I started getting mail sent to our domain addressed to administrator@domain and billing_contact@domain. These addresses are now blackholed; given that the amount of spam was ridiculous I had no choice.
This illustrates the spammers will do anything, however desperate, to get more free advertising, and people get spammed without doing anything "wrong." There is practically no limit to the amount of spam you can get -- it's just a matter of being found and put on one of those infernal spam-list CD's.
To tell us we need to just work harder or get more "tools" is offensive. Tools either cost money or are beyond the technical expertise of most people. Filtering is now beginnning at the server levels because folks like AOL were clearing 30% spam of all email. They rejected outright a valid (solicited) bulk email from Harvard to its applicants. They do not notify sender of blackholing because that takes even more bandwidth and so often the reply-to is some hapless server with no relation to the spammer. I think AOL's handling is maladroit, but obvious spam causes problems. About 2/3 of the email I get is junk; a friend saw his percentage skyrocket overnight from 5% to 90%.
UCE begs for a solution, and the people to complain to AND advise are your Congresspeople. They can't listen to what they're never told, and you can be sure the direct mail people will be heard. Think about it, you're the experts, and you know a lot more about email than anyone else.
The junk fax law worked. Before it passed the fax machines were snarled with junk. Now it's rare, and if you get it there is a clear way to deal with it and have the sender fined.
There will always be some violators, but legitimate businesses will shy away from brazenly violating the law. And unscrupulous one will get fried.
The FTC was earlier this year soliciting comments on proposed regulation of unwanted telemarketer calls. Not sure of its status, but the FTC does some terrific consumer protection work.
I suppose it's a "restraint on trade" (though that's not the right term) but OF COURSE the government can do. It's what they do, after all. There are circumstances where they can't, but these are few, and this isn't one of them. The costs of complying with the law are the business's problem.
The slippery slope argument doesn't work, e.g., "if they set the speed limit at 55 what's to stop them from setting it to 0?" Well, nothing, that's what politics are for.
But it stinks, because the DMA "helped" them write it. People who you've done business with get a free ride, but you should of course demand off of their list -- and forbid them from selling the list to anyone else.
You have to go through a song and dance to invoke the protection of the law, and of course the underpaid person on the line won't know what you're talking about (please don't yell at them unless they're rude; it's the company's fault and they just need a job). Here's a script that purports to hit all the points.
The DMA also offers a telemarketing opt-out at their site, but annoyingly it's a form you have to print, sign, and mail in (wouldn't it be terrible for some prankster to opt you out of these calls). It times out after 5 years, and I have no idea whether it does enough. It only applies to DMA members, or others who voluntarily use the service. Here is another opt-out.
Even picking up the phone to hang up can cause you problems. The autodialer will note that the number is valid, and what time of day you're home. Cute, huh?
We have a talking caller ID and nowadays never pick up if it's "caller unknown." I don't know who that guy is, but I'm going to strangle him.
Actually, the right v. privilege thing is pretty much dead in modern law, though I'm sure some states cling to it. It's pretty much just a trick to distinguish between rights the government would honor versus those that it will not. Because the government generally can't arbitrarily deprive you of something of value without due process (the 5th amendment), even someone faced with losing the "privilege" of the driver's license is entitled to a hearing. Driving is a right, but one you can lose.
The problem here is simply that some licenses (the right to do something) are transferable, others aren't. Nontransferability should be spelled out in the contract.
I have two kids and know exactly what you're talking about. If I stumble into porn, how can I expect my kids not to?
(You shouldn't let your kids watch Disney anyway -- commercial mind control I hear...)
On the other hand, I'm not prepared to install censorship just yet. I too leery of the companies the publish this stuff, and don't want my computer arguing with me about where I want to go. Anyway, how old will the kids have to be before they learn to defeat the stuff? I guess then their encounters with porn will at least be consensual.
A couple of cute trap doors I've found, like dicney.com, but that lead directly to porn -- watch your typing:
whitehouse.com quick-time.com (now reassigned)
These slimeoids obviously do this on purpose; anything for a buck. As if spam weren't enough.
