But my proposal gives you exactly what you want (high speed downloads of high quality music, with the purchase of a subscription), while giving the record companies what they want (the assurance that digital music cannot be shared any more easily than analog music).
As for the no karma bonus, your karma probably just went over the limit to start posting at +2. To post at +1 as usual, click the button.
That doesn't solve the record companies' problem of controlling their intellectual property. It also doesn't prevent digital sharing beyond the subscriber base, which would have the same effect on digital sales as on CD sales.
A subscription system I think is practical would involve a special sound card with an RSA-type decryption and DSP on one chip. Your RSA public key would be your subscription ID; just present it to the server to get music that you and only you can listen to. The private key would be protected on the chip, and since the DSP takes place on board, the unencrypted digital music would be very difficult to access. Like cell phones, the card could be handed out for free, and maybe for a few bucks you could get an extra card or two to install in other computers in your house. To be extra nice, the record companies could distribute degraded music files, which you could freely share, but if you want the real version you have to pay to get the special version for your sound card (e.g., the right channel could be free but the left channel is encrypted, so to hear it in stereo you would have to pay).
The avg. college kid can probably work as an intern in a lot of these when it comes to M$ based solutions, but when you go off into the world of Unices, where people actually need to have a basic understanding of what is happening support costs (and the avg. wage of the staff) would skyrocket.
I thought this was the point of the Red Hat certification program, to develop a class of linux techs who didn't have to be gurus?
Nobody's arguing that technology cannot save us from natural disasters. However, there is a common circular argument (even repeated in the article) that technology can save us from the ravages of technology. Normally, technological development is done with the benefits in mind, and the negative consequences are purely unintended, often that one could not have forseen. Thus, we get into cases where technology causes a problem that has a technological solution, then the solution causes a problem which has a technological solution, which causes a problem... ad infinitum.
... isn't this exactly what we want the RIAA to do? Go after the big violators rather than make life difficult for the individual users by imposing access control?
How many academic programs you wrote as an undergrad (or even a grad student) had to run for hours or even weeks and maybe with direct user interaction and not crash?
As a grad student, I would say, pretty much daily. Some of the numerical integrations or monte carlo simulations that I have written have run for a week or more.
But can you imagine an open laptop? Neon and clear shit for days... Case modding to the extreme!
Indeed, I can imagine... and what's the point? Most of the cool casemods take up power. With neon tubes everywhere, you would probably cut your battery life by a factor of two or three, which would defeat most of the point of getting a laptop.
I'm reminded of an acquaintance of mine from high school, who bought a Geo Metro and added so many car mods (ground effect, huge stereo, etc.) that his alternator couldn't keep up. He bought a new alternator, which destroyed the car's fuel economy, which is basically the only reason to buy a Metro.
Then again, this is probably the wrong crowd to ask "Why get a new gadget?".
What can Slashdot possibly contribute to this other than posting an article that is going to result in a whole lot of political flaming?
You just answered your own question. The forums on CNN and the BBC are heavily moderated, to the extent that they exist at all --/. is one of very few popular sites where people can post their thoughts, some of which are flames, but many of which lead to interesting discussion. I bet this article receives the most comments of any this week.
The folks I worry about with copyright are small artists who either themselves make a living off of their work, or who have living relatives who do so. These are the people that copyright needs to protect, and these are the same people who cannot afford to pay to extend that protection.
That's exactly what Lessig' proposal intends to ensure. By charging a nominal fee to renew copyright, it allows artists to retain control over their work for as long as they are making money from it. Once it becomes unprofitable for them (or they die, and their heirs choose not to pay the fee), the work enters the public domain.
The proposal is intended to allow otherwise unused works to enter the public domain for all to use. It does not address the problem of long-term protection of copyright where the work remains profitable, as in the case of Disney.
Not as easy as you make it sound. Because of the high energies and angular momentums involved, it's extremely difficult and costly in terms of fuel to change orbits once in space. In practice this would mean that all future shuttle missions would be missions to the ISS, meaning no more Hubble servicing missions, etc.
