Is there a government regulation at some point in the future getting rid of the analog HDTVs and recorders?
If the point is to close the analog hole, you can leverage the existing analog TVs by supporting them, but preventing future TVs (and, more to the point, recorders) from supporting that signal. As those wear out and people replace their TVs with (mandated) digital DRM ones, the studios get their dream of DRM all the way through without breaking compatibility with existing set. At some point they all turn on the token for future releases, and the DRM is total.
Yeah, I know it's stupid; as long as one analog recorder exists it'll leak out into the P2P nets and thence into everybody's hard disk. And people will make new ones. I'm just trying to follow their thinking.
So is there some sort of legislation mandating the digital DRM TVs, or am I making that up?
In finance it's called "leverage", and it's what allows us to get work done. Loans are where capital comes from, and capital is what creates the stuff that we sell to make money. Loans do more than buy goods. Capital hires programmers to write software, buys dry cleaning machines for a new dry cleaner, etc. That's money that makes money, because goods and services are produced with it.
The money multiplier doesn't fluctuate much, but the Federal overnight rate does. When that rate goes down, banks can borrow money more easily, and the stock market goes up. The market goes up because they know that eventually that money gets loaned out to people who will use it to make more money, which comes back to stockholders.
I know I'm playing up the good sides; I'm talking about business loans rather than the sort of unsecured personal loans that credit card companies make. And the credit card companies are clearly playing stupid, vile games by lending out money that they know perfectly well isn't going to be used productively, and trying to shuffle the risk off on somebody else. (Like the merchants; they often find ways not to pay the merchants in cases of identity theft.)
But I wouldn't blame the Fed for that. The fake money that the Fed creates can be come real money through productivity. That would happen without it, but much, much more slowly. It's the banks (and only some of them) that are really hosing up the system and blaming others for it.
I'm perplexed. I was under the impression that building your own got you better hardware and more flexibility, but not that it was cheaper. Basically, you could increase the high end, but that if you were looking for just-a-plain-computer you couldn't beat Dell's prices because you can't order the parts in the kind of massive bulk they do.
His goal was to demonstrate that the Western press makes everything political. Perhaps he's right, but it seems to me that he's failed to demonstrate it. He posted a deliberately misleading message on his web site. If he wanted to post evidence, I'd rather see examples of how things he posted were taken out of context. The China Daily article doesn't give them.
Well, now he's attracted attention, and he gets the opportunity to do the demonstration he wanted, but the way he attracted the attention doesn't demonstrate it by itself.
"Bad journalism" seems a misnomer to me. The story they wrote contains the conclusions the blog strongly implied they should. When it turned out they were wrong, they retracted the story. Journalism is "the first rough draft of history", but that draft is continually revised. Which means that sometimes they will be fooled by people deliberately setting out to fool them.
They claim that they were unable to contact him to check the story in detail, and I believe them when they say that they couldn't. If their goal was purely to politicize, they wouldn't have bothered posting the retraction.
If there's criticism to be made of journalists, it's that they feel compelled to report what they see immediately, before they get a chance to do full detailed investigation. That's the fault of the Western system in general, where people will buy whatever news media outlet will give them the news first. And perhaps that also extends to whatever gives them the most "exciting" news, even if it means jumping to conclusions, but I think that this case doesn't demonstrate that.
Well, this isn't a particularly good time to take a data point on movie quality. January, February, and March are classically the time when studios release their dogs. They figure that the kids are in school, and people would rather spend wintry evenings at home than braving the weather to go to the theater.
They release a bunch of good movies around Thanksgiving and New Year's, when people take breaks. That's also when most of the potential Oscar nominees are released, just before the end of the year (to be fresh in the Academy's mind).
And they're waiting for the summer for people to be on vacation again, so they release the stuff that they thought was not good enough to attract attention during the summer and winter rushes of great movies, and the real losers that they're hoping will be able to recoup their losses as long as there's nothing else good to see.
Not that I agree with this "logic"; the studios love to pander to a "conventional wisdom" and never question it. When Spider-Man was released a few weeks _before_ the traditional Memorial Day weekend rush, they were stunned to discover that people who had five months of cruddy movies would throw gobs of money at a good one.
But logic good or ill, movies are cruddy now because that's when the cruddy movies come out. Last year's whole movie season was pretty bad, and the studios deserved to see attendance fall 9%. But if the studios have learned a lesson, you won't see the results until the late spring. They're still flushing their crap. Sorry.
I'm not a historian, especially not a historian of patent law. I can't give you data. Sorry. Call yourself the winner of the argument if you like.
