I didn't think of that as the really hard part in the space elevator problem. I'm sure somebody will figure out how to build a climber. I would have thought that the hard part is figuring out how to build a cable that the climber could climb, which seems to involve scaling up the best known materials by 10 orders of magnitude.
It reminds me of the old joke about the drunk looking under the lamppost for the quarter he dropped in the alley, because that's where the light is better.
In a world that increasingly takes the WWW, its pages and the other documents we exchange in the electronic world as given - and knights Tim Berners-Lee without an understanding of the pre-WWW background of stateless client/server document architectures (e.g. Gopher) and hypertext (e.g. Xanadu) on which he built - there still beavers away a forgotten figure, Ted Nelson, eager to more fully achieve the original hypertext vision.
That's one really long sentence, including a parenthetical example inside of a dashed aside. Maybe it would have been clearer to the editors if you'd taken this one sentence and broken it up into three or four.
And it might have been even clearer to skip the entire introductory clause "In a world..." and gotten to the gist: "Hey, Ted Nelson's not dead! You know, the Xanadu guy."
Actually, I was speaking somewhat precisely: when I say pro-Roe, I mean that the justice would not overturn the Roe v. Wade decision; an anti-Roe justice would.
That's more complicated than simply pro- or anti-abortion. It has to do with the decisions of individual states as well as the right to privacy. The Supreme Court doesn't speak directly on abortion; it speaks on cases.
I was talking that way because I was trying to avoid verging on the argument about whether abortion is right or wrong, or about whether the Iraq war was right or wrong. In that context I was simply trying to talk about politics: who has what power to make which decision. I actually find it a more interesting subject for study than the incessant arguments without obvious solutions. I have little interesting in this forum to contribute to the latter, but I can correct misperceptions about how politics works.
Which is why, yes, I'm quite familiar with Norma McCorvey's current position, but didn't think it was relevant.
The funny thing is that nearly all of that money goes into getting themselves re-elected. Congressmen don't get rich off of it directly; that would be bribery and such thing really are frowned upon. It does manage to make its way to them through back-door channels as they funnel money to their friends, but for most politicans the election is about a chance to get the legislation they want to see passed (on social issues as well as economic ones) and improve their communities, and they need to pander to everybody else to keep getting elected to keep up that chance.
Donations are made to politicians, who spend them on campaign ads. It's still the voters who get taken in by the ads. So to my mind is that it's not so much that we have the best politicians money can buy, but the best ELECTORATE money can buy.
Ultimately, the corporations (and individuals and unions and PACs) are buying access to the mind of the public via TV ads and other campaigning (coordinated by funneling the money through the campaign itself), and the politicians reflect what the voters seem to believe. That the voters somehow manage to believe things that are massively against their own interests I can only chalk up to the genius of campaign managers and advertising executives. Nothing succeeds like success, and the fact that 90%+ of incuments are re-elected testifies that name recognition and the money they get from selling their favors buys continued re-elections indefinitely.
Unpleasant, but I'd rather smarten up the voters they try to change the rules for politicians. Politicians will always find ways around the rules, and as long as the electorate is manipulated by something as crass as a 30-second TV ad they'll keep deriving their abuse of power from the consent of the governed.
The most basic difference for most Kerry voters, I think, was not what would be done but what had been done. It's actually not unreasonable for Kerry to have chosen to stay in Iraq; it's a mess that the US made and which arguable we should try to clean up after ourselves. If we didn't, future deaths resulting from a civil war in Iraq would be blamed on us (not to mention a potential new safe haven for al Qaeda).
But the difference is that Bush HAD gone into a war, under what many prospective Kerry voters considered false pretenses, and for that he deserved to lose his office, even if his policies for the future were exactly identical to Kerry's.
For example, Kerry might have been able to get foreign assistance in Iraq, not because his policies were better than Bush's, but because for many countries the answer would be an automatic "No" to Bush. They'd say Bush had brought it on himself, whereas Kerry would be trying to fix a situation he inherited. That's not a guarantee, but there was no hope of any world support under Bush.
Actually, that's not even the most basic difference. The most basic difference is in the Supreme Court. It was obvious that Bush would appoint at least one new Supreme Court justice, and that he would almost certainly chose an anti-Roe nominee, whereas Kerry would almost certainly chose a pro-Roe nominee. The way it turned out was somewhat more complicated, but at the time both sets of voters may have had abortion (and other things that the Supreme Court weighs in on) at the front of their minds.
There were numerous other policy differences: privatization of social security, concerns over Bush's pro-business style (in particular, the energy policy for which many Democrats feel Bush should be punished), environmental policies.
I'm not trying to debate what should be done in Iraq, or to favor one candidate or the other. I'm just saying that the presence of similarities between the two doesn't mean that there weren't also differences.
