I think this is a big part of the problem. Buying transit is expensive, when you're talking about significant amounts of continuous traffic (non-burst rates); you think that a 10Mb connection is relatively slow, but buying a pipe that would let you use that 10Mb connection all the time, saturating it, and give you a decent QoS is not cheap -- thousands of dollars a month, probably. I think most people would be stunned to figure out how much a "real" internet connection actually costs.
Whether the backbone providers are "ripping off" the tier 2 and 3 providers, is arguable. They're the ones with the massive overhead expenses to cover, but on the other hand they seem to be making a lot of money...but who can blame them, when they own the lines? The cost isn't in the routing, it's in the lines and the associated maintainance (backhoe fade, anyone?)...it takes a huge amount of infrastructure to get your packets from NYC to LA in 100ms.
I guess if you don't like their pricing, see if you can get a few billion dollars of capital and run your own long lines, and try to compete. It's not as though there's only one backbone provider, either -- there is some competition in that market, at least.
The real problem that I have is not the service being provided by Comcast/et al to end users. For $40 a month, you get what you pay for, and it's not that much. I just dislike the way they advertise it. The average person is not that smart, but he's not entirely stupid either; if you're advertising burst speeds, then say they're burst speeds.
When you buy one of those $500, 1Mb connections, they don't advertise it as being "1Gb internet!!" just because that happens to be the maximum burst speed, they advertise it at the continuous-throughput level, or they state both: 1Mb continuous, 1Gb burst. By refusing to advertise and price their home plans this way, Comcast and the rest of the home-broadband providers have only themselves to blame when people get upset.
I think you're looking in the wrong place for the cost.
The cost of you saturating your pipe would really not be in the upgrades necessary to the local infrastructure (at the subnet level), it would be in the additional cost to their ISP (assumedly one of the Tier-1 providers).
The switches at the head-ends of the local cable "exchanges" (whatever they call exchanges in cable parlance) are probably more than capable of pushing 5-6 Mb/s per customer, continuously. Where it gets problematic is as you start aggregating that kind of traffic through the network. If an exchange serves 500 customers, and each of them want to pull 5 Mb continuously, then you're talking about a 2.5 Gb backhaul; if you have an actual connection to the Internet for every 5 local exchanges, that means you'd need to buy a 12.5 Gb/s x 24/7 pipe from the Tier 1 provider. To do that, you're talking Real Money.
What I suspect the problem is, and why you can't use all the bandwidth that Comcast advertises to you, is because Comcast only itself buys a fraction of the connection to the global net that it would need, in order to provide that level of service.
The bottleneck probably isn't down at the local level, it's up where Comcast's network meets the rest of the Internet; they're not peering, they have to buy transit from another provider, thus they have an incentive to try and discourage people from using too much traffic.
The best solution to this, IMO, would be to have two separate limits on traffic, one limit (say, 128kb/s continuously, or an equivalent amount of burst traffic, maxed at 6Mb/s) for packets that actually need to transit to the global net, and another limit for packets that never leave Comcast's copper (6Mb/s continuously). This could be expressed either as a distinct amount of transfer per month, or as rates.
Using those figures just for an example (128kb/s continuous global, 6Mb/s continuous local), you'd be able to push approximately 40GB per month onto the public net, and 1.9TB per month on the Comcast network. (I think I did my math correctly...)
I had the same idea a while back when I was reading about how bad the folks in Australia get hit for broadband. If you think the situation sucks here in the U.S., they really get screwed -- it's almost impossile to get an uncapped (transfer) account there at all. In a situation like that, it seems to me like it would make sense to have two distinct tiers of traffic: local traffic that wasn't going to leave the country (and thus wouldn't have to go through expensive undersea cables and be subject to peering agreements), and international traffic. The latter is what's expensive, the former ought to be free or close to free.
Rather than fighting bittorrent, an ISP like Comcast could just put a cap on the traffic that you could send through to other networks (and publish what the limits are, in terms of burst versus constant throughput, etc.), and then give you your full unthrottled connection to other Comcast subscribers, because this really doesn't cost them anything. Their network ought to be capable of letting someone basically saturate their connection from one node to another node on the same subnet, and with some intelligent caching, they could keep a lot of the BT traffic here.
If they set up the incentive structure correctly, they could probably reduce the load at critical points on their network due to BT traffic, while giving end-users (both heavy downloaders and "burst" users) a better overall experience. They would also eliminate the incentive to obfuscute BT traffic and end the cat-and-mouse game that seems inevitable under the current system.
Agreed. I think it's a deeper problem than that, though. Filmmakers, from the local guys doing commercials to the big Hollywood releases, have become accustomed to the level of detail that a person can see in an NTSC broadcast, and basically aim for that as their output. (Well that, and 35mm theatrical film.) I'm not talking about just postproduction decisions, but actual artistic/compositional choices. You put the actor a certain distance away from the camera, because you want people to be able to see their expressions clearly in the desired output format. You use certain makeup/costume techniques, because you assume that people can't see it. Etc., etc.
Even if you hand a director a HDTV camera and tell him to shoot the thing in HD, it may well end up that the ultimate product doesn't benefit from the additional resolution, or it could even be worse: you might start seeing visible makeup, or clogged pores, or set issues; because the director is 'thinking' in standard-def, the additional information might end up just being extraneous and confusing. The new output format requires a rethinking of the whole process.
It's not until enough people have HDTVs that the people actually making the content will think in those terms when they're working, but people aren't going to get HDTVs until there's really well-designed content for them to watch.
So you're correct that it's a chicken-and-egg situation, or rather a solution seeking a problem that people don't realize they have and/or don't care too much about. HD content can be pretty amazing when it's done right, but there's really not too much of that out there. The stuff I've seen in HD that's really impressive are mostly recordings of actual events (e.g. sports) where the more detail you have, the better it gets; but that more=better isn't always true with other content, unless that level of detail has been anticipated and planned for through the production process.
This isn't true. A better analogy would be if a car was wanted on suspicion of being involved in a hit-and-run, and the police went down to the DMV and asked where said car was registered.
It's beginning with a particular piece of information (either the terrorism suspect's name, or the suspected vehicle's tag number) and then searching through records to find out where that person or vehicle may be, so that it can be investigated further.
The police don't need a warrant to do that any more than they need a warrant to check to see if your car is stolen when you get pulled over.
Where it would have become improper, was if the police had said, "give us the names and addresses of anyone from country x, y, and z who has applied for financial aid to college," or instead of giving the Dept. of Education a list of particular names to search for, they had simply requested a dump of the entire database (or access to the database) to comb through at their leisure. Either of those things would be overly invasive and wrong. But to say that the police shouldn't have the ability to search through government records during the course of an investigation is ridiculous.
Many long-term investigations are broken only because a suspect will unintentionally break cover in some subtle way; it makes sense to have individuals who are on watch lists (terrorism/foreign-nationals-of-interest lists, FBI Wanted lists, outstanding warrants lists) to be filtered through existing databases on a periodic basis to see if they turn up. Frankly I'm surprised they don't just have some sort of batch program set up to do this; rather than making it a one-shot, they ought to re-run the names continously and then notify law enforcement if there's a 'hit.' Doing so wouldn't compromise the privacy of persons not on the lists, and wouldn't require that anyone else's information be turned over to law enforcement -- so unless they were interested in you already, submitting your FAFSA wouldn't put you at risk.
While you may have a good point regarding cellphones (or other 'convergence devices') as educational tools, I thought I'd take a second to respond to the comment about paper notetaking versus other forms.
The reason that most people still use paper, aside from the fact that it's cheap and fault tolerant and almost universally available, is that there's really not a superior electronic note-taking system.
