In theory, this closes the analog hole. In practice, you're right: it takes only one person to crack the thing (whether through the "physical hole" of pointing a camera at a monitor or via an illegal DRM-free device) and release it on P2P to make it universally available.
I wouldn't expect them to try to require devices to play only tagged items. If they do, they'd have to authorize a number of content providers, and with that many copies of the key running around the pirates would certainly be able to get a hold of one. That's effectively what allowed DeCSS to be written.
Is it going to help? Possibly a bit. It prevents just anybody from ripping their CDs and DVDs and putting them on the Internet. Well, it would, if the CD standard didn't make them rippable unless you do something stupid and break the standard, and if DVD hand't already been broken, and if the new hi-res DVDs weren't far too big to share on 99.999% of the world's internet connections.
It does prevent you (more or less) from easily using the analog hole to copy streaming media and downloaded music/video. Personally, I expect that they're going to try to get rid of standard CDs (breaking backwards compatibility) and sell things only using a new, heavily DRMed, standard.
If that slowed down the progress of things to P2P, it would make it easier to find the originators and charge them, and/or convince people to use more reliable pay services.
The original works can be tagged in a variety of ways. The DRM software notices the tag and will only output through the certified devices. The DRM is built into the OS and therefore difficult to circumvent. Usually something about the file is tagged to the computer/devices that it's allowed to be played on.
Legitimate free music or video won't be tagged, and so the DRM software ignores it; it can be output on any device.
Note that this is mostly about protecting music and/or video, not software (except by a wide definition of "software"). The UDI governs output devices. There are other bits of the DRM (e.g. Palladium) that can be used to restrict the copying of software, and the same will apply: legitimate tagged copies will be allowed to run; illegally tagged copies will be forbidden; untagged software like free software will run.
I actually don't know of a name for you, which is funny, since there are an awful lot of people who share your beliefs in one form or another. It's actually more or less the stated doctrine of the Catholic Church.
You could call yourself a Darwinist, which tends to imply that you believe the Big Bang Theory. I don't like that name, because in general I dislike tying theories to people. It's not about Darwin qua Darwin but about the theories that he expounded first (well, not quite first, nor best, but he sort of hit the sweet spot of "nearly first and good enough").
"Evolutionist" is less personality-driven, with the same implications, but it still really doesn't cover it.
You could call yourself a "Christian Scientist", but that's REALLY gonna send the wrong message.
Closest may be "I am a Southern Baptist and also a scientist", at which point you'd better be prepared to reconcile your separate positions. (The Southern Baptist Church is a lot more complicated than most people realize, and you may be in for a long afternoon of clearing up misconceptions.)
Agreed. A nice logo, like you'd find on a business card, would tag an ad without distracting. An offer to punch the monkey, on the other hand, would switch me to another search engine immediately.
My guidelines would call for an ad no bigger than perhaps 32x32, or maybe 64x64, and a single frame; certainly no animations. And I hope they cost a lot; make money to support Google and all the spiffy stuff they do while ensuring that they remain relatively rare.
There are those who object to ads in all their forms. I don't; I know that's how some sites pay for themselves. As long as they don't interfere with the usability of the site, I don't object. I've learned to believe that Google knows the difference, because they've done so well in the past.
The Patriot Act extensions did receive 52 votes in favor of cutting off discussions and moving to a vote. It's just that it requires 60 votes to do that, so we don't get the Patriot Act (today) even though it appears that a majority would vote for it.
Which is all it needs to pass, if it made it to the floor. That's what has Republicans so ticked about filibusters: they allow a (large) minority to stop a bill that has majority approval. When outraged Republicans cry, "Why would you deny a simple up-or-down vote?" they're referring to cases like this. If it weren't for the filibuster rules the Patriot Act would already be approved.
By "now this", do you mean to imply that he's taking responsibility for this? Thus far the White House has had relatively little to say on this topic, and what there has been has been denial that the President has done anything illegal.
As for the ball dropping, it's been gradually lowering for quite some time. Even before the invasion itself the rhetoric had shifted away from WMDs, and towards other reasons for invading Iraq: fostering democracy in the Middle East, overthrowing a dictator who'd been cruel to his own people, the general "War on Terror", forcing Saddam to comply with UN regulations (which he hadn't done; he didn't have the WMDs but didn't give UN inspectors complete access to prove it).
So he's been pushing away from the WMD issue and gradually admitting more and more about the faulty intelligence. The most recent admission is the most bald, but it's laid against a background of other justifications.