But one last bone I'll pick: not all senators are there to sponsor legislation. An awful lot of work goes on in Congress that doesn't get names on bills. The details of the bills are where serious work gets done, not in the overall thrust. A President is as much a negotiator as a policymaker, and being good at those back-room skills getting bills actually passed is at least as important as initiating legislation. John McCain, for example, is more respected for his ability to make the resulting legislation reasonable than for the bills that he himself has sponsored.
Again, I'm not using this to comment on the election itself or take a stand on who you should have voted for. I'm just saying that if you're not seeing any differences, and you're not seeing Kerry's accomplishments, then you need to look more closely.
Not to mention that DNS provides a nice layer of indirection. Change ISPs and you don't have to update everybody's bookmarks. And a bit of clever DNS management allows things like coral and akamai to do distributed web content delivery.
DNS isn't just an option; it's a necessity.
Re:15 Reasons to boycott IMDb
on
IMDb Turns 15
·
· Score: 1
How does that work? Content may be free, but servers and bandwidth aren't.
The answer appears to be "donations", which is cool if somewhat undependable. But I suppose as long as they keep it primarily text-based you can support an awful lot of hits without using up all that much bandwidth.
While I agree with you that TV seems to have taken an ugly turn for the hyperactive, it's precisely because the web has "hyper" built right into it, while TV is a much more linear medium. They get one screen's worth of stuff to show you; if you don't like what the announcer is saying you'll switch to something else. So they put up a lot of extra info in hopes of keeping your attention.
TV news is also primarily an auditory medium, and you only get one auditory channel. So they fill in the rest with text, but since the screen is low-res it has to be moving or constantly changing to get any real bandwidth at all. That information is supposed to be useful; if you don't like it you're watching the wrong news channel.
The web is a much more interactive medium, so they can put more information a click away.
The web is a much more civilized way to present news. But TV has one advantage: you don't have to look at TV. You can listen to it while you're cooking breakfast or getting dressed, and look at it only for the visuals, though that makes the multiple screen chunks unnecessary and perhaps even harmful (since the visuals are even smaller on an already low-res medium).
Personally, I've given up on TV entirely. I get my news with a combination of the web, the radio (occasionally) and the daily newspaper. (I have an advantage that my daily newspaper is The Washington Post, which is a major international newspaper, and so the high school football team never makes the front page.)
But I don't blame the TV people for trying to cram as much information onto the screens as they can. I think that busy-ness comes from the web rather than the other way around.
In terms of "sit[ting] somewhere at an appointed time" there's something to be said for the experince of watching an episode "live" with the rest of the country, being able to share it around the water-cooler the next day. New episodes of Lost are eagerly awaited and discussed live.
But in general I very much agree. I don't have cable and watch what little TV I do watch on DVD, months (or years) after the broadcast.
But then who would pay $1.99 to download an episode of 'Lost' from iTunes if the iPod could also hook up to your television and record that same episode free?
The best reason I can think of is that you don't have to think of it in advance. You don't have to know when it's on; you don't have to remember to program your TiVo/VCR. You can say any time, "Oh, yeah, I think I'd like to watch that" and download it.
Or to put in another way: true cable a la carte, which consumers have been demanding for years and unable to get.
The end of "Oh, was that good? I missed it!" would be a revolution in television.
Technically that's a Canadian case rather than a US case, and the decisions are rather muddy. Percy Schmeiser was sued for deliberately planting seed he knew to be contaminated with Monsanto's genes. They originally tried to blame him for having the seed in the first place, but they couldn't prove that that it didn't just blow in.
In the end they decided that Schmeiser didn't have to pay for the genes but he did have to destroy the contaminated plants. He tried to countersue them for trespass for contaminating his crop, and lost (and it would have been small-claims anyway.)
I don't think that the issue is considered completely settled, either in Canada or in the US. In his case he's destroyed the seed and bought new seed stock, and it seems to me that it would at least be fair to force Monsanto to pay for that (not to mention the damage caused by the loss of his custom-selected seed stock). So this case is over, but there's more to your question that isn't answered yet.
Well, thanks for the mod. It'll show up in my comments as "Somebody modded you down; oops, it's gone!" Sorry about your lost mod point.
It wouldn't have surprised me; I often get modded troll when I try to explain what people are thinking. I write this sort of comment a lot. Whenever I see a "how could they possibly..." comment I'd prefer to know the answer; there's usually a reason. Not necessarily a good one, but there's usually at least an ostensible reason.
The name "gene patents" is a bit hysterical. The USPTO Guidelines say, "If a patent application discloses only nucleic acid molecular structure for a newly discovered gene, and no utility for the claimed isolated gene, the claimed invention is not patentable. But when the inventor also discloses how to use the purified gene isolated from its natural state, the application satisfies the ``utility'' requirement. That is, where the application discloses a specific, substantial, and credible utility for the claimed isolated and purified gene, the isolated and purified gene composition may be patentable."