A keyboard might be an acceptable input device, but only in a very specific set of circumstances where all you're doing is entering text. But note-taking isn't stenography; even in a basic lecture class, many (if not most) people's notes contain more than straight text. At the very least, it might be primitive graphic objects like boxes, arrows, and the like. In many places, the ability to draw diagrams are a must -- I have file-boxes full of notebooks that are probably heavier on diagrams and equations (both of which don't really lend themselves to keyboard entry, although someone very comfortable with LaTeX might disagree) than they are on text. While the paper can handle all forms of static content, a keyboard-entered computer can really only manage text.
Let's consider a person taking notes on an 8-1/2"x11" sheet of paper, with a 0.7mm (0.0028") pen or pencil. This translates to about a resolution of 360 lpi, or an overall resolution for the sheet of 3960x3060 (in the landscape orientation) at 1:1 size. Find me a computer monitor that can do that.
So to really do what you can do on a sheet of paper, the computerized system would either have to have a display capable of displaying the same data density, or have a very clever zooming interface. And not only would it have to be able to display data at this resolution, it would have to be able to record it: your input device (e-pen/stylus/touchscreen) would have to be of an equivalent resolution. Tablets with resolutions in the 300+ dpi exist (with pressure sensitivity to boot) but I've never seen anything that good actually placed over a monitor, certainly not one of paper-like resolution.
I can imagine such a system being constructed -- I don't think it's beyond the capabilities of our technology now -- but it would be ungodly expensive. Right now, it's probably cheaper to put notes on paper and then run them through a high-speed/high-res ADF scanner.
Electronic notetaking does have advantages; the ability to embed audio recordings or video alongside the more traditional notes, but none of these seem like compelling features unless you can get the notes themselves right. I've tried using the Notebook features of Office (on the Mac), which is fairly cool -- it records audio and syncronizes it to your typed notes, so that you can re-read your notes later while hearing the audio that inspired them -- but in the end, typing just doesn't give anything near the flexibility of pen and paper.
Or... just raise the base price of the service by $2.70.
And you know what? That would be totally acceptable.
Raising your rates is one thing -- that's just business. It may cost you customers, but it's all part of the value proposition.
But trying to tack on an unadvertised "fee" that's not really a 'fee' at all, but which somehow you don't advertise as being part of the price of service, that's getting pretty close to misrepresentation in my book.
Even if all the FCC action did was cause Verizon to take their $2.99 fee and move it from a line-item "Compliance Fee" to part of the base cost of DSL service, that would be a Good Thing, because it would make it harder for them to advertise a price for service that wasn't true.
IMO, it's unethical and false advertising for them to advertise a price that doesn't include everything except federally mandated fees which are not kept by the company (e.g. sales tax). If it's not going directly to the government, it's not a 'fee,' and it should be included into their advertised rates. If that makes them less competitive, so be it.
These 'Regulatory Compliance Fees' have got to go; they're misleading to consumers and they make it difficult to make a fair comparison of the costs of service between different companies (i.e. cable and DSL, or cellular and landlines).
I agree; I think it's possible for a computer to be an educational tool, but honestly that's not the way that your garden-variety PC (and its accompanying software, including Windows) is designed.
If there are really that many schools interested in sending students home with laptops, then it stands to reason there ought to be a market for a purpose-built computerized educational tool. Something that didn't function as an entertainment device, and was more like an educational appliance than a computer.
Frankly, something OLPC-ish might be more in order than just giving every kid an iBook or a Dell. Of course, parents would protest, because there seems to be this feeling that the earlier you get Little Johnny started on the MS Word and the PowerPoint, the more successful he'll be -- which is utter tripe. A well-educated person can pick up a book on Word or PowerPoint (or any other software package that they need to use) and figure it out in a weekend.
"Training" and "education" are two very different things, and I think that there are a lot of parents that haven't understood that. You can train someone to use a particular computer program, and still have them be utterly helpless when the slightest thing goes wrong, or when that program is obsolete; a well-educated person will have enough of a conceptual understanding to not be thrown by minor issues, and capable of training themselves.
And I would counter-argue that without compelling evidence showing that viewing certain types of entertainment material causes one to become a criminal and engage in particular criminal acts or behaviors, the state has no business banning any particular type of content.
As you pointed out, everyone seems to have heard the argument that viewing certain types of [kiddie|violent] porn causes one to go out and [abuse|kill] other people -- but there seems to be scant hard evidence besides the circumstantial: there do seem to be a lot of criminals who have abused kids or raped women and have also enjoyed porn, but correlation isn't causation. The substantial number of people who do like certain kinds of "deviant" porn and who don't become criminals, suggests to me that in fact the cause of the criminal behavior is separate, and it that it may lead people to both like the porn and to do the behavior later. Similarly, Jack Thompson and his associates have told everyone that violent videogames are "murder simulators" and cause people to lead lives of crime, but there's little convincing evidence of this and much to the contrary. The argument for banning violent pornography and simulated "child" pornography is the exact same argument for banning certain violent video games.
Now, there is a separate argument for banning true child pornography: by making it illegal to possess, you cut off the demand for it, which in turn means there's less of a motivation for people to make it. Since making it inherently involves the abuse of children, this is a Good Thing. Understand that this is a completely separate argument from banning violent porn that's made using consenting adults (or merely actors who simulate violence), or porn that looks like children but doesn't actually involve any (e.g. hentai, CG, or using particularly youthful-looking-but-legal actors).
If at some point there is some convincing and widely-accepted (by the scientific and subject-matter educated communities, not just 'man on the street' "wisdom") evidence showing that viewing certain types of entertainment actually causes criminal behavior, then perhaps we could have a discussion on how best to regulate that type of material. However, in the absence of such evidence, this whole issue is nothing but a political red herring, something that's being created as a "feel good" piece by desperate politicians trying to capitalize on the emotions of people who don't know better.
This is an interesting thought. I disagree with you philosophically, because I think that the individual (and not the family) is the base unit of society and that each person should be judged and punished according to his or her own merits or weaknesses, but setting that aside for a moment, I think a system like you propose would work.
I'd introduce one more rule, though. Parents, via unanimous consent, could choose at any time to end the life of their child, regardless of how old he or she was. In doing so, the child's assets would be immediately transferred to the state (so they couldn't do it for pecuniary gain). I call this the "Frankenstein Exception." If you and your spouse realize that despite your best efforts, your child has turned out to be a monster -- and that you'll end up being punished alongside them, as per your rule -- then it's only fair to let you pull the plug. In order to make sure that there's no coercion involved, I think not only would both parents have to consent, but both parents would have to participate in the execution in some critical way; no pushing off the responsibility of actually doing the deed on some faceless public servant. (I.e., it wouldn't be like Philip K. Dick's "abortion vans," where you could just call up the county and have them come get your kneebiter for euthanization; this would be very personal.) And perhaps in order to have your children wasted, you'd also have to have yourselves sterilized: no re-dos in this game.
The justification is that if you're going to get punished for someone else's behavior, you have to have some control over it; given that there is a certain amount of randomness in parenting (even good parents can produce a real psycho from time to time), you can't eliminate "bad kids" just by punishing parents. You need to have some method for removing those people who just turn out to be unredeemably evil, without punishing scores of people who have no control over their actions anymore.
Anyway, it would certainly have some interesting consequences on society. I can only imagine that sales of flowers on Mothers' Day would vastly increase.
However, as soon as everyone has an account, checking for vandalism becomes far more time consuming.
I'm not sure this is a fair statement. When you have logins, you might have a better chance of tracking vandals across pages. So when you find one instance of vandalism and see what user did it, you can ban that user, but then you can look at their past changes and see if they've caused any other vandalism that you've missed.
