Weren't the trade sanctions against Cuba put there and don't they remain there in part because of Cuban human rights abuses?
If that's the case, this is another fine example of american double standards, seeing as how you placed your own P.O.W.-jail at Gitmo on Cuba with the sole purpose to be able to abuse human rights at your own discrepancy.
In other words: Yes, there might be human rights violations happening on Cuba, but your government is actively and knowingly participating in bringing them about. In violation of verdicts made by your own cort system, I might add.
In my view, this easily - and resoundingly - settles the matter of whether or not US trade sanctions against Cuba are moral...
"Finally, evidence of water on Mars". This from (more or less) the same people who brought us "Evidence of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq". Next we know, US Marines will probably be deployed pretty soon (by way of their upcoming lunar base, no doubt) to restore peace and order on the red planet.
If this ain't real, the American definition of "evidence" moves two steps closer to the interpretation used by Vladimir Putin...
I don't want to guess who's paying them, but I can venture an opinion on who stands to gain from these results becoming generally accepted knowledge. It's the same thing as on TV and in print media: If you can convince somebody that your audience is generally wealthier and smarter than anybody else's, you can charge more from the advertisers who want to reach them through your site.
Imagine the discussion;
"How come you charge us X dollars per users when we only pay X minus 20 percent at Yahoo!?"
"Well, that's 'cause our users have more money to buy your products. Who will you rather reach; a couch potato with no dough, or a Lexus-toting, MBA-graduated duchebag with nine platinum mastercards and no bars on using them?"
If you're wondering why "The West Wing" is still on (shows with higher ratings than theirs have been cancelled before), that's it: The people who do watch it, are probably most educated TV viewers in the US media universe. Hence, they're "worth" more to the advertisers, and the show makes more money than its viewership would indicate by their mere numbers.
They may have shown it months ago, but Sharp changed the whole software setup in august, when it became obvious that the java-style OS they were intending to use wouldn't work. That's when they turned to Trolltech & Qt, and they've gotten it their system up & running in only three months.
The device ships in the US and Germany in Q1 next year, according to people at Trolltech.
I ran a service called Repliq.net, which lived by this very principle, and tried to pluck out the 10 percent you're talking about.
We had editors who tried to round up and highlight quality music from around the web, made a Slashdot-like rating system to make rating a community as well as an individual thing.
It never took off, though - never got enough people to use it. It didn't help that its launch date more or less coincided with the death of Venture Capitalists' interest in consumer Internet services, and the investors I were in talks with chickened out.
I have a steady job now, but if anybody would be interested in reviving the website together with me, I'd be game indeed! There's a good platform there just waiting to be used...
Another point in case is that at the time of writing (some 14 hours after the conclusion of the event), the transcript from the chat still hasn't appeared. This should probably take them all of three minutes, but strangely enough, we're all still waiting...
I have 50 bucks saying Metallica's lawyers are pouring over the resulting document now, making sure it is water tight before we're allowed to read what they really said...
I follow the ongoing wave of litigation with interest, but it won't do a lick of long-term difference for music piracy over the Internet. IRC, Scour Media Exchange and a host other tools stand ready to "keep up the dirty work". So, what are the consequences of this?
At the risk of sounding like John Katz, I think we'll see people's willingness to pay for music decrease, but not vanish entirely. The established artists and the recording industry will see their income irreversibly reduced. New and secure music formats won't be able to compete with free mp3's, and the feeble attempts we see now ($2.50 pr song? Get a grip!) will dwindle.
To emerging and/or off-label artists, the situation is reversed: If you have submitted your material to a dozen record companies, and nobody bites, the chances are slim to none for getting into a position where you could be losing any roalty income in the first place. Spreading your music via the Internet, then has only upside to it. It may not be big, but at least there's no significant downside.
And maybe, just maybe, people will be more interested in contributing to or paying for music from artists that they honestly care for.
