You're right: actually producing a fairly good "album" (which, in today's world, means a few songs, sometimes related in some way, generally involving the same principal musicians) really isn't that hard, if you have talent. It's a few thousand dollar ordeal at most, and you could probably do a passable job -- equal to professional job a few decades ago -- with equipment most people have plus a few hundred bucks. (Again, assuming talent. But there are a lot of talented amateurs out there.)
But where I've seen band after band falter, is in the advertising and promotion. It's getting the songs and the name of the band out to potential listeners in the first place -- that's the one place where the labels still have an advantage over most independent efforts. They pick a few bands that they think match what people want to hear, and promote them aggressively, pushing them on the radio, on MTV, on shows like Saturday Night Live, and get the songs into advertisements and movies where they get exposure.
Online and 'viral' marketing have helped some bands, but viral marketing is tough to "do" effectively. There's no real recipe that you can run through and have it work. In contrast, as the 90's "manufactured pop" demonstrated, you can get people to listen to anything if you just promote the living hell out of it, day in and day out.
In time, I think the labels are going to fade, but it's going to take a long time and they're not going to go quietly. Technology -- cheap DAW software, CD burners, and inexpensive ADC interfaces -- have lowered the barrier to entry involved in actually recording music. But letting people know that you exist as a band, and getting your songs out to the people who might want to pay for it (or come to a concert, buy a t-shirt, etc.), is still tough, and the labels have some advantages left.
Now the situation is different because we have two channels with vastly different cost structure, and we should maybe let the free market do it's thing. You seem to be in favor of a free market but also in favor of the anti price fixing laws. You can't have it both ways.
There's nothing inherently wrong or even hypocritical about wanting to prohibit price fixing, but also being unwilling to prop up obsolete business models.
Thankfully, there is a grey area between hardcore free-marketism, and hand-everything-to-the-central-bureaucracy socialism. Many intelligent people have realized over the years that a totally unrestrained free market often produce outcomes (monopolies, environmental damage, grinding people up into Soylent Green, etc.) which are not best for the consumer. Therefore, the market is regulated in such a way as to discourage outcomes that are considered undesirable.
So? Who the fuck cares? This is *Wal-Mart* you're talking about, ya know. They can't always call the shots. Let 'em suffer.
I think you're forgetting that Wal-Mart basically owns dozens of Representatives and bunches of Senators; if something threatens their business model they will find a way to legislate around it. Experience has shown that legislation bought by corporate interests tends to be incredibly bad and destructive in the long run; therefore, anything which causes Walmart to call in all of its favors at once and get a lot of stuff rushed into the U.S. Code should be avoided. (Because if you don't think Wal-Mart could in about ten minutes get the "Flying Happy Face" turned into the national bird, and Sam Walton's face printed on all U.S. Currency, you're smoking crack. Walmart has a gun to the head of the government, in the form of the ~1.2M people it could suddenly dump onto unemployment.)
If you think the telecommunications industry, the music companies, or big IT (Microsoft, etc.) have an overabundance of power in government, Walmart is orders of magnitude more powerful than them. It's just that Walmart really doesn't have to do anything very often, because it's busy making money hand over fist the way things are.
As other people have pointed out, Walmart's opening move would probably be easy: they'd just force manufacturers to produce slightly different versions of products for their stores, with lower minimum MSRPs. Rather than forcing everyone to sell at the same price, Walmart would just use the law to its advantage and use the law to prevent anyone from ever competing with them on price, even if they wanted to sell certain products at a loss to get people in their stores.
Since manufacturers already package things specifically for Walmart anyway (with different SKUs, etc.) it's a pretty trivial change in many cases. You just package it a little differently, maybe throw in some different add-ons or different configuration options, or create a new "product line" to market it under (particularly good with clothing), and make the minimum MSRP whatever Walmart demands. Since nobody else can buy the 'Walmart version' (Walmart would insist on exclusivity, of course -- and don't think that's ever going to be legislated against; nobody in government would ever really take on Walmart in a fight) there's no way to compete on price.
The ones who only look at the pricetag and nothing else are either poor (when you're scraping the barrel, you can't afford convenience) or they put very little value on these factors, which tells you a lot about their personality (e.g. they don't value courtesy so probably they wouldn't provide any).
Or, they're idiots. There are a lot of just downright thoughtless people in this country (and, I suspect, the world generally) who don't and never will think more than a few days ahead, about anything. You need to account for them, too.
if the local bookstores days are at an end, so are the local butcher, the local grocer, the local record shop, the local clothing boutique, the local computer shop, local hardware store, etc, etc, etc. pretty soon, all we'll have is walmart, target, barnes and noble, borders, best buy, macy's, jc penny, circuit city, compusa, and home depot.
What's your point?
People vote with their wallets every day, and they've pretty clearly indicated that they don't value these type of establishments, in most cases, enough to pay their premiums. The "value added" in other words, of the local butcher, just isn't enough to most people, to cover the increase in cost versus prepackaged meat from the megamart.
I'm sorry that you don't like the way it's worked out -- and if it helps, I agree with you, and I refuse to shop at Walmart (or Target, or Home Depot) when there's an alternative -- but I think it's fundamentally wrong to try and keep obsolete businesses alive at a direct cost to consumers who have clearly voted with their feet and their wallets and said they're not interested. That's at best regressive, and at worst tyrannical.
Did you say six mils? I think people aren't understanding how thick that is. That is one whoppingly heavy coat of paint.
That's not really "paint," that's more like a sprayed-on or rolled-on coating. Just to compare, that's like seven layers of household (0.02mm) aluminum foil.