I'm not trying to claim that those are good justifications; I'll let you make up your own mind on that. And I've got no (public) opinion on whether he knew the intelligence was faulty at the time. But I can say this isn't a sudden reversal; it's an opinion he's been working towards for some time. If it seems sudden, it's only because he's using language now that admits some of the blame, but only because he can point to some progress in Iraq.
Actually, BMWs are "just cars" over in Europe, especially in Germany. Only the high end models make it to the US, and they like to preserve that niche-market branding here.
First off, you need to distinguish between body and display fonts. Display fonts are the big, complicated, fancy ones, usually for headlines, logos, and very short snatches of text. Text set in display fonts is almost more like a graphic than a piece of text, and they're often rendered precisely that way to give control. In the display text, the font choice has a lot to say about the feel of the site: elegant, chunky, exciting, old-fashioned, etc. They're usually set big enough that additional scaling isn't necessary to readability, though it would be nice to be able to scale it to maintain page layout, to make it selectable and searchable, etc.
Your complaint is more valid registered against the use of interesting fonts for body fonts, which is the main text of the page. That really does have to be a negotiation between the page desginer and the browser. Like display fonts, the feel of the font can really affect the feel of the page, to the same degree but in a less glaring way. Consider the way you can tell if a page has been typeset on a Mac or a Windows box just by the fonts that have been chosen.
An extreme case would be a very old-fashioned font with lots of medial S (the ones that look like f), but even then there's good reason for the user to want to say, "Thanks for the pretty page, may I now please have it in something readable?"
Even without going to that extreme, there's good reason for a designer to feel that the standard fonts don't give the feel he's after. So the compromises are somewhat uneasy. A good standard that allowed designers to send fonts over, at least as a suggestion, and then allow users to swap them out (in a cascading fashion with a user-supplied style sheet) would be nifty.
Some other services, but not all other services. In particular, you can't put on WMA-protected music, which is the next most popular format for legal music downloads after iTMS's own FairPlay/AAC format. (The article is something of a shill for Napster, which uses WMA).
You can get lots and lots of music from other services in other formats supported by the iPod, especially MP3s, but usually those are from less-well-known bands or from services of dubious legality, like allofmp3.com.
You don't just add companies to the NASDAQ 100. You also have to drop them. The losers this time:
Career Education Corp. Dollar Tree Stores Inc. Intersil Corp. Invitrogen Corp Level 3 Communications Inc. Millennium Pharmaceuticals Inc. Molex Inc. Novellus Systems Inc. QLogic Corp. Sanmina-SCI Corp. Synopsys Inc. Smurfit-Stone Container Corp.
I've never heard of most of these companies. And that's one of the problems with the NASDAQ 100 as an index. Its contents change often, to drop losers and reward winners. Which means that the NASDAQ 100 is constantly rising as long as they can find some stocks going up.
How can you compare today's NASDAQ 100 index with yesterday's if the stock on it change? They weight the numbers to ensure that yesterday's number is the same as today's, but it means that tomorrow's number is on a completely different scale. The NASDAQ will almost certainly go up because you've replaced losers with winners, but that makes it hard to use yesterday's numbers with tomorrow's numbers to help visualize the overall trend.
The NASDAQ 100 index is far flakier than the relatively stable Dow Jones Industrial Average, which is why the NASDAQ 100 is less often reported than the Dow. It's supposed to measure the health of the hot tech stocks in the US, which means it's going to be flaky, but it also makes the number somewhat less useful.
Well, I wouldn't say "everything" is on the NASDAQ. NASDAQ is one of the major stock exchanges in the US; the biggest and oldest one is the New York Stock Exchange. A particular stock is usually traded only on one exchange. NASDAQ is heavy on tech stocks, and NYSE is heavy on older, more blue-chip kinds of companies. Most of the companies that affect Slashdot are listed on the NASDAQ, but for most of history it's the NYSE that's been considered the more important index.
The NASDAQ 100 is an index; that is, it's a number designed to tell you how the NASDAQ as a whole is doing. The most famous index is the Dow Jones Industrial Average; when people say "the market is up" they usually mean the Dow.
The Dow is designed to track big old industrial companies like steel, sugar, and railroads. They're "blue chips", meaning they turn in reliable, consistent profits, and are thus supposed to be a good measure of the overall long-term health of the economy. It's heavy on NYSE companies, though NASDAQ companies are gradually creeping their way onto it.
The press release is beautifully vague on the subject.
Reading between the lines, note that it's not the RIAA deciding not to hire these guys any more. They're simply stopping the service. "Effective immediately" is usually code for "Man, we're so screwed up that it's not even worth the effort to pretend." They're not selling the sub-company, or finishing out the month. It's the most undignified way to close out a company.