Yup, review sites are popping up. Look to Repliq for one that Slashdot users will have no problem grasping. True, there really is so much material out there that what you call "promoting labels" can't be kept at bay for very long. They perform functions that are necessary for both the bands and the fans, and they're somewhat of a necessity in the traditional music market. As of yet, however, it's still not too late to get into place substitutes that perform these functions on terms the musicians can agree with!
Napster isn't (in it's present form, anyway) a particularly well-suited distribution tool for independent/emerging artists. However, it is a great tool for getting people acquainted with downloadeable music. Let's just hope that once the record companies get properly euthanized, or people get tired of boy-bands and "best of the (insert ancient decade of your choice here)'s"-collections (whichever comes first), there will be services still in place telling them what music they should really be listening to...
I'm not really concerned about this lawsuit - it's another, beautiful "head-in-the-sand"-stunt, but it might actually work in somebodys favour:
If the RIAA through this - and similar lawsuits - manages to put enough restraints on the material produced by its members, it will eventually become so difficult/expensive to use what is currently mainstream musical material, that people will look to other alternatives for filling up their webpages, radiostreams or whatnot.
This could be exactly the kind of opportunity that off-label or independent artists need to gain a foothold; "Sure, you can stream Madonna on your Internet radio station and pay an arm and a leg for it, but then again, you can also stream this very excellent song for free - who cares if nobody's heard of the artist today, it's great music, and she might as well be huge tomorrow"...
My message is that the more successful the RIAA is in clamping down on music "piracy" on the Internet, the less successful RIAA-generated content will be - provided that there is an alternative source for quality content. And there really is a lot of good stuff out there, even though it needs to be arranged a bit better...
Like, what if the Slashdot-process was applied on legal mp3s? We've done a shot at this - take a look at Repliq!
This may not be the proper forum for this, but since I've felt frustrated by this on numerous occasions, I need to vent;
When I run RedHat 6.1, I truly and honestly don't give a rats ass about how things are done with Linux Kernel 1.7.009 or Debian/Suse/Slackware or whatnot. I don't know how many times I've gone through a document only to find that nothing (or little) within it applies to my problem.
The ultimate functionality enhancer for Linux documentation, would be an interface where you specify whatever hardware/software setup that applies to you, and then get documentation specifically for that purpose.
However, this may be a point more suited for attention from the distributors. RedHat indiscriminatorily doles out a ton of HowTo's that for a large part do little but waste its customer's time, and if someone starts doing this better, I'll switch in a New York minute. The product from the distros should be facilitation of setup and maintenance, not randomly collected material of little relevance...
Oh, and by the way, adding a "Troubleshooting"-section to the howto's would be a blessing for newbies...
I can appreciate the fact that this guy is probably not unintelligent, and even people half his age have trouble fully grasping this; The foundations for current business models are being swept away at an amazing speed. What I found particularly interesting in this interview, however, was the VCR analogy:
He's heard the parallel before, but says "For example, in analog you have to go down to a Blockbuster store, then you have to copy it, then it has to be sent physically. [Distribution via the Internet i]s totally different, totally different.". Well, of course it is different! However, the problem is identical; The current business model is threatened, and instead of actively entering the arena to develop new products and thus be appropriately positioned when money is finally made, they're suing new-thinking people left and right to uphold status quo.
Worst of it is, with the cash cows these guys are sitting on, they probably have no other alternative but to try to keep them alive - artificially if need be. Don't look to this crowd for creative stuff - it will come from someone with a lot less respect, access to, and need for such cows.
In my honest opinion, it can be summed up as follows: If anybody can copy anything they want (think music, film and other "old-economy" copyighted material), they will. It's not that they won't necessarily pay for it, they just won't be willing to pay as much as they do today. Even piracy has its costs - on the Internet you still have to find stuff, download it, piece it together, copy/burn it to some other media, nag, nag, nag - but when you're saving twenty USD a pop, you can afford to use a little time. If your savings total a couple of dollars, it probably won't be worth it. There is a market right there, but the recording industry will have to cannibalise their own business to do it. But hell, that hasn't worked out too bad for the newspaper industry, has it?