So it's not just the DNA sequence that they're patenting; it's the DNA sequence plus a description of how to use it. Not just your body using it, but a technological invention outside your body.
It still seems like an awful lot of store to give away. The idea is that isolating and understanding the functions of genes is expensive, so to encourage people to do it they're giving away rights to use the results of that research (i.e. more than just props for being the first to describe it.)
But no, you can't sue somebody for having children; the use of the gene in its natural state (i.e. you) isn't patentable. Producing the same chemical as a medicine is There's a long history of getting patents on stuff you find in nature and putting a use to it; they cite a patent on adrenaline. You didn't lose right right to get excited, but you couldn't bottle up the output of your adrenal gland without coming up against their patent.
It's interesting that Akimbo has a relationship with Major League Baseball, and it doesn't mention Fox, which I believe has the TV rights to the postseason. I wonder what coverage they're showing; is it bare TV cameras, or are they selling Fox's coverage?
It's "highlights and condensed coverage", which sounds like you're not watching it live. That's the thing that Apple really seems to bring to the table here: the ability to get the content-owners (record labels, maybe the networks) to agree to a new distribution medium, one which is potentially risky (especially if you don't understand how P2P works) but also profitable. It's less about tech than it is about personalities and trust.
Other companies sold MP3s online before Apple, but Apple got the major record labels. It's not necessarily better music, but it's what's in demand. And they also bring on the independents. That's good for consumers, but potentially bad for the majors, since that risks diluting their market share. But smart suits are realizing that things are changing, and if they don't get on it and ahead of it they'll lose out entirely.
The big deal with iTMS was that they got so many major record labels to sell music online. They convinced the labels that their DRM was good enough (far from perfect, but good enough that it's easier to post the rip from a CD) and so the iTMS catalog is enormous, with major-label content.
Now they've got a deal with one of the networks to sell TV shows. I wonder if they're planning to go from there to the rest of the networks. And then to a set-top box hooked into the Internet. It would be like a combination of a TiVo and video on demand: you don't have to set it in advance but it plays regular broadcast TV rather than movies.
Slashdotters will probably swear up and down that it's overpriced and they'd never pay that much for DRM content. $2 a pop is kind of pricey, given that you're used to getting it for free with your cable/satellite bill. If you're the sort of person who watches the TV every night from 8 until 11 then you're going to spend a lot this way.
But I wonder if such a thing might just work. It's like the ultimate a la carte. I got rid of cable because I was too busy to watch TV, but there are a few shows I miss and I'd happily watch $10 or even $20 a month worth of TV to have it come in commercial-free and on my own schedule.
This gets really complicated. As with music, there are many independent content producers who would love to use this to bypass the networks entirely. When 24 came out on DVD it was said that this was what they were really selling, and that the TV broadcasts were just advertisements for those DVDs. I wouldn't go that far, but it really does bring up a whole new avenue for artists to produce content (in this case, short-format video), get it to audiences, and pay for it.
I'm getting way ahead of myself. Apple's next step would be to secure agreements with the other networks (and to get the rest of ABC's programming.) But if Apple starts sending out mysterious postcards again some time next year it wouldn't surprise me to discover that they're hinting at a new iPod that you leave at home.
No, correlation is not causation. But when you have correlation and the most accurate models imply causation, you definitely have to think hard about what you're doing. The fact that global warming was predicted by the models before the data could be taken further suggest that it's not simply alarmist readings of the data.
Science is hard; in many fields it's impossible to prove causation completely. But when you have a theory, and the theory holds up to all the available data, you act as if the theory were true and make decisions based on that. You don't over-react as long as there are competing theories that imply otherwise, but this is one more piece of data to suggest that global warming is very real and quite possibly man-made.
The "quite possibly" means that we shouldn't over-react; as you say, the correlation need not imply causation. But as the burden of evidence falls on the side of man-made global warming, it becomes increasingly dangerous to rely on "Yeah, but are you really, utterly, totally, completely sure?" arguments against action.
What the RIAA does (or rather, the RIAA member companies) is extremely expensive. Their job is to make artists well-known enough to sell a lot of music. If you want to make a living making music, you have to sell a LOT of music. At $10 a CD, you need to sell 1,500 CDs just to get yourself to the poverty line, and that's before you've paid for producing, printing, pressing, much less the advertising that makes people want your CD in the first place. You can tour like crazy but getting thousands of people to cough up $10 for your CD is going to be a challenge, especially when there are literally thousands of bands like yours out there. So real number is more like tens of thousands of CDs. If you want to get rich you'd better sell a million of them, and unless you're REALLY friendly you haven't got a million friends to sell CDs to.