Basically, that smacks of bad management to me. Maybe they were being effective, maybe not, but they're spending $1.6 million a year doing it. I think somebody from the top said, "We're pulling the plug on this. Write the shortest conceivable press release and we'll pretend it never happened."
That was E*Trade, but don't blame them. They presented a simple form using ordinary terms of the market, like "stop" and "limit" and "market". Arguably their help system could have explained the terms slightly better, but that would have to be aimed at complete novices, because that's standard terminology and a user interface that avoided using the technical terms would just have confused anybody with any experience.
And in fact the help system did a fine job of explaining them. I was just worried because if I had managed to misunderstand, it would have been costly.
A few weeks ago I engaged in some slightly complicated stock transactions, where I sold a company short then issued an order to buy it back if it rose to a certain price (in case it rose unexpectedly). Before I punched the "confirm" button I spent rather a long time making sure that I was saying "Only buy it when it hits that price" not "Offer to buy it at that price", which would have resulted in a huge loss for me.
This guy's problem was presumably different; he knew what the forms meant but entered the wrong numbers. Still, it's kind of scary to be looking at a computer screen and thinking, "I hope this is right, or it's REALLY gonna suck."
The Simple Sharing Extension sounds pretty useful. It defines extra fields to help make one feed dependent on another feed, which will be useful when you're creating RSS aggregators.
The List Extension sounds less useful to me; it basically sets up fields to define ways to sort and group RSS feeds (like you can do with a SQL query). This one strikes me as less well thought-out and partially redundant with an RSS reader which could sort on any field. That's especially true for your basic blog-like RSS feed, where the set of fields in use is limited. It looks like this is a piece of a much larger generalized query mechanism using RDF.
I'm not an RSS expert so I can't say how necessary these extensions are. But I'll remind everybody that most new standards come out as somebody initially saying, "Here, try this!" and the ones that like stick and are eventually blessed by a standards committee. HTML predates the W3C, and HTML got a good bit of bashing around trying to find the Right Thing in practice rather than having a standards committee guess what was right.
So I'd recommend that people developing RSS readers consider adding these features and see if their users like them.
I agree with much of your reasoning, but I think you're leaving out a factor. There are two different things that make a song worth more:
1. Many people want it 2. Few people want it, but they want it a lot.
That's why you'll end up with a U-shaped curve: very popular music will sell for a lot because so many people want it that you can raise the price until listeners squeal. And some unpopular songs will have higher prices because they appeal to a market with few people willing to spend a lot of money (say, "rare" jazz recordings or concert bootlegs).
In other words, "demand" is measured in terms of dollars, not in terms of people. The low price is for stuff in the middle, where some people want it but there isn't massive demand, either in terms of people or in terms of dollars.
By "rare" above I mean that they can try to artificially keep rare things rare with DRM. If they decide that DRM really, truly, genuinely doesn't work and everything sells a single copy and is instantly available for free, then everything changes. (I'm not taking a position for or against it, just talking about the economics of it and explaining a technical assumption.) This artificial scarcity corresponds to a completely flexible market, where they can make as many copies as are necessary but will make only as many copies as necessary.
The price to produce sets a floor on how much they can charge (and that price incorporates a company's total expenses, including overhead and the expense of producing records that flop), but that only affects how low the price can go before the company just goes out of business. It doesn't set the top of anything, and there's no economic reason for them to charge less just because they don't need the extra profit.
And for the unpopular stuff there's no particular need to take the floor into account because any sale is worth more than no sale; the expenses are sunk costs. The only floor is the management overhead needed to keep it on the web site, and in fact that may be so low as to be zero compared to the sex appeal of being able to make EVERYTHING available.
Careful with that " $.50 to create" line of reasoning. The second disc costs fifty cents, but the first disc is vastly more expensive.
I'm not disagreeing with your overall argument, but I think you need to be clear on the economics of the situation. An album takes many hours of effort by the band (who would kind of like to be paid, too, plus paying for their very expensive instruments), plus a few dozen hours of studio engineer and mixer (at rates comparable to a computer programmer), album art by an artist, etc.
And that's assuming that all you're doing is creating one album. If you are a studio and helping to produce dozens of albums, the costs of the albums that didn't sell well have to get paid somehow. Plus the management of all those things, plus promoting all those things. (Promotion and marketing are never free; there's a reason sites will pay as much as a dollar for a click on their web site.) The plastic disc is the least expensive part of the process.
I'm not going to try to convince you that it adds up to $15 per album; not even close. But be very careful about lowballing the numbers. Sure, they're being greedy, but if you tell them that what they're selling should only cost a third of what it costs them to produce it, then you're being greedy, too.