But I do know that the rate of inventions increased dramatically in the past couple of hundred years. The United States was a dramatic mover in technology from its inception as a country. Perhaps it's a coincidence that the US also had a strong notion of patents (inherited from England, another patent-awarding country and producer of many of the Industrial Revolution's first advances).
Patents during the Industrial Revolution were very different from what they are today. They were on mechanical inventions rather than mere ideas (especially unimplemented ideas). And the pace of innovation is so fast that we hardly need to encourage it; the speed of communication and the ability of customers to quickly switch from one technology to another provides different incentives to innovate and the slowing down of licensing a patent gets in the way. Change may well have made the patent system unnecessary today, but that doesn't necessarily invalidate its utility in the past, or the soundness of the original idea.
In other words, independent creation of invention occurs in part because the economic incentive of patents encourages many people to work on the problem simultaneously. Without that encouragement, perhaps none of them would have worked on the telephone and it might not have happened until much later.
A couple of scary things on their key statistics: a debt of half-billion (and less than half that much cash on hand). And the -60% earnings growth. The low P/E is very promising, but if their earnings are falling rather than rising it's a red herring.
New management may be able to turn it around. Best of luck. I do miss the old Radio Shack, and I wish there were a Fry's around here.
I can't middle-click to open in a new tab in Firefox, either. That's how I do searching: middle-click the results into a new tab so that I can easily get back to the search page. That's especially handy when the linked-to page does something unpleasant, like redirecting that confuses the back button.
The fee is optional, but they don't guarantee delivery if you don't pay it. That gives AOL the possibility of extorting MoveOn: "pay up or we'll pretend you're spammers and drop your email on the floor." That would be pretty scuzzy of AOL, since it knows that MoveOn is a valid email-sending organization, but they haven't said that they won't do that. They might just claim, "Gee, there are a zillion valid emailers in the world, and we can't keep track of all of them unless they pay us to do it. Besides, we offered them a non-profit discount."
Personally, I'd say that this is a fine plan until we see AOL using it to do evil, and I'd hold off on the "boycott AOL" campaign until they actually do something vile. But the majority on Slashdot beg to differ.
The leeches are in; they're called "spammers". They're able to function because they can send a billion emails a day at zero cost to them. Even if the hit rate is trivial, it's enough as long as the costs are practically zero.
So the situation is already "not good". I can't say if this is the right solution or not, but the present situation doesn't thrill me either.
Goodmail is also supposed to block abuse, even from people who pay. When you sign up with Goodmail you have to sign a contract. I don't know the details of that contract, so perhaps I'm wrong, but I suspect that they will enforce the CAN-SPAM rules (not that I'm thrilled about them, but they do make spam easier to filter).
Remember, Goodmail's sole reason for existence is to limit spam, while allowing legitimate mail. If they block personal emails, or allow through v1@gra ads, they're going to lose customers fast. AOL hopes to attract customers with this, not drive them away.
Of course MoveOn opposes it. MoveOn is exactly the sort of organization who gets hit by this. They send out large quantities of email, presumably to people who have signed up for it. If they send out a work-daily email to 100,000 AOL customers, at a $.001 non-profit rate (I'm making these numbers up, but they're on the rough order of magnitude) that's $100 a day, perhaps $20,000 a year. That's real money to a nonprofit, even if it's half the cost of a single stamp per person for an entire year.
The question would be whether AOL plays nicely. If they have a non-profit rate, does that mean that they WILL absolutely demand their inch of green? Or will they note that MoveOn plays by the spam rules and not block their emails? Will AOL extort that $20k a year even if MoveOn obviously isn't spamming?
I'm a little ticked that MoveOn is trying to pretend that they're fighting for the general freedom of Internet, lest AOL start extorting your grandmother to send baby pictures. In reality they're just interested in themselves. Rightly so, perhaps, but the cloak of hysteria bugs me.
The funny thing is that as long as CDs are sold, there will always be a leak into music swapping systems. Selling one DRMed copy of a song prevents one listener from swapping his copy, but it only takes one unDRMed copy to make it universally available. I keep wondering when they will decide to stop making CDs entirely.
Even if they do, there will still be the analog hole, and I wonder what that will look like. In theory it only takes one person to do that "analog rip" and then watch it spread through the P2P networks, but it it's too much of a pain to do (and they can shut down enough P2P networks, and the quality too low) it may no longer be worth it.
Maybe. Otherwise, really they ought to give up on the DRM and pray that most people are honest, because right now DRM strikes me as nailing shut the door and leaving the window open.