Otherwise, it's pretty easy (and I think frequent) for the same vandal to make multiple attacks from a few different computers (say at school, at home, and at the library) and banning one IP wouldn't do anything, nor would it show you any of the other instances of vandalism. And of course, it results in a lot of "innocent" IP's getting banned.
With accounts, there's nothing stopping a person for signing up for a bunch of them, but you have a second way of tracking them -- IPs and their account. Assuming you record both, of course; but you could pretty easily track them together if you wanted, and then when you find a vandal account, see what other accounts have been using that IP address. You wouldn't want to instantly ban them (what if it's another innocent person, who happens to have used the same computer?), but you could scan through their edit histories to see if there's anything that's obviously vandalism; if it is, chances are it's a duplicate account. You could also compare the password hashes to see if they're the same; again, it wouldn't be necessarily indicative of a duplicate account, but it would be a big red-flag.
Anyway, I think it makes the process for tracking down vandalism a little different, but not necessarily that much harder. Of course, it gets easier the more information you log, so you have to balance the obvious privacy concerns.
I don't think it's any different than if you were recording shows to VHS tape and saving them. That there is no discussion of this in the Sony Betamax case, has let the issue remain basically open and up for debate (SONY CORP. OF AMER. v. UNIVERSAL CITY STUDIOS, INC., 464 U.S. 417 (1984)). Although the case doesn't say anything explicitly (based on my reading) about tape "librarying," it certainly does acknowledge that it exists, and IIRC some guy with a substantial library of tapes was hauled in to testify during the proceedings. That the court ruled in favor of Sony even though they knew librarying existed as a widespread practice, seems to be at least a small nod in favor.
It seems to me that librarying could be easily interpreted as just time-shifting of an arbitrary duration, as long as the works are not further copied. On the other hand, in the ruling, there is a mention of 'time shifting' being the recording of a program at one time, and then watching it a single time later on. Almost as if the playback was a destructive process, and consumed the recording while doing it. However, this is obviously not the case, and any time-shifting technology inherently gives you the ability to watch a recorded program more than once, which really blows away the single-playback test for time shifting.
What's really interesting is that if you read the footnotes in the opinion, there is a sentence which reads: "To the extent that this practice involves librarying, it is addressed in section V. C., infra." (footnote 39) But -- and this is the best part -- there is no section V.C. in the ruling. Section IV has subsections A through B, but no C. Section V doesn't have any subsections at all. It's as if they wrote a section of the opinion to cover home librarying, but then removed it at the last minute, without even updating the footnotes.
This leaves it in a grey area, and to the best of my knowledge there's never been a straightforward test of whether or not librarying for personal use only (without copying or sharing) is infringement. As the Sony case doesn't specify a length of time that a recording can be shifted, I think it could be argued that it's allowed (provided you can pass the other Fair Use tests). Of course, all this is becoming less and less relevant with the DMCA and DRM; there is no Fair Use exemption to the DMCA (although there is one for "interoperability"), so in today's climate, the Sony case wouldn't have even happened -- thus it's hard to extend the ruling too far into the present and future.
At any rate, given the current murkiness of copyright and Fair Use law, I think an unshared archive of legally recorded OTA programs is probably the least of anyone's potential worries at this point. If that's the only thing you have on your computer or your house that might possibly be in violation, you lead either a very virtuous or very boring life.
If you want to read a rather lengthy discussion of the issue, wherein some fairly well-educated (and some not so much) slug it out, it's been beaten to a bloody pulp and then some over at AVS Forums: http://archive.avsforum.com/avs-vb/history/topic/3 01206-1.html
How the heck did it take them that long? Were they working through the Senate in geographic order, from south to north?
When I first heard about this thing, my immediate thought was "it's gotta be that fuckhead from Alaska. Wait -- he couldn't possibly be that stupid, could he?... Yeah, he could." How was he not the first person they looked into?
It's a little alarming that there might have been that many better suspects than him to investigate first. But I guess that's become the point of the Senate these days: a high-pressure hose of pork-barrel cash back to your home state. Keep the money rolling in and your head down, and you can stay there apparently forever.
It's bad enough that most police assume that everyone is guilty of something.
Of course, it doesn't help when we have such a Byzantine system of self-contradictory laws, that any any given time, you're almost certainly guaranteed to be guilty of something.
Show me an innocent man and I'll show you a district prosecutor who wasn't interested in looking for something to hang him by.
Right. Because now that the porn is illegal, he'd just have killed her according to whatever fantasies he was capable of creating in his imagination. That's such a better outcome.
This sounds like his defense lawyer's wet dream: "the porn made me do it! It was the porn!"
This makes about as much sense as if the city of New York had decided to ban dogs after the Son of Sam said his dog told him to kill people. Maybe the problem is just that people are occasionally psychopaths? Like terrorists, there's very little that you can do to stop them, and there's a very great risk that any attempted "cure" can be worse than the "disease." (E.g., an erosion of civil liberties and freedoms in the face of a very small threat.)
This is true, to an extent. You are almost always going to want to use a lossy codec on your portable player. However, there's really no reason that you should store the music in your library in the same format, when you have a hard drive that's many times the size, and easy to expand, and gets upgraded more frequently. (If you have a flash-based player, then your HD is definitely going to be far larger; if you have a HD player, it might or might not.)
What I'd like to see is a system where the music is storted on the computer in the library in a lossless format, and then when you sync your player, if it can fit on as lossless, then that's how it goes. (There are a lot of people running around with half-full or less iPods!) If it can't, then it would start to compress it using the codec of your choice.
Obviously, this could increase sync times a lot -- if you had a player that was filled to the gills as lossless, and then you wanted to add more music to it, you would need to clear the player, and add all the music on as compressed files. (Or at least some of it.) But I don't think this is a deal-breaker; you could do the updating as a batch process at night, when most people just leave their player sitting on its charging cradle.
Computers are fast enough now that I really don't think that the performance hit you'd get during copying, caused by the on-the-fly lossless to lossy transcoding, would really be that big a problem. It's a pretty easy process to multithread, meaning that you can easily take advantage of modern architectures (you have separate threads for at least the decoding and reencoding of each file, and you do multiple files at the same time). In a few more years, we'll probably get to the point where the process would be I/O rather than processor-bound anyway, if chips keep getting faster and computers keep getting more cores. (Unless they start using faster hard drives or memory in portable players.)
Anyway, so I'm not disagreeing with you; people are always going to want to get the most from their investment in a portable player. However, in some cases, getting "the most with what you have" might indicate using a lossless codec instead of a lossy one (if you have a player big enough to fit your music losslessly); I'm just proposing that we make software that's intelligent enough to do the optimization.
Although you do have a point; most people think 128kbit MP3 sounds good, so they might not care.:-/
Depends on how you interpret / how far you want to trust the DMCA's Reverse Engineering exception. To my knowledge, it's never been tested in court. Without precedent, it's a bit of a murky path to go down. Then again, one hopes that the FBI has better things to do than chase down people who are transcoding their music from one format to another for their own use. (Actually I think they have better things to do than any sort of copyright enforcement...why don't they come back once the Wars on Terror, Drugs, and Poverty are over?)
Anyway, my point was more that regardless of whether it's legal or not, I think it's morally defensible, and therefore whether to do it or not is a straightforward risk/benefit calculation, based on your odds of getting caught and the resulting punishment.
Just because it's illegal doesn't mean it's wrong to do, if the law is wrong in making it illegal.
