What benefit would Sony see in convincing anyone that a copy protection scheme works when it doesn't? I can see where Macrovision, or the RIAA, might wrong-headedly see this in their interest, but Sony doesn't own the copy protection scheme, and has no case to prove. They are just trying to contain the music within "authorized" distribution channels, and I doubt if they are anxious to retool their industry for a scheme that doesn't work.
That is why this is a "test," as Sony said in the linked article.
AC, look up the word "misnomer," first of all. An idea cannot be a "misnomer," only a word can.
Secondly, markets don't determine shit by themselves. For the market to be the true arbiter you would need an ideally free market, and a "frictionless" system. We don't have that.
Inferior products vanquish superior ones thanks to superior market positioning and distribution all the time. To say that these superior products "deserved" better postitioning, "deserved" better distribution, is fine. To say they "deserved" to win, therefore, is fine.
Unless, of course, one is in love with the Darwinist (I understand what it means, it's you that apparently do not) mantra.
"this is capitalism, nothing deserves to win except what the market says wins" totally bankrupts the meaning of the word "deserves." Deserves refers to merit -- ANY kind of merit. There are kinds of merit that exist apart from the market.
So, when someone says this or that "deserves" to win, it would be nice if the keepers of the mantra would butt out.
Sony is not without its scientists. They know what a "control group" is.
Guarantee you, they will be able to distinguish among UK, US and German versions; they will be monitoring, tracking and pushing internal reports back and forth on this.
What we should hope to see is lots of rips from US and Germany, and none from the UK. Send them a message that copy-protection will only make their goods a target for the rip artistes.
Why can't someone say. "these guys are doing it right, they deserve the rewards of their labor," without an economic Darwinist coming up with this scrap of useless dogma?
Regardless of economic point of view, one can truthfully say, "I like these guys, I like what they are doing, it's right for the market -- they deserve success." I don't see where this violates the cutthroat principles you seem to hold so dear.
Re:The good and the bad of it
on
GPS Meets PCS
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· Score: 1
It's not the "huge number of untraceable calls" that is specifically the problem; it is the small percentage of these wherein the caller can't identify their location properly (Children, travellers in unfamilar places) or calls that end before location info has been communicated.
Re:The good and the bad of it
on
GPS Meets PCS
·
· Score: 1
I understand there are good reasons to use cell phones; if, for instance, I was a young person with family responsibilities, sure, I'd need that lifeline.
But I think the level of paranoia we are seeing in the posts on this subject is unwarranted by legislation that merely asks for E911 systems to be better equipped to locate the origin of calls.
The idea that phone manufacturers, many of them based outside of this country, are in collaboration with the telcoms and with our government to spy on personal phone users, strikes me as a fever-dream born out of resentment for our high-tech chains.
I would not be surprised if, at some point in the future, localized advertising is offered as a means to offset phone costs. At that time, those who value their privacy will "just say no."
But I don't think our government's recently-empowered kick for keeping tabs on everybody, all the time, has as yet infiltrated the telecom infrastructure.
Re:How very convenient
on
GPS Meets PCS
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· Score: 1
I think wireless communication devices are, most of the time, a "bad idea" for anyone who values privacy.
Having chosen to carry one, however, it's up to you to take responsibility for knowing what the phone's capabilities are, and how to turn them off.
Always-on GPS is not required by the law (at least not yet, and I doubt if ever), only locator services for E911. If your phone is doing more than that, change phones.
Re:The good and the bad of it
on
GPS Meets PCS
·
· Score: 1
It's not an "example" -- it is the entire reason for the legislation. The wide adoption of personal phones has resulted in a huge number of untraceable calls coming in on the emergency lines.
You won't be traceable when your phone is turned off, or if you leave the damn thing at home in the first place.
I don't own a personal phone, 'cause I don't *want* to be reachable 24/7 -- why anyone would want to be hung on a tether like that escapes me.
Considering that cell phone users have volunteered for the shackle, I don't quite understand what they fear in GPS.
I think you're missing some basic principles beneath the argument against such legislation.
As a secular state, and one that values privacy, traditionally we do not make laws against "evil thoughts." The underlying assumption in our child pornography laws is child porn is a record of a real crime committed against a real child, sold for the delectation of the voyeur.
Your argument that certain pictures should be banned because they will prompt "evil thoughts" (amd your ability to qualify such evil thoughts, somehow, as actions), has no precedence; we don't usually attempt to pre-empt crime by outlawing its precursors.
Your attitude has grown more popular lately, and grows more popular daily, it seems.