...Apple has serious problems with Motorola over the PowerPC chips. Its future is hazy. So porting OS X to x86 machines manufactured by Apple makes a lot of sense if they are going to abandon PPC. I don't see why they'd want to produce OS X simultaneously for both chips, but then one should not underestimate the lord Jobs.
I have heard many times over the years that Apple has ported their OS to x86, only to have so many incompatibilities as to make the endeavor worthless. Apple has benefitted a lot from publishing an OS that runs on machines it designs itself with precision.
Re:So who exactly did the hacking?
on
Saddam's Inbox Hacked
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Great point. The elusiveness of the article bothers me -- someone should own up, even if it's the dreaded "reliable source."
I doubt American law protects Hussein's email account or even the Americans who wrote to him; anyway the U.S. wouldn't prosecute, though it should follow up on the messages from its citizens offering material support. Constitutionally, the 4th Amendment does not apply to private actors. Now, Iraqi law must protect his account (after all, Saddam Hussein IS the law) but Wired may be beyond his grasp.
As for ethics, journalists are frequently presented with discovering or handling sensitive or confidential information. It's tough to decide and depends on the gravity of the problem. If they act prevent an imminent crime of significance by violating privacy, I think they should or are morally obligated to. They face the same sort of difficult decision any of us would in the same situation. A good example would be Ellsberg leaking the Pentagon Papers revealing gov't deception concerning the Vietnam War.
Avoid undercover or other surreptitious methods of gathering information except when traditional open methods will not yield information vital to the public. Use of such methods should be explained as part of the story.
Maybe Henson could produce the remaining episodes with the characters sitting around reading the paper, chatting, that sort of thing; hand them over; then get on with the series.
SciFi must realize they have a valuable asset on their hands (even if they did book that Edward creep) and is most likely working on a deal now. Or they're profoundly stupid, there's always that.
Geez, don't these people realize how IMPORTANT this is ?!? (Yes, I do have a life, it's my children I'm thinking of.);-) Thx for the info.
Farscape is/was uneven from episode to episode, but the good ones were amazing. Soooo many TV shows are just plain mediocre, with nary a flash of brilliance. Also, Farscape was the first strong break with the threadbare Star Trek straitjacket to make it on the air. I loved the substitution of largely organic technology for electrical, and was rather fond of Moia (in a platonic way). Aeryn's cool, too. Trek never really pulled it off I think with strong female characters, so rare in scifi.
I'm surprised to hear of the cancellation, but true it is -- see the horse's mouth. However, I doubt it's dead. Farscape has the backing of the brand-name Jim Henson Company, a great premise (IMHO), and a solid library of four years that breaks the magic 88-episode threshold needed for successful post-series syndication.
I bet they'll go to syndication, as all the modern Treks have done, and maybe even score a better channel than SciFi, which can have John Edward for all I care (gag). Keep an eye on UPN. The Farscape season was not set to start until February, being from Australia and all, so there's time.
Enterprise is in its childhood. TNG was VILE for its first three seasons and would have rightfully died if not for the intervention of the Borg and a stunning season-end cliffhanger ("Best of Both Worlds"). I think it will show some decent character development, and I appreciate that they've deprived themselves of 3/4 of the technology that yielded too many pat technobabble solutions on shows like Voyager. Scott Bakula annoys me, but I guess I can get used to him... I just keep expecting him to "leap," you know?
Yes, I watch too much TV, but mostly science fiction.
Whatever Cantwell may be or not be, this kind of crass nonsense doesn't belong here or anywhere. Both of the sites cited by the commentator are right-biased, and their writing shows it; lots of personal insults and few facts.
If you don't like 'em, vote against them, work against them (or better, for the opposition), but let's retire this foul venom that accomplishes nothing. Remember the frustration of the Clinton-haters who couldn't get anything to stick, even if they were right? If your case is so strong, you don't need them.
The internet is so often dealt with as if it were entirely novel. For the most part it's not, and simply complements telephone, fax, USPS, television, and so on for delivering information. (Granted, it is pretty neat.)
So at minimum the internet deserves regulatory parity with these other media. Abuse of telephones and faxes was dealt with years ago -- (albeit incompletely -- our phone rings off the hook, I'll rant another day). For some reason business was quick to push for the outright ban on junk faxes, but hasn't for email which must waste a lot of their employees' time and hassle IT, in the end costing them money. Money talks, so I which there was a more concerted effort by those businesses that would never themselves spam.