As an admitted geek and Linux fan, I'm torn about what to think of the PS3. On one hand, I hope that it succeeds, because that means later I'll be able to buy one to play around with; the whole Cell architecture seems cool, and it's seemingly the most powerful of the next-gen consoles. However, I'm definitely not a fan in any way of BluRay, so that's poisoned a lot of the goodwill I might have had for the platform. It seems like a cheap bundling trick to try and push their DRM-laden, BetaMax-on-a-disc format. I just can't trust anything from that company any more, and I've been burned by their proprietary formats in the past, and the BluRay/PS3 combo stinks of "we want to own you." (And if there's one company I don't want to own me, it's Sony; inventor $60 proprietary HandyCam power plug.) I think that company has vastly outlived its usefulness, and it would be better for everyone involved if it split up into several different independent organizations. If bankruptcy, driven by the cratering failure of the PS3, is what it takes to achieve that, so be it.
I've never been much of a console gamer (or any gamer at all, really), but the Nintendo system seems most intriguing from a bang-for-the-buck perspective; plus I suspect they might have some fun games. I'm wary of this new controller, though. And it seems like it would make a much less capable Linux box and home server, which is something I always keep in mind when I'm looking at gaming devices: when I'm done gaming, I want it to do something else. Obviously I'm in a very small minority in caring about this, though.
The best possible outcome from all this would be that somehow, due to some gigantic economic miscalculation, Microsoft and Sony just annihilate each other and the world becomes a better place. Wouldn't that be nice?
Touche. Although, actually I've rarely purchased DVDs (I have a collection of perhaps half a dozen), although admittedly I do rent them regularly. I hung on to VHS and my LaserDisc player up until fairly recently, when the DRM on DVDs became an effective non-issue. It certainly kept me far, far away for the first few years.
Now, the DVD Consortium doesn't seem to even try to fight DeCSS anymore; it's like they've given up. (Or are they just waiting? Hummm.) In the same way that I take all of my new CDs (new to me, I ususally buy used) and pop them into iTunes, I do most of my video watching after I've run the discs through HandBrake. The whole experience is much more pleasant that way. It's what movie-watching ought to be: you sit down, hit play, and watch the movie; not a lot of other shit they've put on the disc. To me, DVDs are a container/transportation format, and one that I only use due to pragmatism and limited alternatives.
A better question to ask might be what a person's feelings are regarding HD-DVD and BluRay: I have no intention of purchasing either, or any other "next gen" player before its DRM has been completely circumvented as well. Even if that means I'm clinging to my Apex DVD/CD/anything-else-that's-round-and-plastic player in 2015... here's hoping it lasts as long as my LD player did.
I think the anti-iPod thing is trendy right now. There was a point here on Slashdot, when iPods were new, when everyone and their brother was talking about how cool they were and which one they had/were-going-to-buy/etc.
Now, because they've become common, they're no longer cool; they have no geek cachet anymore. (I've always wondered whether, if the apparently dream of so many Slashdotters became reality and Linux really went mainstream, if we'd be flooded with posts the next month about how it was such a crappy OS and BSD/Minix/ReactOS was really far superior.)
The iPod certainly isn't the end-all and be-all of MP3 players, but it's pretty good at what it does. There are certainly a lot worse things floating around on the market; my girlfriend has a Creative and I think the interface and software are just terrible. She doesn't use it nearly as much as she would, I think, if it was an iPod.
I think people also can't separate the iPod from their dislike of the iTMS and its DRM scheme. This is a bit ridiculous; I might as well hate the Creative player because it works with Microsoft's DRM scheme and the Napster subscription service, or bitch because the "PlaysForSure" tracks won't play on my generic MP3-only player or my iPod. Nobody, either in the iPod camp or on the MS/PlaysForSure one, is putting a gun to your head and making you purchase DRMed tracks for that type of player.
If you become a victim of vendor lock-in, whether to an iPod or to a Creative or any of the other MS-compatible models, it's because you made a consious decision to become that way. It's lack of foresight, nothing more; you can't blame the manufacturers for capitalizing on stupidity, it's been a good business plan for thousands of years.
Only if you re-encode it to another lossy algorithm. Every platform has a lossless compressed codec available at this stage (although sadly there's not really a clear standard across platforms). Just recompress to Apple Lossless or FLAC and you've got a DRM-free file that's the same quality as the original DRMed one.
Given the way that hard disk space is increasing, I think the reasons for using lossy compressions are less compelling every day. I've said elsewhere that the killer feature of the next jukebox program I use (i.e., this is what would get me to switch from iTunes) would be the ability to seamlessly transcode songs on-the-fly, only when it's necessary because you're putting them onto a capacity-restricted portable device.
You answered your own question. The "low-cost model" is the answer, because it's what the market will really support. It's what people are willing to pay for. Under such a system I think you'd see the end of multi-million-dollar megaproductions and a lot more very-small-budget stuff, whether music or movies or writing/publishing. Frankly, I think it would probably get to the point where whole secondary and tertiary industries would spring up, in order to aggregate content according to partiuclar tastes. (I.e., you'd subscribe to a service where somebody who's taste you trust would comb through the 'net and review stuff; paying not for the content per se but for the reviewing and filtering.)
As to the free-rider question, I attempted to answer this in another post further up in the thread (a reply to another reply of my original post); basically free riders are not a problem, they're just indicative of demand not being what you think it is. The current system essentially forces people to constantly purchase new entertainment-art, because it's so difficult to get to the "back catalog." The actual societal demand for new work is limitless: it will never be saturated no matter how much stuff you have out there; however it is not that big. It's a relatively small, constant demand for new material. So in an unfettered, unmanipulated market, "entertainment" would probably not be the industry that it is today. There just isn't the demand for it -- as you pointed out, given a choice, quite a few people wouldn't pay to bankroll new productions. This is fair, and it would mean that some new stuff wouldn't get made, because there wouldn't be a market for it. But as people get bored, their demand for new content increases, and eventually someone will pay for something new to be created (even if this just means giving a case of beer to their friendly local college band). Viola -- new content.
I think it would get to the point though, where "freeloading" in the way that you describe would be almost a form of aesceticism. Sit around all day and watch "other people's" art? Stuff that was made for them and to their tastes instead of yours? In a world where everyone else is getting works custom-made for them, it might be a very marginal existence. It would be like filling your house full of the little fake photos that come inside WalMart picture frames when you buy them. Because everyone knows that non-custom-made content is free, its perceived value would disappear quickly.
Sure, you can wait and hope that somebody else will pay for the new content, and just get it afterwards; that's your choice as a consumer and free agent in the market. However, when you're sitting in a sea of previously-created art, suddenly the value of new work (particularly custom work) would go up. You might pay for something to be created so that you'd have your name in the credits, or just for personal consumption, or as a gift/tribute/whatever, but doing so wouldn't be much harder than hiring any other type of skilled tradesperson. It would be available if you wanted to do it; and if you didn't want to participate, if you just wanted to "freeload" and listen to music that had been written for and about other people, and watch movies from the vast back catalog that would be available, that's OK too.
The net result of freeloading means less money spent on entertainment, sure, but that's not all bad. It means that only the amount of entertainment that's demanded (and people are willing to pay for) is what gets created, and that more money is available for other things. You're still going to spend your income somewhere -- if not on entertainment than on hardgoods, or put it into savings -- so there's really no net loss. By removing distortive controls (of which DRM is one), we allow supply to match demand over time, and this is a good thing in general; it ensures that we aren't spending more effort as a society than we should be on 'manufacturing' entertainment.
Of course, since this would mean the demise of the 'entertainme
I don't think that the fee was really stopping anyone who was Truly Interested from getting the service, but it certainly was keeping some people who were maybe peripherally interested, but not wholly convinced, from giving it a shot.
There is very little difference between $19 and $20. There is a huge, vast, gaping chasm between something that costs $1 and something that is free.
If you can now play with a service at no cost, I think more people are likely to try it out, who wouldn't have even considered it before just because it costs money. Now, it's a valid question whether these sorts of folks are really worth anything as customers, but that's a separate issue.