I've read much of the Andover IPO (didn't get my hands on any of it, though) material, and as it would seem from the documents, Slashdot is pretty much the jewel of the Andover crown...
I'm sure you're right that 90% of users who call don't read the documentation. But then again, in far too many cases, I'd say that well in excess of 90% of user documentation is fluff and bullshit. I've learnt my way around a computer, and now that I have that knowledge, I'm not about to read the same crap that your mother (or mine, for that matter) has to read to make anything work...
I love UF. Reading Dilbert made me quit my job in a large corporation two years ago - reading UF makes me proud that I'm now in the Internet business. I don't work in ISP support, even though I did for some time perform some support functions for an Internet service. Highlights from this period includes someone telling me his favorite search engine was Alta La Vista (I'm not kidding), and another yelling at me because the URL he had been supplied with, gave him the error message no match found (turns out that what he did, was point his browser to Altavista, insert the URL in the search field and click enter). Stuff like this is funny, and if we can't laugh about that in retrospect, we'll all become poorer for it...
It doesn't seem that far-fetched that the White House should need to be informed about the proceedings of a case involving the justice department plucking apart the company that comprises the world's ninth largest economy. I find that the statements delivered by Gore on this occasion, despite the obvious shortcomings of some of his statements on other occasions, are sound and fair.
However, Bill Gates' wallet makes him/M$ a "viable force" in American politics; adjusted for some technicalities in language, American politicians ARE for sale. It isn't that far fetched to think that the Microsoft antitrust trial could become "an issue" in the upcoming election...
There's a Norwegian company called Opticom ASA which has been working on new storage media for some time now. They've been working with different kinds of polymer and other materials in order to create an all-organic "film" that works as a storage medium. They claim that their technology and coming products will provide storage media that supercede existing solutions by several orders of magnitude in both size, speed, and energy use as well as storage capacity.
They recently presented an operative one-gigabyte ROM version of their product to the public, and from what I understand, they're currently working to commercialize this technology. They also claim to be able to produce a working RAM version of their product in less than a year. This article (in Norwegian, I'm afraid) sums up their product and marketing ambitions for next year.
I'm not qualified to judge neither the quality nor the feasability of their technology, but they've been highly debated in Norway. The debate has apparently subsided somewhat now when they have working prototypes that may indicate they're moving in the right direction. If somebody knowledgeable out there finds their theories worthy a comment, I'd really like to hear about it!
Sure - this test probably is subjective. Moreover, a if anybody from "our side" runs a similar test, that would probably be subjective as well. "We" don't trust "them" - why should "they" trust "us"?
The only way to work this out (apparently) is if representatives of "both sides" came together and defined parameters of a test. They should specify things such as what hardware the server should run, what services should be running (and more stuff that you sysadmins know about for a living). The group should also lay down specifications on how this should be measured. Then, these specifications should be publically reviewed, and revised if necessary.
Then there should be a test for extremists on both sides to tune the OS of their choice to achieve the best possible performance on the specified platform.
If a vendor (say, Dell, Compaq, IBM, or one of the other companies that now presumably deliver both OS's) could put up a number of similar boxes and have a "tweaking contest" on a software convention or whatever, that would be even better. However, I cannot believe for a second that Microsoft would have the balls to allow such a shoot-out...
"The CD-R version will be ready for shipment before Christmas. The hard drive based unit does not have a slated release date because we are still deciding on best storage size and are obtaining marketing research on prospective sales of the units."
In other words, this is vaporware - the product still has nine months in the coming, and damn near anybody could make this product in that amount of time. Sure, I'd like one, but I for one ain't holding my breath...
I think somebody needs a little enlightenment here. What mr. Cuban thinks he means by stating that nobody has any commercial interest in the format, is that nobody owns it, and nobody can thus make any money by controlling it.
But WE are the ones having an economic motive for using MP3 - christ, I haven't bought a CD for six months, and yet they keep rolling in. How's that for economic incentive?