As with junk faxes (again, analogies everywhere) the injury from each incident is too small to do anything about; but we can act collectively through our government to attack the collective harm that is quite large.
I won't comment on the current political obsessions in DC on anything but domestic policy, but I hope we see something soon. I don't think state-by-state legislation will do the trick. Your opinion will count if you express it to the right people. Writing your congresspeople for one is NOT a futile activity: they carefully tally what their constituents are saying, and you will likely get at least a form letter in reply. (BTW, I think a real paper letter carries more punch than email.)
Thanks -- looking back I realized I was too critical. After all, they were doing 1000's of things for the first time, especially life support.
I later looked this up at this archive, which suggests what you said: The key error (in retrospect) was the use of O2 on the ground. Mercury was ground pressurized with plain air. Another criticism I read somewhere is that the astronauts themselves introduced netting and velcro to store things in the cockpit, and these burned very quickly indeed.
ANYWAY... was this a hardware fault or design failure? Hmm. Well, we're off-topic anyway.
Technically a mechanical failure. If they hadn't had the ingenious idea of using a pure O2 atmosphere the spark probably wouldn't have done much. Pure O2 make anything flammable positively explosive (actually, that's the secret of most explosives -- a built-in oxidizer).
Was there a significant reason for using pure O2? I remember it argued that this was something they could have done without, a bad decision.
Many may think this topic has been done to death, but the examples grow exponentially. Someone recommended the RISKS Digest above, which I agree is terrific.
Rarely is the answer that "the programmer was an idiot." Software bugs are projections and magnifications of human frailties. There is the class of errors where the computer does what it should but interacts with the user poorly, and it's glib to dismiss the user as the idiot.
I have followed military snafus with interest. It is still not clear how much of the Vincennes catastrophe was human versus computer error. The Yorktown was an example of an old-fashioned divide-by-zero error crashing Windows and paralyzing a frigate. The Navy plans to automate aircraft carriers and also hand over fire control to Windows systems, which makes me uncomfortable to say the least. Bill has the bomb.
Voting systems are another area where our understanding of the errors must be completely up-to-date. As it is, most (all?) manufacturers of voting and tallying software consider their code proprietary and won't allow outside audits. If you think chads were bad, just wait for an electronic voting disaster than lacks an old-fashioned paper trail.
Risks and comp.risks may however be the better forums for this topic; but it's not a bad thing for the afficiondoes to bring it to the general interest/.ers' attention from time to time.
P.S. I recall a satellite that was lost in the early 80's for lack of a comma in the code. Which satellite?
Hey, Tracy's great! I was in the same law school class at Cornell Law. Really, she was one of the nicest people I met there. You may rightfully dislike the message, but don't shoot the messenger.
I was talking about the cost of each additional CD, not all the production costs you describe which, I explained, are irrelevant to production cost. Once everything is paid up, the production cost is a tiny factor -- everyone is getting pennies from each CD sold.
If music is sold online, all the savings come from the decrease in the production cost. Artists will have to deal with promotion but there are lots of ways to do it that cost less; and folks happier with the record label approach can just stay with it. The RIAA's official explanation is at http://www.riaa.org/MD-US-7.cfm IMHO, the record label distribution method is inefficient, and the artists lose right along with the consumer.
As for "fucking moron" -- well, at least I'm fucking! You should try it.
Actually, I did consider inflation and the average selling price, as opposed to MSRP, but figured these were too nerdy to go into.:)
Check out an inflation calculator such as http://www.westegg.com/inflation/ -- what cost $18 in 1983 would cost about $30 today.
HOWEVER, CD production costs have dropped radically in the interval, and economies of scale exploded when the CD finally replaced the LP in stores. I think the 25 per CD I speculated is likely far that true cost of 2 or whatever. Distribution costs likely plummeted as well. Look at how cheap CD-R's are at wholesale. They probably spend more on the packing or that little anti-shoplifting tag.
It's like software or CPU's or Wheaties -- the cost of the materials is meaningless. It's the chain of middlemen that establish most of the price. And it's this chain that the industry is really trying to protect; the music is irrelevant. (One "downside" to the CD's is probably that they're a lot harder to wreck than LP's.)
