As was discussed elsewhere, they'd require you to sign away copyright to whatever you turned in as a condition of taking the course - no-one is forcing you to enroll, thus no duress.
I think the greater question is if at a public highschool, when completing your legally-mandated education, can a teacher/professor compel a student to use such a service (and thereby surrender the right to their intellectual property) as a condition of receiving a passing grade in the course?
I think to really establish a case, some students are going to have to flatly refuse to use Turnitin, and wait for a teacher to flunk them in a course that's required in order to graduate (most English classes are, or at least they were back when I was in school). I think there might be some precedent surrounding what schools can require students to do in order to let them graduate, as a result of cases surrounding high-stakes exit exams, perhaps.
It seems to me that you could construct an argument that a public school teacher saying that 'you must use this service or you'll fail the course and not graduate' (when, remember, you don't have any option to be in the class or not, if you're under 18 anyway) counts as duress.
Unless the research is from government funding. All of my funding comes from the NSF or NIST, and since the money is taxpayer's money research that comes from it cannot be copywritten. So in addition to giving the Journal the transfer-of-copyright form, I also send them a form that says technically I have no copyright to transfer to them.
This is very interesting -- I've always thought that this should be how it works, but I wasn't clear whether Government-funded research went into the public domain or what. It certainly seems like nothing but a big fat handout to the journal publishers, if billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded research are just turned over to them by scientists trying to get their papers in print.
Algae, in the desert? Seems like the water consumption would be a big problem; we're already terribly short of water in former-desert areas that have been converted to agriculture as it is. I'm not sure that swapping petroleum shortages for water shortages is really a great plan. I suppose it fixes some of the foreign-policy issues associated with petrodollars flowing to the Middle East, but it still puts us in a precarious position.
If you really want to drive the cheaters out of the woodwork, just normalize or force-curve the grades. Force-curving is significantly more evil (e.g., "I'm going to give two A's, 4 B's, six C's, 4 D's, and 2 F's...you're competing against each other,") and tends to cause ugliness (top students trying to undermine/flunk/kill each other), but a positive-only normalization has many of the benefits without the drawbacks.
If you say at the beginning of class that at the end, you're going to normalize the grades to 80 or 85%, which isn't terribly uncommon, then it creates an incentive not to help someone cheat off of you, but doesn't create a hugely cutthroat competition in the upper echelons of a class.
If that's how it's typically used (and it's not clear in TFA's case whether the teachers/professor submitted the papers, or if the students were required to do it themselves), then the question is whether students at a public highschool can be required to surrender their rights to their own intellectual property in order to receive a grade in a required course.
This is a sketchier argument; in general, most courts in the U.S. have given public schools fairly broad powers to compel students to do anything they want out of them, except where there's a straightforward Constitutional issue (school prayer, vaccinations, etc.).
In order to make that into a tryable case, some student might have to be willing to really sacrifice themselves; write nothing but grade-A papers, but refuse to submit them to Turnitin and wait for the teacher/school to fail them in a required course and prevent them from graduating. That ought to be actionable, since it's easier to see what the damages are; when the damages are just the loss of exclusive rights to your 11th grade English paper on Hamlet, it's not as compelling.
If they wanted something I wrote in their catalog, they can damn well pay me something for it.
I probably wouldn't even ask for very much. Heck, I bet if Turnitin offered a buck a page, they'd get thousands (perhaps millions) of high school and college papers. Who here doesn't have a disk or directory sitting around somewhere, filled with old work from their HS or undergrad courses? I know I do.
When Turnitin misuses students' intellectual property in this way, they not only injure the students (who aren't getting paid for their papers, which obviously have some market value, or Turnitin wouldn't be scooping them up), they're also eliminating a much broader market that might exist, for original highschool- and college-level papers.
Now, I admit, the amount of harm to any one person out there is pretty small. Using my (B.S.) number of $1 a page, which is probably way above what the market would bear (although, to be honest, it's not that much more ridiculous than some of the other "damages" that get called up in lawsuits, e.g., the RIAA's value-per-song), I'm probably not being denied more than a hundred bucks, total. Perhaps there are some English majors out there who would be out some more, but it's not that much per person. However, since Turnitin's entire business model and revenue are based essentially on the repository of stolen IP that they use to compare other papers to, there's a significant amount of value in the papers in toto. (Similarly, even though the damage done to the music companies by any single Napster download was very small, it was obvious due to Napster's success as a company, that there was some value being derived from all that stolen IP.)
Actually, I think the universities are still worth discussing, because many places do not have blanket IP surrender clauses, and there's a lot more valuable IP generated at higher educational institutions than there is at highschools.
Which is not to say that highschool papers are lacking in merit or value, but just that they tend not to be quite as marketable as college ones (and I don't mean just English papers here; think of the amount of research or other IP that comes out of an engineering or business school -- there's a lot of skilled man-hours there).
I don't think the fair use defense is going to hold water. The situations in which you can claim fair use are pretty slim; a for-profit service, who is obviously deriving some economic benefit by using somebody else's copyrighted paper (by adding it to their database) is probably not going to qualify. I'm not sure what harm the students can claim, but if they have any decent lawyers at all, they'll find some way of doing it.
I actually wouldn't mind if it was covered under Fair Use, because I think that's something we could really do with broadening, but the law as written today wouldn't cover it.
Now, what I think will happen, is that Turnitin will advise its clients (schools, universities, etc.) that in order to use the service, they must obtain a release from students that includes permission to upload the files. This way, they'll just offload the responsibility for copyright infringement off on the schools, who will just force students to release their work, or refuse to give them a grade.
I don't think it'll be very long before, when you apply to a college or university, you also sign away all rights to everything you think, say, or do while you're there, in perpetuity, in any medium whatsoever. They'll just make it part of the admissions contract, and that will be it -- at least for private schools and colleges. I'm not sure what legal grounds you would get into with public schools, and whether they could force students to do that or not.