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I think this is a big part of the problem. Buying transit is expensive, when you're talking about significant amounts of continuous traffic (non-burst rates); you think that a 10Mb connection is relatively slow, but buying a pipe that would let you use that 10Mb connection all the time, saturating it, and give you a decent QoS is not cheap -- thousands of dollars a month, probably. I think most people would be stunned to figure out how much a "real" internet connection actually costs.
Whether the backbone providers are "ripping off" the tier 2 and 3 providers, is arguable. They're the ones with the massive overhead expenses to cover, but on the other hand they seem to be making a lot of money...but who can blame them, when they own the lines? The cost isn't in the routing, it's in the lines and the associated maintainance (backhoe fade, anyone?)...it takes a huge amount of infrastructure to get your packets from NYC to LA in 100ms.
I guess if you don't like their pricing, see if you can get a few billion dollars of capital and run your own long lines, and try to compete. It's not as though there's only one backbone provider, either -- there is some competition in that market, at least.
The real problem that I have is not the service being provided by Comcast/et al to end users. For $40 a month, you get what you pay for, and it's not that much. I just dislike the way they advertise it. The average person is not that smart, but he's not entirely stupid either; if you're advertising burst speeds, then say they're burst speeds.
When you buy one of those $500, 1Mb connections, they don't advertise it as being "1Gb internet!!" just because that happens to be the maximum burst speed, they advertise it at the continuous-throughput level, or they state both: 1Mb continuous, 1Gb burst. By refusing to advertise and price their home plans this way, Comcast and the rest of the home-broadband providers have only themselves to blame when people get upset.
I think you're looking in the wrong place for the cost.
The cost of you saturating your pipe would really not be in the upgrades necessary to the local infrastructure (at the subnet level), it would be in the additional cost to their ISP (assumedly one of the Tier-1 providers).
The switches at the head-ends of the local cable "exchanges" (whatever they call exchanges in cable parlance) are probably more than capable of pushing 5-6 Mb/s per customer, continuously. Where it gets problematic is as you start aggregating that kind of traffic through the network. If an exchange serves 500 customers, and each of them want to pull 5 Mb continuously, then you're talking about a 2.5 Gb backhaul; if you have an actual connection to the Internet for every 5 local exchanges, that means you'd need to buy a 12.5 Gb/s x 24/7 pipe from the Tier 1 provider. To do that, you're talking Real Money.
What I suspect the problem is, and why you can't use all the bandwidth that Comcast advertises to you, is because Comcast only itself buys a fraction of the connection to the global net that it would need, in order to provide that level of service.
The bottleneck probably isn't down at the local level, it's up where Comcast's network meets the rest of the Internet; they're not peering, they have to buy transit from another provider, thus they have an incentive to try and discourage people from using too much traffic.
The best solution to this, IMO, would be to have two separate limits on traffic, one limit (say, 128kb/s continuously, or an equivalent amount of burst traffic, maxed at 6Mb/s) for packets that actually need to transit to the global net, and another limit for packets that never leave Comcast's copper (6Mb/s continuously). This could be expressed either as a distinct amount of transfer per month, or as rates.
Using those figures just for an example (128kb/s continuous global, 6Mb/s continuous local), you'd be able to push approximately 40GB per month onto the public net, and 1.9TB per month on the Comcast network. (I think I did my math correctly...)
I had the same idea a while back when I was reading about how bad the folks in Australia get hit for broadband. If you think the situation sucks here in the U.S., they really get screwed -- it's almost impossile to get an uncapped (transfer) account there at all. In a situation like that, it seems to me like it would make sense to have two distinct tiers of traffic: local traffic that wasn't going to leave the country (and thus wouldn't have to go through expensive undersea cables and be subject to peering agreements), and international traffic. The latter is what's expensive, the former ought to be free or close to free.
Rather than fighting bittorrent, an ISP like Comcast could just put a cap on the traffic that you could send through to other networks (and publish what the limits are, in terms of burst versus constant throughput, etc.), and then give you your full unthrottled connection to other Comcast subscribers, because this really doesn't cost them anything. Their network ought to be capable of letting someone basically saturate their connection from one node to another node on the same subnet, and with some intelligent caching, they could keep a lot of the BT traffic here.
If they set up the incentive structure correctly, they could probably reduce the load at critical points on their network due to BT traffic, while giving end-users (both heavy downloaders and "burst" users) a better overall experience. They would also eliminate the incentive to obfuscute BT traffic and end the cat-and-mouse game that seems inevitable under the current system.
Agreed. I think it's a deeper problem than that, though. Filmmakers, from the local guys doing commercials to the big Hollywood releases, have become accustomed to the level of detail that a person can see in an NTSC broadcast, and basically aim for that as their output. (Well that, and 35mm theatrical film.) I'm not talking about just postproduction decisions, but actual artistic/compositional choices. You put the actor a certain distance away from the camera, because you want people to be able to see their expressions clearly in the desired output format. You use certain makeup/costume techniques, because you assume that people can't see it. Etc., etc.
Even if you hand a director a HDTV camera and tell him to shoot the thing in HD, it may well end up that the ultimate product doesn't benefit from the additional resolution, or it could even be worse: you might start seeing visible makeup, or clogged pores, or set issues; because the director is 'thinking' in standard-def, the additional information might end up just being extraneous and confusing. The new output format requires a rethinking of the whole process.
It's not until enough people have HDTVs that the people actually making the content will think in those terms when they're working, but people aren't going to get HDTVs until there's really well-designed content for them to watch.
So you're correct that it's a chicken-and-egg situation, or rather a solution seeking a problem that people don't realize they have and/or don't care too much about. HD content can be pretty amazing when it's done right, but there's really not too much of that out there. The stuff I've seen in HD that's really impressive are mostly recordings of actual events (e.g. sports) where the more detail you have, the better it gets; but that more=better isn't always true with other content, unless that level of detail has been anticipated and planned for through the production process.
This isn't true. A better analogy would be if a car was wanted on suspicion of being involved in a hit-and-run, and the police went down to the DMV and asked where said car was registered.
It's beginning with a particular piece of information (either the terrorism suspect's name, or the suspected vehicle's tag number) and then searching through records to find out where that person or vehicle may be, so that it can be investigated further.
The police don't need a warrant to do that any more than they need a warrant to check to see if your car is stolen when you get pulled over.
Where it would have become improper, was if the police had said, "give us the names and addresses of anyone from country x, y, and z who has applied for financial aid to college," or instead of giving the Dept. of Education a list of particular names to search for, they had simply requested a dump of the entire database (or access to the database) to comb through at their leisure. Either of those things would be overly invasive and wrong. But to say that the police shouldn't have the ability to search through government records during the course of an investigation is ridiculous.
Many long-term investigations are broken only because a suspect will unintentionally break cover in some subtle way; it makes sense to have individuals who are on watch lists (terrorism/foreign-nationals-of-interest lists, FBI Wanted lists, outstanding warrants lists) to be filtered through existing databases on a periodic basis to see if they turn up. Frankly I'm surprised they don't just have some sort of batch program set up to do this; rather than making it a one-shot, they ought to re-run the names continously and then notify law enforcement if there's a 'hit.' Doing so wouldn't compromise the privacy of persons not on the lists, and wouldn't require that anyone else's information be turned over to law enforcement -- so unless they were interested in you already, submitting your FAFSA wouldn't put you at risk.
While you may have a good point regarding cellphones (or other 'convergence devices') as educational tools, I thought I'd take a second to respond to the comment about paper notetaking versus other forms.
The reason that most people still use paper, aside from the fact that it's cheap and fault tolerant and almost universally available, is that there's really not a superior electronic note-taking system.