...why the debate is framed as free music v. the music industry. We can decide to dislike both sides, and still get free music -- by encouraging musicians to self-publish either samples or entire albums as freeware or shareware. For those without internet connections and CD burners, music stores could offer a write-your-own-CD services (and I think I've seen this in prototype?).
Up to now the recording studios have been like the cartoon syndicates -- a necessary evil because they control the production, distribution, and promotion of music, with staggering overhead. Why does a 25 CD cost $18, anyway, about what it cost when invented 20 years ago? How many non-geek consumers know about this profit margin, and how loudly would they complain if they did?
...for chiming in. Clinton/Gore should count the WH site a critical step towards openness in gov't as one of their greater achievements. I think they were pioneers not just for gov't, but for substantive use of the Web. The C-G years were otherwise marked by so much political negativism -- X trying to stop Y from doing Z, etc. -- that too little was accomplished. (And some of what was, needs undoing.)
The problem, as the original post indicates, is to ensure ongoing integrity, regardless of who is in office. I think many politicians are incapable of reasonable objectivity. Posting raw materials is a good thing, but as someone who has spent time researching the Congressional Record, much of that stuff is indigestible for most folks. It would be nice to have a nonpartisan digest of the political activity, kind of like the OMB is supposed to be to financial analysis.
What a wonderful thing the Web is for accountability. Now if someone would teach the press and pundits to use it. For one, I am sooooo tired of the "invented the Internet" thing. I can imagine folks like Leno going, "So what if it's not true, it's funny"... if they even know.
You might be thinking of tortious interference, but it's not that either. eBay can do business, or not do business with whomever they choose, within the limits of civil rights and other antidiscrimination laws.
Slashdot Mirror
I started getting mail sent to our domain addressed to administrator@domain and billing_contact@domain. These addresses are now blackholed; given that the amount of spam was ridiculous I had no choice.
This illustrates the spammers will do anything, however desperate, to get more free advertising, and people get spammed without doing anything "wrong." There is practically no limit to the amount of spam you can get -- it's just a matter of being found and put on one of those infernal spam-list CD's.
To tell us we need to just work harder or get more "tools" is offensive. Tools either cost money or are beyond the technical expertise of most people. Filtering is now beginnning at the server levels because folks like AOL were clearing 30% spam of all email. They rejected outright a valid (solicited) bulk email from Harvard to its applicants. They do not notify sender of blackholing because that takes even more bandwidth and so often the reply-to is some hapless server with no relation to the spammer. I think AOL's handling is maladroit, but obvious spam causes problems. About 2/3 of the email I get is junk; a friend saw his percentage skyrocket overnight from 5% to 90%.
UCE begs for a solution, and the people to complain to AND advise are your Congresspeople. They can't listen to what they're never told, and you can be sure the direct mail people will be heard. Think about it, you're the experts, and you know a lot more about email than anyone else.
Someone has unicorns on the mind.
Now, what would Freud say?
(har har)
Maybe the unicorns missed out on the ark?
Isn't the Web "the largest collection of erotica in the world"?
see also "P0rn again Christians"
The junk fax law worked. Before it passed the fax machines were snarled with junk. Now it's rare, and if you get it there is a clear way to deal with it and have the sender fined.
There will always be some violators, but legitimate businesses will shy away from brazenly violating the law. And unscrupulous one will get fried.
The FTC was earlier this year soliciting comments on proposed regulation of unwanted telemarketer calls. Not sure of its status, but the FTC does some terrific consumer protection work.
Good laws do work. Don't give up!!
I suppose it's a "restraint on trade" (though that's not the right term) but OF COURSE the government can do. It's what they do, after all. There are circumstances where they can't, but these are few, and this isn't one of them. The costs of complying with the law are the business's problem.
The slippery slope argument doesn't work, e.g., "if they set the speed limit at 55 what's to stop them from setting it to 0?" Well, nothing, that's what politics are for.
But it stinks, because the DMA "helped" them write it. People who you've done business with get a free ride, but you should of course demand off of their list -- and forbid them from selling the list to anyone else.