A program can still do plenty of damage even without root privileges. Your system per se may be safe, but your files aren't: they can be deleted or sent over the network. Or you could become a spam-bot, just like a Windows user: it doesn't require root privileges to open a port.
It may not be able to make itself last through rebootings, but you're not supposed to have to reboot OS X very often.
Thanks; I didn't know about either of those. They have so much stuff I can't keep up. I still use my own domain, so I don't use my gmail much, but I hear they're planning to solve that problem, too.
I wonder: If GMail were to incorporate an RSS reader (the way Thunderbird does), it could potentially update many, many users with a single hit of each RSS site.
I'm leaning towards using RSS as a way to do announcements rather than maintain a mailing list. Rather than tell me you want me to send you updates (and deal with being potentially a spammer, deal with your unsubscribe, your email address change, etc.), just poll my site every so often (days, for the lists I'm talking about; hours, for Slashdot) and let it show up in your mail queue.
The idea isn't quite ready for prime time; too few people use RSS. But GMail could make that happen in one fell swoop. Well, two fell swoops: you'd need some sort of browser extension to make the little orange "RSS feed" button notify GMail.
I wonder if just having GMail (and hotmail, aol, and yahoo) handle that would solve the problem to the point where we no longer needed a P2P RSS distribution system.
Alternatively, if ISPs were to cache the RSS feeds the way some do with certain web pages, that might also take a lot of the load off. People will still impolitely set their RSS readers to check the feed every 10 seconds, but at least it never gets out onto the backbone if it's cached at the ISP.
If we did get a response it would probably be more than just "Got your message, please reply."
No, it would probably be some sort if intergalactic smiley: %*&. An we'd figure that the pointy bits were probably teeth, and get all pissed at them, so we'd send them a snarky message back, and then it's just flame-flame-flame for a few millennia.
(Of course on the planet Arkthon IV you have to turn your head to the right rather than the left to read the smileys.)
Slashdot Mirror
Is there a government regulation at some point in the future getting rid of the analog HDTVs and recorders?
If the point is to close the analog hole, you can leverage the existing analog TVs by supporting them, but preventing future TVs (and, more to the point, recorders) from supporting that signal. As those wear out and people replace their TVs with (mandated) digital DRM ones, the studios get their dream of DRM all the way through without breaking compatibility with existing set. At some point they all turn on the token for future releases, and the DRM is total.
Yeah, I know it's stupid; as long as one analog recorder exists it'll leak out into the P2P nets and thence into everybody's hard disk. And people will make new ones. I'm just trying to follow their thinking.
So is there some sort of legislation mandating the digital DRM TVs, or am I making that up?
Thanks for the pointer; I was waiting for somebody to post a cogent rebuttal. Sorry all I've got for you is kudos; no mod points today.
In finance it's called "leverage", and it's what allows us to get work done. Loans are where capital comes from, and capital is what creates the stuff that we sell to make money. Loans do more than buy goods. Capital hires programmers to write software, buys dry cleaning machines for a new dry cleaner, etc. That's money that makes money, because goods and services are produced with it.
The money multiplier doesn't fluctuate much, but the Federal overnight rate does. When that rate goes down, banks can borrow money more easily, and the stock market goes up. The market goes up because they know that eventually that money gets loaned out to people who will use it to make more money, which comes back to stockholders.
I know I'm playing up the good sides; I'm talking about business loans rather than the sort of unsecured personal loans that credit card companies make. And the credit card companies are clearly playing stupid, vile games by lending out money that they know perfectly well isn't going to be used productively, and trying to shuffle the risk off on somebody else. (Like the merchants; they often find ways not to pay the merchants in cases of identity theft.)
But I wouldn't blame the Fed for that. The fake money that the Fed creates can be come real money through productivity. That would happen without it, but much, much more slowly. It's the banks (and only some of them) that are really hosing up the system and blaming others for it.
And lowering your credit score can be great fun, too. Apply for a few dozen credit cards, max 'em out, and party like it's 2099.
I'm perplexed. I was under the impression that building your own got you better hardware and more flexibility, but not that it was cheaper. Basically, you could increase the high end, but that if you were looking for just-a-plain-computer you couldn't beat Dell's prices because you can't order the parts in the kind of massive bulk they do.
His goal was to demonstrate that the Western press makes everything political. Perhaps he's right, but it seems to me that he's failed to demonstrate it. He posted a deliberately misleading message on his web site. If he wanted to post evidence, I'd rather see examples of how things he posted were taken out of context. The China Daily article doesn't give them.
