Music used to be heavily restricted. You bought an LP/cassette/8-track and you couldn't back it up, make extracts from it, mash it up with anything, or do much except play it on the device for which you bought it. You could try to make a copy, but you were going to suffer extreme quality loss and after only a couple of generations it would be unlistenable. The Rights Management wasn't Digital but it sure was Restrictive.
It's only since the creation of the CD that you could do any of those things. The old model has to go out the window; people like the stuff that they can do with the new format. But it's not clear where to go from there, since free copying tends to encourage exactly one pricing model: give it away. It may be the only model, given how ineffective DRM is compared to the old "press it into vinyl" model.
There is a huge difference between the various services that the article does not take into account: mass marketing of the underlying music.
The companies that want DRM on their music are the ones that they spend a lot of money making popular. Their business model is to get a lot of people aware of certain songs, and then sell the song to each of them individually. That's the RIAA's model.
The independent labels don't have a huge marketing budget, and so they care a lot less about whether they get paid for each individual download. For them, passing songs between people really is free advertising.
So the success of any individual music store has more to do with how effective they are at getting you to find the music you want than with the DRM. iTMS sells a lot of the RIAA's music, which the labels spend megabucks marketing (an investment they want to protect). eMusic sells songs that aren't heavily marketed.
There are a few performers who straddle the line, who got famous on the RIAA's dime and then managed to extricate themselves. They get the best of both worlds: a huge audience without the need to make each individual download pay. But these are the exceptions, not the rule; don't forget how they got famous in the first place.
That's the key here: promotion. It's way more important to most people's music choices than nearly anything else.
Root exploits have the ability to screw other users besides you, and I think that's where the Slashdot ethos comes in. If you screw yourself it's because you weren't l33t enough to protect yourself. If you get screwed by some other user because the OS didn't protect you, then your l33t-ness goes down.
So everybody's willing to accept a system that lets users screw themselves (ha ha!) but not you. And running a system that gives you the rope you need to hang yourself means you must be pretty l33t since you're too smart to fall for any traps.
My problem with treadmills is that I have to pay too much attention to them. Maybe I just need better treadmills, but I find that the ones I've used require me to keep too steady a pace to keep me from creeping forward or falling back. As a marathoner I find it's very useful to vary my speed to shift the work to various muscle groups differently. It's all subconscious, and watching to prevent that from happening is exhausting.
I'm all for figuring out that corn isn't a miracle for anything except winning votes in Iowa, but where did you get the idea that potatoes require "next to no fertilizers"? I grow potatoes and you have to fertilize the bejeezus out of the things or you end up with cute little micro-potatoes.
Potatoes are still better than corn; for all I know you're right that they're the most efficient. But I just wanted to point out that fertilizers are still going to be necessary.
It's called "Iowa". Eliminate the Iowa caucuses as the "first in the nation" that every Presidential candidate must suck up to (and convince his party to suck up to) and you'll never hear about corn-based ethanol ever again.
I wonder how much a "cut of the profit" is. The thing contains perhaps millions of papers, each worth an equal amount. They may be making a "good deal" of money, but amortized out over the total set of papers, each individual contribution is probably worth less than a penny per year.
It's not quite as easy as it sounds. It hinges on the notion of "purporting to be from Paypal users". It's easy to eliminate cases where the return address is paypal.com but the signature fails. It's harder when the return address is paypa1.com (look closely), and eventually it just devolves to the spam recognition problem, which is known to be hard.
And once you've defined that, the digital signature becomes nearly moot. If it's in the "looks like Paypal" category but links to something other than paypal.com, you know it's a fraud. GMail already seems to be 100% effective at sorting those out; I haven't seen a phishing attack along those lines in forever (despite getting hundreds of spams per day to certain addresses.)
Here's some cynicism: this is a way of letting PayPal carry paid advertising. Right now they know that they can't link to anybody but PayPal or the email gets chucked. If they convince mail providers to say, "We're 100% convinced this is authentic PayPal" they can start carrying any content they like, including (essentially) spam. Oh, sure, they'd call it "marketing partners" or something even more dubious, but spam it would be.
Ford is outsourcing its legal department to the RIAA. If you buy a Chevy they'll sue you and hope you pay up without actually making them take you to court.
Ah, son of a b*tch. That was supposed to be "sarcasm tags", which Slashdot promptly removed, making me look (and feel like, and presumably be) a complete idiot. Sorry.
