You can't make 10,000 copies of a music file unless you store it on something, just like you can make a copy of a book unless you store it on some paper. 10,000 tunes would take around 60G of space, so you're looking at at least a hundred bucks. And if you want to keep those, you need backup... cheapest option is around 80 CD-Rs, which aren't reuseable.
I should have clarified better.
I can post an album in digital format on my hard drive and share it on KaZaA or upload it to the newsgroups. I didn't need to buy extra anything -- I have more than enough space on my HD for an album without impinging on anything else.
10,000 people can download it, each requiring negligable space. No CD-Rs, no extra drives, nothing.
I wasn't talking about one person making physical media copies.
How about keeping high ports open by default? That is sort of how the system was designed to begin with. It wasn't until Windows, with no concept of priviledged ports & administrative rights, that this started to spin out of control.
I have, in my hand, a copy of a Harry Potter book.
In my other hand, I have a digital camera. Watch, as I take a photo of page 52.
Oh my, it appears the text is readable. Here, let me just share this out on Kazaa... (As a matter of fact, most popular books are shared right now)
Right. Now do that 500 more times and exactly how many people are going to flip thru 500 JPEGs instead of spending $20? "Oh, shit. I didn't get pages 241-247 off of KaZaA!"
The ones I've seen online aren't done like that. They are done by teams of people who each scan and OCR a chapter, then release it as PDF after correcting it by hand.
I'm not disputing the traditional media companies are fighting tooth and nail to preserve their existing profit model. Not am I disputing that they will eventually lose -- it is like trying to hold back the tide.
What I'm saying is that there is a distinct difference in both cost and mechanism for duplicating and distributing andlog and digital media. YOU were talking about digitizing -- converting analog to digital then distributing the digital.
The new digital era really makes the publishers -- the middlemen -- mreo and more marginal. It becomes possible for the artist/author to distribute their work without the publisher.
The main reason digital books haven't taken off more is because there is no decent digital display as good as a book. PDA screens are too small. PCs & PDAs are too fragile, too heavy and too expensive. Most people don't want to sit in front of a monitor to read a book. Once a decent device for this is created, the publishers are going to really start their death screams...
Substitute "line-out type recording..." with "photocopy" and "digital goods" with "book" and you'll understand that the same argument applies to all media in general, digitial or not. Again, just because it's on a computer doesn't make it new or unique. VHS, DVD, CDs, Piano Rolls...doesn't keep people from shopping at Half-priced books, or Used CD stores.
Not quite true.
Duplication of physical goods requires raw materials (paper & toner, or blank disks/tapes) and has an inherent cost in both time and money.
Why don't people photocopy the latest best seller? Because of the cost inherent with the process.
Further restraints aren't necessary in the analog world because the nature of the media is itself a restraint.
In the digital world it is just bits. I can make 10,000 copies of a music file for a net 0 cost -- my cable modem is a flat rate and my PC can serve files in the background without interfering with what I am doing.
What would 10,000 copies of a physical CD cost in duplication, time and distribution? How about the latest Harry Potter book?
In the digital world, the media itself no longer acts as a restraint.
Now, whether this is good or bad, enivitable or not is beside the point. There ARE differences between physical items and digital ones and pretending there aren't is an argument that won't fly.
All of this is to say NOTHING about the dangers of transporting the waste to Las Vegas. As can be seen in the first link on this page (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UT F-8&q=rocket+penetrate+nuclear+waste), a rocket propelled grenade can penetrate the nuclear waste casks.
The problem with this argument is that it can also be made for where the waste is now. Waste is sitting at dozens of sites across the country. Is it more secure where it is? The vast majority of it only has to be moved once. Yes, you have to move the newly created stuff, but we have decades of stockpiles in backlog.
Moving it will be a bitch. Leaving it where it is will be a worse bitch.
Hmmm... chance of an eruption happening during the next 10,000 years. 1 in 70,000,000. Last eruption close to 80,000 years ago.
YOU want to shoot it into the Sun. Exactly how many rockets do you remember exploding on launch? What do you think would happen if a rocket loaded with radioactive material exploded in the atmosophere?
YOU may live near uranium mines and worry about when the oil runs out, but I lived 20 miles downrange from where they lauch the rockets (Cape Canaveral, FL) for years. I was a hell of a lot more nervous about the launch of Cassini (w/plutonium) than you are about uranium mines.
Paying for maintenance is another. Maintaining rural lines can be expensive. They are much longer than metro lines, and located a long way from any service points. Maintenance and repair on any of those lines costs more.
If the USF fee is to also cover extending broadband, and with it VOIP, to the rural areas, then the switches in the COs will need to be replaced and again paid for.