He's probably talking about multiuser detection, which is an idea that has been around for about 20 years. The idea is that instead of observing only the signal that you're interested in, you also observe every other transmitted signal. If the other signals are digital, you can reconstruct those signals electronically and subtract the resulting interference. Unfortunately it is a hideously complicated problem in practice, and is not terribly robust, so no major wireless standard incorporates it (not even any of the 3G standards).
1. Cow eats grass. 2. Cow produces waste. 3. Bacteria degrades waste to methane. 4. Digester burns methane, produces CO2. 5. Grass absorbs CO2. 6. Go to 1.
Ideally, no more CO2 is produced than was in the grass anyway, so this process adds no more CO2 to the atmosphere. Furthermore, methane is very clean-burning, producing very little in the way of noxious by-products. In fact, since the grass produces energy from sunlight, you could think of this as a type of solar power!
Recent results from Galileo indicate that Callisto and Ganymede may also have vast oceans beneath their surfaces. So ruling out Europa doesn't mean that there is no life in the Jovian system.
It's also not like people don't have friends. You want a distro with three discs -- get two friends, download a disk each, and burn. It is free, after all.
And if you want conspiracy theories, maybe RedHat is leaning on the university so that students will actually buy the boxed version?
With this privatization, they closed all their notebooks and journals and stopped teaching others how to implement a great webcrawler and search ranking system.
Troll.
The upside to patenting (at least in theory) is that Google no longer has to keep its IP secret, in fear that someone else will copy them. If you're so curious, why don't you request a copy of their patent yourself, and review it.
Thanks, but I like RedHat, I've always used RedHat, and I see no reason to change for one package. Isn't open source about choice, and not being locked in?
Slashdot Mirror
But my proposal gives you exactly what you want (high speed downloads of high quality music, with the purchase of a subscription), while giving the record companies what they want (the assurance that digital music cannot be shared any more easily than analog music).
As for the no karma bonus, your karma probably just went over the limit to start posting at +2. To post at +1 as usual, click the button.
And they seem to have plenty of money to spend on lawyers to prosecute college students.
Lawyers are to failing companies as cockroaches are to post-nuclear-apocalypse civilization; they are all that's left. Take SCO for example.
That doesn't solve the record companies' problem of controlling their intellectual property. It also doesn't prevent digital sharing beyond the subscriber base, which would have the same effect on digital sales as on CD sales.
A subscription system I think is practical would involve a special sound card with an RSA-type decryption and DSP on one chip. Your RSA public key would be your subscription ID; just present it to the server to get music that you and only you can listen to. The private key would be protected on the chip, and since the DSP takes place on board, the unencrypted digital music would be very difficult to access. Like cell phones, the card could be handed out for free, and maybe for a few bucks you could get an extra card or two to install in other computers in your house. To be extra nice, the record companies could distribute degraded music files, which you could freely share, but if you want the real version you have to pay to get the special version for your sound card (e.g., the right channel could be free but the left channel is encrypted, so to hear it in stereo you would have to pay).
The avg. college kid can probably work as an intern in a lot of these when it comes to M$ based solutions, but when you go off into the world of Unices, where people actually need to have a basic understanding of what is happening support costs (and the avg. wage of the staff) would skyrocket.
I thought this was the point of the Red Hat certification program, to develop a class of linux techs who didn't have to be gurus?
Nobody's arguing that technology cannot save us from natural disasters. However, there is a common circular argument (even repeated in the article) that technology can save us from the ravages of technology. Normally, technological development is done with the benefits in mind, and the negative consequences are purely unintended, often that one could not have forseen. Thus, we get into cases where technology causes a problem that has a technological solution, then the solution causes a problem which has a technological solution, which causes a problem ... ad infinitum.
technology has potential to annihilate ... as well as the potential to protect us from annihilation.
It is circular to argue that a technology that can annihilate us can also be used to protect us from the annihilation that the technology causes.
And what if you can't tell which technology is which?
I now inform you that you are too far from reality.
What makes you so sure that they won't have a proprietary, encrypted format so that you can only play Universal music on Apple hardware?
From the Google translation:
An entrance into the music business would fit the strategy of the Computerbauers.
Heh ... I'm going to have "Computerbauer" put on my business card.
That'll work out great. I just downloaded the RH9 ISOs.
