be possible that a disease is both genetically transmitted and rapidly spreading?
Makes no sense to me.
Yes, Microsoft supplies us with that which the RIAA demands.
Market forces at their best.
Even if DoD is knocked out completely, every application and every game will still be cracked and distributed within 48 hours of release.
Do you believe in life after death? - No, I believe in death after life.
I like the idea of paying for good content, but I feel that payments should not be enforceable.
If a user refuses to pay a given site, then the site owner could restrict that user's access.
This way, fears of fraud can be allayed, and good Web sites fill find it easy to get some revenue.
Also, let every site owner decide their own prices, that has always been the way a market works.
Is there some way to protect my Win2000 installation in such a way that someone who steals (ok, confiscates) my computer will not be able to read the registry?
RIAA might be able to buy out Fasttrack, but Morpheus etc. still possess a licence to use Fasttrack software. RIAA can't take away that licence.
What's more, if they buy Fasttrack and shut it down, someone else will instantly duplicate the functionality.
that MS gets months every time they have to prepare a statement but the states are now asked to make their most important decision in just a couple of days?
When Tom tested Atlon 1800 XP vs Intel 2 GHz he used lots of different benchmarks, including quake, unreal torunament, dronez, evolva, 3DMark 2000, 3DMark 2001, Sisoft Sandra, and Cinema4D.
Seems very thorough to me. Also he concluded the Athlon was better than then Pentium.
That was the funniest post I saw on Slashdot in a long while. Unfortunately I just spent all my moderator points.
For details and damning screenshots go visit http://firingsquad.gamers.com/news/newsarticle.asp ?searchid=3456