So the RIAA spends money: they lobby radio stations (and paying them, even though that's illegal) to play your music, they advertise your tour on TV, they give away free t-shirts, etc. All on a national level, because if you want to sell tens of thousands of CDs you need to adverise to many, many people.
What they have in the end is a brand. They've spent a lot of money on you, and 20 artists like you who didn't catch fire. Once they have your name on everybody's lips, they want a cut of everything that makes money from that brand. They didn't create the music, they created the fame, and it's the fame (not the music) that's bringing people to Google to search on your name.
I'm oversimplifying like crazy (of course the music is relevant to make the brand appealing) but you get the idea. More importantly, it's not like they're not already wildly profitable (even accounting for all of their failed attempts), and they're not taking nearly as big a risk as I'm suggesting. For example, a lot of the start-up costs are taken out of your royalties. You the artist don't see squat until you've paid back the immense costs of producing that album. (In addition to marketing costs, RIAA companies own very expensive equipment, managed by very expensive engineers, operated by very expensive producers and mixers. A musician will tell you that those things are critical to making an album you're going to want to buy, and those who aren't with the labels spend a lot of their own money to buy the equivlent themselves.)
But perhaps your real question is, "Why do they risk alienating their customers so much?" That, I can't say for sure, except to say that I assume that somebody in a room somewhere has done a cost-benefit analysis and taken a guess that maximizing the profit on their brand is worth the customers who are alienated. They may be right; Slashdot readers (and posters) are exquisitely sensitive to the sort of manipulation that the RIAA does but many less technologically aware people aren't.
Ultimately it is all about greed; their job is to make the maximum money. They walk a careful line; some industries do very well by appearing to be generous. Instead, they've chosen to try to milk every possible dollar. But that's "greed" in the "trying to maximize your value" sense, not "greed" in the stealing-from-other-people sense. They want the benefit of what they've created, even though it seems awfully miserly of them (and even counter-productive) to go about it the way they are.
I imagine that they get that cynical as a result of manipulating people into buying the music in the first place, music that a lot of people think isn't very good but which a lot of people spend money on and which many go out of their way to download. (The vast majority of bands would love to have you download their music, because it means you've at least hard of them.) Since they think that they can create the desire to buy music (and their CD sales figures show that they can), the seem to think that they've got the formula licked and can risk alienating their customers because they'd rather buy the CDs from the RIAA than risk jail or take a chance on a band they've never heard of.
This story seems to have less to do with digital music as with the industry trying to claim that the artist is a brand, whose very name is valuable. As such it continues a line from the guys who have sued Google in the past trying to keep them from selling Ad Words to competitors. And if this works for the music industry it may spread to other people-brands: movie stars, NASCAR drivers, etc.
The RIAA's business is making people famous. Anybody can make,produce, and distribute music, but it takes a major corporation to sell a gold record's worth of music. Even after carefully selecting the artists that they think will be worth the investment they fail much more often than they succeed, so they feel compelled to milk those artists who do succeed. Not for their music per se, but for the fame of their brand, which is the one thing that they've added to the mix.
It sounds like the RIAA is trying to buy themselves a Supreme Court fight on the subject of fair use. Not about the usual question of whether you can make backups or play it in on your Linux box, but at what point a tiny fragment of a brand (like a name in a search engine) becomes usable by the public without charge. That decision will end up affecting a lot more than the music industry. There are other people-as-brands, as well as more classic product brands. I'm sure other industries will be watching this closely.
Incidentally, that's why they're so zealous in trying to eliminate music sharing. They feel that the reason you want that music is precisely because they created you wanting it. That is, there's lots and lots and lots of music available, but you want the RIAA's music because they spent a buttload of money coaxing you into wanting it: getting it onto radio stations, putting posters in music stores, TV ads, etc.
There are plenty of people who don't like the blandness of the lowest-common denominator music that the RIAA promotes, and in theory the RIAA has no argument with those people sharing the non-label music, except they get caught up in the general sweep of things. I suspect (but don't have any numbers) that most of the P2P-shared music is RIAA-produced music precisely because the RIAA labels have put so much effort into promoting it. Tiny local bands would be thrilled to think that you knew enough about their music to go to the effort of downloading it.
OK, there's no such thing as Intellectual Property. Fine. Agreed.
But I think it's pretty clear that the precise arrangement of bits that make up a movie/song performance/book are something that took a lot of work to create, and which people are willing to pay to watch/listen to/read. Out of curiosity, if it's not intellectual property (which we've already agreed doesn't exist), do you have a name for it? Or any particular way to encourage people to put in the work to make those movies/etc?
Basically, if it's not intellectual property, what is it?
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't think of that as the really hard part in the space elevator problem. I'm sure somebody will figure out how to build a climber. I would have thought that the hard part is figuring out how to build a cable that the climber could climb, which seems to involve scaling up the best known materials by 10 orders of magnitude.
