While I am sure monetary benefit factored into Apple's equation when making the decision to make iTunes and the iPod a closed pair there are other factors. If the court were to force Apple to license FairPlay Apple would then have to assume the Support Cost of making sure that songs purchased on iTunes function on other players. This in my opinion is the main reason Apple has locked out other players.
Apple has a history of pairing Hardware and Software to make sure they produce a functional product. This is the same reason Console games are easier to code than PC games there is less hardware to worry about.
Based on this argument alone I can not see the courts forcing Apple to license FairPlay or include other DRM schemes in the iPod.
1) Purchase an 802.11 card that allows the users to alter MAC address and an external antenna. = $45
2) Drive around random suburban neighborhoods looking for open access points. Be sure to change your MAC address at random intervals. Netstumbler will make this easier. = 20 hours of your time
3) When you are downloading those Linux ISOs choose a new access point and MAC address every evening. You will need a van to ensure privacy and comfort. = $20,000
Total = $20,045 Time Investment = 20 hours + downloading time
I think I will stick to purchasing my software and music.
I think Creative's problem and the problem of all manufacturers is going to be the click wheel. I have used a lot of MP3 players over the years dating back to the Rio 500 and I have never seen a superior user interface. As long as Apple holds the patent on the touch wheel idea I don't think they are in any danger.
I have looked at the Zen Touch and Zen Micro and they might rate a distant second place but the click wheel is still by far superior. The Rio Karma is fine but not in the same class as either product. My advice to anyone looking to purchase an MP3 player; borrow a friend's G4 iPod for a day. If you are still able to consider another MP3 player after that I will be very surprised.
I believe many of these taxes go directly to services like 911 emergency response. I work at a University and we are taxed base not only on the number of phone numbers but also on the number of drops. So if we use the same phone number in two location we get taxed twice. It makes some since because if there is ever a 911 call from that phone number and the caller is not able give his or her location the 911 operator will have to dispatch police to both locations.
I don't feel like we are overly burdened here when it comes to taxes in the US. But if it were up to me we would do away with all taxes save Federal Income, State Income, and local sales tax. All product / service tied taxes, sales, service, or property are regressive in nature. They have more effect on your purchasing power the lower your annual income. And just think some people in Washington want to institute a national Sales Tax.
Shutter, can you image the administrative bureaucracy with a national sales tax. Forget the IRS we are going to need a whole new brand of government, Executive, Judicial, Legislative, and Sales Tax. Yikes!
"charging gun manufacturers with murder when a gun is used to kill someone" There is a big difference here. Guns are manufactured to kill or injure. Everyone knows they are and they are used for that purpose. The gun companies are not out there saying our products are not designed to kill, because they obviously are.
"Just because vehicles are used as "get-away cars" in bank robberies should we outlaw automobiles?" I would call this a matter of scale. Cars are used in criminal activity far less than they are used in legitimate activity. I don't think the same can be said for P2P software.
I think the P2P companies could have avoided alot of bad press by making a good faith effort to control illegal file swapping on their networks. Hell there is a copyrighted field in MP3 id tags and they dident even bother to filter out those results; even simple text filters (*spears*.mp3, *warcraft*.(zip|exe)) built into the programs. If they made an effort to comply with the demands of the AGs they would not be 100% successful in stopping illegal file swapping but they would have something to point to and say look we tried.
"How can I hurt them if I am not causing them a loss in revenue? I would not have given them any money to begin with." Then you should not be benefiting from the use of their product. And yes I did say their product not the artist's. The artist has chosen to sign with them so it is their product.
"I don't consider a company successful just because they are profitable." That is the only measure of a successful company. Never invest if you have that attitude. Business should only invest money in something that is going to show a return. Why do business donate to charity? Because it improves their public image and increases profits. Why do successful business have good customer service? Because it increases repeat customers and increases their profits. Welcome to capitalism.
If you would never have purchased it they you should not own it. I do not download music illegally. I use Rhapsody or the radio to decide what programs I would like to purchase then buy them on iTunes. It is less of a hassle then P2P and it is legal.
To answer who you a hurting, you are hurting the record labels. I know that no one cares about them but personally I don't penalize successful companies from protecting their profits. Its called capitalism and it is what put America on the map.
I love how everyone on/. gets up in arms when someone threatens a P2P company. I work at a University and have to remove P2P software from someone's computer at least once a week. I have yet to see one case where the user was using P2P for something legitimate.
If someone produces a product they have a right to be paid for it. Even if they are a greedy money grubbing Record Label, or Motion picture company. It seams like people have forgotten that these companies are successful for a reason the get paid for their products.
People say that they don't like buying CDs because there is only one or two good songs on it. Has no one on/. heard of ITunes, WalMart, Real music stores. Buy the songs you want.