Central data switches for telco offices are *expensive*. Remember, 911 runs off this stuff so you just can't plunk down any old switch. Granted, decent Cisco MPLS, Lucent or Nortel ATM switches are a bit cheaper than telephone 5E units, they still aren't peanuts. Add to that cost DSLAMS and replacing substandard wire (almost all of it) and it'll cost.
If the USF *isn't* going to cover that, then we're back to maintenance and greed.
What value does the government bring to VoIP? If you can't point to any value that the government brings to this technology, then (it seems to me) that you have to admit that they're just trying to recover lost revenue.
The Universal Service Fee was put into place to ensure that rural areas received phone services without it costing users thousands of dollars for an install. The gov't saw the benefits, mostly economic, of having telephone service in more than just metro areas.
Why do rural areas have telephone service but not DSL or cable? Because the USF *paid* for it to happen but doesn't pay for cable or DSL.
If traditional phone lines go away, they need to be replaced in those rural areas as well. The USF would assist in paying for the exorbanant costs of running broadband to those areas. (Yes, DSL can be put out there. Lucent's Stinger DSLAM comes in a pole-mount version that doesn't have to be located in the CO. It would be damned expensive, though but is a solution for people located too far from a CO or switch.)
However, if taxed to heavily and too early, it will end up killing what could be an excellent economic stimulator.
Downloading slashdot's mainpage travels over the same infrastructure as making a VoIP call, so why should the latter be subject to special taxes?
Because this isn't quite true. Most backbones run ATM or some other protocol that provides real QoS. Internet connections have always been "best effort", whereas voice was given the highest priority.
Slashdot can handle a 5 second delay in delivering packets -- your phone can't.
In short, while bits are bits, the method of delivery is different and needs to be paid for that way.
I am paying for raw internet bandwidth and that is what I expect to get. I will not tollerate any filtering or restrictions on the use of my account.
Then you are in the minority. Most big ISPs have terms of service limiting things like servers being run from residential accounts. SpeakEasy DSL is the only major I know of that really offers raw connections. Who is your ISP?
Yeah, I just ran into that today. My dad's PC was all screwed up and I tried to use VNC to get in. I had him lower the settings on the firewall, but it didn't help.
Then I had him double-check his IP: 192.168.1.21
Oops.
Bellsouth Broadband seems to have started using NAT for their DSL subscribers about a month ago.
The suit was about MS pressuring OEMs to not install other OSes on hard drives of machines they shipped. They did NOT want to see a dual-boot situation.
One of the big issues is getting end-users to install another OS. Since most people never have to install an OS, it is a daunting concept no matter how easy it is.
The whole effort in making Linux so easy to install derived from this.
Now, with the settlement, MS doesn't have to defend this practice in court. They don't admit guilt and can keep on pressuring OEMs to not install alternatives to Windows on new machines.
$23+ million is chump change if it avoids getting dragged into court and having this practice under scrutiny.
Railroads do the same thing. Most of the profit in railroads is made in cargo. More cargo needs to be moved than people, and the needs of cargo are much simpler than people.
No restrooms, no food, no water, much greater tolerances on atmosphere.
This is a step in turning space travel into more of a commodity, everyday occurance.
I think it would be a good guess that these hundreds of suits are the result of the anonymous subpeonas.
While it is possible to file a "John Doe" type of anonymous suit, it can't really procede until the defendants are identified. It is a necessary step in the direction of getting court orders for identification records from ISPs.
The RIAA will still have to go through all the process of gathering evidence and PROVING not only infringement, but identity and linking the two......so much easier to let people just send in their picture IDs so everything is on file in case that nick shows up again on KaZaA.
Remember, Intel's Processor ID was supposed to do this too, and everyone that I know turned it off.
Why was this such a big deal? MAC addresses are unique and have been used as serial numbers for expensive software (like some CAD tools) for years. If you have a network card, you have a serial number.
Yes, it is possible to change a MAC on many cards, but you can't change it to the same as another while on the same network segment. (No dupes)
I think that whole Intel Processor ID thing was just bad PR.
Slashdot Mirror
What would be the standards used for this certification?
:-)
Did the check clear?
on your cvs comment, it sounds alot like the rsync solution...
Doh!
I meant rsync. I use it to sync websites on multiple servers.
Thanks.
ISPs could simply put some squid caches between the net and their dial-up banks. Turn mod_gzip on and you'll accomplish a lot of the same thing.
.diffs came across. :-)
Instead of having to traverse the Internet, with all the associated latency, pages are pulled locally - 1 hop away. Pages are also compressed.
A better way would be to figure out how to transfer pages via CVS, so only
In regards to our sub-discussion on e-books.
t m
Ouch.
http://www.fool.com/News/mft/2003/mft03090904.h
Oh... of course! Hard drives and CD-R are free!
You can't make 10,000 copies of a music file unless you store it on something, just like you can make a copy of a book unless you store it on some paper. 10,000 tunes would take around 60G of space, so you're looking at at least a hundred bucks. And if you want to keep those, you need backup... cheapest option is around 80 CD-Rs, which aren't reuseable.