The push is on the posting end. Rather than there being one particular server for each news feed, each post is pushed out to all of the Usenet servers in the world. It's very clever, and nicely redundant (in the good way), but the pull is only for the last mile from your NNTP host to your client.
I suppose you could use the Usenet protocol like this, where each blogger set up his own Usenet server and you pulled from that. That would have some advantages over RSS (like two-way communication). But that's not the way Usenet is done now. Now it's one server per client, rather than one server per poster, and a whole lot of copying.
Being skeptical is a good thing but head in the sand dogma is hurting not helping the science.
How, exactly? Suppose, for giggles, that the scientists decided to be less skeptical and run shouting in the streets, "There's water on Mars! And two of three Viking tests showed that there's life on Mars! Yay!" And then...
Then what, exactly? We don't really know anything more than we did this morning; we've just decided to reinterpret the data more optimistically.
Maybe you're just suggesting that the public would be more behind additional scientific research if they thought there was something extraordinary like life on other planets to find there. But that's public relations, not science. Science is about knowledge, not opinion.
It is only by building piece of evidence upon other pieces of evidence that science proceeds. That's dogmatic, perhaps, but it's an extremely successful way of looking at the world. When you start to accept speculation and extrapolation as fact, you gradually introduce more and more errors until you don't really know anything any more.
And I wouldn't call water on Europa an accepted fact, though you wouldn't necessarily know it from reading Slashdot, where the best information on Europa seems to come from the movie 2010. Water on Europa is looked at by astrophysicists in exactly the same way as water on Mars: there is tantalizing evidence but no proof, yet. It won't take muddy boots; it'll just take more probes and more analysis of the existing evidence to rule out other possibilities.
Only when there's no other interpretation of the data can you grant something the status of "fact". And the more you want something to be true, the harder you'd better double-check that it's not just wishful thinking. That's brought down more than one good scientist in the past.
Additional work will continue to be done on the most likely hypotheses. Tantalizing evidence for water on Mars allows us to build machines that will be able to look for it in more detail because we know where, what kind, etc. to look for. Our time and money are limited, so we limit ourselves to the most likely hypotheses. That's why announcements like this are celebrated, but cautiously.
I'm not an expert on the history, but I believe that the moderation/karma system was devised by Slashdot. I've never seen anything quite like it. I'm sure there were various predecessors, but Slashdot's is particularly effective.
The most fundamental difference between usenet and RSS is that Usenet is push, and RSS is pull. The push nature of Usenet makes spam really, really easy, and hard to fight. You end up accepting a lot of crap on your machine, and filter it out later. When you go to an RSS feed you know that there is control over it, and if one particular source starts spewing junk you stop reading it.
It also makes Usenet very democratic: anybody can say anything, anonymously. Those two things will always be opposite sides of the same coin. RSS requires more resources of your own (though there are a remarkable number of free blogging sites, so anybody anywhere can create a blog as long as they have Web access).
Unfortunately, the number of anonymous sources with brilliant information is infinitesimal compared to the number of people willing to spew crap into whatever data stream is available for free. And that's why bloggers won't go to Usenet: they lack the control necessary to keep readers. RSS gives them that control.
The rootkit does give you a warning, in the form of a badly-written and probably meaningless EULA. I'm sure not defending the action, but it wasn't rape. It's saying "yes" to a charming asshole.
The funny thing is that television got to be a one-way pipe to a dumb terminal precisely when it was the most monopolistic. The US government adopted TV standards, and sold (for a pittance) the rights to spectrum that has become increasingly valuable over the years. The terminal is dumb only because a standard was imposed; otherwise, the network affiliates could all have chosen different standards to try to lock you in to watching a particular network. Or you could buy a smarter box to read them all.
Now that the market for video delivery is far more open, you see companies doing precisely what companies do when they compete: try to lock you in to theirs. You've got many more options, and while being able to pick and choose is better for you, it's a loss for the company who would rather keep 100% of the attention that they pay so much to get (both in terms of bandwidth to deliver their content, whether from a web server or a broadcast tower, and in marketing to convince you to check them out in the first place.)
In other words, it seems to me as if the free market is doing exactly what it's always doing. In a sense what you're asking for is to remove an element of competition, by forcing the various vendors to adhere to some sort of standard.
It may be that those who choose a more open standard will form a cartel between them and eventually win over the others as you the consumer elect the single distribution channel with the most content. Or maybe not; even a decade after cell phones became widespread they still interoperate only via the original monopolistic network. It being an open market, it's up to the consumer to decide.