Think about big name bands giving free concerts. Do they have more economic incentive for their activity than unknown bands posting their MP3's on the net for free download? We're talking about music here! To have people listen to music that you've made, to have them sing along with words that you put together - this is a drug more potent than any of the ones otherwise flourishing in the music business (people trading such substances, by the way, have economic interests - not that it matters much to the current discussion).
Bottom line: Economic interest doesn't control us anymore. Free music, free software - what's the difference? The invisible hand, figuratively speaking, has stopped masturbating the invisible pecker, and it will inavoidably go limp. This is bad news for the "economic interests" that want to screw us, but it's excellent news for those of us who don't need economic interest to yank us out of bed in the morning...
PS: I've heard Clinton knows how to handle a Cuban - who'll tell him we've got one that needs to be stuffed here?
Bullshit. Microsoft probably seeks to gain the exact opposite effect: "Microsoft has a Linux strategy for their office suite, so why the hell should we?"...
The following, disturbing "fact" from Katz's article really has me rattled:
>Linux users are growing at the >rate of 40 per cent a year.
Shit! I'm not prepared for this! And my wife probably won't stand for it either! That means I'll top 250 pounds sometime in mid-November! I never knew this Open Source stuff was so potent!
Jokes aside - I must recommend Katz's gift for putting words to thoughts that have been mulling and lulling around in my subconciousness. I'm a relatively inexperienced Linux user myself, struggling to fathom this new power-tool, in awe of its potential both as an OS and a political statement. Keep up the good work Katz - I, for one, am listening!
Slashdot Mirror
If that's the case, this is another fine example of american double standards, seeing as how you placed your own P.O.W.-jail at Gitmo on Cuba with the sole purpose to be able to abuse human rights at your own discrepancy.
In other words: Yes, there might be human rights violations happening on Cuba, but your government is actively and knowingly participating in bringing them about. In violation of verdicts made by your own cort system, I might add.
In my view, this easily - and resoundingly - settles the matter of whether or not US trade sanctions against Cuba are moral...
If this ain't real, the American definition of "evidence" moves two steps closer to the interpretation used by Vladimir Putin...
Imagine the discussion;
"How come you charge us X dollars per users when we only pay X minus 20 percent at Yahoo!?"
"Well, that's 'cause our users have more money to buy your products. Who will you rather reach; a couch potato with no dough, or a Lexus-toting, MBA-graduated duchebag with nine platinum mastercards and no bars on using them?"
If you're wondering why "The West Wing" is still on (shows with higher ratings than theirs have been cancelled before), that's it: The people who do watch it, are probably most educated TV viewers in the US media universe. Hence, they're "worth" more to the advertisers, and the show makes more money than its viewership would indicate by their mere numbers.
Primary Examiner: Thompson; Marc D.
This guy doesn't look too foreign to me, but English is a difficult language...
That's great! If they could make those rovers as fertile as cockroaches, too, we could have the entire surface of Mars covered in no time!
They may have shown it months ago, but Sharp changed the whole software setup in august, when it became obvious that the java-style OS they were intending to use wouldn't work. That's when they turned to Trolltech & Qt, and they've gotten it their system up & running in only three months.
The device ships in the US and Germany in Q1 next year, according to people at Trolltech.
We had editors who tried to round up and highlight quality music from around the web, made a Slashdot-like rating system to make rating a community as well as an individual thing.
It never took off, though - never got enough people to use it. It didn't help that its launch date more or less coincided with the death of Venture Capitalists' interest in consumer Internet services, and the investors I were in talks with chickened out.
I have a steady job now, but if anybody would be interested in reviving the website together with me, I'd be game indeed! There's a good platform there just waiting to be used...
I have 50 bucks saying Metallica's lawyers are pouring over the resulting document now, making sure it is water tight before we're allowed to read what they really said...
At the risk of sounding like John Katz, I think we'll see people's willingness to pay for music decrease, but not vanish entirely. The established artists and the recording industry will see their income irreversibly reduced. New and secure music formats won't be able to compete with free mp3's, and the feeble attempts we see now ($2.50 pr song? Get a grip!) will dwindle.