If you don't like their encryption try TotalRecorder works great for me. Format shifting is still perfectly legal. As long as you paid for it.
For some reason otherwise normal law-abiding citizens get defensive when you talk about tougher enforcement of traffic laws. I have always found this to be an interesting part of the modern driver.
Exceeding the speed limit is against the law. When you break the law you deserve to get punished. As voters it is our responsibility to tell our governments what laws we want and then allow them to be enforced. This system has nothing to do with traffic laws only the enforcement of the laws already in place.
The only concern I have seen in this group that appears valid to me is exceeding the speed limit to avoid a dangerous situation. If the system is put in place and there are a reasonable number of roadside readers, say every 3-5 miles on the freeway, this would be an easy situation to solve.
If you are clocked exceeding the speed limit at a station it could make a time stamp of the incident and let the network know that you have exceed the speed limit at xxx time. The speed limit would be known and the distance between stations. If you arrive at the second station too soon (given some allowance for 60 seconds of speeding or similar) then you would be issued a citation.
I don't think I have ever been in a situation where it took me more than 60 seconds to pass another motorist. If it is taking you longer than 60 seconds you are probably better off to slow down and pass the other car later when it is wedged in and you can safely pass.
If I could get this system installed in North Texas I would. I love the idea of everyone being required to obey the law. If the laws are unreasonable then it is up to voters to get them changed, not to limit their enforcement.
I don't know why more/.ers are not offended by this idea. I am an IT manager and I have had to fight an uphill battle to get P2P curtailed on our network. What Overpeer is doing is creating more useless traffic across the wire.
I know in this era of cheep bandwidth we are not supposed to worry about things like that. But for the love of god this one deserves some attention! If everyone that download's an Overpeer package deletes it and tries again the overhead from duplicated request could increase exponentially.
At my University we were having bandwidth problems so the decision was made to buy more bandwidth than we could possibly need 2 DS3s in our case. The week after we had installed them we were maxing out our throughput.
We then installed a packet shaper on the network and limited the total P2P traffic to 10Mbps. Needless to say the we have not reached our peek since the product was installed.
In this one instance I must say I am in favor of regulation rather than the rampant abuse of Internet traffic. I can't be the first one to think about this consequence.
nintendoland.com has a good explanation of the events from 1991 onward. The article is devoted to the SNES CD which was a separate project. The Playstaton was always an independent console that Sony devloped on their own to play SNES and CD games. The SNES CD or ND and it was sometimes called was an add-on to the original SNES console but their were a lot of problem incorporating the Sony version of the add-on. That is why Sony started the Playstaion project. They could not make their CD system work with the pitiful processor in the SNES.
I know we all would like the internet to be an open network available to all without censorship. But do we want to achieve that through government regulation? The internet is simply a network of public and private hosts and who is to say that any business is not allowed to conduct their business in a manner of their choosing on that network?
To me that should be the consumer not the government. If you are unhappy with the service that Google provides, don't use Google. And if they choose to black list your site, as a private institution that is their right. No court is going to go an Ad agency and tell them that they have to publish an advertisement. Why should a search engine be any different.
My $0.02
Re:There is a solution...
on
Window or Aisle?
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
I hesitate to respond to such an off topic remark but here we go.
First our government:
Believe it or not they usually have the best interests of the country in mind no matter what transgression we are talking about here. Are there going to be mistakes? YES, we are talking about human beings there are always going to be mistakes. And let he who has never made a mistake or acted with conflicting goals cast the first stone.
Anyone reading this that believes that they can make better decisions, I am glad run for office we need more geeks on The Hill.
Our Employers:
As hard as it is to admit some times we do live in a capitalist society. If you are unhappy with your job or pay it is your responsibility to look for something better. But if there are CCNAs out there that are making less then $60,000/year you need to be looking any way. If you are making that much, guess what you are already making more then %87 of Americans get over it.
Well I know it is always our desire to have our cake and eat it to but please while you are ranting and raving remember you are:
Worth whatever you are dedicated enough to fight for.
Going to have to give up something to the government to avoid chaos.
Not the lease fortunate person on the planet.
Responsible to your employers and your employer's customers.
Not the only one that agrees with you but you don't have to shove it down our throats.
I see one possibility that has been overlooked so far, Star Wars Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader. Possibly one of the best SW games out there. Too bad it is only available for the GameCube. Maybe we will lick out and it will be ported to PC. Defiantly in my top ten favorite games. I had to rent a GameCube to play it but it rocks. Check out the videos on their site. The audio is amazing too, direct out takes from the movies. Everyone will recognize the Death Star run by the way it seams to be modeled on the old CGA game. Be sure to check out the Screen Shots and Videos in the Gallery.