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In theory, this closes the analog hole. In practice, you're right: it takes only one person to crack the thing (whether through the "physical hole" of pointing a camera at a monitor or via an illegal DRM-free device) and release it on P2P to make it universally available.
I wouldn't expect them to try to require devices to play only tagged items. If they do, they'd have to authorize a number of content providers, and with that many copies of the key running around the pirates would certainly be able to get a hold of one. That's effectively what allowed DeCSS to be written.
Is it going to help? Possibly a bit. It prevents just anybody from ripping their CDs and DVDs and putting them on the Internet. Well, it would, if the CD standard didn't make them rippable unless you do something stupid and break the standard, and if DVD hand't already been broken, and if the new hi-res DVDs weren't far too big to share on 99.999% of the world's internet connections.
It does prevent you (more or less) from easily using the analog hole to copy streaming media and downloaded music/video. Personally, I expect that they're going to try to get rid of standard CDs (breaking backwards compatibility) and sell things only using a new, heavily DRMed, standard.
If that slowed down the progress of things to P2P, it would make it easier to find the originators and charge them, and/or convince people to use more reliable pay services.
Or not.
The original works can be tagged in a variety of ways. The DRM software notices the tag and will only output through the certified devices. The DRM is built into the OS and therefore difficult to circumvent. Usually something about the file is tagged to the computer/devices that it's allowed to be played on.
Legitimate free music or video won't be tagged, and so the DRM software ignores it; it can be output on any device.
Note that this is mostly about protecting music and/or video, not software (except by a wide definition of "software"). The UDI governs output devices. There are other bits of the DRM (e.g. Palladium) that can be used to restrict the copying of software, and the same will apply: legitimate tagged copies will be allowed to run; illegally tagged copies will be forbidden; untagged software like free software will run.
I actually don't know of a name for you, which is funny, since there are an awful lot of people who share your beliefs in one form or another. It's actually more or less the stated doctrine of the Catholic Church.
You could call yourself a Darwinist, which tends to imply that you believe the Big Bang Theory. I don't like that name, because in general I dislike tying theories to people. It's not about Darwin qua Darwin but about the theories that he expounded first (well, not quite first, nor best, but he sort of hit the sweet spot of "nearly first and good enough").
"Evolutionist" is less personality-driven, with the same implications, but it still really doesn't cover it.
You could call yourself a "Christian Scientist", but that's REALLY gonna send the wrong message.
Closest may be "I am a Southern Baptist and also a scientist", at which point you'd better be prepared to reconcile your separate positions. (The Southern Baptist Church is a lot more complicated than most people realize, and you may be in for a long afternoon of clearing up misconceptions.)
Agreed. A nice logo, like you'd find on a business card, would tag an ad without distracting. An offer to punch the monkey, on the other hand, would switch me to another search engine immediately.
My guidelines would call for an ad no bigger than perhaps 32x32, or maybe 64x64, and a single frame; certainly no animations. And I hope they cost a lot; make money to support Google and all the spiffy stuff they do while ensuring that they remain relatively rare.
There are those who object to ads in all their forms. I don't; I know that's how some sites pay for themselves. As long as they don't interfere with the usability of the site, I don't object. I've learned to believe that Google knows the difference, because they've done so well in the past.
The Patriot Act extensions did receive 52 votes in favor of cutting off discussions and moving to a vote. It's just that it requires 60 votes to do that, so we don't get the Patriot Act (today) even though it appears that a majority would vote for it.
Which is all it needs to pass, if it made it to the floor. That's what has Republicans so ticked about filibusters: they allow a (large) minority to stop a bill that has majority approval. When outraged Republicans cry, "Why would you deny a simple up-or-down vote?" they're referring to cases like this. If it weren't for the filibuster rules the Patriot Act would already be approved.
By "now this", do you mean to imply that he's taking responsibility for this? Thus far the White House has had relatively little to say on this topic, and what there has been has been denial that the President has done anything illegal.
As for the ball dropping, it's been gradually lowering for quite some time. Even before the invasion itself the rhetoric had shifted away from WMDs, and towards other reasons for invading Iraq: fostering democracy in the Middle East, overthrowing a dictator who'd been cruel to his own people, the general "War on Terror", forcing Saddam to comply with UN regulations (which he hadn't done; he didn't have the WMDs but didn't give UN inspectors complete access to prove it).
So he's been pushing away from the WMD issue and gradually admitting more and more about the faulty intelligence. The most recent admission is the most bald, but it's laid against a background of other justifications.
I'm not trying to claim that those are good justifications; I'll let you make up your own mind on that. And I've got no (public) opinion on whether he knew the intelligence was faulty at the time. But I can say this isn't a sudden reversal; it's an opinion he's been working towards for some time. If it seems sudden, it's only because he's using language now that admits some of the blame, but only because he can point to some progress in Iraq.