Now, maybe it's still easier to put up than gluing sheets of a solid material in place, but the quantity of this stuff that's going to be required to coat a large space is going to be enormous. And unless it has some sort of quick-drying solvent base, it must have to be sprayed in multiple coats, particularly onto ceilings, just to keep from dripping.
I could see a lot of problems in using this stuff in anything but secure areas; it's not just a drop-in replacement for current, conventional house or office wall paint.
Um, yes there is, if he's using it to gather intelligence on political activists for later persecution based on nothing more than political activities which are explicitly protected by the first amendment of the Constitution. You should acquaint yourself with the 20th century abuses of such "innocent" behavior (particularly 1960-1975) before making such silly comments.
No; in that case it's the oppression that's illegal, not the information-gathering. It's not illegal for the police to compile dossiers on people, or send undercover officers to public meetings.
There's a key difference between compiling information on someone and then actually using that to oppress someone, or a group of someones.
How much does everybody wanna bet that Apple scraped and scraped away at OS X to make sure it could run in as little RAM as possible?
I'm absolutely sure they did. They would have been stupid not to.
Why? Because they wanted to make sure that if anyone found a way to run "real" OS X on it, it would be close to useless because of the small amount of RAM. Sigh.
An interesting conspiracy theory, but here's one that's slightly easier to believe: they minimized the amount of RAM... because RAM costs money. Given that they had probably already decided on the price point (based on what people will pay for such a thing), the more they can cut down on the hardware, the bigger the profit margin.
Actually the judge's ruling went about as far as the judge was in a position to go.
Kinderstart didn't have any claims that had merit, so there wasn't really a possibility of creating any new precedent or caselaw. They judge just tossed the whole thing out, and then as a bonus, said they were so ridiculously bad, that Kinderstart should have known not to bring such a steaming pile into the courtroom, in the first place.
In order to 'go any further,' Kinderstart would have needed to have a claim with a modicum of merit, which they didn't.
I guess maybe you can hope that someone smarter will sue Google for the same thing tomorrow, but I think they're probably just happy for the moment.
We've got so many redundant or ignored TLDs already (e.g..us), one more can't hurt.
All the TLDs we have now, exist for some sort of purpose. Granted, some of them are arguably underutilized, but they all were made for a reason.
A.xxx TLD wouldn't have any good, compelling reason for existence.
We shouldn't make TLD's just because "one more can't hurt" and we want to appease a bunch of idiots -- that's stupid. It just opens the floodgates for any number of stupid ideas and resulting TLDs.
We need to have a higher standard than 'eh, whatever... what's one more?' before making a new TLD.
They're two sides of the same coin; many of the people pushing for.xxx as a TLD are in favor of schemes which could only work if all pornography occurred there. In fact, many of the justifications they use for creating the TLD in the first place (e.g. "protect children") are meaningless if you can't somehow magically put all the porn there.
If you accept that it's impossible to restrict porn to.xxx, and further realize that most porn sites will just register two domain names, one in.xxx and one in a regular TLD, then many of the reasons cited for having an "adult" TLD fall apart. At that point, the only people it benefits are the registrars and ICANN, because it would force a massive namespace land grab: everyone would need to get their existing names in.xxx, either to use themselves or just to keep someone else from getting and using. (You think Disney isn't going to buy disney.xxx just to keep it out of circulation?)
There's no point in just creating an.xxx TLD for the sake of having a new TLD. It wouldn't do anything to assist in censorship for folks who don't want to see porn; it wouldn't 'protect' anyone; and it wouldn't make the internet 'cleaner.' It would just make ICANN and Verisign a few billion bucks each.
Tough call, but there are porn laws on the books now. I don't see why ICANN just adopt some of the currently existing laws and use those. I get your point but I think something like foot-fetish sites would serve as a better example. It will be subjective, no doubt, but it is certainly doable.
So, which law would you like to use? The U.S.'s? (I mean, obviously we should copy the laws from a country with one of the highest teen-pregnancy rates in the industrialized world -- clearly they must have some good ideas going there.) Even within the United States, we don't have a uniform definition of pornography or obscenity; the Supreme Court intentionally left the standard vague, realizing that it varies by community.
I'm sure some European residents would probably chafe at the thought of having their web sites judged under Puritannical USian laws; maybe we should use one of theirs instead? Somehow I think that this might not go over so well in Asia or the Middle East, and let's face it, if we go by population, they have the rest of us outvoted.
Your comparison with driving is silly. Right now, we have a "road" without "traffic laws" and the whole thing works very well, thank you. There are a minority of people who think that the whole thing is just too crazy and want to slow the whole thing down, and I think it's totally fair to give them a special, padded lane, if that's what they want. It's certainly better than messing with the working system we have right now.
Define "sexual" in the context of 'sexual entertainment,' so that we'll all be sure exactly what type of conduct is acceptable or not. And, please, when you state your definition, ensure that it's equally applicable to Orthodox Hasidic Jews, Lakota Native Americans, U.S. fratboys, nudists, and traditionalist Muslims.
What exactly is an 'educational video' and what's 'sexual entertainment'? If I'm a pornographer, and you make it difficult to sell straightforward porn, it makes sense that I'm going to make them into "training films" if that helps me reach my audience (or my advertisers' audience, i.e., get eyeballs/clicks).
I can guarantee you that the page 2 bra ads in most major U.S. newspapers could probably be sold as sexual entertainment in some places, but they're also just bra ads. Since the internet is a global medium, how do you propose to determine which a person is doing? Which side are you going to err on? And who's going to be the final arbiter? (And if the final arbiter is not the U.S. Supreme Court, what are you going to do when they disagree, and the USSC accuses you of hampering someone's protected speech rights? And if it is the USSC, how do you avoid making people not living in the USA effectively subject to US laws? It's a lose-lose situation.)