I don't know if the telescope is associated with the company. However, in Japanese, "Subaru" is the name for the the Pleiades star cluster.
... isn't this exactly what we want the RIAA to do? Go after the big violators rather than make life difficult for the individual users by imposing access control?
How many academic programs you wrote as an undergrad (or even a grad student) had to run for hours or even weeks and maybe with direct user interaction and not crash?
As a grad student, I would say, pretty much daily. Some of the numerical integrations or monte carlo simulations that I have written have run for a week or more.
But can you imagine an open laptop? Neon and clear shit for days... Case modding to the extreme!
Indeed, I can imagine ... and what's the point? Most of the cool casemods take up power. With neon tubes everywhere, you would probably cut your battery life by a factor of two or three, which would defeat most of the point of getting a laptop.
I'm reminded of an acquaintance of mine from high school, who bought a Geo Metro and added so many car mods (ground effect, huge stereo, etc.) that his alternator couldn't keep up. He bought a new alternator, which destroyed the car's fuel economy, which is basically the only reason to buy a Metro.
Then again, this is probably the wrong crowd to ask "Why get a new gadget?".
What can Slashdot possibly contribute to this other than posting an article that is going to result in a whole lot of political flaming?
You just answered your own question. The forums on CNN and the BBC are heavily moderated, to the extent that they exist at all -- /. is one of very few popular sites where people can post their thoughts, some of which are flames, but many of which lead to interesting discussion. I bet this article receives the most comments of any this week.
The folks I worry about with copyright are small artists who either themselves make a living off of their work, or who have living relatives who do so. These are the people that copyright needs to protect, and these are the same people who cannot afford to pay to extend that protection.
That's exactly what Lessig' proposal intends to ensure. By charging a nominal fee to renew copyright, it allows artists to retain control over their work for as long as they are making money from it. Once it becomes unprofitable for them (or they die, and their heirs choose not to pay the fee), the work enters the public domain.
The proposal is intended to allow otherwise unused works to enter the public domain for all to use. It does not address the problem of long-term protection of copyright where the work remains profitable, as in the case of Disney.
and enough fuel to get to the ISS.
Not as easy as you make it sound. Because of the high energies and angular momentums involved, it's extremely difficult and costly in terms of fuel to change orbits once in space. In practice this would mean that all future shuttle missions would be missions to the ISS, meaning no more Hubble servicing missions, etc.
He's probably talking about multiuser detection, which is an idea that has been around for about 20 years. The idea is that instead of observing only the signal that you're interested in, you also observe every other transmitted signal. If the other signals are digital, you can reconstruct those signals electronically and subtract the resulting interference. Unfortunately it is a hideously complicated problem in practice, and is not terribly robust, so no major wireless standard incorporates it (not even any of the 3G standards).
Great. Where's his law degree from again?
Nope. Think of it this way:
1. Cow eats grass.
2. Cow produces waste.
3. Bacteria degrades waste to methane.
4. Digester burns methane, produces CO2.
5. Grass absorbs CO2.
6. Go to 1.
Ideally, no more CO2 is produced than was in the grass anyway, so this process adds no more CO2 to the atmosphere. Furthermore, methane is very clean-burning, producing very little in the way of noxious by-products. In fact, since the grass produces energy from sunlight, you could think of this as a type of solar power!
Recent results from Galileo indicate that Callisto and Ganymede may also have vast oceans beneath their surfaces. So ruling out Europa doesn't mean that there is no life in the Jovian system.
It's also not like people don't have friends. You want a distro with three discs -- get two friends, download a disk each, and burn. It is free, after all.
And if you want conspiracy theories, maybe RedHat is leaning on the university so that students will actually buy the boxed version?
Ah yes ... internationally renowned pharmacologist Chris Rock. I just read his article in Nature.
With this privatization, they closed all their notebooks and journals and stopped teaching others how to implement a great webcrawler and search ranking system.
Troll.
The upside to patenting (at least in theory) is that Google no longer has to keep its IP secret, in fear that someone else will copy them. If you're so curious, why don't you request a copy of their patent yourself, and review it.
Thanks, but I like RedHat, I've always used RedHat, and I see no reason to change for one package. Isn't open source about choice, and not being locked in?