Actually, BMWs are "just cars" over in Europe, especially in Germany. Only the high end models make it to the US, and they like to preserve that niche-market branding here.
First off, you need to distinguish between body and display fonts. Display fonts are the big, complicated, fancy ones, usually for headlines, logos, and very short snatches of text. Text set in display fonts is almost more like a graphic than a piece of text, and they're often rendered precisely that way to give control. In the display text, the font choice has a lot to say about the feel of the site: elegant, chunky, exciting, old-fashioned, etc. They're usually set big enough that additional scaling isn't necessary to readability, though it would be nice to be able to scale it to maintain page layout, to make it selectable and searchable, etc.
Your complaint is more valid registered against the use of interesting fonts for body fonts, which is the main text of the page. That really does have to be a negotiation between the page desginer and the browser. Like display fonts, the feel of the font can really affect the feel of the page, to the same degree but in a less glaring way. Consider the way you can tell if a page has been typeset on a Mac or a Windows box just by the fonts that have been chosen.
An extreme case would be a very old-fashioned font with lots of medial S (the ones that look like f), but even then there's good reason for the user to want to say, "Thanks for the pretty page, may I now please have it in something readable?"
Even without going to that extreme, there's good reason for a designer to feel that the standard fonts don't give the feel he's after. So the compromises are somewhat uneasy. A good standard that allowed designers to send fonts over, at least as a suggestion, and then allow users to swap them out (in a cascading fashion with a user-supplied style sheet) would be nifty.
Some other services, but not all other services. In particular, you can't put on WMA-protected music, which is the next most popular format for legal music downloads after iTMS's own FairPlay/AAC format. (The article is something of a shill for Napster, which uses WMA).
You can get lots and lots of music from other services in other formats supported by the iPod, especially MP3s, but usually those are from less-well-known bands or from services of dubious legality, like allofmp3.com.
You don't just add companies to the NASDAQ 100. You also have to drop them. The losers this time:
Career Education Corp.
Dollar Tree Stores Inc.
Intersil Corp.
Invitrogen Corp
Level 3 Communications Inc.
Millennium Pharmaceuticals Inc.
Molex Inc.
Novellus Systems Inc.
QLogic Corp.
Sanmina-SCI Corp.
Synopsys Inc.
Smurfit-Stone Container Corp.
I've never heard of most of these companies. And that's one of the problems with the NASDAQ 100 as an index. Its contents change often, to drop losers and reward winners. Which means that the NASDAQ 100 is constantly rising as long as they can find some stocks going up.
How can you compare today's NASDAQ 100 index with yesterday's if the stock on it change? They weight the numbers to ensure that yesterday's number is the same as today's, but it means that tomorrow's number is on a completely different scale. The NASDAQ will almost certainly go up because you've replaced losers with winners, but that makes it hard to use yesterday's numbers with tomorrow's numbers to help visualize the overall trend.
The NASDAQ 100 index is far flakier than the relatively stable Dow Jones Industrial Average, which is why the NASDAQ 100 is less often reported than the Dow. It's supposed to measure the health of the hot tech stocks in the US, which means it's going to be flaky, but it also makes the number somewhat less useful.
Well, I wouldn't say "everything" is on the NASDAQ. NASDAQ is one of the major stock exchanges in the US; the biggest and oldest one is the New York Stock Exchange. A particular stock is usually traded only on one exchange. NASDAQ is heavy on tech stocks, and NYSE is heavy on older, more blue-chip kinds of companies. Most of the companies that affect Slashdot are listed on the NASDAQ, but for most of history it's the NYSE that's been considered the more important index.
The NASDAQ 100 is an index; that is, it's a number designed to tell you how the NASDAQ as a whole is doing. The most famous index is the Dow Jones Industrial Average; when people say "the market is up" they usually mean the Dow.
The Dow is designed to track big old industrial companies like steel, sugar, and railroads. They're "blue chips", meaning they turn in reliable, consistent profits, and are thus supposed to be a good measure of the overall long-term health of the economy. It's heavy on NYSE companies, though NASDAQ companies are gradually creeping their way onto it.
The press release is beautifully vague on the subject.
Reading between the lines, note that it's not the RIAA deciding not to hire these guys any more. They're simply stopping the service. "Effective immediately" is usually code for "Man, we're so screwed up that it's not even worth the effort to pretend." They're not selling the sub-company, or finishing out the month. It's the most undignified way to close out a company.