A keyboard might be an acceptable input device, but only in a very specific set of circumstances where all you're doing is entering text. But note-taking isn't stenography; even in a basic lecture class, many (if not most) people's notes contain more than straight text. At the very least, it might be primitive graphic objects like boxes, arrows, and the like. In many places, the ability to draw diagrams are a must -- I have file-boxes full of notebooks that are probably heavier on diagrams and equations (both of which don't really lend themselves to keyboard entry, although someone very comfortable with LaTeX might disagree) than they are on text. While the paper can handle all forms of static content, a keyboard-entered computer can really only manage text.
Let's consider a person taking notes on an 8-1/2"x11" sheet of paper, with a 0.7mm (0.0028") pen or pencil. This translates to about a resolution of 360 lpi, or an overall resolution for the sheet of 3960x3060 (in the landscape orientation) at 1:1 size. Find me a computer monitor that can do that.
So to really do what you can do on a sheet of paper, the computerized system would either have to have a display capable of displaying the same data density, or have a very clever zooming interface. And not only would it have to be able to display data at this resolution, it would have to be able to record it: your input device (e-pen/stylus/touchscreen) would have to be of an equivalent resolution. Tablets with resolutions in the 300+ dpi exist (with pressure sensitivity to boot) but I've never seen anything that good actually placed over a monitor, certainly not one of paper-like resolution.
I can imagine such a system being constructed -- I don't think it's beyond the capabilities of our technology now -- but it would be ungodly expensive. Right now, it's probably cheaper to put notes on paper and then run them through a high-speed/high-res ADF scanner.
Electronic notetaking does have advantages; the ability to embed audio recordings or video alongside the more traditional notes, but none of these seem like compelling features unless you can get the notes themselves right. I've tried using the Notebook features of Office (on the Mac), which is fairly cool -- it records audio and syncronizes it to your typed notes, so that you can re-read your notes later while hearing the audio that inspired them -- but in the end, typing just doesn't give anything near the flexibility of pen and paper.
Or... just raise the base price of the service by $2.70.
And you know what? That would be totally acceptable.
Raising your rates is one thing -- that's just business. It may cost you customers, but it's all part of the value proposition.
But trying to tack on an unadvertised "fee" that's not really a 'fee' at all, but which somehow you don't advertise as being part of the price of service, that's getting pretty close to misrepresentation in my book.
Even if all the FCC action did was cause Verizon to take their $2.99 fee and move it from a line-item "Compliance Fee" to part of the base cost of DSL service, that would be a Good Thing, because it would make it harder for them to advertise a price for service that wasn't true.
IMO, it's unethical and false advertising for them to advertise a price that doesn't include everything except federally mandated fees which are not kept by the company (e.g. sales tax). If it's not going directly to the government, it's not a 'fee,' and it should be included into their advertised rates. If that makes them less competitive, so be it.
These 'Regulatory Compliance Fees' have got to go; they're misleading to consumers and they make it difficult to make a fair comparison of the costs of service between different companies (i.e. cable and DSL, or cellular and landlines).
I agree; I think it's possible for a computer to be an educational tool, but honestly that's not the way that your garden-variety PC (and its accompanying software, including Windows) is designed.
If there are really that many schools interested in sending students home with laptops, then it stands to reason there ought to be a market for a purpose-built computerized educational tool. Something that didn't function as an entertainment device, and was more like an educational appliance than a computer.
Frankly, something OLPC-ish might be more in order than just giving every kid an iBook or a Dell. Of course, parents would protest, because there seems to be this feeling that the earlier you get Little Johnny started on the MS Word and the PowerPoint, the more successful he'll be -- which is utter tripe. A well-educated person can pick up a book on Word or PowerPoint (or any other software package that they need to use) and figure it out in a weekend.
"Training" and "education" are two very different things, and I think that there are a lot of parents that haven't understood that. You can train someone to use a particular computer program, and still have them be utterly helpless when the slightest thing goes wrong, or when that program is obsolete; a well-educated person will have enough of a conceptual understanding to not be thrown by minor issues, and capable of training themselves.
And I would counter-argue that without compelling evidence showing that viewing certain types of entertainment material causes one to become a criminal and engage in particular criminal acts or behaviors, the state has no business banning any particular type of content.
As you pointed out, everyone seems to have heard the argument that viewing certain types of [kiddie|violent] porn causes one to go out and [abuse|kill] other people -- but there seems to be scant hard evidence besides the circumstantial: there do seem to be a lot of criminals who have abused kids or raped women and have also enjoyed porn, but correlation isn't causation. The substantial number of people who do like certain kinds of "deviant" porn and who don't become criminals, suggests to me that in fact the cause of the criminal behavior is separate, and it that it may lead people to both like the porn and to do the behavior later. Similarly, Jack Thompson and his associates have told everyone that violent videogames are "murder simulators" and cause people to lead lives of crime, but there's little convincing evidence of this and much to the contrary. The argument for banning violent pornography and simulated "child" pornography is the exact same argument for banning certain violent video games.
Now, there is a separate argument for banning true child pornography: by making it illegal to possess, you cut off the demand for it, which in turn means there's less of a motivation for people to make it. Since making it inherently involves the abuse of children, this is a Good Thing. Understand that this is a completely separate argument from banning violent porn that's made using consenting adults (or merely actors who simulate violence), or porn that looks like children but doesn't actually involve any (e.g. hentai, CG, or using particularly youthful-looking-but-legal actors).
If at some point there is some convincing and widely-accepted (by the scientific and subject-matter educated communities, not just 'man on the street' "wisdom") evidence showing that viewing certain types of entertainment actually causes criminal behavior, then perhaps we could have a discussion on how best to regulate that type of material. However, in the absence of such evidence, this whole issue is nothing but a political red herring, something that's being created as a "feel good" piece by desperate politicians trying to capitalize on the emotions of people who don't know better.
This is an interesting thought. I disagree with you philosophically, because I think that the individual (and not the family) is the base unit of society and that each person should be judged and punished according to his or her own merits or weaknesses, but setting that aside for a moment, I think a system like you propose would work.
I'd introduce one more rule, though. Parents, via unanimous consent, could choose at any time to end the life of their child, regardless of how old he or she was. In doing so, the child's assets would be immediately transferred to the state (so they couldn't do it for pecuniary gain). I call this the "Frankenstein Exception." If you and your spouse realize that despite your best efforts, your child has turned out to be a monster -- and that you'll end up being punished alongside them, as per your rule -- then it's only fair to let you pull the plug. In order to make sure that there's no coercion involved, I think not only would both parents have to consent, but both parents would have to participate in the execution in some critical way; no pushing off the responsibility of actually doing the deed on some faceless public servant. (I.e., it wouldn't be like Philip K. Dick's "abortion vans," where you could just call up the county and have them come get your kneebiter for euthanization; this would be very personal.) And perhaps in order to have your children wasted, you'd also have to have yourselves sterilized: no re-dos in this game.
The justification is that if you're going to get punished for someone else's behavior, you have to have some control over it; given that there is a certain amount of randomness in parenting (even good parents can produce a real psycho from time to time), you can't eliminate "bad kids" just by punishing parents. You need to have some method for removing those people who just turn out to be unredeemably evil, without punishing scores of people who have no control over their actions anymore.
Anyway, it would certainly have some interesting consequences on society. I can only imagine that sales of flowers on Mothers' Day would vastly increase.
However, as soon as everyone has an account, checking for vandalism becomes far more time consuming.
I'm not sure this is a fair statement. When you have logins, you might have a better chance of tracking vandals across pages. So when you find one instance of vandalism and see what user did it, you can ban that user, but then you can look at their past changes and see if they've caused any other vandalism that you've missed.
Otherwise, it's pretty easy (and I think frequent) for the same vandal to make multiple attacks from a few different computers (say at school, at home, and at the library) and banning one IP wouldn't do anything, nor would it show you any of the other instances of vandalism. And of course, it results in a lot of "innocent" IP's getting banned.