But I think the students in the Turnitin case, have just as much if not more grounds than the plaintiffs in the similar cases of book publishers vs. Google. (Actually, I think Google has a much better Fair Use defense than Turnitin does.)
We can deduct part of the cost from tax. It is subsidized, through tax and county net, and it is possible, in US as well. On the countryside it is different even here, as houses are very separated. I would not say the problems in US is very different than here, it is more that they trying to solve it without subsidies.
And I think a major part of the question in the U.S. is "do we really want to subsidize it?"
I'm a big supporter of broadband, and I think the government could do a lot more to spur development in this area, but even I draw the line when it comes to using direct tax revenue to subsidize consumer broadband access. That doesn't seem like a legitimate function of government to me. Particularly when you add in all the other things that I'd like the government to deal with first (either to spend money on, or stop spending money on), broadband probably isn't even in the top 5 or 10.
Add to that the seemingly utter incapability of our government to find ways of funding that don't involve more taxes, and I'm further disinclined to support subsidies. I'm not going to pay more on April 15 so that my next-door neighbor can get better WoW pingtimes. Providing broadband to a lab that does cancer research might be different, but I'm not going to pay for other consumers' access -- if they want broadband, they can buy it. As long as we create competition, so that people have multiple options of who they want to buy it from, I'm content to let the market fix the price of what's essentially a luxury itself.
The only exception to this which I'd support, would be on very local levels; e.g. local municipal broadband. But I probably wouldn't support it on a state, and certainly not a Federal, level -- as you get further away from the voters, responsiveness and responsibility decreases (I think it's some sort of inverse-square law, or maybe 1/x^3). And even in the case of a local municipality, I probably wouldn't support any direct financing, only low-interest loans using the municipality's bond rating to get startup capital.
The major problem we have in the U.S. is that the telcos have basically colluded with government and got a lot of protective legislation passed, that makes it difficult to compete with them. "Broadband in every home," like 'a chicken in every pot,' may be a nice sentiment, but I'm not going to help pay for it. As long as there is full and open competition, with the least barriers to entry as possible, the rest is up to consumers to decide if they want to buy it.
The best part about that movie is that it was actually made by Microsoft. It was a sort of self-critique, prior to Zune, of "this is how we shouldn't do it."
That's what really does it for me -- they know how mediocre an organization they are, but yet they can't seem to stop being lame.
Seriously, though, I think that TextMate survives because it doesn't quite try to be an IDE, although it does have some definitely IDE-ish features for a text editor.
It's basically for the kind of person who doesn't want to use a full on development environment, but instead just wants a really robust, extensible text editor for cranking out various forms of ASCII (and Unicode).
I don't quite agree with the reviewer when he describes TextMate as mostly a RoR development tool. I've never really noticed that about Textmate. In fact, it comes with a huge selection of built-in highlighting presets, for every commonly-used language, plus less-commonly used ones, plus some things that aren't even programming languages at all (e.g., syntax highlighting for markup languages like Markdown or MultiMarkDown). It's a very general-purpose tool.
The idea is to be an "Emacs for OS X" (which is totally different than being a port of Emacs to OS X -- they want to make a general-purpose, heavy-duty text editor that's as true to the Mac GUI philosophy as Emacs is to the Unix one), which is slightly different than being an IDE. They don't really try to compete directly with Eclipse, or Xcode.
Not totally certain, but I would guess so. Depending on how big the pagefile was, perhaps the drive does some intelligent load-balancing that would keep you from frying it too quickly, but it might be better to keep another drive around for that, or loading the machine up with enough RAM to keep it from swapping often.
I used to know people who swore that, after adding RAM, the best thing you could do for speed was to add a small-but-fast SCSI hard drive and use it for nothing but your swapfile. I've never gone that route personally, because I've never thought it worth the expense, but I bet it would make for a pretty nice system. And I also suspect there have to be a lot of SCSI drives on the used market if you look.
I stopped reading that article when I got to this sentence: "This value system is not intrinsically worse than the one that determines prime-time television's crisp, white-collar aesthetic..."
Crisp, white-collar aesthetic? What prime-time television are they watching, Masterpiece Theatre on PBS? Where I live, the top-rated shows recently have been American Idol, whose major feature is watching talentless drones try to sing and be mercilessly ridiculed for their effort, and Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader, which is essentially ridiculing people for being dumber than their own children.
If this is a "crisp, white collar aesthetic," then I'd hate to see what the Grey Lady thinks "blue collar" is like. A six-pack of PBR and a bug zapper?
Sadly, most interviewers gave less than enthusiastic reviews of her performance. Most dubbed her "vanilla", the "same old thing", "boring", etc. I think that losing the uniqueness of the "YouTube only" format is already costing her.
Bingo. She had a niche as an internet phenomenon, that she probably could have spun into something, but I think she jumped at this record deal, and now she's just a very small fish in a very big ocean.
Oh, well. She proved that it could be done, and that you could achieve a significant amount of notoriety on the Internet, even with just a single song -- other people will follow, and follow through.
I curious about the number of installed TVs in 1998 that didn't have a composite video input.
It was probably pretty high -- I know my parents still have an old VHF/UHF set sitting around in an extra bedroom, and almost 10 years ago there were probably a lot more.
However, the problem of TVs without composite inputs was basically solved during the 70s and 80s by VCRs. They built a RF modulator into them so that you can hook it up to your TV and just tune to Chan. 3 and see whatever the VCR is currently putting out, be it the feed from its own tuner, or from the tape deck.
Now, were it not from Macrovision, Mr and Mrs America could have just plugged their brand-new DVD player into the back of their VCR, and watched their DVDs that way. Unfortunately, most (new) VCRs won't work that way, because they go all haywire thanks to the Macrovision signal, necessitating a second RF modulator (which there is NO GOOD REASON for) to watch DVDs on an old TV. Or, a professional VCR that ignores Macrovision (which basically means it has a defeatable Auto Gain Control circuit).