Basically, that smacks of bad management to me. Maybe they were being effective, maybe not, but they're spending $1.6 million a year doing it. I think somebody from the top said, "We're pulling the plug on this. Write the shortest conceivable press release and we'll pretend it never happened."
That was E*Trade, but don't blame them. They presented a simple form using ordinary terms of the market, like "stop" and "limit" and "market". Arguably their help system could have explained the terms slightly better, but that would have to be aimed at complete novices, because that's standard terminology and a user interface that avoided using the technical terms would just have confused anybody with any experience.
And in fact the help system did a fine job of explaining them. I was just worried because if I had managed to misunderstand, it would have been costly.
A few weeks ago I engaged in some slightly complicated stock transactions, where I sold a company short then issued an order to buy it back if it rose to a certain price (in case it rose unexpectedly). Before I punched the "confirm" button I spent rather a long time making sure that I was saying "Only buy it when it hits that price" not "Offer to buy it at that price", which would have resulted in a huge loss for me.
This guy's problem was presumably different; he knew what the forms meant but entered the wrong numbers. Still, it's kind of scary to be looking at a computer screen and thinking, "I hope this is right, or it's REALLY gonna suck."
The Simple Sharing Extension sounds pretty useful. It defines extra fields to help make one feed dependent on another feed, which will be useful when you're creating RSS aggregators.
The List Extension sounds less useful to me; it basically sets up fields to define ways to sort and group RSS feeds (like you can do with a SQL query). This one strikes me as less well thought-out and partially redundant with an RSS reader which could sort on any field. That's especially true for your basic blog-like RSS feed, where the set of fields in use is limited. It looks like this is a piece of a much larger generalized query mechanism using RDF.
I'm not an RSS expert so I can't say how necessary these extensions are. But I'll remind everybody that most new standards come out as somebody initially saying, "Here, try this!" and the ones that like stick and are eventually blessed by a standards committee. HTML predates the W3C, and HTML got a good bit of bashing around trying to find the Right Thing in practice rather than having a standards committee guess what was right.
So I'd recommend that people developing RSS readers consider adding these features and see if their users like them.
I agree with much of your reasoning, but I think you're leaving out a factor. There are two different things that make a song worth more:
1. Many people want it
2. Few people want it, but they want it a lot.
That's why you'll end up with a U-shaped curve: very popular music will sell for a lot because so many people want it that you can raise the price until listeners squeal. And some unpopular songs will have higher prices because they appeal to a market with few people willing to spend a lot of money (say, "rare" jazz recordings or concert bootlegs).
In other words, "demand" is measured in terms of dollars, not in terms of people. The low price is for stuff in the middle, where some people want it but there isn't massive demand, either in terms of people or in terms of dollars.
By "rare" above I mean that they can try to artificially keep rare things rare with DRM. If they decide that DRM really, truly, genuinely doesn't work and everything sells a single copy and is instantly available for free, then everything changes. (I'm not taking a position for or against it, just talking about the economics of it and explaining a technical assumption.) This artificial scarcity corresponds to a completely flexible market, where they can make as many copies as are necessary but will make only as many copies as necessary.
The price to produce sets a floor on how much they can charge (and that price incorporates a company's total expenses, including overhead and the expense of producing records that flop), but that only affects how low the price can go before the company just goes out of business. It doesn't set the top of anything, and there's no economic reason for them to charge less just because they don't need the extra profit.
And for the unpopular stuff there's no particular need to take the floor into account because any sale is worth more than no sale; the expenses are sunk costs. The only floor is the management overhead needed to keep it on the web site, and in fact that may be so low as to be zero compared to the sex appeal of being able to make EVERYTHING available.
Careful with that " $.50 to create" line of reasoning. The second disc costs fifty cents, but the first disc is vastly more expensive.
I'm not disagreeing with your overall argument, but I think you need to be clear on the economics of the situation. An album takes many hours of effort by the band (who would kind of like to be paid, too, plus paying for their very expensive instruments), plus a few dozen hours of studio engineer and mixer (at rates comparable to a computer programmer), album art by an artist, etc.
And that's assuming that all you're doing is creating one album. If you are a studio and helping to produce dozens of albums, the costs of the albums that didn't sell well have to get paid somehow. Plus the management of all those things, plus promoting all those things. (Promotion and marketing are never free; there's a reason sites will pay as much as a dollar for a click on their web site.) The plastic disc is the least expensive part of the process.
I'm not going to try to convince you that it adds up to $15 per album; not even close. But be very careful about lowballing the numbers. Sure, they're being greedy, but if you tell them that what they're selling should only cost a third of what it costs them to produce it, then you're being greedy, too.