I suspect this has something to do with our increasing historical distance from the threat of Fascism a half-century ago; the phrase "thought police" seems not to have the impact that it used to.
The "but I wanna eat" argument is itself specious. There's no reason to believe musical artists would make less money in a system not dominated by "Intellectual Property Capitalists" like the RIAA membership -- the power in that organization is *not* held by the creative artists, but by those who own the (outmoded) distribution channels.
It's no accident that the record labels grow rich and powerful, while all but a few music artists crash and burn. Whatever breaks down RIAA power is very likely to put more power in the artists' hands.
But, even if your argument were considered to hold water, a lyrics archive is no threat to your income. A method of distributing your (presumably wonderful) lyrics, separate from the musical work itself, serves only as one more means to make your work known far and wide and whet your potential public's appetite. Since no one is about to pay a penny for an unknown's lyrics, it's nothing from your pocket, and since it could conceivably help you to make a name for yourself outside of established distribution channels, this is an example of how the RIAA is keeping you, and other independent artists, down.
*Very* informative link, particularly in its realistic assessment of what technologies stand to benefit from quantum communications. Anyone as confused as I was by the contradictory posts in this thread should checkit out...
...Looks like the MPAA's attitude towards copyrighted material is spreading...
Let's get the nature of the enemy straight; it is one multiheaded beast. Universal, Sony, Columbia = MPAA = RIAA. What we are talking about is Intellectual Property Capitalists; people who feel that, since they currently own the distribution system throyugh which creative cultural works currently flow, they merit all the profit they can possibly squeeze from said properties, and legal protection from any perceived threat to that distribution system. It's nothing new, it's just the first real challenge to their stranglehold on the cultchah...
Anyone with a good soundcard can create a rip, using a good codec and a high enough bitrate, that sounds (to most ears) indistinguishable from most pure digital rips (especialy considering how many people use low bitrates and quick, low-quality encoding). People accustomed to playing music on their computer will actually be forced into making such rips, assuming these disks are not playable on cd-rom drives.
The first method of distributing/sharing mp3s was the newsgroups -- a method I still prefer. Believe me, the expert rip-artistes of alt.binaries.sounds.mp3 will be targeting Universals's copy-protected releases and releasing them to the world quite promptly; a skip and a hop and they'll be on all sharing services as well.
Perhaps this is Universal's scheme to get the music more widely distributed?
Shall I remind you that under the Anti-Terrorist Act this proposal to engage in a Denial of Service attack is classified as a Terrorist Act, punishable by life in prison without parole?
Consider the other creditors (including other employees) of the bankrupt company, who would otherwise share in the potential value of those assets.
If he can work out a means of payment with the employer why is he obligated to concern himself whether other employees are doing the same or not? That is the employer's obligation, not his.
When I got fired from a startup by calling my boss a drunk (which he was), I got paid for the first time in a month and left the company even-up. My fellow employees never were paid or that month, and some got screwed for as much as thre months' more salary.
Was I wrong to accept my severance check?
I have a hard time imagining that any of these employees were *quite* stupid enough to be owed so much money that they could 'justify' stealing some of the larger-ticket items described in the article.
I worked for a magazine startup once, where the art director, the editor, and the financier/publisher (a Wall Street weasel if ever there was one) were ownership partners.
Despite winning a few prestigious publishing awards, the commercial end never quite came together, in part because the art director was a hopeless alcoholic with no regard for deadline. As Production Editor, deadlines were my job. (An impossible position, as the people who I had to lean on regarding deadlines were all owners!)
Toward the end of our days, as the money was running out, I advised the A.D. that if things wern't working out, perhaps he should "have another drink."
I was fired, and was paid on the spot. But I was the last person to be paid, though the company limped along for quite some time afterwards.
The editor, a friend of mine, knew, but could not prove, that the financer/publisher had been siphoning money from the company throughout its two-year run. Shortly after I left, Feds started to come out of the woodwork, but they couldn't prove anything either.
The editor, whose share of ownership was bought by his hard work, continued to work an additional three months without pay after I left, simply because,a s a partner, he had no choice until the thing was surely dead, working on an issue that never reached the presses.
The day it all finally ended, he went back to the office to retrieve the main workstation, a high-end (for the time) Mac. But it was already gone, no doubt pilfered by the Wall Street Weasel himself. My friend satisfied himself with a somewhat lower-end Mac and a laser printer.
His alternative: to sit there and take it in the rear.
Maybe my friend should not have been swayed by the Weasel when he was first approached with the prospect of doing whatever magazine he wanted to do, with a bankroll of several million behind it.