With accounts, there's nothing stopping a person for signing up for a bunch of them, but you have a second way of tracking them -- IPs and their account. Assuming you record both, of course; but you could pretty easily track them together if you wanted, and then when you find a vandal account, see what other accounts have been using that IP address. You wouldn't want to instantly ban them (what if it's another innocent person, who happens to have used the same computer?), but you could scan through their edit histories to see if there's anything that's obviously vandalism; if it is, chances are it's a duplicate account. You could also compare the password hashes to see if they're the same; again, it wouldn't be necessarily indicative of a duplicate account, but it would be a big red-flag.
Anyway, I think it makes the process for tracking down vandalism a little different, but not necessarily that much harder. Of course, it gets easier the more information you log, so you have to balance the obvious privacy concerns.
I don't think it's any different than if you were recording shows to VHS tape and saving them. That there is no discussion of this in the Sony Betamax case, has let the issue remain basically open and up for debate (SONY CORP. OF AMER. v. UNIVERSAL CITY STUDIOS, INC., 464 U.S. 417 (1984)). Although the case doesn't say anything explicitly (based on my reading) about tape "librarying," it certainly does acknowledge that it exists, and IIRC some guy with a substantial library of tapes was hauled in to testify during the proceedings. That the court ruled in favor of Sony even though they knew librarying existed as a widespread practice, seems to be at least a small nod in favor.
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It seems to me that librarying could be easily interpreted as just time-shifting of an arbitrary duration, as long as the works are not further copied. On the other hand, in the ruling, there is a mention of 'time shifting' being the recording of a program at one time, and then watching it a single time later on. Almost as if the playback was a destructive process, and consumed the recording while doing it. However, this is obviously not the case, and any time-shifting technology inherently gives you the ability to watch a recorded program more than once, which really blows away the single-playback test for time shifting.
What's really interesting is that if you read the footnotes in the opinion, there is a sentence which reads: "To the extent that this practice involves librarying, it is addressed in section V. C., infra." (footnote 39) But -- and this is the best part -- there is no section V.C. in the ruling. Section IV has subsections A through B, but no C. Section V doesn't have any subsections at all. It's as if they wrote a section of the opinion to cover home librarying, but then removed it at the last minute, without even updating the footnotes.
This leaves it in a grey area, and to the best of my knowledge there's never been a straightforward test of whether or not librarying for personal use only (without copying or sharing) is infringement. As the Sony case doesn't specify a length of time that a recording can be shifted, I think it could be argued that it's allowed (provided you can pass the other Fair Use tests). Of course, all this is becoming less and less relevant with the DMCA and DRM; there is no Fair Use exemption to the DMCA (although there is one for "interoperability"), so in today's climate, the Sony case wouldn't have even happened -- thus it's hard to extend the ruling too far into the present and future.
At any rate, given the current murkiness of copyright and Fair Use law, I think an unshared archive of legally recorded OTA programs is probably the least of anyone's potential worries at this point. If that's the only thing you have on your computer or your house that might possibly be in violation, you lead either a very virtuous or very boring life.
If you want to read a rather lengthy discussion of the issue, wherein some fairly well-educated (and some not so much) slug it out, it's been beaten to a bloody pulp and then some over at AVS Forums: http://archive.avsforum.com/avs-vb/history/topic/
How the heck did it take them that long? Were they working through the Senate in geographic order, from south to north?
... Yeah, he could." How was he not the first person they looked into?
When I first heard about this thing, my immediate thought was "it's gotta be that fuckhead from Alaska. Wait -- he couldn't possibly be that stupid, could he?
It's a little alarming that there might have been that many better suspects than him to investigate first. But I guess that's become the point of the Senate these days: a high-pressure hose of pork-barrel cash back to your home state. Keep the money rolling in and your head down, and you can stay there apparently forever.
It's bad enough that most police assume that everyone is guilty of something.
Of course, it doesn't help when we have such a Byzantine system of self-contradictory laws, that any any given time, you're almost certainly guaranteed to be guilty of something.
Show me an innocent man and I'll show you a district prosecutor who wasn't interested in looking for something to hang him by.
Jack the Ripper used AOL.
Right. Because now that the porn is illegal, he'd just have killed her according to whatever fantasies he was capable of creating in his imagination. That's such a better outcome.
This sounds like his defense lawyer's wet dream: "the porn made me do it! It was the porn!"
This makes about as much sense as if the city of New York had decided to ban dogs after the Son of Sam said his dog told him to kill people. Maybe the problem is just that people are occasionally psychopaths? Like terrorists, there's very little that you can do to stop them, and there's a very great risk that any attempted "cure" can be worse than the "disease." (E.g., an erosion of civil liberties and freedoms in the face of a very small threat.)
This is true, to an extent. You are almost always going to want to use a lossy codec on your portable player. However, there's really no reason that you should store the music in your library in the same format, when you have a hard drive that's many times the size, and easy to expand, and gets upgraded more frequently. (If you have a flash-based player, then your HD is definitely going to be far larger; if you have a HD player, it might or might not.)
:-/
What I'd like to see is a system where the music is storted on the computer in the library in a lossless format, and then when you sync your player, if it can fit on as lossless, then that's how it goes. (There are a lot of people running around with half-full or less iPods!) If it can't, then it would start to compress it using the codec of your choice.
Obviously, this could increase sync times a lot -- if you had a player that was filled to the gills as lossless, and then you wanted to add more music to it, you would need to clear the player, and add all the music on as compressed files. (Or at least some of it.) But I don't think this is a deal-breaker; you could do the updating as a batch process at night, when most people just leave their player sitting on its charging cradle.
Computers are fast enough now that I really don't think that the performance hit you'd get during copying, caused by the on-the-fly lossless to lossy transcoding, would really be that big a problem. It's a pretty easy process to multithread, meaning that you can easily take advantage of modern architectures (you have separate threads for at least the decoding and reencoding of each file, and you do multiple files at the same time). In a few more years, we'll probably get to the point where the process would be I/O rather than processor-bound anyway, if chips keep getting faster and computers keep getting more cores. (Unless they start using faster hard drives or memory in portable players.)
Anyway, so I'm not disagreeing with you; people are always going to want to get the most from their investment in a portable player. However, in some cases, getting "the most with what you have" might indicate using a lossless codec instead of a lossy one (if you have a player big enough to fit your music losslessly); I'm just proposing that we make software that's intelligent enough to do the optimization.
Although you do have a point; most people think 128kbit MP3 sounds good, so they might not care.
Depends on how you interpret / how far you want to trust the DMCA's Reverse Engineering exception. To my knowledge, it's never been tested in court. Without precedent, it's a bit of a murky path to go down. Then again, one hopes that the FBI has better things to do than chase down people who are transcoding their music from one format to another for their own use. (Actually I think they have better things to do than any sort of copyright enforcement...why don't they come back once the Wars on Terror, Drugs, and Poverty are over?)
Anyway, my point was more that regardless of whether it's legal or not, I think it's morally defensible, and therefore whether to do it or not is a straightforward risk/benefit calculation, based on your odds of getting caught and the resulting punishment.
Just because it's illegal doesn't mean it's wrong to do, if the law is wrong in making it illegal.
As an admitted geek and Linux fan, I'm torn about what to think of the PS3. On one hand, I hope that it succeeds, because that means later I'll be able to buy one to play around with; the whole Cell architecture seems cool, and it's seemingly the most powerful of the next-gen consoles. However, I'm definitely not a fan in any way of BluRay, so that's poisoned a lot of the goodwill I might have had for the platform. It seems like a cheap bundling trick to try and push their DRM-laden, BetaMax-on-a-disc format. I just can't trust anything from that company any more, and I've been burned by their proprietary formats in the past, and the BluRay/PS3 combo stinks of "we want to own you." (And if there's one company I don't want to own me, it's Sony; inventor $60 proprietary HandyCam power plug.) I think that company has vastly outlived its usefulness, and it would be better for everyone involved if it split up into several different independent organizations. If bankruptcy, driven by the cratering failure of the PS3, is what it takes to achieve that, so be it.