The push is on the posting end. Rather than there being one particular server for each news feed, each post is pushed out to all of the Usenet servers in the world. It's very clever, and nicely redundant (in the good way), but the pull is only for the last mile from your NNTP host to your client.
I suppose you could use the Usenet protocol like this, where each blogger set up his own Usenet server and you pulled from that. That would have some advantages over RSS (like two-way communication). But that's not the way Usenet is done now. Now it's one server per client, rather than one server per poster, and a whole lot of copying.
Being skeptical is a good thing but head in the sand dogma is hurting not helping the science.
How, exactly? Suppose, for giggles, that the scientists decided to be less skeptical and run shouting in the streets, "There's water on Mars! And two of three Viking tests showed that there's life on Mars! Yay!" And then...
Then what, exactly? We don't really know anything more than we did this morning; we've just decided to reinterpret the data more optimistically.
Maybe you're just suggesting that the public would be more behind additional scientific research if they thought there was something extraordinary like life on other planets to find there. But that's public relations, not science. Science is about knowledge, not opinion.
It is only by building piece of evidence upon other pieces of evidence that science proceeds. That's dogmatic, perhaps, but it's an extremely successful way of looking at the world. When you start to accept speculation and extrapolation as fact, you gradually introduce more and more errors until you don't really know anything any more.
And I wouldn't call water on Europa an accepted fact, though you wouldn't necessarily know it from reading Slashdot, where the best information on Europa seems to come from the movie 2010. Water on Europa is looked at by astrophysicists in exactly the same way as water on Mars: there is tantalizing evidence but no proof, yet. It won't take muddy boots; it'll just take more probes and more analysis of the existing evidence to rule out other possibilities.
Only when there's no other interpretation of the data can you grant something the status of "fact". And the more you want something to be true, the harder you'd better double-check that it's not just wishful thinking. That's brought down more than one good scientist in the past.
Additional work will continue to be done on the most likely hypotheses. Tantalizing evidence for water on Mars allows us to build machines that will be able to look for it in more detail because we know where, what kind, etc. to look for. Our time and money are limited, so we limit ourselves to the most likely hypotheses. That's why announcements like this are celebrated, but cautiously.
I'm not an expert on the history, but I believe that the moderation/karma system was devised by Slashdot. I've never seen anything quite like it. I'm sure there were various predecessors, but Slashdot's is particularly effective.
The most fundamental difference between usenet and RSS is that Usenet is push, and RSS is pull. The push nature of Usenet makes spam really, really easy, and hard to fight. You end up accepting a lot of crap on your machine, and filter it out later. When you go to an RSS feed you know that there is control over it, and if one particular source starts spewing junk you stop reading it.
It also makes Usenet very democratic: anybody can say anything, anonymously. Those two things will always be opposite sides of the same coin. RSS requires more resources of your own (though there are a remarkable number of free blogging sites, so anybody anywhere can create a blog as long as they have Web access).
Unfortunately, the number of anonymous sources with brilliant information is infinitesimal compared to the number of people willing to spew crap into whatever data stream is available for free. And that's why bloggers won't go to Usenet: they lack the control necessary to keep readers. RSS gives them that control.
TFA sez MP3, which AFAIK is w/o DRM.
Missed that part. Yeah, that's rape.
The rootkit does give you a warning, in the form of a badly-written and probably meaningless EULA. I'm sure not defending the action, but it wasn't rape. It's saying "yes" to a charming asshole.
The funny thing is that television got to be a one-way pipe to a dumb terminal precisely when it was the most monopolistic. The US government adopted TV standards, and sold (for a pittance) the rights to spectrum that has become increasingly valuable over the years. The terminal is dumb only because a standard was imposed; otherwise, the network affiliates could all have chosen different standards to try to lock you in to watching a particular network. Or you could buy a smarter box to read them all.
Now that the market for video delivery is far more open, you see companies doing precisely what companies do when they compete: try to lock you in to theirs. You've got many more options, and while being able to pick and choose is better for you, it's a loss for the company who would rather keep 100% of the attention that they pay so much to get (both in terms of bandwidth to deliver their content, whether from a web server or a broadcast tower, and in marketing to convince you to check them out in the first place.)
In other words, it seems to me as if the free market is doing exactly what it's always doing. In a sense what you're asking for is to remove an element of competition, by forcing the various vendors to adhere to some sort of standard.
It may be that those who choose a more open standard will form a cartel between them and eventually win over the others as you the consumer elect the single distribution channel with the most content. Or maybe not; even a decade after cell phones became widespread they still interoperate only via the original monopolistic network. It being an open market, it's up to the consumer to decide.