Well, now he's attracted attention, and he gets the opportunity to do the demonstration he wanted, but the way he attracted the attention doesn't demonstrate it by itself.
"Bad journalism" seems a misnomer to me. The story they wrote contains the conclusions the blog strongly implied they should. When it turned out they were wrong, they retracted the story. Journalism is "the first rough draft of history", but that draft is continually revised. Which means that sometimes they will be fooled by people deliberately setting out to fool them.
They claim that they were unable to contact him to check the story in detail, and I believe them when they say that they couldn't. If their goal was purely to politicize, they wouldn't have bothered posting the retraction.
If there's criticism to be made of journalists, it's that they feel compelled to report what they see immediately, before they get a chance to do full detailed investigation. That's the fault of the Western system in general, where people will buy whatever news media outlet will give them the news first. And perhaps that also extends to whatever gives them the most "exciting" news, even if it means jumping to conclusions, but I think that this case doesn't demonstrate that.
There seems to be some pretty substantial innovation in the realm of IEDs recently.
Well, this isn't a particularly good time to take a data point on movie quality. January, February, and March are classically the time when studios release their dogs. They figure that the kids are in school, and people would rather spend wintry evenings at home than braving the weather to go to the theater.
They release a bunch of good movies around Thanksgiving and New Year's, when people take breaks. That's also when most of the potential Oscar nominees are released, just before the end of the year (to be fresh in the Academy's mind).
And they're waiting for the summer for people to be on vacation again, so they release the stuff that they thought was not good enough to attract attention during the summer and winter rushes of great movies, and the real losers that they're hoping will be able to recoup their losses as long as there's nothing else good to see.
Not that I agree with this "logic"; the studios love to pander to a "conventional wisdom" and never question it. When Spider-Man was released a few weeks _before_ the traditional Memorial Day weekend rush, they were stunned to discover that people who had five months of cruddy movies would throw gobs of money at a good one.
But logic good or ill, movies are cruddy now because that's when the cruddy movies come out. Last year's whole movie season was pretty bad, and the studios deserved to see attendance fall 9%. But if the studios have learned a lesson, you won't see the results until the late spring. They're still flushing their crap. Sorry.
I'm not a historian, especially not a historian of patent law. I can't give you data. Sorry. Call yourself the winner of the argument if you like.
But I do know that the rate of inventions increased dramatically in the past couple of hundred years. The United States was a dramatic mover in technology from its inception as a country. Perhaps it's a coincidence that the US also had a strong notion of patents (inherited from England, another patent-awarding country and producer of many of the Industrial Revolution's first advances).
Patents during the Industrial Revolution were very different from what they are today. They were on mechanical inventions rather than mere ideas (especially unimplemented ideas). And the pace of innovation is so fast that we hardly need to encourage it; the speed of communication and the ability of customers to quickly switch from one technology to another provides different incentives to innovate and the slowing down of licensing a patent gets in the way. Change may well have made the patent system unnecessary today, but that doesn't necessarily invalidate its utility in the past, or the soundness of the original idea.
In other words, independent creation of invention occurs in part because the economic incentive of patents encourages many people to work on the problem simultaneously. Without that encouragement, perhaps none of them would have worked on the telephone and it might not have happened until much later.
A couple of scary things on their key statistics: a debt of half-billion (and less than half that much cash on hand). And the -60% earnings growth. The low P/E is very promising, but if their earnings are falling rather than rising it's a red herring.
New management may be able to turn it around. Best of luck. I do miss the old Radio Shack, and I wish there were a Fry's around here.
I can't middle-click to open in a new tab in Firefox, either. That's how I do searching: middle-click the results into a new tab so that I can easily get back to the search page. That's especially handy when the linked-to page does something unpleasant, like redirecting that confuses the back button.
The fee is optional, but they don't guarantee delivery if you don't pay it. That gives AOL the possibility of extorting MoveOn: "pay up or we'll pretend you're spammers and drop your email on the floor." That would be pretty scuzzy of AOL, since it knows that MoveOn is a valid email-sending organization, but they haven't said that they won't do that. They might just claim, "Gee, there are a zillion valid emailers in the world, and we can't keep track of all of them unless they pay us to do it. Besides, we offered them a non-profit discount."
Personally, I'd say that this is a fine plan until we see AOL using it to do evil, and I'd hold off on the "boycott AOL" campaign until they actually do something vile. But the majority on Slashdot beg to differ.
The leeches are in; they're called "spammers". They're able to function because they can send a billion emails a day at zero cost to them. Even if the hit rate is trivial, it's enough as long as the costs are practically zero.