You have to go through a song and dance to invoke the protection of the law, and of course the underpaid person on the line won't know what you're talking about (please don't yell at them unless they're rude; it's the company's fault and they just need a job). Here's a script that purports to hit all the points.
The DMA also offers a telemarketing opt-out at their site, but annoyingly it's a form you have to print, sign, and mail in (wouldn't it be terrible for some prankster to opt you out of these calls). It times out after 5 years, and I have no idea whether it does enough. It only applies to DMA members, or others who voluntarily use the service. Here is another opt-out.
Even picking up the phone to hang up can cause you problems. The autodialer will note that the number is valid, and what time of day you're home. Cute, huh?
We have a talking caller ID and nowadays never pick up if it's "caller unknown." I don't know who that guy is, but I'm going to strangle him.
Actually, the right v. privilege thing is pretty much dead in modern law, though I'm sure some states cling to it. It's pretty much just a trick to distinguish between rights the government would honor versus those that it will not. Because the government generally can't arbitrarily deprive you of something of value without due process (the 5th amendment), even someone faced with losing the "privilege" of the driver's license is entitled to a hearing. Driving is a right, but one you can lose.
The problem here is simply that some licenses (the right to do something) are transferable, others aren't. Nontransferability should be spelled out in the contract.
I have two kids and know exactly what you're talking about. If I stumble into porn, how can I expect my kids not to?
(You shouldn't let your kids watch Disney anyway -- commercial mind control I hear...)
On the other hand, I'm not prepared to install censorship just yet. I too leery of the companies the publish this stuff, and don't want my computer arguing with me about where I want to go. Anyway, how old will the kids have to be before they learn to defeat the stuff? I guess then their encounters with porn will at least be consensual.
A couple of cute trap doors I've found, like dicney.com, but that lead directly to porn -- watch your typing:
whitehouse.com
quick-time.com (now reassigned)
These slimeoids obviously do this on purpose; anything for a buck. As if spam weren't enough.
...Apple has serious problems with Motorola over the PowerPC chips. Its future is hazy. So porting OS X to x86 machines manufactured by Apple makes a lot of sense if they are going to abandon PPC. I don't see why they'd want to produce OS X simultaneously for both chips, but then one should not underestimate the lord Jobs.
I have heard many times over the years that Apple has ported their OS to x86, only to have so many incompatibilities as to make the endeavor worthless. Apple has benefitted a lot from publishing an OS that runs on machines it designs itself with precision.
Great point. The elusiveness of the article bothers me -- someone should own up, even if it's the dreaded "reliable source."
I doubt American law protects Hussein's email account or even the Americans who wrote to him; anyway the U.S. wouldn't prosecute, though it should follow up on the messages from its citizens offering material support. Constitutionally, the 4th Amendment does not apply to private actors. Now, Iraqi law must protect his account (after all, Saddam Hussein IS the law) but Wired may be beyond his grasp.
As for ethics, journalists are frequently presented with discovering or handling sensitive or confidential information. It's tough to decide and depends on the gravity of the problem. If they act prevent an imminent crime of significance by violating privacy, I think they should or are morally obligated to. They face the same sort of difficult decision any of us would in the same situation. A good example would be Ellsberg leaking the Pentagon Papers revealing gov't deception concerning the Vietnam War.
One code of journalist ethics proposes:
Avoid undercover or other surreptitious methods of gathering information except when traditional open methods will not yield information vital to the public. Use of such methods should be explained as part of the story.
Maybe Henson could produce the remaining episodes with the characters sitting around reading the paper, chatting, that sort of thing; hand them over; then get on with the series.
;-) Thx for the info.
SciFi must realize they have a valuable asset on their hands (even if they did book that Edward creep) and is most likely working on a deal now. Or they're profoundly stupid, there's always that.
Geez, don't these people realize how IMPORTANT this is ?!? (Yes, I do have a life, it's my children I'm thinking of.)
Farscape is/was uneven from episode to episode, but the good ones were amazing. Soooo many TV shows are just plain mediocre, with nary a flash of brilliance. Also, Farscape was the first strong break with the threadbare Star Trek straitjacket to make it on the air. I loved the substitution of largely organic technology for electrical, and was rather fond of Moia (in a platonic way). Aeryn's cool, too. Trek never really pulled it off I think with strong female characters, so rare in scifi.