It reminds me of the old joke about the drunk looking under the lamppost for the quarter he dropped in the alley, because that's where the light is better.
In a world that increasingly takes the WWW, its pages and the other documents we exchange in the electronic world as given - and knights Tim Berners-Lee without an understanding of the pre-WWW background of stateless client/server document architectures (e.g. Gopher) and hypertext (e.g. Xanadu) on which he built - there still beavers away a forgotten figure, Ted Nelson, eager to more fully achieve the original hypertext vision.
That's one really long sentence, including a parenthetical example inside of a dashed aside. Maybe it would have been clearer to the editors if you'd taken this one sentence and broken it up into three or four.
And it might have been even clearer to skip the entire introductory clause "In a world..." and gotten to the gist: "Hey, Ted Nelson's not dead! You know, the Xanadu guy."
Actually, I was speaking somewhat precisely: when I say pro-Roe, I mean that the justice would not overturn the Roe v. Wade decision; an anti-Roe justice would.
That's more complicated than simply pro- or anti-abortion. It has to do with the decisions of individual states as well as the right to privacy. The Supreme Court doesn't speak directly on abortion; it speaks on cases.
I was talking that way because I was trying to avoid verging on the argument about whether abortion is right or wrong, or about whether the Iraq war was right or wrong. In that context I was simply trying to talk about politics: who has what power to make which decision. I actually find it a more interesting subject for study than the incessant arguments without obvious solutions. I have little interesting in this forum to contribute to the latter, but I can correct misperceptions about how politics works.
Which is why, yes, I'm quite familiar with Norma McCorvey's current position, but didn't think it was relevant.
The funny thing is that nearly all of that money goes into getting themselves re-elected. Congressmen don't get rich off of it directly; that would be bribery and such thing really are frowned upon. It does manage to make its way to them through back-door channels as they funnel money to their friends, but for most politicans the election is about a chance to get the legislation they want to see passed (on social issues as well as economic ones) and improve their communities, and they need to pander to everybody else to keep getting elected to keep up that chance.
Donations are made to politicians, who spend them on campaign ads. It's still the voters who get taken in by the ads. So to my mind is that it's not so much that we have the best politicians money can buy, but the best ELECTORATE money can buy.
Ultimately, the corporations (and individuals and unions and PACs) are buying access to the mind of the public via TV ads and other campaigning (coordinated by funneling the money through the campaign itself), and the politicians reflect what the voters seem to believe. That the voters somehow manage to believe things that are massively against their own interests I can only chalk up to the genius of campaign managers and advertising executives. Nothing succeeds like success, and the fact that 90%+ of incuments are re-elected testifies that name recognition and the money they get from selling their favors buys continued re-elections indefinitely.
Unpleasant, but I'd rather smarten up the voters they try to change the rules for politicians. Politicians will always find ways around the rules, and as long as the electorate is manipulated by something as crass as a 30-second TV ad they'll keep deriving their abuse of power from the consent of the governed.
The most basic difference for most Kerry voters, I think, was not what would be done but what had been done. It's actually not unreasonable for Kerry to have chosen to stay in Iraq; it's a mess that the US made and which arguable we should try to clean up after ourselves. If we didn't, future deaths resulting from a civil war in Iraq would be blamed on us (not to mention a potential new safe haven for al Qaeda).
But the difference is that Bush HAD gone into a war, under what many prospective Kerry voters considered false pretenses, and for that he deserved to lose his office, even if his policies for the future were exactly identical to Kerry's.
For example, Kerry might have been able to get foreign assistance in Iraq, not because his policies were better than Bush's, but because for many countries the answer would be an automatic "No" to Bush. They'd say Bush had brought it on himself, whereas Kerry would be trying to fix a situation he inherited. That's not a guarantee, but there was no hope of any world support under Bush.
Actually, that's not even the most basic difference. The most basic difference is in the Supreme Court. It was obvious that Bush would appoint at least one new Supreme Court justice, and that he would almost certainly chose an anti-Roe nominee, whereas Kerry would almost certainly chose a pro-Roe nominee. The way it turned out was somewhat more complicated, but at the time both sets of voters may have had abortion (and other things that the Supreme Court weighs in on) at the front of their minds.
There were numerous other policy differences: privatization of social security, concerns over Bush's pro-business style (in particular, the energy policy for which many Democrats feel Bush should be punished), environmental policies.
I'm not trying to debate what should be done in Iraq, or to favor one candidate or the other. I'm just saying that the presence of similarities between the two doesn't mean that there weren't also differences.
But one last bone I'll pick: not all senators are there to sponsor legislation. An awful lot of work goes on in Congress that doesn't get names on bills. The details of the bills are where serious work gets done, not in the overall thrust. A President is as much a negotiator as a policymaker, and being good at those back-room skills getting bills actually passed is at least as important as initiating legislation. John McCain, for example, is more respected for his ability to make the resulting legislation reasonable than for the bills that he himself has sponsored.