But he had bought into it, and he, and his idea, were raped by the Weasel, for short-term personal profit.
At the time he took the equipment, the company owed him some $110,000 in (admittedly inflated) salary that he had no chance whatever of seeing.
I am sure my friend violated the law, but was his act immoral? The Weasel was highly likely to be getting the other Mac on his next trip to the office. How "immoral" is it to steal from a thief?
You could make the argument that every cent I was paid on this job was stolen from defrauded investors who went bust on a magazine start-up that was probably intended to fail. Does that mean I should return my salary? Don't hold your breath, pal.
No offense, but this question translates as, "How does it feel not to have grown up?"
Not every so-called jock beat on so-called nerds. The distinction between "jocks" and "nerds" is not so sharp as the distinction between the emotionally stunted and those who have achieved maturity.
Having worked in the magazine editorial field for some twenty years before starting a 2nd career as a tech, I have plenty of criticism for the print media. But that disclaimer is quite justified.
If a letter rambles on with 15 pages of irrelevant screed (for examples, see the thread on moral absolutism, above), but has a hard seed of truth and enlightenment within a few of its paragraphs, it would be a shame to have to reject it because of the signal-to-noise ratio.
That's what an editor does when he is truly and properly doing his job: improve the signal-to-noise ratio.
Ananova needs to update their news more assiduously if they wish to be a legit news source.
I checked every source I could think of to verify Ananova's uncredited story, finally found the same story repeated at Afghan News Network, and credited to Reuters; their posted story was dated 9-22 at 3 am (who knows what time zone, I am assuming Greenwich).
"Despite earlier contradictory statements, Taliban officials said they had established that their forces had downed a pilotless drone aircraft over Tashkurghan with machinegun fire as well as a helicopter near Dara-i-Suf." So the latest claim is they shot down one of each.
Ananova's performance in this regard is worrisome, and the situation is likely to grow worse....any sites that do not have the resources to update news reports to the most reliable versions have no business relaying war news.
At any rate, I would verify any future news reports from Ananova before assuming them to be accurate.
Slashdot Mirror
What benefit would Sony see in convincing anyone that a copy protection scheme works when it doesn't? I can see where Macrovision, or the RIAA, might wrong-headedly see this in their interest, but Sony doesn't own the copy protection scheme, and has no case to prove. They are just trying to contain the music within "authorized" distribution channels, and I doubt if they are anxious to retool their industry for a scheme that doesn't work.
That is why this is a "test," as Sony said in the linked article.
AC, look up the word "misnomer," first of all. An idea cannot be a "misnomer," only a word can.
Secondly, markets don't determine shit by themselves. For the market to be the true arbiter you would need an ideally free market, and a "frictionless" system. We don't have that.
Inferior products vanquish superior ones thanks to superior market positioning and distribution all the time. To say that these superior products "deserved" better postitioning, "deserved" better distribution, is fine. To say they "deserved" to win, therefore, is fine.
Unless, of course, one is in love with the Darwinist (I understand what it means, it's you that apparently do not) mantra.
"this is capitalism, nothing deserves to win except what the market says wins" totally bankrupts the meaning of the word "deserves." Deserves refers to merit -- ANY kind of merit. There are kinds of merit that exist apart from the market.
So, when someone says this or that "deserves" to win, it would be nice if the keepers of the mantra would butt out.
Note that Sony called this a "test."
Sony is not without its scientists. They know what a "control group" is.
Guarantee you, they will be able to distinguish among UK, US and German versions; they will be monitoring, tracking and pushing internal reports back and forth on this.
What we should hope to see is lots of rips from US and Germany, and none from the UK. Send them a message that copy-protection will only make their goods a target for the rip artistes.
That is why this makes a good testbed.
The overlap between CD-rip artistes and boy band followers is presumably slim. Therefore, negative reactions to this toe in the water will be slim.
If they'd tried this on the new Basement Jaxx, Garbage, or Bob Dylan, the hue and cry would disturb the 'speriment.
Why can't someone say. "these guys are doing it right, they deserve the rewards of their labor," without an economic Darwinist coming up with this scrap of useless dogma?
Regardless of economic point of view, one can truthfully say, "I like these guys, I like what they are doing, it's right for the market -- they deserve success." I don't see where this violates the cutthroat principles you seem to hold so dear.
It's not the "huge number of untraceable calls" that is specifically the problem; it is the small percentage of these wherein the caller can't identify their location properly (Children, travellers in unfamilar places) or calls that end before location info has been communicated.