I'm just repeating what I read on the Web. I know some people were griping about its software, which you presumably bypass with your TiVo. Plus there are the usual "DRM is teh 3v1L" comments all over the place.
Mostly this is Apple's way of leveraging the video capability of its iTMS out to your TV, exactly the way TiVo does for Amazon Unbox.
I'll admit I'm mystified why they didn't make it a general DVR at the same time. My best guess is that it's coming but that the software wasn't ready yet; Apple's got very high standards for such things. But I haven't heard any complaints from TiVo customers, and my limited experience with them has been pleasant.
On the other hand I've heard much bitching about Unbox. Maybe Apple felt that they could get ahead of that and make people prefer to download rather than record; they'd rather sell you Lost for $2 than record it for free. They're certainly being way forward-looking by aiming at HDTVs, but they're not selling HDTV content yet, so they seem to be premature or out of touch.
"Networked to each other" and "networked to the wide world" are two different things. And if they must be networked remotely, and if the Internet is the most effective way to get there, then you can dramatically limit access with a firewall. You're still potentially screwed, since custom applications are terribly prone to buffer overruns, publicly-known passwords, insertion attacks, etc., but that's a programmer problem, not a Windows problem.
It wouldn't surprise me to discover that they were deliberately overstepping their patent, hoping that people would pay up or get out of the way rather than go to court and risk losing. Even if they won, in fact, they'd need to find a judge willing to award them considerable damages to make up for the expense of the trial and the lost opportunities.
I don't know any of that for a fact; I'm just guessing. But we've all seen similar instances documented here on Slashdot. It's enough to make even those most sympathetic to the idea of intellectual property want to give it up as a bad job.
I don't know exactly what goes on in that office, but I suspect it hasn't changed radically in 10 years. They're probably running identical software, perhaps with occasional upgrades. Probably some custom application providing access to their database. Why replace all the hardware just to stay in place?
Sure, the security of 98 is a nightmare. They definitely need to keep these computers behind a firewall, and in fact preferably with absolutely no access at all. Buy different computers if they need to do email or web surfing; these computers are a complete loss from a security standpoint. But if all they need to do is run some set of applications that haven't changed in years, don't fix what ain't broke.
I am merely wondering on what basis you make your prediction. I have spent time promoting professional musicians, and my experience suggests that "those who are willing to sing for their dinner" will continue to face tremendous hurdles. There are many bands competing for limited slots in live clubs, and even fewer slots in the sorts of venues which pay more than a token sum.
But if you've got a reasoned basis for predicting that all live musicians will "do well", by all means, please elaborate.
Unfortunately, that's the most debatable of the clauses. Much of the time, if it's both "novel" and "useful" (the other two things you have to have for a patent), and nobody's done it before, the patent filer will claim that as evidence that it isn't obvious. A lot of things are obvious in retrospect, but until somebody has shown it to you you'll walk right past it.
That said, "non-obvious" isn't sufficient, it has to be not obvious to somebody "skilled in the art". If somebody else seeing the same problem would find the same solution immediately, I'd consider that "obvious", but for a long time the PTO has disagreed. They say that often recognizing the problem is not always obvious itself, and it gets bogged down from there.
I'd really like to see the PTO work up a good paper on what they mean by "non-obvious", and try to raise the bar a bit from where it currently stands.
At this point it's more of an in-joke than an actual lamenting of our lonely state. There's a canonical geek out there we all think of fondly, and perhaps we even were that guy at some point, even if we've grown out of it now. Slashdot is much more diversified than it used to be.
There is one more cost: management. The papers don't get from researchers to reviewers for free. They maintain an office, and a number of people work in that office. At least one of them is probably a full-time PhD; it's not just secretaries putting things in the mailbox. And remember that a secretary making $20k per year really costs $40k, by the time you've paid FICA, health insurance, 401(k), etc. The PhD probably costs considerably more.
I don't know how much that costs. Probably a few hundred thousand a year. For a journal with limited distribution, that works out to a non-trivial amount per copy.
We use skip lists in our software. Like b-trees, they're more useful in persistent situations where getting data in blocks is an important consideration than in memory-only applications.
Slashdot Mirror
Music used to be heavily restricted. You bought an LP/cassette/8-track and you couldn't back it up, make extracts from it, mash it up with anything, or do much except play it on the device for which you bought it. You could try to make a copy, but you were going to suffer extreme quality loss and after only a couple of generations it would be unlistenable. The Rights Management wasn't Digital but it sure was Restrictive.