A glib answer like "sexual entertainment" doesn't solve any problems, it just exchanges one ('what the hell is 'pornography'') for another ('what the hell is 'sexual entertainment'') and so on as you try to define it further ('what the hell is 'sexual''). There are no universal answers to these questions.
What do you mean the "probability of dying from cigarattes is over 90%"? That's an utterly meaningless statement.
If I smoke one cigarette, I doubt I have a 9/10 chance of dropping dead. That's worse odds than Russian Roulette.
In order to approach that level of mortality, you have to be talking about chronic use.
But if that's going to be the basis, then you have to compare apples to apples, and talk about the chronic use of McDonalds food. If you went and ate 3 (or more) meals a day at McDonalds, that stuff would kill you eventually, too. Might take somewhat longer than cigarettes, and most people who do themselves in that way don't just stick to one restaurant chain, or even just food, they combine it with a lot of other unhealthy stuff, but it's still not good for you, and everyone knows it.
And just going for a jog doesn't "undo" the damage you get from eating food that contains a lot of trans and saturated fats; it certainly helps, but do it long enough, and you can still clog your arteries and drop dead of an M.I. even if you spend all your time between Big Macs on the treadmill.
The GGP said that cigarettes when used in their recommended fashion will kill you, but I think you could say the same thing about Krispy Kreme donuts (insofar as neither of them really say how many you should consume). On the side of a box of Krispys it says "Eat Krispy Kreme Donuts." If I take that literally, as an order, and just start chowing down, eating donuts with the same regularity that some people smoke cigarettes, I'd end up looking like Jabba the Hutt and probably dying in a few short, morbidly obese years.
My point is that it's idiotic to blindly follow the advisement of someone who's trying to sell you something. If the cigarette companies say "Smoke Marlboros!" and I do, and I end up dead, that's really no different than if I listen to the writing on the Krispy Kreme box and eat 3 or 4 dozen of them a day until I have a heart attack. I'm an idiot either way, for having just taken someone who's clearly biased at face value.
Cigarettes and other tobacco products only have two things that should draw special consideration: first, is that they're rather physically addictive, and people should be warned of that, and two, that they produce fumes which can be harmful to people who didn't decide to smoke them. (My solution to the latter problem is simple: just hold restaurants to the same standards for air quality and particulate matter contamination and appropriate safety equipment that any other industry has to.) Aside from that, they're just another one of many toxic substances which you can choose to ingest if you want -- just like saturated fat or ethanol.
I'm not saying that tobacco isn't harmful, it obviously is, but there's really no reason to put it on a pedestal by itself.
You're being far too US-centric. The proposals you outline might work -- I wouldn't go so far as to say "well," but might actually be feasible -- if you were talking about.xxx.us, but remember, we're talking about a global "porn TLD" here. You're being rather parochial.
Your definitions of porn aren't going to be the same (or maybe not even close) to what some people in other parts of the world are going to think. Who gets to decide on those "case by case basis" situations you're talking about? You? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? The head of a family-oriented nudist collective from the Netherlands?
I've got an idea, why don't you get everyone in the world to agree on a standard for what's "obscene." Once you've got something that satisfies everyone, then you can come back and discuss imposing it on the Internet. But until that framework exists, there's no point in trying to implement a technological scheme that utterly depends on it.
If nations really want "porn zones," they can implement them in their own namespace -- we can have ".xxx.us" and the Dutch can have ".xxx.nl" and the Iranians can have ".xxx.ir". (Or, probably more usefully, if your goal is to provide censored internet service, create "clean.us" and "clean.nl" and "clean.ir" where nipples, strong violence, and bare ankles are verboten, respectively. Then people can just restrict browsing to the white-zones of their choice.)
But seriously, "common sense" is a very regional thing. What seems blindingly obvious to you, probably doesn't to someone on the other side of the planet, and your view shouldn't carry any more weight than theirs when we're talking about the fate of a global medium.
I think the reason why it doesn't support Divx is obvious. Apple wants to try and kill Divx as a de facto standard, if they possibly can. They would much rather have people using H.264 inside.mp4 container files, than Divx video inside.avi or.divx containers.
It's my understanding though that at least in recent versions, Divx is essentially ISO-compliant MPEG-4 Part 2 ASP video, albeit in a nonstandard container. So it seems like it ought to be possible to 'recontainerize' a Divx.divx or.avi into an.mp4 file without decompressing and recompressing it, thus avoiding loss. I'm not aware of any software tools that do this, though, and I might be misunderstanding ways in which Divx diverges from the standards.
Although I would really like to see Apple and.mp4 win this one, I'm not sure that they're going to; the installed base of divx-playing equipment may just be too big, and they may be forced to release an update to add support for it later.
I find it odd that so many Slashdotters seem in love with.divx or Divx-containing.avis, which are just as much of a closed, single-vendor, proprietary format as MS Word's.doc is, and everyone loves to just shit all over that. The.mp4 container format is the video equivalent of ODF, and although I'm not going to buy one, I hope that the Apple TV is popular enough to get the script kiddies and release groups that push TV shows and movies out on bittorrent using it (because, lets face it, the main driver of Divx is "unauthorized" content, to put it politely).
At least in the U.S., (adult) porn won't put you in jail. Many other things, including certain types of software, potentially will.
You can watch people shitting on each other to your heart's content, but if the wrong people take note of your work on something like libdvdcss and really want to mess with you, well... it might be good to develop an interest in homo-erotic behavior, because you might be in for a lot of it from your cellmates.
There are probably other parts of the world where you'd want to disguise things the other way around.