Not all the big box stores have driven the little guy out of business. If the little guy can provide better service and quality products, even at a higher price, consumers will still buy from them. Where I am from people value the local butcher, as the cuts of meat are better than the megamart packs, with it being the same price or cheaper. And the local lumber company is thriving as well too, even with Lowes and Home Depot in the area. A knowledgeable staff and quality product selection is worth its weight in gold. Now if a small business doesn't provide one of these features, then yes, they will probably not stay in business in todays market.
I'm with you; but this just furthers my point, that artificial protection isn't necessary to keep big boxes from running everyone else over. Stores that provide service that is in some way superior to the big-box ones, will remain in business. Stores that don't, will go under. That's the way it ought to work.
There are lots of ways that you can compete with Wal-Mart or Target, besides price; there's selection, atmosphere, quality of service... any number of factors. The key is just finding something that people will pay for. If they'll pay for it, then viola, you've got your business model. If they won't, then keep looking -- but don't think that just because you're a Mom&Pop, that you somehow deserve to have your failing business model propped up through protective regulation. That doesn't help anyone in the long run.
Saying that Walmart is going to destroy all other business is a little, to me, like saying that McDonalds is going to run all the other restaurants out of business. A new McDonalds in town might cause the local greasy spoon or hot-dog stand to go under, but it's not going to affect higher end restaurants that offer something that McD's doesn't.
The people who really need to fear WalMart and Target are the ones who have nothing to offer the consumer except what WalMart and Target do better.
I agree that socialist/quasi-communist economies did some spectacular environmental damage, and otherwise demonstrated a callousness for human life that's pretty remarkable. (Not least of which was taking old positive-void-coefficient bomb-factory reactors and using them in nuclear power plants, as a large uninhabited area in the Ukraine can attest to.)
However, you get the same problems on the other end of the extreme, if you have totally unrestrained free markets. It's just that we don't have quite as many examples of them, in the recent First World anyway, because there aren't that many totally unrestrained free markets. Down in poorer countries, though, there have been well-documented environmental and human abuses by corporations trying to maximize profit in the absence of regulation -- in particular, things like the Bhopal disaster, and the ongoing environmental problems in S.E. Asian ship breakers. Historically, we had periods in the U.S. when there was great loss of life due to private-sector negligence (Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Love Canal, etc.), and which have spurred varying degrees of regulation.
Moreover, if both the private sector and the public can be dangerous to the public when they're unrestrained by themselves, it's when they work together against the public interest that they're really worst -- and this situation is fairly common in the third world, where the populace is simply another resource to be exploited by corporations, together with the full complicity and aid of the government.
So I'm not really sure that it's worth pointing fingers as to which is "worst." Unrestrained free markets tend to lead to companies who are so powerful, that the acquire the power to manipulate and influence government, and entrench their positions. When you say that "monopolies of the type usually used to justify government interventionism... have trouble staying in business," you ignore that companies that big usually can afford legislation that protects their monopoly. Unless you have a government that's somehow un-corruptable (an impossibility, if it involves human beings at any level at all), it's just not safe to allow corporations to get that big, because they will always just buy protection when their business starts to collapse under its own weight.
But overall, I think you can find ample historical examples both for the evils of an overly powerful central government, and overly-powerful industry. Neither situation is really one that I'd prefer to live under. As usual, it's somewhere in the middle that you avoid most of the worst problems.
There are (at least) two separate technologies being discussed in the article summary. This being Slashdot, they're all muddled together.
The "gait recognition" is fairly new, and I'd agree it's a tad creepy.
However, the non-moving-object detection isn't that new, and is a pretty good idea IMO. It's one of the things that actually makes cameras effective rather than just a tool to help the police sort out what the hell happened after a crime or act of terrorism has already been committed.
Basically, you can tell a computer what the view from a camera should look like when it's totally empty (say, an airport lobby when the airport is closed). Then, it can constantly analyze the frame and look for any new objects that aren't transient. This way it ignores people standing about, but can flag stuff that's not furniture or permanent objects, but which hasn't moved in a while. It's an obnoxious job for a human being to try and do this, and people are easily distracted, but it's easy for a computer.
And the computer can bring it to the attention of human staff, who can then look at the camera and determine subjectively if there's something there worth checking out, or if it's just somebody who's flight got delayed and is sleeping on a bench.
It can also spot vehicles in parking lots/garages that haven't moved, over some period of time (which could be minutes/hours/days), which is handy. It saves police some work if you can automatically flag cars that are parking or standing where they're not supposed to be, and let someone come on a PA system and ask them to move along, rather than having officers constantly patrol and spend their time directing traffic when they should be doing more important functions (like looking for folks who look suspicious or "not right" in some way; as a lot of experience in Israel has shown, it's people looking at other people for the guy who just doesn't look right, that's actually far more effective than equipment at picking out would-be terrorists).
Now, I'm not sure what the utility would be of a system like this on a random city street -- parking enforcement would be about it, unless you're going to call the bomb squad every time somebody leaves some trash next to a can -- but for airports, train stations, subways, etc., it's not bad.
The more complex system that attempt to do "fingerprinting," e.g. facial recognition or gait recognition, I'm a lot more skeptical of. But the simpler object-detection systems are fairly benign.
This might work, however, I suspect that people might just listen to the 64kbps version and never buy the high-quality version, because they don't care about (or won't pay for) quality. I've listened to some really dreadful stuff that's originated on P2P networks (compression artifacts, audible clipping, tape rumble, etc.), and a lot of people just don't seem to notice how bad it is, or care. I'm not talking about audiophile-grade differences here, I mean music that literally sounds like it was played out of a AM radio inside a 88-gallon oil drum, as recorded by a Fisher Price tape deck. And people have this on their iPod and think it's just fine.
So I think that you might find your market narrowed only to people who care about sound quality, which is small (for pop music, anyway, based on my unscientific observations).