Again, I'm not using this to comment on the election itself or take a stand on who you should have voted for. I'm just saying that if you're not seeing any differences, and you're not seeing Kerry's accomplishments, then you need to look more closely.
Why... he could Rule the World!
If you look a little further down it gives marginally more information:
... ?
# Improvements to Bookmarks/History
# Per-Site Options
# Enhancements to the Extensions system, Find Toolbar, Software Update, Search and other areas.
# Accessibility compliance
# More
But I still think it's a major stretch to call that "promising".
Not to mention that DNS provides a nice layer of indirection. Change ISPs and you don't have to update everybody's bookmarks. And a bit of clever DNS management allows things like coral and akamai to do distributed web content delivery.
DNS isn't just an option; it's a necessity.
How does that work? Content may be free, but servers and bandwidth aren't.
The answer appears to be "donations", which is cool if somewhat undependable. But I suppose as long as they keep it primarily text-based you can support an awful lot of hits without using up all that much bandwidth.
While I agree with you that TV seems to have taken an ugly turn for the hyperactive, it's precisely because the web has "hyper" built right into it, while TV is a much more linear medium. They get one screen's worth of stuff to show you; if you don't like what the announcer is saying you'll switch to something else. So they put up a lot of extra info in hopes of keeping your attention.
TV news is also primarily an auditory medium, and you only get one auditory channel. So they fill in the rest with text, but since the screen is low-res it has to be moving or constantly changing to get any real bandwidth at all. That information is supposed to be useful; if you don't like it you're watching the wrong news channel.
The web is a much more interactive medium, so they can put more information a click away.
The web is a much more civilized way to present news. But TV has one advantage: you don't have to look at TV. You can listen to it while you're cooking breakfast or getting dressed, and look at it only for the visuals, though that makes the multiple screen chunks unnecessary and perhaps even harmful (since the visuals are even smaller on an already low-res medium).
Personally, I've given up on TV entirely. I get my news with a combination of the web, the radio (occasionally) and the daily newspaper. (I have an advantage that my daily newspaper is The Washington Post, which is a major international newspaper, and so the high school football team never makes the front page.)
But I don't blame the TV people for trying to cram as much information onto the screens as they can. I think that busy-ness comes from the web rather than the other way around.
In terms of "sit[ting] somewhere at an appointed time" there's something to be said for the experince of watching an episode "live" with the rest of the country, being able to share it around the water-cooler the next day. New episodes of Lost are eagerly awaited and discussed live.
But in general I very much agree. I don't have cable and watch what little TV I do watch on DVD, months (or years) after the broadcast.
But then who would pay $1.99 to download an episode of 'Lost' from iTunes if the iPod could also hook up to your television and record that same episode free?
The best reason I can think of is that you don't have to think of it in advance. You don't have to know when it's on; you don't have to remember to program your TiVo/VCR. You can say any time, "Oh, yeah, I think I'd like to watch that" and download it.
Or to put in another way: true cable a la carte, which consumers have been demanding for years and unable to get.
The end of "Oh, was that good? I missed it!" would be a revolution in television.
Schmeiser claims that he did not use Roundup. I'm in no position to evaluate the truth of either his claims or yours.
Technically that's a Canadian case rather than a US case, and the decisions are rather muddy. Percy Schmeiser was sued for deliberately planting seed he knew to be contaminated with Monsanto's genes. They originally tried to blame him for having the seed in the first place, but they couldn't prove that that it didn't just blow in.
In the end they decided that Schmeiser didn't have to pay for the genes but he did have to destroy the contaminated plants. He tried to countersue them for trespass for contaminating his crop, and lost (and it would have been small-claims anyway.)
I don't think that the issue is considered completely settled, either in Canada or in the US. In his case he's destroyed the seed and bought new seed stock, and it seems to me that it would at least be fair to force Monsanto to pay for that (not to mention the damage caused by the loss of his custom-selected seed stock). So this case is over, but there's more to your question that isn't answered yet.
Well, thanks for the mod. It'll show up in my comments as "Somebody modded you down; oops, it's gone!" Sorry about your lost mod point.
It wouldn't have surprised me; I often get modded troll when I try to explain what people are thinking. I write this sort of comment a lot. Whenever I see a "how could they possibly..." comment I'd prefer to know the answer; there's usually a reason. Not necessarily a good one, but there's usually at least an ostensible reason.
Don't matter to me; I've got plenty of karma.
The name "gene patents" is a bit hysterical. The USPTO Guidelines say, "If a patent application discloses only nucleic acid molecular structure for a newly discovered gene, and no utility for the claimed isolated gene, the claimed invention is not patentable. But when the inventor also discloses how to use the purified gene isolated from its natural state, the application satisfies the ``utility'' requirement. That is, where the application discloses a specific, substantial, and credible utility for the claimed isolated and purified gene, the isolated and purified gene composition may be patentable."