I understand there are good reasons to use cell phones; if, for instance, I was a young person with family responsibilities, sure, I'd need that lifeline.
But I think the level of paranoia we are seeing in the posts on this subject is unwarranted by legislation that merely asks for E911 systems to be better equipped to locate the origin of calls.
The idea that phone manufacturers, many of them based outside of this country, are in collaboration with the telcoms and with our government to spy on personal phone users, strikes me as a fever-dream born out of resentment for our high-tech chains.
I would not be surprised if, at some point in the future, localized advertising is offered as a means to offset phone costs. At that time, those who value their privacy will "just say no."
But I don't think our government's recently-empowered kick for keeping tabs on everybody, all the time, has as yet infiltrated the telecom infrastructure.
I think wireless communication devices are, most of the time, a "bad idea" for anyone who values privacy.
Having chosen to carry one, however, it's up to you to take responsibility for knowing what the phone's capabilities are, and how to turn them off.
Always-on GPS is not required by the law (at least not yet, and I doubt if ever), only locator services for E911. If your phone is doing more than that, change phones.
It's not an "example" -- it is the entire reason for the legislation. The wide adoption of personal phones has resulted in a huge number of untraceable calls coming in on the emergency lines.
You won't be traceable when your phone is turned off, or if you leave the damn thing at home in the first place.
I don't own a personal phone, 'cause I don't *want* to be reachable 24/7 -- why anyone would want to be hung on a tether like that escapes me.
Considering that cell phone users have volunteered for the shackle, I don't quite understand what they fear in GPS.
I think you're missing some basic principles beneath the argument against such legislation.
As a secular state, and one that values privacy, traditionally we do not make laws against "evil thoughts." The underlying assumption in our child pornography laws is child porn is a record of a real crime committed against a real child, sold for the delectation of the voyeur.
Your argument that certain pictures should be banned because they will prompt "evil thoughts" (amd your ability to qualify such evil thoughts, somehow, as actions), has no precedence; we don't usually attempt to pre-empt crime by outlawing its precursors.
Your attitude has grown more popular lately, and grows more popular daily, it seems.
I suspect this has something to do with our increasing historical distance from the threat of Fascism a half-century ago; the phrase "thought police" seems not to have the impact that it used to.
That worries me. YMMV, and I'm sure it does....
The "but I wanna eat" argument is itself specious. There's no reason to believe musical artists would make less money in a system not dominated by "Intellectual Property Capitalists" like the RIAA membership -- the power in that organization is *not* held by the creative artists, but by those who own the (outmoded) distribution channels.
It's no accident that the record labels grow rich and powerful, while all but a few music artists crash and burn. Whatever breaks down RIAA power is very likely to put more power in the artists' hands.
But, even if your argument were considered to hold water, a lyrics archive is no threat to your income. A method of distributing your (presumably wonderful) lyrics, separate from the musical work itself, serves only as one more means to make your work known far and wide and whet your potential public's appetite. Since no one is about to pay a penny for an unknown's lyrics, it's nothing from your pocket, and since it could conceivably help you to make a name for yourself outside of established distribution channels, this is an example of how the RIAA is keeping you, and other independent artists, down.
*Very* informative link, particularly in its realistic assessment of what technologies stand to benefit from quantum communications. Anyone as confused as I was by the contradictory posts in this thread should checkit out...
What is theft, however?
Let's get the nature of the enemy straight; it is one multiheaded beast. Universal, Sony, Columbia = MPAA = RIAA. What we are talking about is Intellectual Property Capitalists; people who feel that, since they currently own the distribution system throyugh which creative cultural works currently flow, they merit all the profit they can possibly squeeze from said properties, and legal protection from any perceived threat to that distribution system. It's nothing new, it's just the first real challenge to their stranglehold on the cultchah...
Anyone with a good soundcard can create a rip, using a good codec and a high enough bitrate, that sounds (to most ears) indistinguishable from most pure digital rips (especialy considering how many people use low bitrates and quick, low-quality encoding). People accustomed to playing music on their computer will actually be forced into making such rips, assuming these disks are not playable on cd-rom drives.
The first method of distributing/sharing mp3s was the newsgroups -- a method I still prefer. Believe me, the expert rip-artistes of alt.binaries.sounds.mp3 will be targeting Universals's copy-protected releases and releasing them to the world quite promptly; a skip and a hop and they'll be on all sharing services as well.
Perhaps this is Universal's scheme to get the music more widely distributed?
Shall I remind you that under the Anti-Terrorist Act this proposal to engage in a Denial of Service attack is classified as a Terrorist Act, punishable by life in prison without parole?