Slashdot Mirror
While I am sure monetary benefit factored into Apple's equation when making the decision to make iTunes and the iPod a closed pair there are other factors. If the court were to force Apple to license FairPlay Apple would then have to assume the Support Cost of making sure that songs purchased on iTunes function on other players. This in my opinion is the main reason Apple has locked out other players.
Apple has a history of pairing Hardware and Software to make sure they produce a functional product. This is the same reason Console games are easier to code than PC games there is less hardware to worry about.
Based on this argument alone I can not see the courts forcing Apple to license FairPlay or include other DRM schemes in the iPod.
1) Purchase an 802.11 card that allows the users to alter MAC address and an external antenna. = $45
2) Drive around random suburban neighborhoods looking for open access points. Be sure to change your MAC address at random intervals. Netstumbler will make this easier. = 20 hours of your time
3) When you are downloading those Linux ISOs choose a new access point and MAC address every evening. You will need a van to ensure privacy and comfort. = $20,000
Total = $20,045
Time Investment = 20 hours + downloading time
I think I will stick to purchasing my software and music.
I think Creative's problem and the problem of all manufacturers is going to be the click wheel. I have used a lot of MP3 players over the years dating back to the Rio 500 and I have never seen a superior user interface. As long as Apple holds the patent on the touch wheel idea I don't think they are in any danger.
I have looked at the Zen Touch and Zen Micro and they might rate a distant second place but the click wheel is still by far superior. The Rio Karma is fine but not in the same class as either product. My advice to anyone looking to purchase an MP3 player; borrow a friend's G4 iPod for a day. If you are still able to consider another MP3 player after that I will be very surprised.
MythTV
No AAC support that I know of but is does support FLAC and Ogg.
http://www.mythtv.org/
I believe many of these taxes go directly to services like 911 emergency response. I work at a University and we are taxed base not only on the number of phone numbers but also on the number of drops. So if we use the same phone number in two location we get taxed twice. It makes some since because if there is ever a 911 call from that phone number and the caller is not able give his or her location the 911 operator will have to dispatch police to both locations.
I don't feel like we are overly burdened here when it comes to taxes in the US. But if it were up to me we would do away with all taxes save Federal Income, State Income, and local sales tax. All product / service tied taxes, sales, service, or property are regressive in nature. They have more effect on your purchasing power the lower your annual income. And just think some people in Washington want to institute a national Sales Tax.
Shutter, can you image the administrative bureaucracy with a national sales tax. Forget the IRS we are going to need a whole new brand of government, Executive, Judicial, Legislative, and Sales Tax. Yikes!
"charging gun manufacturers with murder when a gun is used to kill someone"
There is a big difference here. Guns are manufactured to kill or injure. Everyone knows they are and they are used for that purpose. The gun companies are not out there saying our products are not designed to kill, because they obviously are.
"Just because vehicles are used as "get-away cars" in bank robberies should we outlaw automobiles?"
I would call this a matter of scale. Cars are used in criminal activity far less than they are used in legitimate activity. I don't think the same can be said for P2P software.
I think the P2P companies could have avoided alot of bad press by making a good faith effort to control illegal file swapping on their networks. Hell there is a copyrighted field in MP3 id tags and they dident even bother to filter out those results; even simple text filters (*spears*.mp3, *warcraft*.(zip|exe)) built into the programs. If they made an effort to comply with the demands of the AGs they would not be 100% successful in stopping illegal file swapping but they would have something to point to and say look we tried.
"How can I hurt them if I am not causing them a loss in revenue? I would not have given them any money to begin with."
Then you should not be benefiting from the use of their product. And yes I did say their product not the artist's. The artist has chosen to sign with them so it is their product.
"I don't consider a company successful just because they are profitable."
That is the only measure of a successful company. Never invest if you have that attitude. Business should only invest money in something that is going to show a return. Why do business donate to charity? Because it improves their public image and increases profits. Why do successful business have good customer service? Because it increases repeat customers and increases their profits. Welcome to capitalism.
If you would never have purchased it they you should not own it. I do not download music illegally. I use Rhapsody or the radio to decide what programs I would like to purchase then buy them on iTunes. It is less of a hassle then P2P and it is legal.
To answer who you a hurting, you are hurting the record labels. I know that no one cares about them but personally I don't penalize successful companies from protecting their profits. Its called capitalism and it is what put America on the map.
I love how everyone on /. gets up in arms when someone threatens a P2P company. I work at a University and have to remove P2P software from someone's computer at least once a week. I have yet to see one case where the user was using P2P for something legitimate.
/. heard of ITunes, WalMart, Real music stores. Buy the songs you want.
If someone produces a product they have a right to be paid for it. Even if they are a greedy money grubbing Record Label, or Motion picture company. It seams like people have forgotten that these companies are successful for a reason the get paid for their products.