So it's not just the DNA sequence that they're patenting; it's the DNA sequence plus a description of how to use it. Not just your body using it, but a technological invention outside your body.
It still seems like an awful lot of store to give away. The idea is that isolating and understanding the functions of genes is expensive, so to encourage people to do it they're giving away rights to use the results of that research (i.e. more than just props for being the first to describe it.)
But no, you can't sue somebody for having children; the use of the gene in its natural state (i.e. you) isn't patentable. Producing the same chemical as a medicine is There's a long history of getting patents on stuff you find in nature and putting a use to it; they cite a patent on adrenaline. You didn't lose right right to get excited, but you couldn't bottle up the output of your adrenal gland without coming up against their patent.
I'm not defending it; I'm just explaining it.
It's interesting that Akimbo has a relationship with Major League Baseball, and it doesn't mention Fox, which I believe has the TV rights to the postseason. I wonder what coverage they're showing; is it bare TV cameras, or are they selling Fox's coverage?
It's "highlights and condensed coverage", which sounds like you're not watching it live. That's the thing that Apple really seems to bring to the table here: the ability to get the content-owners (record labels, maybe the networks) to agree to a new distribution medium, one which is potentially risky (especially if you don't understand how P2P works) but also profitable. It's less about tech than it is about personalities and trust.
Other companies sold MP3s online before Apple, but Apple got the major record labels. It's not necessarily better music, but it's what's in demand. And they also bring on the independents. That's good for consumers, but potentially bad for the majors, since that risks diluting their market share. But smart suits are realizing that things are changing, and if they don't get on it and ahead of it they'll lose out entirely.
The big deal with iTMS was that they got so many major record labels to sell music online. They convinced the labels that their DRM was good enough (far from perfect, but good enough that it's easier to post the rip from a CD) and so the iTMS catalog is enormous, with major-label content.
Now they've got a deal with one of the networks to sell TV shows. I wonder if they're planning to go from there to the rest of the networks. And then to a set-top box hooked into the Internet. It would be like a combination of a TiVo and video on demand: you don't have to set it in advance but it plays regular broadcast TV rather than movies.
Slashdotters will probably swear up and down that it's overpriced and they'd never pay that much for DRM content. $2 a pop is kind of pricey, given that you're used to getting it for free with your cable/satellite bill. If you're the sort of person who watches the TV every night from 8 until 11 then you're going to spend a lot this way.
But I wonder if such a thing might just work. It's like the ultimate a la carte. I got rid of cable because I was too busy to watch TV, but there are a few shows I miss and I'd happily watch $10 or even $20 a month worth of TV to have it come in commercial-free and on my own schedule.
This gets really complicated. As with music, there are many independent content producers who would love to use this to bypass the networks entirely. When 24 came out on DVD it was said that this was what they were really selling, and that the TV broadcasts were just advertisements for those DVDs. I wouldn't go that far, but it really does bring up a whole new avenue for artists to produce content (in this case, short-format video), get it to audiences, and pay for it.
I'm getting way ahead of myself. Apple's next step would be to secure agreements with the other networks (and to get the rest of ABC's programming.) But if Apple starts sending out mysterious postcards again some time next year it wouldn't surprise me to discover that they're hinting at a new iPod that you leave at home.
How are you gonna make a million friends a day that way? Progress, my boy, progress!
No, correlation is not causation. But when you have correlation and the most accurate models imply causation, you definitely have to think hard about what you're doing. The fact that global warming was predicted by the models before the data could be taken further suggest that it's not simply alarmist readings of the data.
Science is hard; in many fields it's impossible to prove causation completely. But when you have a theory, and the theory holds up to all the available data, you act as if the theory were true and make decisions based on that. You don't over-react as long as there are competing theories that imply otherwise, but this is one more piece of data to suggest that global warming is very real and quite possibly man-made.
The "quite possibly" means that we shouldn't over-react; as you say, the correlation need not imply causation. But as the burden of evidence falls on the side of man-made global warming, it becomes increasingly dangerous to rely on "Yeah, but are you really, utterly, totally, completely sure?" arguments against action.
They require the www prefix: www.opennic.unrated.net.
What the RIAA does (or rather, the RIAA member companies) is extremely expensive. Their job is to make artists well-known enough to sell a lot of music. If you want to make a living making music, you have to sell a LOT of music. At $10 a CD, you need to sell 1,500 CDs just to get yourself to the poverty line, and that's before you've paid for producing, printing, pressing, much less the advertising that makes people want your CD in the first place. You can tour like crazy but getting thousands of people to cough up $10 for your CD is going to be a challenge, especially when there are literally thousands of bands like yours out there. So real number is more like tens of thousands of CDs. If you want to get rich you'd better sell a million of them, and unless you're REALLY friendly you haven't got a million friends to sell CDs to.