If he can work out a means of payment with the employer why is he obligated to concern himself whether other employees are doing the same or not? That is the employer's obligation, not his.
When I got fired from a startup by calling my boss a drunk (which he was), I got paid for the first time in a month and left the company even-up. My fellow employees never were paid or that month, and some got screwed for as much as thre months' more salary.
Was I wrong to accept my severance check?
I have a hard time imagining that any of these employees were *quite* stupid enough to be owed so much money that they could 'justify' stealing some of the larger-ticket items described in the article.
I worked for a magazine startup once, where the art director, the editor, and the financier/publisher (a Wall Street weasel if ever there was one) were ownership partners.
Despite winning a few prestigious publishing awards, the commercial end never quite came together, in part because the art director was a hopeless alcoholic with no regard for deadline. As Production Editor, deadlines were my job. (An impossible position, as the people who I had to lean on regarding deadlines were all owners!)
Toward the end of our days, as the money was running out, I advised the A.D. that if things wern't working out, perhaps he should "have another drink."
I was fired, and was paid on the spot. But I was the last person to be paid, though the company limped along for quite some time afterwards.
The editor, a friend of mine, knew, but could not prove, that the financer/publisher had been siphoning money from the company throughout its two-year run. Shortly after I left, Feds started to come out of the woodwork, but they couldn't prove anything either.
The editor, whose share of ownership was bought by his hard work, continued to work an additional three months without pay after I left, simply because,a s a partner, he had no choice until the thing was surely dead, working on an issue that never reached the presses.
The day it all finally ended, he went back to the office to retrieve the main workstation, a high-end (for the time) Mac. But it was already gone, no doubt pilfered by the Wall Street Weasel himself. My friend satisfied himself with a somewhat lower-end Mac and a laser printer.
His alternative: to sit there and take it in the rear.
Maybe my friend should not have been swayed by the Weasel when he was first approached with the prospect of doing whatever magazine he wanted to do, with a bankroll of several million behind it.
But he had bought into it, and he, and his idea, were raped by the Weasel, for short-term personal profit.
At the time he took the equipment, the company owed him some $110,000 in (admittedly inflated) salary that he had no chance whatever of seeing.
I am sure my friend violated the law, but was his act immoral? The Weasel was highly likely to be getting the other Mac on his next trip to the office. How "immoral" is it to steal from a thief?
You could make the argument that every cent I was paid on this job was stolen from defrauded investors who went bust on a magazine start-up that was probably intended to fail. Does that mean I should return my salary? Don't hold your breath, pal.
yeah a crime is a crime (thats a circularity).
"legality"=!"morality"
No offense, but this question translates as, "How does it feel not to have grown up?"
Not every so-called jock beat on so-called nerds. The distinction between "jocks" and "nerds" is not so sharp as the distinction between the emotionally stunted and those who have achieved maturity.
Sorry for being off-topic...
Just curious; did your parents know and understand what distributed.net was? Did you have their permission to share their processor?
Having worked in the magazine editorial field for some twenty years before starting a 2nd career as a tech, I have plenty of criticism for the print media. But that disclaimer is quite justified.
If a letter rambles on with 15 pages of irrelevant screed (for examples, see the thread on moral absolutism, above), but has a hard seed of truth and enlightenment within a few of its paragraphs, it would be a shame to have to reject it because of the signal-to-noise ratio.
That's what an editor does when he is truly and properly doing his job: improve the signal-to-noise ratio.
Ananova needs to update their news more assiduously if they wish to be a legit news source.
I checked every source I could think of to verify Ananova's uncredited story, finally found the same story repeated at Afghan News Network, and credited to Reuters; their posted story was dated 9-22 at 3 am (who knows what time zone, I am assuming Greenwich).
If you go to Reuters website, the version of this story now available, presumably the last-filed Reuters report, is dated 9-22 at 11:47 am.
"Despite earlier contradictory statements, Taliban officials said they had established that their forces had downed a pilotless drone aircraft over Tashkurghan with machinegun fire as well as a helicopter near Dara-i-Suf." So the latest claim is they shot down one of each.
Ananova's performance in this regard is worrisome, and the situation is likely to grow worse....any sites that do not have the resources to update news reports to the most reliable versions have no business relaying war news.
At any rate, I would verify any future news reports from Ananova before assuming them to be accurate.
No. It's just that some jokes are even too nerdy for us.
Do we really need this kind of meaningless numbers shit/hype on Slashdot too?
Without it, when could we say "Beowulf?"