I should have clarified better.
I can post an album in digital format on my hard drive and share it on KaZaA or upload it to the newsgroups. I didn't need to buy extra anything -- I have more than enough space on my HD for an album without impinging on anything else.
10,000 people can download it, each requiring negligable space. No CD-Rs, no extra drives, nothing.
I wasn't talking about one person making physical media copies.
How about keeping high ports open by default? That is sort of how the system was designed to begin with. It wasn't until Windows, with no concept of priviledged ports & administrative rights, that this started to spin out of control.
Hmm. Let's see here.
I have, in my hand, a copy of a Harry Potter book.
In my other hand, I have a digital camera. Watch, as I take a photo of page 52.
Oh my, it appears the text is readable. Here, let me just share this out on Kazaa... (As a matter of fact, most popular books are shared right now)
Right. Now do that 500 more times and exactly how many people are going to flip thru 500 JPEGs instead of spending $20? "Oh, shit. I didn't get pages 241-247 off of KaZaA!"
The ones I've seen online aren't done like that. They are done by teams of people who each scan and OCR a chapter, then release it as PDF after correcting it by hand.
I'm not disputing the traditional media companies are fighting tooth and nail to preserve their existing profit model. Not am I disputing that they will eventually lose -- it is like trying to hold back the tide.
What I'm saying is that there is a distinct difference in both cost and mechanism for duplicating and distributing andlog and digital media. YOU were talking about digitizing -- converting analog to digital then distributing the digital.
The new digital era really makes the publishers -- the middlemen -- mreo and more marginal. It becomes possible for the artist/author to distribute their work without the publisher.
The main reason digital books haven't taken off more is because there is no decent digital display as good as a book. PDA screens are too small. PCs & PDAs are too fragile, too heavy and too expensive. Most people don't want to sit in front of a monitor to read a book. Once a decent device for this is created, the publishers are going to really start their death screams...
Substitute "line-out type recording..." with "photocopy" and "digital goods" with "book" and you'll understand that the same argument applies to all media in general, digitial or not. Again, just because it's on a computer doesn't make it new or unique. VHS, DVD, CDs, Piano Rolls...doesn't keep people from shopping at Half-priced books, or Used CD stores.
Not quite true.
Duplication of physical goods requires raw materials (paper & toner, or blank disks/tapes) and has an inherent cost in both time and money.
Why don't people photocopy the latest best seller? Because of the cost inherent with the process.
Further restraints aren't necessary in the analog world because the nature of the media is itself a restraint.
In the digital world it is just bits. I can make 10,000 copies of a music file for a net 0 cost -- my cable modem is a flat rate and my PC can serve files in the background without interfering with what I am doing.
What would 10,000 copies of a physical CD cost in duplication, time and distribution? How about the latest Harry Potter book?
In the digital world, the media itself no longer acts as a restraint.
Now, whether this is good or bad, enivitable or not is beside the point. There ARE differences between physical items and digital ones and pretending there aren't is an argument that won't fly.
All of this is to say NOTHING about the dangers of transporting the waste to Las Vegas. As can be seen in the first link on this page (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UT F-8&q=rocket+penetrate+nuclear+waste), a rocket propelled grenade can penetrate the nuclear waste casks.
The problem with this argument is that it can also be made for where the waste is now. Waste is sitting at dozens of sites across the country. Is it more secure where it is? The vast majority of it only has to be moved once. Yes, you have to move the newly created stuff, but we have decades of stockpiles in backlog.
Moving it will be a bitch. Leaving it where it is will be a worse bitch.
Hmmm... chance of an eruption happening during the next 10,000 years. 1 in 70,000,000. Last eruption close to 80,000 years ago.
YOU want to shoot it into the Sun. Exactly how many rockets do you remember exploding on launch? What do you think would happen if a rocket loaded with radioactive material exploded in the atmosophere?
YOU may live near uranium mines and worry about when the oil runs out, but I lived 20 miles downrange from where they lauch the rockets (Cape Canaveral, FL) for years. I was a hell of a lot more nervous about the launch of Cassini (w/plutonium) than you are about uranium mines.
Greed is one motive.
Paying for maintenance is another. Maintaining rural lines can be expensive. They are much longer than metro lines, and located a long way from any service points. Maintenance and repair on any of those lines costs more.
If the USF fee is to also cover extending broadband, and with it VOIP, to the rural areas, then the switches in the COs will need to be replaced and again paid for.
Central data switches for telco offices are *expensive*. Remember, 911 runs off this stuff so you just can't plunk down any old switch. Granted, decent Cisco MPLS, Lucent or Nortel ATM switches are a bit cheaper than telephone 5E units, they still aren't peanuts. Add to that cost DSLAMS and replacing substandard wire (almost all of it) and it'll cost.