To emerging and/or off-label artists, the situation is reversed: If you have submitted your material to a dozen record companies, and nobody bites, the chances are slim to none for getting into a position where you could be losing any roalty income in the first place. Spreading your music via the Internet, then has only upside to it. It may not be big, but at least there's no significant downside.
And maybe, just maybe, people will be more interested in contributing to or paying for music from artists that they honestly care for.
Napster isn't (in it's present form, anyway) a particularly well-suited distribution tool for independent/emerging artists. However, it is a great tool for getting people acquainted with downloadeable music. Let's just hope that once the record companies get properly euthanized, or people get tired of boy-bands and "best of the (insert ancient decade of your choice here)'s"-collections (whichever comes first), there will be services still in place telling them what music they should really be listening to...
If the RIAA through this - and similar lawsuits - manages to put enough restraints on the material produced by its members, it will eventually become so difficult/expensive to use what is currently mainstream musical material, that people will look to other alternatives for filling up their webpages, radiostreams or whatnot.
This could be exactly the kind of opportunity that off-label or independent artists need to gain a foothold; "Sure, you can stream Madonna on your Internet radio station and pay an arm and a leg for it, but then again, you can also stream this very excellent song for free - who cares if nobody's heard of the artist today, it's great music, and she might as well be huge tomorrow"...
My message is that the more successful the RIAA is in clamping down on music "piracy" on the Internet, the less successful RIAA-generated content will be - provided that there is an alternative source for quality content. And there really is a lot of good stuff out there, even though it needs to be arranged a bit better...
Like, what if the Slashdot-process was applied on legal mp3s? We've done a shot at this - take a look at Repliq!
When I run RedHat 6.1, I truly and honestly don't give a rats ass about how things are done with Linux Kernel 1.7.009 or Debian/Suse/Slackware or whatnot. I don't know how many times I've gone through a document only to find that nothing (or little) within it applies to my problem.
The ultimate functionality enhancer for Linux documentation, would be an interface where you specify whatever hardware/software setup that applies to you, and then get documentation specifically for that purpose.
However, this may be a point more suited for attention from the distributors. RedHat indiscriminatorily doles out a ton of HowTo's that for a large part do little but waste its customer's time, and if someone starts doing this better, I'll switch in a New York minute. The product from the distros should be facilitation of setup and maintenance, not randomly collected material of little relevance...
Oh, and by the way, adding a "Troubleshooting"-section to the howto's would be a blessing for newbies...
He's heard the parallel before, but says "For example, in analog you have to go down to a Blockbuster store, then you have to copy it, then it has to be sent physically. [Distribution via the Internet i]s totally different, totally different.". Well, of course it is different! However, the problem is identical; The current business model is threatened, and instead of actively entering the arena to develop new products and thus be appropriately positioned when money is finally made, they're suing new-thinking people left and right to uphold status quo.
Worst of it is, with the cash cows these guys are sitting on, they probably have no other alternative but to try to keep them alive - artificially if need be. Don't look to this crowd for creative stuff - it will come from someone with a lot less respect, access to, and need for such cows.
In my honest opinion, it can be summed up as follows: If anybody can copy anything they want (think music, film and other "old-economy" copyighted material), they will. It's not that they won't necessarily pay for it, they just won't be willing to pay as much as they do today. Even piracy has its costs - on the Internet you still have to find stuff, download it, piece it together, copy/burn it to some other media, nag, nag, nag - but when you're saving twenty USD a pop, you can afford to use a little time. If your savings total a couple of dollars, it probably won't be worth it. There is a market right there, but the recording industry will have to cannibalise their own business to do it. But hell, that hasn't worked out too bad for the newspaper industry, has it?
I've read much of the Andover IPO (didn't get my hands on any of it, though) material, and as it would seem from the documents, Slashdot is pretty much the jewel of the Andover crown...