Furthermore, if the quality of the free version was degraded enough to cause a large number of people to think that the high-quality version was a significant improvement, then the people who are going to pirate, are just going to pirate the HQ version.
So overall, I'm not sure that you've really deterred any piracy. If your "LQ" version is too good, people -- pirates and honest folks alike -- won't buy the HQ version and just stick with what's free; if it's too crappy, then it'll be ignored by people who are going to pirate, and they'll just trade the HQ version instead, as if the LQ one hadn't existed. Now, given those two scenarios, it's the latter one that's more desirable, since it really doesn't hurt you (versus not releasing a free version at all), plus maybe some people (who won't pirate) will hear the song from the LQ version and go on to purchase legit copies. But there's danger in providing a LQ version that might compete with the version you make money from, because it will cut into legitimate sales.
I think, overall, the 'solution' to the 'piracy problem' is not to view it as a problem. If you don't try to sell your music as a product, but instead view it as an advertising vehicle that gets people to come to your shows and buy your merchandise, then suddenly someone who puts your band's tracks up on Bittorrent is doing you a favor rather than harm. (And, you can even turn CDs from a simple can of easily-pirated bits, into non-duplicable merchandise, just by signing it and marketing it as an "autographed copy.")
As I mentioned in another topic, I think this is insane but apparently the RIAA thinks CDs should cost $34 each due to inflation...
Actually, I would really enjoy seeing the RIAA's member companies decide to all price their CDs at $35 a piece. Yeah, just try that, guys.
It would be the best thing that ever happened to non-RIAA music and bands, though. I also suspect that sales of blank CDs (for copying) and tapes (for recording off the radio) would skyrocket, and internet traffic would go through the roof.
I suspect that $15 or $20 is the real "point of pain" for most people, when it comes to purchasing an durable entertainment product (as opposed to a transient entertainment product, like a movie ticket, where it's a little lower). Go any higher than that, and people are going to find alternatives, even if it's just listening to the voices in their heads.
Do you pay more to see 300 or Zodiac than you pay for Wild Hogs? Nope.
Well, sort of: I was willing to pay $8.50 to see 300 and Zodiac, and I might be willing to see $SOME_CRAPPY_MOVIE for a quarter (particularly if they sold beer at the same time), but the theater doesn't show movies for a quarter, so I only go to the ones that I think won't suck.
They sell them for the same price, but I'm only willing to go to a few of them for the price they charge.
Likewise, I only buy the tracks that I really like at $1 a song. (Actually, I hardly buy any, because I think $1 a song is still highway robbery for DRMed music, but theoretically I'd be willing to buy some songs for a buck.) If they were $0.05 a song (like, say, a certain Russian site I won't mention), I'd probably never buy just a single song off a CD, I'd just get the whole disc just on the off-chance that another song might be decent. Conversely, at $8 a song, I'd probably never buy it regardless of how good it was -- I'd just sit and hum to myself, or listen to music that I already own.
The problem isn't variable pricing per se, the problem is that the record labels want to implement variable pricing with $1/track as the price floor, for the crap tracks, when they should really be thinking about that as a price ceiling, for the very best ones.
But anyway, aside from that, I'm agreeing with you.
For new singers, most people don't know, or cannot be bothered to download/pirate their new songs, and the only way to listen to those songs is to buy them.
What? Are you high? That doesn't make sense.
If a particular song becomes popular, it will get pirated. There's no way to get popularity while also avoiding pirates. If you want to not be pirated, you could try to not be popular, but that's sort of the opposite of what anyone trying to sell CDs or promote concerts wants. You'll never make money if you drop an act the second it becomes popular enough to get on Bittorrent -- that's totally counterproductive.
What you're suggesting, I think, is that promoters and labels will record a few songs with an artist, and then drop them the second that the become popular and their stuff gets pirated, which is also the time when people would start buying merchandise and showing up to concerts (and when the artist could probably go out on his own and start making money on said merch and tickets). Nobody's just going to walk away from their investment of time and money at that point.
First, piracy isn't that bad: it doesn't stop people from buying CDs completely, as evidenced by the fact that I can still walk into a store and buy them. Second, even if it was, there are ways to make money off of popularity besides selling CDs. Concert tickets and merch are just the tip of the iceberg. Even the most stogy labels have to realize this (and if they don't pursue them, it's only because they're already making enough off of CDs, furthering my point that the piracy isn't as bad as you seem to think it is).
Popularity is an advantage unto itself, and if a label or promoter dumped a band that was on the cusp of becoming phenomenal, then certainly someone else would step in and pick it up. (And companies that did this repeatedly would probably end up out of business in short order.)
Some people like bands that do concept albums, some people don't.
They're two entirely different styles of music. It's like the difference between a symphony written for full orchestra and something written for a four-part chamber ensemble. I don't think that many people would really argue that the orchestral piece is inherently 'superior,' in any sort of quantifiable way besides personal taste, to the chamber piece, they're just different. (And, more to the point, many composers have written for both.) It's as bizarre as saying that novelists are inherently "better" writers than essayists, because they produce longer stories. It doesn't make sense.
The three- to four-minute "song" has proved to be an incredibly popular format for popular music over the last century, and I don't think you can chalk that up entirely to the machinations of the RIAA (which, let's face it, was a pretty benign organization until fairly recently) or the "music industry." Probably a lot of credit goes to radio, but if people really hated individual songs, there's no way they'd be as popular as they are.
It's a format people enjoy, and there's nothing inherently better or worse about it than a long album. To be honest, I'd argue that an artist that could communicate effectively in either format was probably better at their trade than one who's mostly restricted themselves to either 70-minute concept albums or 3-minute ditties, but it's really an academic point.
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As was discussed elsewhere, they'd require you to sign away copyright to whatever you turned in as a condition of taking the course - no-one is forcing you to enroll, thus no duress.