I wonder how long it will take before we start seeing some very advanced offline-browsing and shared-caching technology coming out of the amateur software development community in India?
I mean, if your internet access gets cut off at 6pm, then what you need to do, obviously, is rig up a few old machines with some big hard drives, and have them first work as caching proxies during the day, saving all the content that's been recently browsed, and then they need to crawl all the pages that are subjectively related (maybe based on Google PageRank?) to the pages that have been browsed, and cache those, too.
Likewise, you'd want to really get that bittorrent client smoking during the day, so that you'd have lots of content to watch after hours. (That'll make for some interesting traffic patterns.)
Yeah, it's not as good as having the 'real' internet at night, but it would let you get your fill of porn.
I admit that I don't really understand the psychology of Indian IT students, but I can only imagine what would happen if you tried to pull something like this at a major U.S. IT school -- it would be an open challenge to the students, to figure out a way to get what they want despite the restrictions.
Has anyone ever traced the origins of the term "pirate" with regard to un-licensed informational products?
It just seems like a bizarre word to pick out of the entire English language to describe that activity. I can't imagine that it was chosen by anyone who didn't have a definite axe to grind against "unauthorized copying," since it's such a loaded term.
I wonder if its origins have ever been really well researched, because it's probably too late now to ever change it. I suspect that the generation of young people growing up now are going to, on hearing the word 'pirate,' think first of a hot copy of Photoshop, and only second of a smelly guy with a knife clutched in his teeth. So there's no getting rid of it now.
I'm not suggesting that they go on a death march for every trivial bug. That's unreasonable. (Although I would like them to notify users of workarounds for all known issues, even the seemingly trivial ones, or at least note their existence somewhere.)
But here's the problem when you don't have any public disclosure, and you're laboring under the impression that nobody outside of the company knows of the bugs. Let's say you get in four trivial bugs, and one critical vulnerability. There is a lot of temptation -- and I have seen this happen, over and over, in places where I work -- to fix the trivial ones first and let the big whopper sit a while until everyone has "cleared their desk." That way, you make your metrics look good, which makes the PHB happy, etc. Then when everything else is done, work gets started on the big problem.
That's not really the best outcome for users, because unless the vulnerability was discovered internally, I just don't believe that it's really "undisclosed." Somebody knows about it, and the fewer people know about it, the more of an advantage they have, and the more tempting it's going to be for them to abuse it (either auction it off or use it directly).
So I wouldn't want a vendor freaking out every time anything comes in, but I do want them to feel like there's at least as much of a gun to their head, as there is to mine as a user, when something critical comes in.
True, but a software engineer is judged, in many cases, on the quality of the software that s/he produces, and how many bugs it has.
If I were to churn something out that was terribly flawed, completely broken, and was completely a result of my failure to take a step back and rationally analyze the situation, I'd probably be a pretty shitty software engineer. Likewise, I don't think it's unfair to lambast a politician -- whose job it is, after all, to make good laws -- for doing something similar.
If you write crap software that has to be totally rewritten later, you're probably not a good software engineer. If you support dumb laws or stances that force you to utterly contradict yourself later, you're probably not a good politician.
But I'm glad the guy saw the light eventually. I guess that still makes him better than some.
At any rate, though, I don't think it's really any surprise that large parts of Apple still bow to the notion that "if there's a bug in the code, and nobody outside of the company knows about it, is it really a bug?" somehow warrants a 'yes' answer.
Should read: At any rate, though, I don't think it's really any surprise that large parts of Apple still bow to the notion that "if there's a bug in the code, and nobody outside of the company knows about it, is it really a bug?" somehow warrants a 'no' answer.
In other words, big portions of the Mac OS are still developed as closed-source products, or by people who probably were trained in that mindset, where a bug really only matters once it's widely disclosed.
I've never bought this, because frankly I just don't trust people to keep their mouths shut while a company fixes things at their own pace. I'd rather see bugs get tons of press, and force companies into hauling their developers in on overtime and fixing the thing ASAP, so that the time before first discovery and patching is minimized. I would rather everyone know about it (including administrators and owners who can take defensive measures) than try to cover it up for as long as possible, maximizing the chance that the Russian mafia or other black hats will get their hands on an unknown (to everyone else) vuln.
Some parts of Apple seem much more comfortable with full disclosure than others, and I'm perfectly comfortable with bludgeoning the parts that aren't if that's what it takes. As a Mac user, I'm not at all displeased about MoAB, regardless of its motivations.
I'll accept that the MoAB was definitely a result of the furor and press over the wireless vulnerability. But I'm not sure that I believe the smear campaign / character assassination part. Honestly, Apple really didn't need to bother; those guys' original presentation was so sketchy that they practically invited criticism themselves. First they'd say one thing (that it affected all Macs) but then they demo'ed it with a totally different hardware setup, with no good explanation as to why, producing countervailing views as to whether all Macs were really that insecure in their default state, etc. There's no way you can spin the way the vulnerability was announced as a well-managed affair. The whole thing stank from the beginning.
At any rate, though, I don't think it's really any surprise that large parts of Apple still bow to the notion that "if there's a bug in the code, and nobody outside of the company knows about it, is it really a bug?" somehow warrants a 'yes' answer. So as a Mac user, I'm not really unhappy at all that MoAB happened, for whatever reason. I'd rather have stuff out in the open, and patched quickly, than some sort of quasi-secret (because, let's face it, if more than one person knows about it, it's not a secret anymore) unpatched vulnerability. I like Apple's gear but that doesn't mean I don't think they need to get a swift kick in the ass every once in a while to stay on top of things.
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I think it's the advertising that stymies people.