So the RIAA spends money: they lobby radio stations (and paying them, even though that's illegal) to play your music, they advertise your tour on TV, they give away free t-shirts, etc. All on a national level, because if you want to sell tens of thousands of CDs you need to adverise to many, many people.
What they have in the end is a brand. They've spent a lot of money on you, and 20 artists like you who didn't catch fire. Once they have your name on everybody's lips, they want a cut of everything that makes money from that brand. They didn't create the music, they created the fame, and it's the fame (not the music) that's bringing people to Google to search on your name.
I'm oversimplifying like crazy (of course the music is relevant to make the brand appealing) but you get the idea. More importantly, it's not like they're not already wildly profitable (even accounting for all of their failed attempts), and they're not taking nearly as big a risk as I'm suggesting. For example, a lot of the start-up costs are taken out of your royalties. You the artist don't see squat until you've paid back the immense costs of producing that album. (In addition to marketing costs, RIAA companies own very expensive equipment, managed by very expensive engineers, operated by very expensive producers and mixers. A musician will tell you that those things are critical to making an album you're going to want to buy, and those who aren't with the labels spend a lot of their own money to buy the equivlent themselves.)
But perhaps your real question is, "Why do they risk alienating their customers so much?" That, I can't say for sure, except to say that I assume that somebody in a room somewhere has done a cost-benefit analysis and taken a guess that maximizing the profit on their brand is worth the customers who are alienated. They may be right; Slashdot readers (and posters) are exquisitely sensitive to the sort of manipulation that the RIAA does but many less technologically aware people aren't.
Ultimately it is all about greed; their job is to make the maximum money. They walk a careful line; some industries do very well by appearing to be generous. Instead, they've chosen to try to milk every possible dollar. But that's "greed" in the "trying to maximize your value" sense, not "greed" in the stealing-from-other-people sense. They want the benefit of what they've created, even though it seems awfully miserly of them (and even counter-productive) to go about it the way they are.
I imagine that they get that cynical as a result of manipulating people into buying the music in the first place, music that a lot of people think isn't very good but which a lot of people spend money on and which many go out of their way to download. (The vast majority of bands would love to have you download their music, because it means you've at least hard of them.) Since they think that they can create the desire to buy music (and their CD sales figures show that they can), the seem to think that they've got the formula licked and can risk alienating their customers because they'd rather buy the CDs from the RIAA than risk jail or take a chance on a band they've never heard of.
This story seems to have less to do with digital music as with the industry trying to claim that the artist is a brand, whose very name is valuable. As such it continues a line from the guys who have sued Google in the past trying to keep them from selling Ad Words to competitors. And if this works for the music industry it may spread to other people-brands: movie stars, NASCAR drivers, etc.
The RIAA's business is making people famous. Anybody can make,produce, and distribute music, but it takes a major corporation to sell a gold record's worth of music. Even after carefully selecting the artists that they think will be worth the investment they fail much more often than they succeed, so they feel compelled to milk those artists who do succeed. Not for their music per se, but for the fame of their brand, which is the one thing that they've added to the mix.
It sounds like the RIAA is trying to buy themselves a Supreme Court fight on the subject of fair use. Not about the usual question of whether you can make backups or play it in on your Linux box, but at what point a tiny fragment of a brand (like a name in a search engine) becomes usable by the public without charge. That decision will end up affecting a lot more than the music industry. There are other people-as-brands, as well as more classic product brands. I'm sure other industries will be watching this closely.
Incidentally, that's why they're so zealous in trying to eliminate music sharing. They feel that the reason you want that music is precisely because they created you wanting it. That is, there's lots and lots and lots of music available, but you want the RIAA's music because they spent a buttload of money coaxing you into wanting it: getting it onto radio stations, putting posters in music stores, TV ads, etc.
There are plenty of people who don't like the blandness of the lowest-common denominator music that the RIAA promotes, and in theory the RIAA has no argument with those people sharing the non-label music, except they get caught up in the general sweep of things. I suspect (but don't have any numbers) that most of the P2P-shared music is RIAA-produced music precisely because the RIAA labels have put so much effort into promoting it. Tiny local bands would be thrilled to think that you knew enough about their music to go to the effort of downloading it.
Do they hate them more than having to feel a dog's testicles for a living?
OK, there's no such thing as Intellectual Property. Fine. Agreed.
But I think it's pretty clear that the precise arrangement of bits that make up a movie/song performance/book are something that took a lot of work to create, and which people are willing to pay to watch/listen to/read. Out of curiosity, if it's not intellectual property (which we've already agreed doesn't exist), do you have a name for it? Or any particular way to encourage people to put in the work to make those movies/etc?
Basically, if it's not intellectual property, what is it?