I think the greater question is if at a public highschool, when completing your legally-mandated education, can a teacher/professor compel a student to use such a service (and thereby surrender the right to their intellectual property) as a condition of receiving a passing grade in the course?
I think to really establish a case, some students are going to have to flatly refuse to use Turnitin, and wait for a teacher to flunk them in a course that's required in order to graduate (most English classes are, or at least they were back when I was in school). I think there might be some precedent surrounding what schools can require students to do in order to let them graduate, as a result of cases surrounding high-stakes exit exams, perhaps.
It seems to me that you could construct an argument that a public school teacher saying that 'you must use this service or you'll fail the course and not graduate' (when, remember, you don't have any option to be in the class or not, if you're under 18 anyway) counts as duress.
Unless the research is from government funding. All of my funding comes from the NSF or NIST, and since the money is taxpayer's money research that comes from it cannot be copywritten. So in addition to giving the Journal the transfer-of-copyright form, I also send them a form that says technically I have no copyright to transfer to them.
This is very interesting -- I've always thought that this should be how it works, but I wasn't clear whether Government-funded research went into the public domain or what. It certainly seems like nothing but a big fat handout to the journal publishers, if billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded research are just turned over to them by scientists trying to get their papers in print.
Obviously, we just need some way of bypassing the middle man in all this, and converting poor people directly into fuel!
Algae, in the desert? Seems like the water consumption would be a big problem; we're already terribly short of water in former-desert areas that have been converted to agriculture as it is. I'm not sure that swapping petroleum shortages for water shortages is really a great plan. I suppose it fixes some of the foreign-policy issues associated with petrodollars flowing to the Middle East, but it still puts us in a precarious position.
If you really want to drive the cheaters out of the woodwork, just normalize or force-curve the grades. Force-curving is significantly more evil (e.g., "I'm going to give two A's, 4 B's, six C's, 4 D's, and 2 F's...you're competing against each other,") and tends to cause ugliness (top students trying to undermine/flunk/kill each other), but a positive-only normalization has many of the benefits without the drawbacks.
If you say at the beginning of class that at the end, you're going to normalize the grades to 80 or 85%, which isn't terribly uncommon, then it creates an incentive not to help someone cheat off of you, but doesn't create a hugely cutthroat competition in the upper echelons of a class.
If that's how it's typically used (and it's not clear in TFA's case whether the teachers/professor submitted the papers, or if the students were required to do it themselves), then the question is whether students at a public highschool can be required to surrender their rights to their own intellectual property in order to receive a grade in a required course.
This is a sketchier argument; in general, most courts in the U.S. have given public schools fairly broad powers to compel students to do anything they want out of them, except where there's a straightforward Constitutional issue (school prayer, vaccinations, etc.).
In order to make that into a tryable case, some student might have to be willing to really sacrifice themselves; write nothing but grade-A papers, but refuse to submit them to Turnitin and wait for the teacher/school to fail them in a required course and prevent them from graduating. That ought to be actionable, since it's easier to see what the damages are; when the damages are just the loss of exclusive rights to your 11th grade English paper on Hamlet, it's not as compelling.
It is precisely because they are profiting off of my hard work that I block them in robots.txt.
I didn't know that professors obeyed robots.txt.
I guess I shouldn't be so surprised...
If they wanted something I wrote in their catalog, they can damn well pay me something for it.
I probably wouldn't even ask for very much. Heck, I bet if Turnitin offered a buck a page, they'd get thousands (perhaps millions) of high school and college papers. Who here doesn't have a disk or directory sitting around somewhere, filled with old work from their HS or undergrad courses? I know I do.
When Turnitin misuses students' intellectual property in this way, they not only injure the students (who aren't getting paid for their papers, which obviously have some market value, or Turnitin wouldn't be scooping them up), they're also eliminating a much broader market that might exist, for original highschool- and college-level papers.
Now, I admit, the amount of harm to any one person out there is pretty small. Using my (B.S.) number of $1 a page, which is probably way above what the market would bear (although, to be honest, it's not that much more ridiculous than some of the other "damages" that get called up in lawsuits, e.g., the RIAA's value-per-song), I'm probably not being denied more than a hundred bucks, total. Perhaps there are some English majors out there who would be out some more, but it's not that much per person. However, since Turnitin's entire business model and revenue are based essentially on the repository of stolen IP that they use to compare other papers to, there's a significant amount of value in the papers in toto. (Similarly, even though the damage done to the music companies by any single Napster download was very small, it was obvious due to Napster's success as a company, that there was some value being derived from all that stolen IP.)
Actually, I think the universities are still worth discussing, because many places do not have blanket IP surrender clauses, and there's a lot more valuable IP generated at higher educational institutions than there is at highschools.
Which is not to say that highschool papers are lacking in merit or value, but just that they tend not to be quite as marketable as college ones (and I don't mean just English papers here; think of the amount of research or other IP that comes out of an engineering or business school -- there's a lot of skilled man-hours there).
I don't think the fair use defense is going to hold water. The situations in which you can claim fair use are pretty slim; a for-profit service, who is obviously deriving some economic benefit by using somebody else's copyrighted paper (by adding it to their database) is probably not going to qualify. I'm not sure what harm the students can claim, but if they have any decent lawyers at all, they'll find some way of doing it.
I actually wouldn't mind if it was covered under Fair Use, because I think that's something we could really do with broadening, but the law as written today wouldn't cover it.
Now, what I think will happen, is that Turnitin will advise its clients (schools, universities, etc.) that in order to use the service, they must obtain a release from students that includes permission to upload the files. This way, they'll just offload the responsibility for copyright infringement off on the schools, who will just force students to release their work, or refuse to give them a grade.
I don't think it'll be very long before, when you apply to a college or university, you also sign away all rights to everything you think, say, or do while you're there, in perpetuity, in any medium whatsoever. They'll just make it part of the admissions contract, and that will be it -- at least for private schools and colleges. I'm not sure what legal grounds you would get into with public schools, and whether they could force students to do that or not.