You're right: actually producing a fairly good "album" (which, in today's world, means a few songs, sometimes related in some way, generally involving the same principal musicians) really isn't that hard, if you have talent. It's a few thousand dollar ordeal at most, and you could probably do a passable job -- equal to professional job a few decades ago -- with equipment most people have plus a few hundred bucks. (Again, assuming talent. But there are a lot of talented amateurs out there.)
But where I've seen band after band falter, is in the advertising and promotion. It's getting the songs and the name of the band out to potential listeners in the first place -- that's the one place where the labels still have an advantage over most independent efforts. They pick a few bands that they think match what people want to hear, and promote them aggressively, pushing them on the radio, on MTV, on shows like Saturday Night Live, and get the songs into advertisements and movies where they get exposure.
Online and 'viral' marketing have helped some bands, but viral marketing is tough to "do" effectively. There's no real recipe that you can run through and have it work. In contrast, as the 90's "manufactured pop" demonstrated, you can get people to listen to anything if you just promote the living hell out of it, day in and day out.
In time, I think the labels are going to fade, but it's going to take a long time and they're not going to go quietly. Technology -- cheap DAW software, CD burners, and inexpensive ADC interfaces -- have lowered the barrier to entry involved in actually recording music. But letting people know that you exist as a band, and getting your songs out to the people who might want to pay for it (or come to a concert, buy a t-shirt, etc.), is still tough, and the labels have some advantages left.
Now the situation is different because we have two channels with vastly different cost structure, and we should maybe let the free market do it's thing. You seem to be in favor of a free market but also in favor of the anti price fixing laws. You can't have it both ways.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
There's nothing inherently wrong or even hypocritical about wanting to prohibit price fixing, but also being unwilling to prop up obsolete business models.
Thankfully, there is a grey area between hardcore free-marketism, and hand-everything-to-the-central-bureaucracy socialism. Many intelligent people have realized over the years that a totally unrestrained free market often produce outcomes (monopolies, environmental damage, grinding people up into Soylent Green, etc.) which are not best for the consumer. Therefore, the market is regulated in such a way as to discourage outcomes that are considered undesirable.
So? Who the fuck cares? This is *Wal-Mart* you're talking about, ya know. They can't always call the shots. Let 'em suffer.
I think you're forgetting that Wal-Mart basically owns dozens of Representatives and bunches of Senators; if something threatens their business model they will find a way to legislate around it. Experience has shown that legislation bought by corporate interests tends to be incredibly bad and destructive in the long run; therefore, anything which causes Walmart to call in all of its favors at once and get a lot of stuff rushed into the U.S. Code should be avoided. (Because if you don't think Wal-Mart could in about ten minutes get the "Flying Happy Face" turned into the national bird, and Sam Walton's face printed on all U.S. Currency, you're smoking crack. Walmart has a gun to the head of the government, in the form of the ~1.2M people it could suddenly dump onto unemployment.)
If you think the telecommunications industry, the music companies, or big IT (Microsoft, etc.) have an overabundance of power in government, Walmart is orders of magnitude more powerful than them. It's just that Walmart really doesn't have to do anything very often, because it's busy making money hand over fist the way things are.
As other people have pointed out, Walmart's opening move would probably be easy: they'd just force manufacturers to produce slightly different versions of products for their stores, with lower minimum MSRPs. Rather than forcing everyone to sell at the same price, Walmart would just use the law to its advantage and use the law to prevent anyone from ever competing with them on price, even if they wanted to sell certain products at a loss to get people in their stores.
Since manufacturers already package things specifically for Walmart anyway (with different SKUs, etc.) it's a pretty trivial change in many cases. You just package it a little differently, maybe throw in some different add-ons or different configuration options, or create a new "product line" to market it under (particularly good with clothing), and make the minimum MSRP whatever Walmart demands. Since nobody else can buy the 'Walmart version' (Walmart would insist on exclusivity, of course -- and don't think that's ever going to be legislated against; nobody in government would ever really take on Walmart in a fight) there's no way to compete on price.
The ones who only look at the pricetag and nothing else are either poor (when you're scraping the barrel, you can't afford convenience) or they put very little value on these factors, which tells you a lot about their personality (e.g. they don't value courtesy so probably they wouldn't provide any).
Or, they're idiots. There are a lot of just downright thoughtless people in this country (and, I suspect, the world generally) who don't and never will think more than a few days ahead, about anything. You need to account for them, too.
if the local bookstores days are at an end, so are the local butcher, the local grocer, the local record shop, the local clothing boutique, the local computer shop, local hardware store, etc, etc, etc. pretty soon, all we'll have is walmart, target, barnes and noble, borders, best buy, macy's, jc penny, circuit city, compusa, and home depot.
What's your point?
People vote with their wallets every day, and they've pretty clearly indicated that they don't value these type of establishments, in most cases, enough to pay their premiums. The "value added" in other words, of the local butcher, just isn't enough to most people, to cover the increase in cost versus prepackaged meat from the megamart.
I'm sorry that you don't like the way it's worked out -- and if it helps, I agree with you, and I refuse to shop at Walmart (or Target, or Home Depot) when there's an alternative -- but I think it's fundamentally wrong to try and keep obsolete businesses alive at a direct cost to consumers who have clearly voted with their feet and their wallets and said they're not interested. That's at best regressive, and at worst tyrannical.
Waaaait a minute here.
Did you say six mils ? I think people aren't understanding how thick that is. That is one whoppingly heavy coat of paint.
That's not really "paint," that's more like a sprayed-on or rolled-on coating. Just to compare, that's like seven layers of household (0.02mm) aluminum foil.