It's only since the creation of the CD that you could do any of those things. The old model has to go out the window; people like the stuff that they can do with the new format. But it's not clear where to go from there, since free copying tends to encourage exactly one pricing model: give it away. It may be the only model, given how ineffective DRM is compared to the old "press it into vinyl" model.
There is a huge difference between the various services that the article does not take into account: mass marketing of the underlying music.
The companies that want DRM on their music are the ones that they spend a lot of money making popular. Their business model is to get a lot of people aware of certain songs, and then sell the song to each of them individually. That's the RIAA's model.
The independent labels don't have a huge marketing budget, and so they care a lot less about whether they get paid for each individual download. For them, passing songs between people really is free advertising.
So the success of any individual music store has more to do with how effective they are at getting you to find the music you want than with the DRM. iTMS sells a lot of the RIAA's music, which the labels spend megabucks marketing (an investment they want to protect). eMusic sells songs that aren't heavily marketed.
There are a few performers who straddle the line, who got famous on the RIAA's dime and then managed to extricate themselves. They get the best of both worlds: a huge audience without the need to make each individual download pay. But these are the exceptions, not the rule; don't forget how they got famous in the first place.
That's the key here: promotion. It's way more important to most people's music choices than nearly anything else.
Root exploits have the ability to screw other users besides you, and I think that's where the Slashdot ethos comes in. If you screw yourself it's because you weren't l33t enough to protect yourself. If you get screwed by some other user because the OS didn't protect you, then your l33t-ness goes down.
So everybody's willing to accept a system that lets users screw themselves (ha ha!) but not you. And running a system that gives you the rope you need to hang yourself means you must be pretty l33t since you're too smart to fall for any traps.
My problem with treadmills is that I have to pay too much attention to them. Maybe I just need better treadmills, but I find that the ones I've used require me to keep too steady a pace to keep me from creeping forward or falling back. As a marathoner I find it's very useful to vary my speed to shift the work to various muscle groups differently. It's all subconscious, and watching to prevent that from happening is exhausting.
Besides, outside is so much prettier.
I'm all for figuring out that corn isn't a miracle for anything except winning votes in Iowa, but where did you get the idea that potatoes require "next to no fertilizers"? I grow potatoes and you have to fertilize the bejeezus out of the things or you end up with cute little micro-potatoes.
More data:
http://ohioline.osu.edu/hyg-fact/1000/1619.html
Potatoes are still better than corn; for all I know you're right that they're the most efficient. But I just wanted to point out that fertilizers are still going to be necessary.
It's called "Iowa". Eliminate the Iowa caucuses as the "first in the nation" that every Presidential candidate must suck up to (and convince his party to suck up to) and you'll never hear about corn-based ethanol ever again.
I wonder how much a "cut of the profit" is. The thing contains perhaps millions of papers, each worth an equal amount. They may be making a "good deal" of money, but amortized out over the total set of papers, each individual contribution is probably worth less than a penny per year.
It's not quite as easy as it sounds. It hinges on the notion of "purporting to be from Paypal users". It's easy to eliminate cases where the return address is paypal.com but the signature fails. It's harder when the return address is paypa1.com (look closely), and eventually it just devolves to the spam recognition problem, which is known to be hard.
And once you've defined that, the digital signature becomes nearly moot. If it's in the "looks like Paypal" category but links to something other than paypal.com, you know it's a fraud. GMail already seems to be 100% effective at sorting those out; I haven't seen a phishing attack along those lines in forever (despite getting hundreds of spams per day to certain addresses.)
Here's some cynicism: this is a way of letting PayPal carry paid advertising. Right now they know that they can't link to anybody but PayPal or the email gets chucked. If they convince mail providers to say, "We're 100% convinced this is authentic PayPal" they can start carrying any content they like, including (essentially) spam. Oh, sure, they'd call it "marketing partners" or something even more dubious, but spam it would be.
Does that mean Ford can sue me if I buy a Chevy?
Ford is outsourcing its legal department to the RIAA. If you buy a Chevy they'll sue you and hope you pay up without actually making them take you to court.
Ah, son of a b*tch. That was supposed to be "sarcasm tags", which Slashdot promptly removed, making me look (and feel like, and presumably be) a complete idiot. Sorry.
You must be using Safari. It doesn't render tags properly.
I'm just repeating what I read on the Web. I know some people were griping about its software, which you presumably bypass with your TiVo. Plus there are the usual "DRM is teh 3v1L" comments all over the place.