But I think the students in the Turnitin case, have just as much if not more grounds than the plaintiffs in the similar cases of book publishers vs. Google. (Actually, I think Google has a much better Fair Use defense than Turnitin does.)
We can deduct part of the cost from tax. It is subsidized, through tax and county net, and it is possible, in US as well. On the countryside it is different even here, as houses are very separated. I would not say the problems in US is very different than here, it is more that they trying to solve it without subsidies.
And I think a major part of the question in the U.S. is "do we really want to subsidize it?"
I'm a big supporter of broadband, and I think the government could do a lot more to spur development in this area, but even I draw the line when it comes to using direct tax revenue to subsidize consumer broadband access. That doesn't seem like a legitimate function of government to me. Particularly when you add in all the other things that I'd like the government to deal with first (either to spend money on, or stop spending money on), broadband probably isn't even in the top 5 or 10.
Add to that the seemingly utter incapability of our government to find ways of funding that don't involve more taxes, and I'm further disinclined to support subsidies. I'm not going to pay more on April 15 so that my next-door neighbor can get better WoW pingtimes. Providing broadband to a lab that does cancer research might be different, but I'm not going to pay for other consumers' access -- if they want broadband, they can buy it. As long as we create competition, so that people have multiple options of who they want to buy it from, I'm content to let the market fix the price of what's essentially a luxury itself.
The only exception to this which I'd support, would be on very local levels; e.g. local municipal broadband. But I probably wouldn't support it on a state, and certainly not a Federal, level -- as you get further away from the voters, responsiveness and responsibility decreases (I think it's some sort of inverse-square law, or maybe 1/x^3). And even in the case of a local municipality, I probably wouldn't support any direct financing, only low-interest loans using the municipality's bond rating to get startup capital.
The major problem we have in the U.S. is that the telcos have basically colluded with government and got a lot of protective legislation passed, that makes it difficult to compete with them. "Broadband in every home," like 'a chicken in every pot,' may be a nice sentiment, but I'm not going to help pay for it. As long as there is full and open competition, with the least barriers to entry as possible, the rest is up to consumers to decide if they want to buy it.
The best part about that movie is that it was actually made by Microsoft. It was a sort of self-critique, prior to Zune, of "this is how we shouldn't do it."
That's what really does it for me -- they know how mediocre an organization they are, but yet they can't seem to stop being lame.
Yeah -- it's not Eclipse.
Seriously, though, I think that TextMate survives because it doesn't quite try to be an IDE, although it does have some definitely IDE-ish features for a text editor.
It's basically for the kind of person who doesn't want to use a full on development environment, but instead just wants a really robust, extensible text editor for cranking out various forms of ASCII (and Unicode).
I don't quite agree with the reviewer when he describes TextMate as mostly a RoR development tool. I've never really noticed that about Textmate. In fact, it comes with a huge selection of built-in highlighting presets, for every commonly-used language, plus less-commonly used ones, plus some things that aren't even programming languages at all (e.g., syntax highlighting for markup languages like Markdown or MultiMarkDown). It's a very general-purpose tool.
The idea is to be an "Emacs for OS X" (which is totally different than being a port of Emacs to OS X -- they want to make a general-purpose, heavy-duty text editor that's as true to the Mac GUI philosophy as Emacs is to the Unix one), which is slightly different than being an IDE. They don't really try to compete directly with Eclipse, or Xcode.
Not totally certain, but I would guess so. Depending on how big the pagefile was, perhaps the drive does some intelligent load-balancing that would keep you from frying it too quickly, but it might be better to keep another drive around for that, or loading the machine up with enough RAM to keep it from swapping often.
I used to know people who swore that, after adding RAM, the best thing you could do for speed was to add a small-but-fast SCSI hard drive and use it for nothing but your swapfile. I've never gone that route personally, because I've never thought it worth the expense, but I bet it would make for a pretty nice system. And I also suspect there have to be a lot of SCSI drives on the used market if you look.
I stopped reading that article when I got to this sentence: "This value system is not intrinsically worse than the one that determines prime-time television's crisp, white-collar aesthetic..."
Crisp, white-collar aesthetic? What prime-time television are they watching, Masterpiece Theatre on PBS? Where I live, the top-rated shows recently have been American Idol, whose major feature is watching talentless drones try to sing and be mercilessly ridiculed for their effort, and Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader, which is essentially ridiculing people for being dumber than their own children.
If this is a "crisp, white collar aesthetic," then I'd hate to see what the Grey Lady thinks "blue collar" is like. A six-pack of PBR and a bug zapper?
Methinks they're a little out of touch.
Sadly, most interviewers gave less than enthusiastic reviews of her performance. Most dubbed her "vanilla", the "same old thing", "boring", etc. I think that losing the uniqueness of the "YouTube only" format is already costing her.
Bingo. She had a niche as an internet phenomenon, that she probably could have spun into something, but I think she jumped at this record deal, and now she's just a very small fish in a very big ocean.
Oh, well. She proved that it could be done, and that you could achieve a significant amount of notoriety on the Internet, even with just a single song -- other people will follow, and follow through.
I curious about the number of installed TVs in 1998 that didn't have a composite video input.
It was probably pretty high -- I know my parents still have an old VHF/UHF set sitting around in an extra bedroom, and almost 10 years ago there were probably a lot more.
However, the problem of TVs without composite inputs was basically solved during the 70s and 80s by VCRs. They built a RF modulator into them so that you can hook it up to your TV and just tune to Chan. 3 and see whatever the VCR is currently putting out, be it the feed from its own tuner, or from the tape deck.