So the situation is already "not good". I can't say if this is the right solution or not, but the present situation doesn't thrill me either.
Goodmail is also supposed to block abuse, even from people who pay. When you sign up with Goodmail you have to sign a contract. I don't know the details of that contract, so perhaps I'm wrong, but I suspect that they will enforce the CAN-SPAM rules (not that I'm thrilled about them, but they do make spam easier to filter).
Remember, Goodmail's sole reason for existence is to limit spam, while allowing legitimate mail. If they block personal emails, or allow through v1@gra ads, they're going to lose customers fast. AOL hopes to attract customers with this, not drive them away.
Of course MoveOn opposes it. MoveOn is exactly the sort of organization who gets hit by this. They send out large quantities of email, presumably to people who have signed up for it. If they send out a work-daily email to 100,000 AOL customers, at a $.001 non-profit rate (I'm making these numbers up, but they're on the rough order of magnitude) that's $100 a day, perhaps $20,000 a year. That's real money to a nonprofit, even if it's half the cost of a single stamp per person for an entire year.
The question would be whether AOL plays nicely. If they have a non-profit rate, does that mean that they WILL absolutely demand their inch of green? Or will they note that MoveOn plays by the spam rules and not block their emails? Will AOL extort that $20k a year even if MoveOn obviously isn't spamming?
I'm a little ticked that MoveOn is trying to pretend that they're fighting for the general freedom of Internet, lest AOL start extorting your grandmother to send baby pictures. In reality they're just interested in themselves. Rightly so, perhaps, but the cloak of hysteria bugs me.
Ah, the old Y2.1K problem. They've gone back to 2 digits years, and anything after '06 is treated as 2106. They figure you're -178 years old.
The funny thing is that as long as CDs are sold, there will always be a leak into music swapping systems. Selling one DRMed copy of a song prevents one listener from swapping his copy, but it only takes one unDRMed copy to make it universally available. I keep wondering when they will decide to stop making CDs entirely.
Even if they do, there will still be the analog hole, and I wonder what that will look like. In theory it only takes one person to do that "analog rip" and then watch it spread through the P2P networks, but it it's too much of a pain to do (and they can shut down enough P2P networks, and the quality too low) it may no longer be worth it.
Maybe. Otherwise, really they ought to give up on the DRM and pray that most people are honest, because right now DRM strikes me as nailing shut the door and leaving the window open.
Isn't this the one that gets defeated by holding down the SHIFT key when you insert the disc?
A program can still do plenty of damage even without root privileges. Your system per se may be safe, but your files aren't: they can be deleted or sent over the network. Or you could become a spam-bot, just like a Windows user: it doesn't require root privileges to open a port.
It may not be able to make itself last through rebootings, but you're not supposed to have to reboot OS X very often.
I don't get it. (I'm not a Mac user; I'm just trying to understand the world.)
What's the "safe" file that's being executed: the ZIP archive, or is it it the JPG with executable content?
Can you get The Ricky Gervais Show on Songbird?
Thanks; I didn't know about either of those. They have so much stuff I can't keep up. I still use my own domain, so I don't use my gmail much, but I hear they're planning to solve that problem, too.
I wonder: If GMail were to incorporate an RSS reader (the way Thunderbird does), it could potentially update many, many users with a single hit of each RSS site.
I'm leaning towards using RSS as a way to do announcements rather than maintain a mailing list. Rather than tell me you want me to send you updates (and deal with being potentially a spammer, deal with your unsubscribe, your email address change, etc.), just poll my site every so often (days, for the lists I'm talking about; hours, for Slashdot) and let it show up in your mail queue.
The idea isn't quite ready for prime time; too few people use RSS. But GMail could make that happen in one fell swoop. Well, two fell swoops: you'd need some sort of browser extension to make the little orange "RSS feed" button notify GMail.
I wonder if just having GMail (and hotmail, aol, and yahoo) handle that would solve the problem to the point where we no longer needed a P2P RSS distribution system.
Alternatively, if ISPs were to cache the RSS feeds the way some do with certain web pages, that might also take a lot of the load off. People will still impolitely set their RSS readers to check the feed every 10 seconds, but at least it never gets out onto the backbone if it's cached at the ISP.
If we did get a response it would probably be more than just "Got your message, please reply."
No, it would probably be some sort if intergalactic smiley: %*&. An we'd figure that the pointy bits were probably teeth, and get all pissed at them, so we'd send them a snarky message back, and then it's just flame-flame-flame for a few millennia.
(Of course on the planet Arkthon IV you have to turn your head to the right rather than the left to read the smileys.)