Mostly this is Apple's way of leveraging the video capability of its iTMS out to your TV, exactly the way TiVo does for Amazon Unbox.
I'll admit I'm mystified why they didn't make it a general DVR at the same time. My best guess is that it's coming but that the software wasn't ready yet; Apple's got very high standards for such things. But I haven't heard any complaints from TiVo customers, and my limited experience with them has been pleasant.
On the other hand I've heard much bitching about Unbox. Maybe Apple felt that they could get ahead of that and make people prefer to download rather than record; they'd rather sell you Lost for $2 than record it for free. They're certainly being way forward-looking by aiming at HDTVs, but they're not selling HDTV content yet, so they seem to be premature or out of touch.
"Networked to each other" and "networked to the wide world" are two different things. And if they must be networked remotely, and if the Internet is the most effective way to get there, then you can dramatically limit access with a firewall. You're still potentially screwed, since custom applications are terribly prone to buffer overruns, publicly-known passwords, insertion attacks, etc., but that's a programmer problem, not a Windows problem.
It wouldn't surprise me to discover that they were deliberately overstepping their patent, hoping that people would pay up or get out of the way rather than go to court and risk losing. Even if they won, in fact, they'd need to find a judge willing to award them considerable damages to make up for the expense of the trial and the lost opportunities.
I don't know any of that for a fact; I'm just guessing. But we've all seen similar instances documented here on Slashdot. It's enough to make even those most sympathetic to the idea of intellectual property want to give it up as a bad job.
And ya know, that's not necessarily a bad thing.
I don't know exactly what goes on in that office, but I suspect it hasn't changed radically in 10 years. They're probably running identical software, perhaps with occasional upgrades. Probably some custom application providing access to their database. Why replace all the hardware just to stay in place?
Sure, the security of 98 is a nightmare. They definitely need to keep these computers behind a firewall, and in fact preferably with absolutely no access at all. Buy different computers if they need to do email or web surfing; these computers are a complete loss from a security standpoint. But if all they need to do is run some set of applications that haven't changed in years, don't fix what ain't broke.
I am merely wondering on what basis you make your prediction. I have spent time promoting professional musicians, and my experience suggests that "those who are willing to sing for their dinner" will continue to face tremendous hurdles. There are many bands competing for limited slots in live clubs, and even fewer slots in the sorts of venues which pay more than a token sum.
But if you've got a reasoned basis for predicting that all live musicians will "do well", by all means, please elaborate.
Unfortunately, that's the most debatable of the clauses. Much of the time, if it's both "novel" and "useful" (the other two things you have to have for a patent), and nobody's done it before, the patent filer will claim that as evidence that it isn't obvious. A lot of things are obvious in retrospect, but until somebody has shown it to you you'll walk right past it.
That said, "non-obvious" isn't sufficient, it has to be not obvious to somebody "skilled in the art". If somebody else seeing the same problem would find the same solution immediately, I'd consider that "obvious", but for a long time the PTO has disagreed. They say that often recognizing the problem is not always obvious itself, and it gets bogged down from there.
I'd really like to see the PTO work up a good paper on what they mean by "non-obvious", and try to raise the bar a bit from where it currently stands.
Thank you for posting that. Sucks that you got modded troll; if I had any mod points you'd be very entitled to them.
I've only been working with a touring band for two years, but I concur: those numbers are out of touch with my experience as well.
Out of curiosity, have you ever been a professional musician?
Will snopes.com suffice?
t m
t ml
http://www.snopes.com/language/notthink/deserts.h
If not, try this one:
http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/just-deserts.h
At this point it's more of an in-joke than an actual lamenting of our lonely state. There's a canonical geek out there we all think of fondly, and perhaps we even were that guy at some point, even if we've grown out of it now. Slashdot is much more diversified than it used to be.
There is one more cost: management. The papers don't get from researchers to reviewers for free. They maintain an office, and a number of people work in that office. At least one of them is probably a full-time PhD; it's not just secretaries putting things in the mailbox. And remember that a secretary making $20k per year really costs $40k, by the time you've paid FICA, health insurance, 401(k), etc. The PhD probably costs considerably more.
I don't know how much that costs. Probably a few hundred thousand a year. For a journal with limited distribution, that works out to a non-trivial amount per copy.
We use skip lists in our software. Like b-trees, they're more useful in persistent situations where getting data in blocks is an important consideration than in memory-only applications.