Now, maybe it's still easier to put up than gluing sheets of a solid material in place, but the quantity of this stuff that's going to be required to coat a large space is going to be enormous. And unless it has some sort of quick-drying solvent base, it must have to be sprayed in multiple coats, particularly onto ceilings, just to keep from dripping.
I could see a lot of problems in using this stuff in anything but secure areas; it's not just a drop-in replacement for current, conventional house or office wall paint.
Um, yes there is, if he's using it to gather intelligence on political activists for later persecution based on nothing more than political activities which are explicitly protected by the first amendment of the Constitution. You should acquaint yourself with the 20th century abuses of such "innocent" behavior (particularly 1960-1975) before making such silly comments.
No; in that case it's the oppression that's illegal, not the information-gathering. It's not illegal for the police to compile dossiers on people, or send undercover officers to public meetings.
There's a key difference between compiling information on someone and then actually using that to oppress someone, or a group of someones.
How much does everybody wanna bet that Apple scraped and scraped away at OS X to make sure it could run in as little RAM as possible?
... because RAM costs money. Given that they had probably already decided on the price point (based on what people will pay for such a thing), the more they can cut down on the hardware, the bigger the profit margin.
I'm absolutely sure they did. They would have been stupid not to.
Why? Because they wanted to make sure that if anyone found a way to run "real" OS X on it, it would be close to useless because of the small amount of RAM. Sigh.
An interesting conspiracy theory, but here's one that's slightly easier to believe: they minimized the amount of RAM
The second amendment does not apply to normal citizens. It applies to organized militias.
That's your interpretation. Thankfully, many other people disagree.
Actually the judge's ruling went about as far as the judge was in a position to go.
Kinderstart didn't have any claims that had merit, so there wasn't really a possibility of creating any new precedent or caselaw. They judge just tossed the whole thing out, and then as a bonus, said they were so ridiculously bad, that Kinderstart should have known not to bring such a steaming pile into the courtroom, in the first place.
In order to 'go any further,' Kinderstart would have needed to have a claim with a modicum of merit, which they didn't.
I guess maybe you can hope that someone smarter will sue Google for the same thing tomorrow, but I think they're probably just happy for the moment.
We've got so many redundant or ignored TLDs already (e.g. .us), one more can't hurt.
.xxx TLD wouldn't have any good, compelling reason for existence.
... what's one more?' before making a new TLD.
All the TLDs we have now, exist for some sort of purpose. Granted, some of them are arguably underutilized, but they all were made for a reason.
A
We shouldn't make TLD's just because "one more can't hurt" and we want to appease a bunch of idiots -- that's stupid. It just opens the floodgates for any number of stupid ideas and resulting TLDs.
We need to have a higher standard than 'eh, whatever
They're two sides of the same coin; many of the people pushing for .xxx as a TLD are in favor of schemes which could only work if all pornography occurred there. In fact, many of the justifications they use for creating the TLD in the first place (e.g. "protect children") are meaningless if you can't somehow magically put all the porn there.
.xxx, and further realize that most porn sites will just register two domain names, one in .xxx and one in a regular TLD, then many of the reasons cited for having an "adult" TLD fall apart. At that point, the only people it benefits are the registrars and ICANN, because it would force a massive namespace land grab: everyone would need to get their existing names in .xxx, either to use themselves or just to keep someone else from getting and using. (You think Disney isn't going to buy disney.xxx just to keep it out of circulation?)
.xxx TLD for the sake of having a new TLD. It wouldn't do anything to assist in censorship for folks who don't want to see porn; it wouldn't 'protect' anyone; and it wouldn't make the internet 'cleaner.' It would just make ICANN and Verisign a few billion bucks each.
If you accept that it's impossible to restrict porn to
There's no point in just creating an
Tough call, but there are porn laws on the books now. I don't see why ICANN just adopt some of the currently existing laws and use those. I get your point but I think something like foot-fetish sites would serve as a better example. It will be subjective, no doubt, but it is certainly doable.
So, which law would you like to use? The U.S.'s? (I mean, obviously we should copy the laws from a country with one of the highest teen-pregnancy rates in the industrialized world -- clearly they must have some good ideas going there.) Even within the United States, we don't have a uniform definition of pornography or obscenity; the Supreme Court intentionally left the standard vague, realizing that it varies by community.
I'm sure some European residents would probably chafe at the thought of having their web sites judged under Puritannical USian laws; maybe we should use one of theirs instead? Somehow I think that this might not go over so well in Asia or the Middle East, and let's face it, if we go by population, they have the rest of us outvoted.
Your comparison with driving is silly. Right now, we have a "road" without "traffic laws" and the whole thing works very well, thank you. There are a minority of people who think that the whole thing is just too crazy and want to slow the whole thing down, and I think it's totally fair to give them a special, padded lane, if that's what they want. It's certainly better than messing with the working system we have right now.
Define "sexual" in the context of 'sexual entertainment,' so that we'll all be sure exactly what type of conduct is acceptable or not. And, please, when you state your definition, ensure that it's equally applicable to Orthodox Hasidic Jews, Lakota Native Americans, U.S. fratboys, nudists, and traditionalist Muslims.
What exactly is an 'educational video' and what's 'sexual entertainment'? If I'm a pornographer, and you make it difficult to sell straightforward porn, it makes sense that I'm going to make them into "training films" if that helps me reach my audience (or my advertisers' audience, i.e., get eyeballs/clicks).
I can guarantee you that the page 2 bra ads in most major U.S. newspapers could probably be sold as sexual entertainment in some places, but they're also just bra ads. Since the internet is a global medium, how do you propose to determine which a person is doing? Which side are you going to err on? And who's going to be the final arbiter? (And if the final arbiter is not the U.S. Supreme Court, what are you going to do when they disagree, and the USSC accuses you of hampering someone's protected speech rights? And if it is the USSC, how do you avoid making people not living in the USA effectively subject to US laws? It's a lose-lose situation.)