... I just keep expecting him to "leap," you know?
I'm surprised to hear of the cancellation, but true it is -- see the horse's mouth. However, I doubt it's dead. Farscape has the backing of the brand-name Jim Henson Company, a great premise (IMHO), and a solid library of four years that breaks the magic 88-episode threshold needed for successful post-series syndication.
I bet they'll go to syndication, as all the modern Treks have done, and maybe even score a better channel than SciFi, which can have John Edward for all I care (gag). Keep an eye on UPN. The Farscape season was not set to start until February, being from Australia and all, so there's time.
Enterprise is in its childhood. TNG was VILE for its first three seasons and would have rightfully died if not for the intervention of the Borg and a stunning season-end cliffhanger ("Best of Both Worlds"). I think it will show some decent character development, and I appreciate that they've deprived themselves of 3/4 of the technology that yielded too many pat technobabble solutions on shows like Voyager. Scott Bakula annoys me, but I guess I can get used to him
Yes, I watch too much TV, but mostly science fiction.
Whatever Cantwell may be or not be, this kind of crass nonsense doesn't belong here or anywhere. Both of the sites cited by the commentator are right-biased, and their writing shows it; lots of personal insults and few facts.
If you don't like 'em, vote against them, work against them (or better, for the opposition), but let's retire this foul venom that accomplishes nothing. Remember the frustration of the Clinton-haters who couldn't get anything to stick, even if they were right? If your case is so strong, you don't need them.
The internet is so often dealt with as if it were entirely novel. For the most part it's not, and simply complements telephone, fax, USPS, television, and so on for delivering information. (Granted, it is pretty neat.)
So at minimum the internet deserves regulatory parity with these other media. Abuse of telephones and faxes was dealt with years ago -- (albeit incompletely -- our phone rings off the hook, I'll rant another day). For some reason business was quick to push for the outright ban on junk faxes, but hasn't for email which must waste a lot of their employees' time and hassle IT, in the end costing them money. Money talks, so I which there was a more concerted effort by those businesses that would never themselves spam.
As with junk faxes (again, analogies everywhere) the injury from each incident is too small to do anything about; but we can act collectively through our government to attack the collective harm that is quite large.
I won't comment on the current political obsessions in DC on anything but domestic policy, but I hope we see something soon. I don't think state-by-state legislation will do the trick. Your opinion will count if you express it to the right people. Writing your congresspeople for one is NOT a futile activity: they carefully tally what their constituents are saying, and you will likely get at least a form letter in reply. (BTW, I think a real paper letter carries more punch than email.)
Exasperated outside DC, Andrew
Thanks -- looking back I realized I was too critical. After all, they were doing 1000's of things for the first time, especially life support.
... was this a hardware fault or design failure? Hmm. Well, we're off-topic anyway.
I later looked this up at this archive, which suggests what you said: The key error (in retrospect) was the use of O2 on the ground. Mercury was ground pressurized with plain air. Another criticism I read somewhere is that the astronauts themselves introduced netting and velcro to store things in the cockpit, and these burned very quickly indeed.
ANYWAY
Technically a mechanical failure. If they hadn't had the ingenious idea of using a pure O2 atmosphere the spark probably wouldn't have done much. Pure O2 make anything flammable positively explosive (actually, that's the secret of most explosives -- a built-in oxidizer).
Was there a significant reason for using pure O2? I remember it argued that this was something they could have done without, a bad decision.
Would it be so hard to display ERROR??? If they're stuck with numbers, how about something impossible like 99,999 feet?
That programmer should be taken for a little jet ride. So the pilots could show their thanks.
Many may think this topic has been done to death, but the examples grow exponentially. Someone recommended the RISKS Digest above, which I agree is terrific.
/.ers' attention from time to time.
Rarely is the answer that "the programmer was an idiot." Software bugs are projections and magnifications of human frailties. There is the class of errors where the computer does what it should but interacts with the user poorly, and it's glib to dismiss the user as the idiot.
I have followed military snafus with interest. It is still not clear how much of the Vincennes catastrophe was human versus computer error. The Yorktown was an example of an old-fashioned divide-by-zero error crashing Windows and paralyzing a frigate. The Navy plans to automate aircraft carriers and also hand over fire control to Windows systems, which makes me uncomfortable to say the least. Bill has the bomb.