Now, were it not from Macrovision, Mr and Mrs America could have just plugged their brand-new DVD player into the back of their VCR, and watched their DVDs that way. Unfortunately, most (new) VCRs won't work that way, because they go all haywire thanks to the Macrovision signal, necessitating a second RF modulator (which there is NO GOOD REASON for) to watch DVDs on an old TV. Or, a professional VCR that ignores Macrovision (which basically means it has a defeatable Auto Gain Control circuit).
Not all the big box stores have driven the little guy out of business. If the little guy can provide better service and quality products, even at a higher price, consumers will still buy from them. Where I am from people value the local butcher, as the cuts of meat are better than the megamart packs, with it being the same price or cheaper. And the local lumber company is thriving as well too, even with Lowes and Home Depot in the area. A knowledgeable staff and quality product selection is worth its weight in gold. Now if a small business doesn't provide one of these features, then yes, they will probably not stay in business in todays market.
... any number of factors. The key is just finding something that people will pay for. If they'll pay for it, then viola, you've got your business model. If they won't, then keep looking -- but don't think that just because you're a Mom&Pop, that you somehow deserve to have your failing business model propped up through protective regulation. That doesn't help anyone in the long run.
I'm with you; but this just furthers my point, that artificial protection isn't necessary to keep big boxes from running everyone else over. Stores that provide service that is in some way superior to the big-box ones, will remain in business. Stores that don't, will go under. That's the way it ought to work.
There are lots of ways that you can compete with Wal-Mart or Target, besides price; there's selection, atmosphere, quality of service
Saying that Walmart is going to destroy all other business is a little, to me, like saying that McDonalds is going to run all the other restaurants out of business. A new McDonalds in town might cause the local greasy spoon or hot-dog stand to go under, but it's not going to affect higher end restaurants that offer something that McD's doesn't.
The people who really need to fear WalMart and Target are the ones who have nothing to offer the consumer except what WalMart and Target do better.
I agree that socialist/quasi-communist economies did some spectacular environmental damage, and otherwise demonstrated a callousness for human life that's pretty remarkable. (Not least of which was taking old positive-void-coefficient bomb-factory reactors and using them in nuclear power plants, as a large uninhabited area in the Ukraine can attest to.)
... have trouble staying in business," you ignore that companies that big usually can afford legislation that protects their monopoly. Unless you have a government that's somehow un-corruptable (an impossibility, if it involves human beings at any level at all), it's just not safe to allow corporations to get that big, because they will always just buy protection when their business starts to collapse under its own weight.
However, you get the same problems on the other end of the extreme, if you have totally unrestrained free markets. It's just that we don't have quite as many examples of them, in the recent First World anyway, because there aren't that many totally unrestrained free markets. Down in poorer countries, though, there have been well-documented environmental and human abuses by corporations trying to maximize profit in the absence of regulation -- in particular, things like the Bhopal disaster, and the ongoing environmental problems in S.E. Asian ship breakers. Historically, we had periods in the U.S. when there was great loss of life due to private-sector negligence (Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Love Canal, etc.), and which have spurred varying degrees of regulation.
Moreover, if both the private sector and the public can be dangerous to the public when they're unrestrained by themselves, it's when they work together against the public interest that they're really worst -- and this situation is fairly common in the third world, where the populace is simply another resource to be exploited by corporations, together with the full complicity and aid of the government.
So I'm not really sure that it's worth pointing fingers as to which is "worst." Unrestrained free markets tend to lead to companies who are so powerful, that the acquire the power to manipulate and influence government, and entrench their positions. When you say that "monopolies of the type usually used to justify government interventionism
But overall, I think you can find ample historical examples both for the evils of an overly powerful central government, and overly-powerful industry. Neither situation is really one that I'd prefer to live under. As usual, it's somewhere in the middle that you avoid most of the worst problems.
There are (at least) two separate technologies being discussed in the article summary. This being Slashdot, they're all muddled together.
The "gait recognition" is fairly new, and I'd agree it's a tad creepy.
However, the non-moving-object detection isn't that new, and is a pretty good idea IMO. It's one of the things that actually makes cameras effective rather than just a tool to help the police sort out what the hell happened after a crime or act of terrorism has already been committed.
Basically, you can tell a computer what the view from a camera should look like when it's totally empty (say, an airport lobby when the airport is closed). Then, it can constantly analyze the frame and look for any new objects that aren't transient. This way it ignores people standing about, but can flag stuff that's not furniture or permanent objects, but which hasn't moved in a while. It's an obnoxious job for a human being to try and do this, and people are easily distracted, but it's easy for a computer.
And the computer can bring it to the attention of human staff, who can then look at the camera and determine subjectively if there's something there worth checking out, or if it's just somebody who's flight got delayed and is sleeping on a bench.
It can also spot vehicles in parking lots/garages that haven't moved, over some period of time (which could be minutes/hours/days), which is handy. It saves police some work if you can automatically flag cars that are parking or standing where they're not supposed to be, and let someone come on a PA system and ask them to move along, rather than having officers constantly patrol and spend their time directing traffic when they should be doing more important functions (like looking for folks who look suspicious or "not right" in some way; as a lot of experience in Israel has shown, it's people looking at other people for the guy who just doesn't look right, that's actually far more effective than equipment at picking out would-be terrorists).
Now, I'm not sure what the utility would be of a system like this on a random city street -- parking enforcement would be about it, unless you're going to call the bomb squad every time somebody leaves some trash next to a can -- but for airports, train stations, subways, etc., it's not bad.
The more complex system that attempt to do "fingerprinting," e.g. facial recognition or gait recognition, I'm a lot more skeptical of. But the simpler object-detection systems are fairly benign.
This might work, however, I suspect that people might just listen to the 64kbps version and never buy the high-quality version, because they don't care about (or won't pay for) quality. I've listened to some really dreadful stuff that's originated on P2P networks (compression artifacts, audible clipping, tape rumble, etc.), and a lot of people just don't seem to notice how bad it is, or care. I'm not talking about audiophile-grade differences here, I mean music that literally sounds like it was played out of a AM radio inside a 88-gallon oil drum, as recorded by a Fisher Price tape deck. And people have this on their iPod and think it's just fine.