If the USF *isn't* going to cover that, then we're back to maintenance and greed.
What value does the government bring to VoIP? If you can't point to any value that the government brings to this technology, then (it seems to me) that you have to admit that they're just trying to recover lost revenue.
The Universal Service Fee was put into place to ensure that rural areas received phone services without it costing users thousands of dollars for an install. The gov't saw the benefits, mostly economic, of having telephone service in more than just metro areas.
Why do rural areas have telephone service but not DSL or cable? Because the USF *paid* for it to happen but doesn't pay for cable or DSL.
If traditional phone lines go away, they need to be replaced in those rural areas as well. The USF would assist in paying for the exorbanant costs of running broadband to those areas. (Yes, DSL can be put out there. Lucent's Stinger DSLAM comes in a pole-mount version that doesn't have to be located in the CO. It would be damned expensive, though but is a solution for people located too far from a CO or switch.)
However, if taxed to heavily and too early, it will end up killing what could be an excellent economic stimulator.
Downloading slashdot's mainpage travels over the same infrastructure as making a VoIP call, so why should the latter be subject to special taxes?
Because this isn't quite true. Most backbones run ATM or some other protocol that provides real QoS. Internet connections have always been "best effort", whereas voice was given the highest priority.
Slashdot can handle a 5 second delay in delivering packets -- your phone can't.
In short, while bits are bits, the method of delivery is different and needs to be paid for that way.
I am paying for raw internet bandwidth and that is what I expect to get. I will not tollerate any filtering or restrictions on the use of my account.
Then you are in the minority. Most big ISPs have terms of service limiting things like servers being run from residential accounts. SpeakEasy DSL is the only major I know of that really offers raw connections. Who is your ISP?
Yeah, I just ran into that today. My dad's PC was all screwed up and I tried to use VNC to get in. I had him lower the settings on the firewall, but it didn't help.
Then I had him double-check his IP: 192.168.1.21
Oops.
Bellsouth Broadband seems to have started using NAT for their DSL subscribers about a month ago.
I disagree. It should be OPT-OUT. The idea is to protect the clueless, and the rest of the net FROM the clueless.
If you know anything about opening a port, then you are ahead of 99% of those connected, and know what you are doing. Thus, you can opt out.
This wouldn't prevent you from using blocked ports.
It would be, by far, less of an inconvenience that the shit that goes on now with everything wide open.
The suit was about MS pressuring OEMs to not install other OSes on hard drives of machines they shipped. They did NOT want to see a dual-boot situation.
One of the big issues is getting end-users to install another OS. Since most people never have to install an OS, it is a daunting concept no matter how easy it is.
The whole effort in making Linux so easy to install derived from this.
Now, with the settlement, MS doesn't have to defend this practice in court. They don't admit guilt and can keep on pressuring OEMs to not install alternatives to Windows on new machines.
$23+ million is chump change if it avoids getting dragged into court and having this practice under scrutiny.
...the "BSD is dying" troll when you need him? This is a perfect opportunity for a cut-n-paste troll.
Look at it from this perspective...
Railroads do the same thing. Most of the profit in railroads is made in cargo. More cargo needs to be moved than people, and the needs of cargo are much simpler than people.
No restrooms, no food, no water, much greater tolerances on atmosphere.
This is a step in turning space travel into more of a commodity, everyday occurance.
...couldn't they just impersonate techs, walk in and grab the government mainframes? :-)
I think it would be a good guess that these hundreds of suits are the result of the anonymous subpeonas.
...so much easier to let people just send in their picture IDs so everything is on file in case that nick shows up again on KaZaA.
While it is possible to file a "John Doe" type of anonymous suit, it can't really procede until the defendants are identified. It is a necessary step in the direction of getting court orders for identification records from ISPs.
The RIAA will still have to go through all the process of gathering evidence and PROVING not only infringement, but identity and linking the two...
'have to send a completed, notarized amnesty form to the RIAA, with a copy of a photo ID.'
What? Didn't the "anonymous" subpeonas get anywhere?
Any upper level (Junior/Senior) CompSci students who were infected and notified by the automated bot should be ASHAMED!
It should also be noted in their record. (Wants to run a network, but can figure out Windows Update, personal firewalls or anti-virus software...)
Not...
It ends with a voice over of "IBM Servers running Linux..."
Remember, Intel's Processor ID was supposed to do this too, and everyone that I know turned it off.
Why was this such a big deal? MAC addresses are unique and have been used as serial numbers for expensive software (like some CAD tools) for years. If you have a network card, you have a serial number.
Yes, it is possible to change a MAC on many cards, but you can't change it to the same as another while on the same network segment. (No dupes)
I think that whole Intel Processor ID thing was just bad PR.