Voting systems are another area where our understanding of the errors must be completely up-to-date. As it is, most (all?) manufacturers of voting and tallying software consider their code proprietary and won't allow outside audits. If you think chads were bad, just wait for an electronic voting disaster than lacks an old-fashioned paper trail.
Risks and comp.risks may however be the better forums for this topic; but it's not a bad thing for the afficiondoes to bring it to the general interest
P.S. I recall a satellite that was lost in the early 80's for lack of a comma in the code. Which satellite?
Hey, Tracy's great! I was in the same law school class at Cornell Law. Really, she was one of the nicest people I met there. You may rightfully dislike the message, but don't shoot the messenger.
You should read before you rant.
I was talking about the cost of each additional CD, not all the production costs you describe which, I explained, are irrelevant to production cost. Once everything is paid up, the production cost is a tiny factor -- everyone is getting pennies from each CD sold.
If music is sold online, all the savings come from the decrease in the production cost. Artists will have to deal with promotion but there are lots of ways to do it that cost less; and folks happier with the record label approach can just stay with it. The RIAA's official explanation is at http://www.riaa.org/MD-US-7.cfm IMHO, the record label distribution method is inefficient, and the artists lose right along with the consumer.
As for "fucking moron" -- well, at least I'm fucking! You should try it.
Actually, I did consider inflation and the average selling price, as opposed to MSRP, but figured these were too nerdy to go into. :)
Check out an inflation calculator such as http://www.westegg.com/inflation/ -- what cost $18 in 1983 would cost about $30 today.
HOWEVER, CD production costs have dropped radically in the interval, and economies of scale exploded when the CD finally replaced the LP in stores. I think the 25 per CD I speculated is likely far that true cost of 2 or whatever. Distribution costs likely plummeted as well. Look at how cheap CD-R's are at wholesale. They probably spend more on the packing or that little anti-shoplifting tag.
It's like software or CPU's or Wheaties -- the cost of the materials is meaningless. It's the chain of middlemen that establish most of the price. And it's this chain that the industry is really trying to protect; the music is irrelevant. (One "downside" to the CD's is probably that they're a lot harder to wreck than LP's.)
...why the debate is framed as free music v. the music industry. We can decide to dislike both sides, and still get free music -- by encouraging musicians to self-publish either samples or entire albums as freeware or shareware. For those without internet connections and CD burners, music stores could offer a write-your-own-CD services (and I think I've seen this in prototype?).
Up to now the recording studios have been like the cartoon syndicates -- a necessary evil because they control the production, distribution, and promotion of music, with staggering overhead. Why does a 25 CD cost $18, anyway, about what it cost when invented 20 years ago? How many non-geek consumers know about this profit margin, and how loudly would they complain if they did?
compulsive quest for sexual gratification
... didn't you work for President Clinton? (I voted for him, twice.)
But
Are you in the DC area still? (I live in Arl.)
...for chiming in. Clinton/Gore should count the WH site a critical step towards openness in gov't as one of their greater achievements. I think they were pioneers not just for gov't, but for substantive use of the Web. The C-G years were otherwise marked by so much political negativism -- X trying to stop Y from doing Z, etc. -- that too little was accomplished. (And some of what was, needs undoing.)
... if they even know.
... thank you for your work!
The problem, as the original post indicates, is to ensure ongoing integrity, regardless of who is in office. I think many politicians are incapable of reasonable objectivity. Posting raw materials is a good thing, but as someone who has spent time researching the Congressional Record, much of that stuff is indigestible for most folks. It would be nice to have a nonpartisan digest of the political activity, kind of like the OMB is supposed to be to financial analysis.
What a wonderful thing the Web is for accountability. Now if someone would teach the press and pundits to use it. For one, I am sooooo tired of the "invented the Internet" thing. I can imagine folks like Leno going, "So what if it's not true, it's funny"
Anyway
DEF: "restraint of trade"
You might be thinking of tortious interference, but it's not that either. eBay can do business, or not do business with whomever they choose, within the limits of civil rights and other antidiscrimination laws.