I've never been much of a console gamer (or any gamer at all, really), but the Nintendo system seems most intriguing from a bang-for-the-buck perspective; plus I suspect they might have some fun games. I'm wary of this new controller, though. And it seems like it would make a much less capable Linux box and home server, which is something I always keep in mind when I'm looking at gaming devices: when I'm done gaming, I want it to do something else. Obviously I'm in a very small minority in caring about this, though.
The best possible outcome from all this would be that somehow, due to some gigantic economic miscalculation, Microsoft and Sony just annihilate each other and the world becomes a better place. Wouldn't that be nice?
Touche. Although, actually I've rarely purchased DVDs (I have a collection of perhaps half a dozen), although admittedly I do rent them regularly. I hung on to VHS and my LaserDisc player up until fairly recently, when the DRM on DVDs became an effective non-issue. It certainly kept me far, far away for the first few years.
... here's hoping it lasts as long as my LD player did.
Now, the DVD Consortium doesn't seem to even try to fight DeCSS anymore; it's like they've given up. (Or are they just waiting? Hummm.) In the same way that I take all of my new CDs (new to me, I ususally buy used) and pop them into iTunes, I do most of my video watching after I've run the discs through HandBrake. The whole experience is much more pleasant that way. It's what movie-watching ought to be: you sit down, hit play, and watch the movie; not a lot of other shit they've put on the disc. To me, DVDs are a container/transportation format, and one that I only use due to pragmatism and limited alternatives.
A better question to ask might be what a person's feelings are regarding HD-DVD and BluRay: I have no intention of purchasing either, or any other "next gen" player before its DRM has been completely circumvented as well. Even if that means I'm clinging to my Apex DVD/CD/anything-else-that's-round-and-plastic player in 2015
I think the anti-iPod thing is trendy right now. There was a point here on Slashdot, when iPods were new, when everyone and their brother was talking about how cool they were and which one they had/were-going-to-buy/etc.
Now, because they've become common, they're no longer cool; they have no geek cachet anymore. (I've always wondered whether, if the apparently dream of so many Slashdotters became reality and Linux really went mainstream, if we'd be flooded with posts the next month about how it was such a crappy OS and BSD/Minix/ReactOS was really far superior.)
The iPod certainly isn't the end-all and be-all of MP3 players, but it's pretty good at what it does. There are certainly a lot worse things floating around on the market; my girlfriend has a Creative and I think the interface and software are just terrible. She doesn't use it nearly as much as she would, I think, if it was an iPod.
I think people also can't separate the iPod from their dislike of the iTMS and its DRM scheme. This is a bit ridiculous; I might as well hate the Creative player because it works with Microsoft's DRM scheme and the Napster subscription service, or bitch because the "PlaysForSure" tracks won't play on my generic MP3-only player or my iPod. Nobody, either in the iPod camp or on the MS/PlaysForSure one, is putting a gun to your head and making you purchase DRMed tracks for that type of player.
If you become a victim of vendor lock-in, whether to an iPod or to a Creative or any of the other MS-compatible models, it's because you made a consious decision to become that way. It's lack of foresight, nothing more; you can't blame the manufacturers for capitalizing on stupidity, it's been a good business plan for thousands of years.
Only if you re-encode it to another lossy algorithm. Every platform has a lossless compressed codec available at this stage (although sadly there's not really a clear standard across platforms). Just recompress to Apple Lossless or FLAC and you've got a DRM-free file that's the same quality as the original DRMed one.
Given the way that hard disk space is increasing, I think the reasons for using lossy compressions are less compelling every day. I've said elsewhere that the killer feature of the next jukebox program I use (i.e., this is what would get me to switch from iTunes) would be the ability to seamlessly transcode songs on-the-fly, only when it's necessary because you're putting them onto a capacity-restricted portable device.
Is it wrong? No.
Is it illegal? Probably.
Was it really dumb to spend $1,000 on DRMed music? Yep.
You answered your own question. The "low-cost model" is the answer, because it's what the market will really support. It's what people are willing to pay for. Under such a system I think you'd see the end of multi-million-dollar megaproductions and a lot more very-small-budget stuff, whether music or movies or writing/publishing. Frankly, I think it would probably get to the point where whole secondary and tertiary industries would spring up, in order to aggregate content according to partiuclar tastes. (I.e., you'd subscribe to a service where somebody who's taste you trust would comb through the 'net and review stuff; paying not for the content per se but for the reviewing and filtering.)
As to the free-rider question, I attempted to answer this in another post further up in the thread (a reply to another reply of my original post); basically free riders are not a problem, they're just indicative of demand not being what you think it is. The current system essentially forces people to constantly purchase new entertainment-art, because it's so difficult to get to the "back catalog." The actual societal demand for new work is limitless: it will never be saturated no matter how much stuff you have out there; however it is not that big. It's a relatively small, constant demand for new material. So in an unfettered, unmanipulated market, "entertainment" would probably not be the industry that it is today. There just isn't the demand for it -- as you pointed out, given a choice, quite a few people wouldn't pay to bankroll new productions. This is fair, and it would mean that some new stuff wouldn't get made, because there wouldn't be a market for it. But as people get bored, their demand for new content increases, and eventually someone will pay for something new to be created (even if this just means giving a case of beer to their friendly local college band). Viola -- new content.
I think it would get to the point though, where "freeloading" in the way that you describe would be almost a form of aesceticism. Sit around all day and watch "other people's" art? Stuff that was made for them and to their tastes instead of yours? In a world where everyone else is getting works custom-made for them, it might be a very marginal existence. It would be like filling your house full of the little fake photos that come inside WalMart picture frames when you buy them. Because everyone knows that non-custom-made content is free, its perceived value would disappear quickly.
Sure, you can wait and hope that somebody else will pay for the new content, and just get it afterwards; that's your choice as a consumer and free agent in the market. However, when you're sitting in a sea of previously-created art, suddenly the value of new work (particularly custom work) would go up. You might pay for something to be created so that you'd have your name in the credits, or just for personal consumption, or as a gift/tribute/whatever, but doing so wouldn't be much harder than hiring any other type of skilled tradesperson. It would be available if you wanted to do it; and if you didn't want to participate, if you just wanted to "freeload" and listen to music that had been written for and about other people, and watch movies from the vast back catalog that would be available, that's OK too.
The net result of freeloading means less money spent on entertainment, sure, but that's not all bad. It means that only the amount of entertainment that's demanded (and people are willing to pay for) is what gets created, and that more money is available for other things. You're still going to spend your income somewhere -- if not on entertainment than on hardgoods, or put it into savings -- so there's really no net loss. By removing distortive controls (of which DRM is one), we allow supply to match demand over time, and this is a good thing in general; it ensures that we aren't spending more effort as a society than we should be on 'manufacturing' entertainment.
Of course, since this would mean the demise of the 'entertainme
I don't think that the fee was really stopping anyone who was Truly Interested from getting the service, but it certainly was keeping some people who were maybe peripherally interested, but not wholly convinced, from giving it a shot.
There is very little difference between $19 and $20. There is a huge, vast, gaping chasm between something that costs $1 and something that is free.
If you can now play with a service at no cost, I think more people are likely to try it out, who wouldn't have even considered it before just because it costs money. Now, it's a valid question whether these sorts of folks are really worth anything as customers, but that's a separate issue.