A glib answer like "sexual entertainment" doesn't solve any problems, it just exchanges one ('what the hell is 'pornography'') for another ('what the hell is 'sexual entertainment'') and so on as you try to define it further ('what the hell is 'sexual''). There are no universal answers to these questions.
What do you mean the "probability of dying from cigarattes is over 90%"? That's an utterly meaningless statement.
If I smoke one cigarette, I doubt I have a 9/10 chance of dropping dead. That's worse odds than Russian Roulette.
In order to approach that level of mortality, you have to be talking about chronic use.
But if that's going to be the basis, then you have to compare apples to apples, and talk about the chronic use of McDonalds food. If you went and ate 3 (or more) meals a day at McDonalds, that stuff would kill you eventually, too. Might take somewhat longer than cigarettes, and most people who do themselves in that way don't just stick to one restaurant chain, or even just food, they combine it with a lot of other unhealthy stuff, but it's still not good for you, and everyone knows it.
And just going for a jog doesn't "undo" the damage you get from eating food that contains a lot of trans and saturated fats; it certainly helps, but do it long enough, and you can still clog your arteries and drop dead of an M.I. even if you spend all your time between Big Macs on the treadmill.
The GGP said that cigarettes when used in their recommended fashion will kill you, but I think you could say the same thing about Krispy Kreme donuts (insofar as neither of them really say how many you should consume). On the side of a box of Krispys it says "Eat Krispy Kreme Donuts." If I take that literally, as an order, and just start chowing down, eating donuts with the same regularity that some people smoke cigarettes, I'd end up looking like Jabba the Hutt and probably dying in a few short, morbidly obese years.
My point is that it's idiotic to blindly follow the advisement of someone who's trying to sell you something. If the cigarette companies say "Smoke Marlboros!" and I do, and I end up dead, that's really no different than if I listen to the writing on the Krispy Kreme box and eat 3 or 4 dozen of them a day until I have a heart attack. I'm an idiot either way, for having just taken someone who's clearly biased at face value.
Cigarettes and other tobacco products only have two things that should draw special consideration: first, is that they're rather physically addictive, and people should be warned of that, and two, that they produce fumes which can be harmful to people who didn't decide to smoke them. (My solution to the latter problem is simple: just hold restaurants to the same standards for air quality and particulate matter contamination and appropriate safety equipment that any other industry has to.) Aside from that, they're just another one of many toxic substances which you can choose to ingest if you want -- just like saturated fat or ethanol.
I'm not saying that tobacco isn't harmful, it obviously is, but there's really no reason to put it on a pedestal by itself.
You're being far too US-centric. The proposals you outline might work -- I wouldn't go so far as to say "well," but might actually be feasible -- if you were talking about .xxx.us, but remember, we're talking about a global "porn TLD" here. You're being rather parochial.
Your definitions of porn aren't going to be the same (or maybe not even close) to what some people in other parts of the world are going to think. Who gets to decide on those "case by case basis" situations you're talking about? You? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? The head of a family-oriented nudist collective from the Netherlands?
I've got an idea, why don't you get everyone in the world to agree on a standard for what's "obscene." Once you've got something that satisfies everyone, then you can come back and discuss imposing it on the Internet. But until that framework exists, there's no point in trying to implement a technological scheme that utterly depends on it.
If nations really want "porn zones," they can implement them in their own namespace -- we can have ".xxx.us" and the Dutch can have ".xxx.nl" and the Iranians can have ".xxx.ir". (Or, probably more usefully, if your goal is to provide censored internet service, create "clean.us" and "clean.nl" and "clean.ir" where nipples, strong violence, and bare ankles are verboten, respectively. Then people can just restrict browsing to the white-zones of their choice.)
But seriously, "common sense" is a very regional thing. What seems blindingly obvious to you, probably doesn't to someone on the other side of the planet, and your view shouldn't carry any more weight than theirs when we're talking about the fate of a global medium.
And used as recommended, McDonalds causes heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, and stroke.
What's your point? They're all selling assisted suicide.
I think the reason why it doesn't support Divx is obvious. Apple wants to try and kill Divx as a de facto standard, if they possibly can. They would much rather have people using H.264 inside .mp4 container files, than Divx video inside .avi or .divx containers.
.divx or .avi into an .mp4 file without decompressing and recompressing it, thus avoiding loss. I'm not aware of any software tools that do this, though, and I might be misunderstanding ways in which Divx diverges from the standards.
.mp4 win this one, I'm not sure that they're going to; the installed base of divx-playing equipment may just be too big, and they may be forced to release an update to add support for it later.
.divx or Divx-containing .avis, which are just as much of a closed, single-vendor, proprietary format as MS Word's .doc is, and everyone loves to just shit all over that. The .mp4 container format is the video equivalent of ODF, and although I'm not going to buy one, I hope that the Apple TV is popular enough to get the script kiddies and release groups that push TV shows and movies out on bittorrent using it (because, lets face it, the main driver of Divx is "unauthorized" content, to put it politely).
It's my understanding though that at least in recent versions, Divx is essentially ISO-compliant MPEG-4 Part 2 ASP video, albeit in a nonstandard container. So it seems like it ought to be possible to 'recontainerize' a Divx
Although I would really like to see Apple and
I find it odd that so many Slashdotters seem in love with
At least in the U.S., (adult) porn won't put you in jail. Many other things, including certain types of software, potentially will.