People say that they don't like buying CDs because there is only one or two good songs on it. Has no one on
If you don't like their encryption try TotalRecorder works great for me. Format shifting is still perfectly legal. As long as you paid for it.
For some reason otherwise normal law-abiding citizens get defensive when you talk about tougher enforcement of traffic laws. I have always found this to be an interesting part of the modern driver.
Exceeding the speed limit is against the law. When you break the law you deserve to get punished. As voters it is our responsibility to tell our governments what laws we want and then allow them to be enforced. This system has nothing to do with traffic laws only the enforcement of the laws already in place.
The only concern I have seen in this group that appears valid to me is exceeding the speed limit to avoid a dangerous situation. If the system is put in place and there are a reasonable number of roadside readers, say every 3-5 miles on the freeway, this would be an easy situation to solve.
If you are clocked exceeding the speed limit at a station it could make a time stamp of the incident and let the network know that you have exceed the speed limit at xxx time. The speed limit would be known and the distance between stations. If you arrive at the second station too soon (given some allowance for 60 seconds of speeding or similar) then you would be issued a citation.
I don't think I have ever been in a situation where it took me more than 60 seconds to pass another motorist. If it is taking you longer than 60 seconds you are probably better off to slow down and pass the other car later when it is wedged in and you can safely pass.
If I could get this system installed in North Texas I would. I love the idea of everyone being required to obey the law. If the laws are unreasonable then it is up to voters to get them changed, not to limit their enforcement.
My $0.02,
BedivereW
I don't know why more /.ers are not offended by this idea. I am an IT manager and I have had to fight an uphill battle to get P2P curtailed on our network. What Overpeer is doing is creating more useless traffic across the wire.
I know in this era of cheep bandwidth we are not supposed to worry about things like that. But for the love of god this one deserves some attention! If everyone that download's an Overpeer package deletes it and tries again the overhead from duplicated request could increase exponentially.
At my University we were having bandwidth problems so the decision was made to buy more bandwidth than we could possibly need 2 DS3s in our case. The week after we had installed them we were maxing out our throughput.
We then installed a packet shaper on the network and limited the total P2P traffic to 10Mbps. Needless to say the we have not reached our peek since the product was installed.
In this one instance I must say I am in favor of regulation rather than the rampant abuse of Internet traffic. I can't be the first one to think about this consequence.
nintendoland.com has a good explanation of the events from 1991 onward. The article is devoted to the SNES CD which was a separate project. The Playstaton was always an independent console that Sony devloped on their own to play SNES and CD games. The SNES CD or ND and it was sometimes called was an add-on to the original SNES console but their were a lot of problem incorporating the Sony version of the add-on. That is why Sony started the Playstaion project. They could not make their CD system work with the pitiful processor in the SNES.
I know we all would like the internet to be an open network available to all without censorship. But do we want to achieve that through government regulation? The internet is simply a network of public and private hosts and who is to say that any business is not allowed to conduct their business in a manner of their choosing on that network?
To me that should be the consumer not the government. If you are unhappy with the service that Google provides, don't use Google. And if they choose to black list your site, as a private institution that is their right. No court is going to go an Ad agency and tell them that they have to publish an advertisement. Why should a search engine be any different.
My $0.02
First our government:
Believe it or not they usually have the best interests of the country in mind no matter what transgression we are talking about here. Are there going to be mistakes? YES, we are talking about human beings there are always going to be mistakes. And let he who has never made a mistake or acted with conflicting goals cast the first stone.
Anyone reading this that believes that they can make better decisions, I am glad run for office we need more geeks on The Hill.
Our Employers:
As hard as it is to admit some times we do live in a capitalist society. If you are unhappy with your job or pay it is your responsibility to look for something better. But if there are CCNAs out there that are making less then $60,000/year you need to be looking any way. If you are making that much, guess what you are already making more then %87 of Americans get over it.
Well I know it is always our desire to have our cake and eat it to but please while you are ranting and raving remember you are:
- Worth whatever you are dedicated enough to fight for.
- Going to have to give up something to the government to avoid chaos.
- Not the lease fortunate person on the planet.
- Responsible to your employers and your employer's customers.
- Not the only one that agrees with you but you don't have to shove it down our throats.
My $0.02,Robert W.
I see one possibility that has been overlooked so far, Star Wars Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader. Possibly one of the best SW games out there. Too bad it is only available for the GameCube. Maybe we will lick out and it will be ported to PC. Defiantly in my top ten favorite games. I had to rent a GameCube to play it but it rocks. Check out the videos on their site. The audio is amazing too, direct out takes from the movies. Everyone will recognize the Death Star run by the way it seams to be modeled on the old CGA game. Be sure to check out the Screen Shots and Videos in the Gallery.
a ult.htm
http://www.lucasarts.com/products/rogueleader/def