I love UF. Reading Dilbert made me quit my job in a large corporation two years ago - reading UF makes me proud that I'm now in the Internet business. I don't work in ISP support, even though I did for some time perform some support functions for an Internet service. Highlights from this period includes someone telling me his favorite search engine was Alta La Vista (I'm not kidding), and another yelling at me because the URL he had been supplied with, gave him the error message no match found (turns out that what he did, was point his browser to Altavista, insert the URL in the search field and click enter). Stuff like this is funny, and if we can't laugh about that in retrospect, we'll all become poorer for it...
However, Bill Gates' wallet makes him/M$ a "viable force" in American politics; adjusted for some technicalities in language, American politicians ARE for sale. It isn't that far fetched to think that the Microsoft antitrust trial could become "an issue" in the upcoming election...
They recently presented an operative one-gigabyte ROM version of their product to the public, and from what I understand, they're currently working to commercialize this technology. They also claim to be able to produce a working RAM version of their product in less than a year. This article (in Norwegian, I'm afraid) sums up their product and marketing ambitions for next year.
I'm not qualified to judge neither the quality nor the feasability of their technology, but they've been highly debated in Norway. The debate has apparently subsided somewhat now when they have working prototypes that may indicate they're moving in the right direction. If somebody knowledgeable out there finds their theories worthy a comment, I'd really like to hear about it!
The only way to work this out (apparently) is if representatives of "both sides" came together and defined parameters of a test. They should specify things such as what hardware the server should run, what services should be running (and more stuff that you sysadmins know about for a living). The group should also lay down specifications on how this should be measured. Then, these specifications should be publically reviewed, and revised if necessary.
Then there should be a test for extremists on both sides to tune the OS of their choice to achieve the best possible performance on the specified platform.
If a vendor (say, Dell, Compaq, IBM, or one of the other companies that now presumably deliver both OS's) could put up a number of similar boxes and have a "tweaking contest" on a software convention or whatever, that would be even better. However, I cannot believe for a second that Microsoft would have the balls to allow such a shoot-out...
"The CD-R version will be ready for shipment before Christmas. The hard drive based unit does not have a slated release date because we are still deciding on best storage size and are obtaining marketing research on prospective sales of the units."
In other words, this is vaporware - the product still has nine months in the coming, and damn near anybody could make this product in that amount of time. Sure, I'd like one, but I for one ain't holding my breath...
But WE are the ones having an economic motive for using MP3 - christ, I haven't bought a CD for six months, and yet they keep rolling in. How's that for economic incentive?
Think about big name bands giving free concerts. Do they have more economic incentive for their activity than unknown bands posting their MP3's on the net for free download? We're talking about music here! To have people listen to music that you've made, to have them sing along with words that you put together - this is a drug more potent than any of the ones otherwise flourishing in the music business (people trading such substances, by the way, have economic interests - not that it matters much to the current discussion).
Bottom line: Economic interest doesn't control us anymore. Free music, free software - what's the difference? The invisible hand, figuratively speaking, has stopped masturbating the invisible pecker, and it will inavoidably go limp. This is bad news for the "economic interests" that want to screw us, but it's excellent news for those of us who don't need economic interest to yank us out of bed in the morning...
PS: I've heard Clinton knows how to handle a Cuban - who'll tell him we've got one that needs to be stuffed here?
Bullshit. Microsoft probably seeks to gain the exact opposite effect: "Microsoft has a Linux strategy for their office suite, so why the hell should we?"...
This makes a lot of sence! A reciprocal Slashdot effect, costing Rob his hair...
The following, disturbing "fact" from Katz's article really has me rattled:
>Linux users are growing at the
>rate of 40 per cent a year.
Shit! I'm not prepared for this! And my wife probably won't stand for it either! That means I'll top 250 pounds sometime in mid-November! I never knew this Open Source stuff was so potent!
Jokes aside - I must recommend Katz's gift for putting words to thoughts that have been mulling and lulling around in my subconciousness. I'm a relatively inexperienced Linux user myself, struggling to fathom this new power-tool, in awe of its potential both as an OS and a political statement. Keep up the good work Katz - I, for one, am listening!
It's okay - we forgive... ;-)
In a couple of months, I hope to have my own zine. In a couple of years, it might do as well as yours...