... it might be good to develop an interest in homo-erotic behavior, because you might be in for a lot of it from your cellmates.
You can watch people shitting on each other to your heart's content, but if the wrong people take note of your work on something like libdvdcss and really want to mess with you, well
There are probably other parts of the world where you'd want to disguise things the other way around.
I wonder how long it will take before we start seeing some very advanced offline-browsing and shared-caching technology coming out of the amateur software development community in India?
I mean, if your internet access gets cut off at 6pm, then what you need to do, obviously, is rig up a few old machines with some big hard drives, and have them first work as caching proxies during the day, saving all the content that's been recently browsed, and then they need to crawl all the pages that are subjectively related (maybe based on Google PageRank?) to the pages that have been browsed, and cache those, too.
Likewise, you'd want to really get that bittorrent client smoking during the day, so that you'd have lots of content to watch after hours. (That'll make for some interesting traffic patterns.)
Yeah, it's not as good as having the 'real' internet at night, but it would let you get your fill of porn.
I admit that I don't really understand the psychology of Indian IT students, but I can only imagine what would happen if you tried to pull something like this at a major U.S. IT school -- it would be an open challenge to the students, to figure out a way to get what they want despite the restrictions.
Has anyone ever traced the origins of the term "pirate" with regard to un-licensed informational products?
It just seems like a bizarre word to pick out of the entire English language to describe that activity. I can't imagine that it was chosen by anyone who didn't have a definite axe to grind against "unauthorized copying," since it's such a loaded term.
I wonder if its origins have ever been really well researched, because it's probably too late now to ever change it. I suspect that the generation of young people growing up now are going to, on hearing the word 'pirate,' think first of a hot copy of Photoshop, and only second of a smelly guy with a knife clutched in his teeth. So there's no getting rid of it now.
I'm not suggesting that they go on a death march for every trivial bug. That's unreasonable. (Although I would like them to notify users of workarounds for all known issues, even the seemingly trivial ones, or at least note their existence somewhere.)
But here's the problem when you don't have any public disclosure, and you're laboring under the impression that nobody outside of the company knows of the bugs. Let's say you get in four trivial bugs, and one critical vulnerability. There is a lot of temptation -- and I have seen this happen, over and over, in places where I work -- to fix the trivial ones first and let the big whopper sit a while until everyone has "cleared their desk." That way, you make your metrics look good, which makes the PHB happy, etc. Then when everything else is done, work gets started on the big problem.
That's not really the best outcome for users, because unless the vulnerability was discovered internally, I just don't believe that it's really "undisclosed." Somebody knows about it, and the fewer people know about it, the more of an advantage they have, and the more tempting it's going to be for them to abuse it (either auction it off or use it directly).
So I wouldn't want a vendor freaking out every time anything comes in, but I do want them to feel like there's at least as much of a gun to their head, as there is to mine as a user, when something critical comes in.
True, but a software engineer is judged, in many cases, on the quality of the software that s/he produces, and how many bugs it has.
If I were to churn something out that was terribly flawed, completely broken, and was completely a result of my failure to take a step back and rationally analyze the situation, I'd probably be a pretty shitty software engineer. Likewise, I don't think it's unfair to lambast a politician -- whose job it is, after all, to make good laws -- for doing something similar.
If you write crap software that has to be totally rewritten later, you're probably not a good software engineer. If you support dumb laws or stances that force you to utterly contradict yourself later, you're probably not a good politician.
But I'm glad the guy saw the light eventually. I guess that still makes him better than some.
Should read: At any rate, though, I don't think it's really any surprise that large parts of Apple still bow to the notion that "if there's a bug in the code, and nobody outside of the company knows about it, is it really a bug?" somehow warrants a 'no' answer.
In other words, big portions of the Mac OS are still developed as closed-source products, or by people who probably were trained in that mindset, where a bug really only matters once it's widely disclosed.
I've never bought this, because frankly I just don't trust people to keep their mouths shut while a company fixes things at their own pace. I'd rather see bugs get tons of press, and force companies into hauling their developers in on overtime and fixing the thing ASAP, so that the time before first discovery and patching is minimized. I would rather everyone know about it (including administrators and owners who can take defensive measures) than try to cover it up for as long as possible, maximizing the chance that the Russian mafia or other black hats will get their hands on an unknown (to everyone else) vuln.
Some parts of Apple seem much more comfortable with full disclosure than others, and I'm perfectly comfortable with bludgeoning the parts that aren't if that's what it takes. As a Mac user, I'm not at all displeased about MoAB, regardless of its motivations.
I'll accept that the MoAB was definitely a result of the furor and press over the wireless vulnerability. But I'm not sure that I believe the smear campaign / character assassination part. Honestly, Apple really didn't need to bother; those guys' original presentation was so sketchy that they practically invited criticism themselves. First they'd say one thing (that it affected all Macs) but then they demo'ed it with a totally different hardware setup, with no good explanation as to why, producing countervailing views as to whether all Macs were really that insecure in their default state, etc. There's no way you can spin the way the vulnerability was announced as a well-managed affair. The whole thing stank from the beginning.
At any rate, though, I don't think it's really any surprise that large parts of Apple still bow to the notion that "if there's a bug in the code, and nobody outside of the company knows about it, is it really a bug?" somehow warrants a 'yes' answer. So as a Mac user, I'm not really unhappy at all that MoAB happened, for whatever reason. I'd rather have stuff out in the open, and patched quickly, than some sort of quasi-secret (because, let's face it, if more than one person knows about it, it's not a secret anymore) unpatched vulnerability. I like Apple's gear but that doesn't mean I don't think they need to get a swift kick in the ass every once in a while to stay on top of things.