So I think that you might find your market narrowed only to people who care about sound quality, which is small (for pop music, anyway, based on my unscientific observations).
Furthermore, if the quality of the free version was degraded enough to cause a large number of people to think that the high-quality version was a significant improvement, then the people who are going to pirate, are just going to pirate the HQ version.
So overall, I'm not sure that you've really deterred any piracy. If your "LQ" version is too good, people -- pirates and honest folks alike -- won't buy the HQ version and just stick with what's free; if it's too crappy, then it'll be ignored by people who are going to pirate, and they'll just trade the HQ version instead, as if the LQ one hadn't existed. Now, given those two scenarios, it's the latter one that's more desirable, since it really doesn't hurt you (versus not releasing a free version at all), plus maybe some people (who won't pirate) will hear the song from the LQ version and go on to purchase legit copies. But there's danger in providing a LQ version that might compete with the version you make money from, because it will cut into legitimate sales.
I think, overall, the 'solution' to the 'piracy problem' is not to view it as a problem. If you don't try to sell your music as a product, but instead view it as an advertising vehicle that gets people to come to your shows and buy your merchandise, then suddenly someone who puts your band's tracks up on Bittorrent is doing you a favor rather than harm. (And, you can even turn CDs from a simple can of easily-pirated bits, into non-duplicable merchandise, just by signing it and marketing it as an "autographed copy.")
As I mentioned in another topic, I think this is insane but apparently the RIAA thinks CDs should cost $34 each due to inflation...
Actually, I would really enjoy seeing the RIAA's member companies decide to all price their CDs at $35 a piece. Yeah, just try that, guys.
It would be the best thing that ever happened to non-RIAA music and bands, though. I also suspect that sales of blank CDs (for copying) and tapes (for recording off the radio) would skyrocket, and internet traffic would go through the roof.
I suspect that $15 or $20 is the real "point of pain" for most people, when it comes to purchasing an durable entertainment product (as opposed to a transient entertainment product, like a movie ticket, where it's a little lower). Go any higher than that, and people are going to find alternatives, even if it's just listening to the voices in their heads.
Do you pay more to see 300 or Zodiac than you pay for Wild Hogs? Nope.
Well, sort of: I was willing to pay $8.50 to see 300 and Zodiac, and I might be willing to see $SOME_CRAPPY_MOVIE for a quarter (particularly if they sold beer at the same time), but the theater doesn't show movies for a quarter, so I only go to the ones that I think won't suck.
They sell them for the same price, but I'm only willing to go to a few of them for the price they charge.
Likewise, I only buy the tracks that I really like at $1 a song. (Actually, I hardly buy any, because I think $1 a song is still highway robbery for DRMed music, but theoretically I'd be willing to buy some songs for a buck.) If they were $0.05 a song (like, say, a certain Russian site I won't mention), I'd probably never buy just a single song off a CD, I'd just get the whole disc just on the off-chance that another song might be decent. Conversely, at $8 a song, I'd probably never buy it regardless of how good it was -- I'd just sit and hum to myself, or listen to music that I already own.
The problem isn't variable pricing per se, the problem is that the record labels want to implement variable pricing with $1/track as the price floor, for the crap tracks, when they should really be thinking about that as a price ceiling, for the very best ones.
But anyway, aside from that, I'm agreeing with you.
For new singers, most people don't know, or cannot be bothered to download/pirate their new songs, and the only way to listen to those songs is to buy them.
What? Are you high? That doesn't make sense.
If a particular song becomes popular, it will get pirated. There's no way to get popularity while also avoiding pirates. If you want to not be pirated, you could try to not be popular, but that's sort of the opposite of what anyone trying to sell CDs or promote concerts wants. You'll never make money if you drop an act the second it becomes popular enough to get on Bittorrent -- that's totally counterproductive.
What you're suggesting, I think, is that promoters and labels will record a few songs with an artist, and then drop them the second that the become popular and their stuff gets pirated, which is also the time when people would start buying merchandise and showing up to concerts (and when the artist could probably go out on his own and start making money on said merch and tickets). Nobody's just going to walk away from their investment of time and money at that point.
First, piracy isn't that bad: it doesn't stop people from buying CDs completely, as evidenced by the fact that I can still walk into a store and buy them. Second, even if it was, there are ways to make money off of popularity besides selling CDs. Concert tickets and merch are just the tip of the iceberg. Even the most stogy labels have to realize this (and if they don't pursue them, it's only because they're already making enough off of CDs, furthering my point that the piracy isn't as bad as you seem to think it is).
Popularity is an advantage unto itself, and if a label or promoter dumped a band that was on the cusp of becoming phenomenal, then certainly someone else would step in and pick it up. (And companies that did this repeatedly would probably end up out of business in short order.)
Some people like bands that do concept albums, some people don't.
They're two entirely different styles of music. It's like the difference between a symphony written for full orchestra and something written for a four-part chamber ensemble. I don't think that many people would really argue that the orchestral piece is inherently 'superior,' in any sort of quantifiable way besides personal taste, to the chamber piece, they're just different. (And, more to the point, many composers have written for both.) It's as bizarre as saying that novelists are inherently "better" writers than essayists, because they produce longer stories. It doesn't make sense.
The three- to four-minute "song" has proved to be an incredibly popular format for popular music over the last century, and I don't think you can chalk that up entirely to the machinations of the RIAA (which, let's face it, was a pretty benign organization until fairly recently) or the "music industry." Probably a lot of credit goes to radio, but if people really hated individual songs, there's no way they'd be as popular as they are.
It's a format people enjoy, and there's nothing inherently better or worse about it than a long album. To be honest, I'd argue that an artist that could communicate effectively in either format was probably better at their trade than one who's mostly restricted themselves to either 70-minute concept albums or 3-minute ditties, but it's really an academic point.