The iTunes Music Store has the capability of only selling the album and not the individual tracks. These artists and bands know that. This is about staking out a negotiating posture to try and get more money. I wish all negoating parties good luck.
There is big difference between the artist getting to choose the method of presentation and dictating audience behavior. Requiring that you buy the whole album (or making all songs on the album one big track, for instance) is the artist's choice of presentation. If you then want to buy the product and break it up into tracks or only listen to one song, go for it.
If you don't want to buy the album for one song, then you have two choices: 1. Complain to the artist and maybe they'll change their mind for a customer, or 2. Vote with your feet.
If you really like the one song and want to hear it but don't want the rest, then you've got a decision to make. Buck up and make it.
And yet, artists should be able to decide that they only prefer people to consume their work in the context of the artists' choosing. This is the "rights" part of copyright. I think it is only appropriate. The creator should be allowed to put out his/her work in whatever format they'd like (vinyl, tape, CD, MP3, only live performances, etc). If the artist needs more money and thinks that they can get more by selling individual tracks, then it is their right to decide whether they will break up their work into smaller segments or only sell the work as a whole. The onus is on the creator, which is as it should be.
And, yeah, I know we can start talking about how the big, bad music industry exploits all but the most recognized artists. Heck, I'd even agree with this statement. But taking away control from the artist (by forcing them to sell individual tracks, either through legislation or market pressures) doesn't give them more clout, pull or power. It just takes away what little oversight they might have in that decision and takes the balance from the publisher. The exploitation of artists by corporate members of the RIAA is a problem in and of itself, not an argument for making all artists sell by the track.
They might well lose money. But it's their right to lose those sales and keep the work together if they so choose.
My folks use Mac portables with a Netgear wireless router. We have to use WEP and not any WPA because they have one of the HP all-in-one scanner/fax/printers with wireless access. My understanding is that ASCII WEP passwords are hashed on the client side and submitted as hexadecimal values to the router. Because the algorithm that Netgear uses to convert their text password into the hexadecimal password isn't the same one that Apple uses, the ASCII password fails and only the 28-character hexadecimal password works when attempting to have the Macs (or the printer) join the network. I'd forgotten about WPA, which is substantially better, but its a moot point because the HP device doesn't support WPA.
I concede that my understanding of how 802.11 device pass WEP passwords is inference-based, so I may be way off base.
Do the upcoming offerings provide working cross-platform hashing algorithms? Meaning, if I have a LinkSys/Netgear/Foo 802.11x router, will I be able to use the password I entered or will I have to type out an increasingly lengthy hexadecimal equivalent on my MacBook? Try explaining to Mom why, after setting the cat's name as the password on the wireless router, they can't type that in when the system asks for the network password.
Fix this stuff first, then get the speed and latency stuff worked out. Sheesh!
I will preface all I am about to say with this. I, hands down, prefer the claims of science over all religious faiths. That said...
To say that science threatens faith is to misunderstand the nature of science. Science is a faith, folks. Get used to the idea. Any given world view (Kuhn called it a paradigm) has a basic set of assumptions and beliefs that are unquestioned. Sound familiar? Like, say, religion. To a devout Christian, aspects of science are, simply, heretical. The reverse is true for any staunch scientist.
However, in this modern world of ours, we've gotten used to holding oppositional beliefs in our heads, such that people make claims regarding their ability to reconcile scientific knowledge with their religious beliefs. These claims always fall apart upon inspection and/or challenge.
If there is anything that makes science superior, it is in its ability to better predict natural phenomenon. How well it can do this is debatable, as is a determination of what is lost in transition from faith in a god to faith in the sciences. This sort of understanding is key to the modern philosophy of science.
Of course, scientists and clerics alike typically ignore all this and go on about their business. They leave the pondering up to the goofy philosophers.
"...trying to separate "fact" and "truth" is a strange notion. In the end a "fact" must be proven to be true."
I suggest that the following three assumptions can easily be proven fallacious:
(a) Facts are directly given to careful, unprejudiced observers via the senses.
(b) Facts are prior to and independent of theory.
(c) Facts constitute a firm and reliable foundation for scientific knowledge.
From thence do we get Inductivism (Hume) => Falsificationism (Popper) => Paradigm Shifts (Kuhn) => Research Programs (Lakatos) => the Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge (Feyerabend) => the Bayesian Approach
Everybody with me so far? Basically, an appeal to logic as the grounding of truth can't work because you can't prove logic correct from first principles.
What I find so inufuriating is that most people who espouse "Intelligent Design" theories AND most people who attempt to refute it lack any understanding of the philosophical and historical critiques of science that the Intelligent Design philosophy makes use of. Noithing exists in a vaccuum and most of this stuff is old news to any one who has studied it. But most people aren't interested in real truth, but rather in bolstering the claims of their fragile world view. Everyone, on both sides, needs to wake up, read some books and then come back and we can all have a real debate.
Seriously, the guy sounds downright creepy: "These are aging industries run by aging men, and they're up against 17-year-olds who have turned themselves into electronic Hezbollah because they resent the content industry for its proprietary practices."
The right to freely associate is not free at all if it means that you end up on some big list in a government computer (or anyone else's computer for that matter).
Regardless of whether they hand their records over to the NSA, every phone company keeps a record of all calls made.
I think one reality to face here is that while strict liability may pressure large businesses to act immediately, many smaller businesses either won't know they need to act or will simply choose to roll the dice. If the goal is to make sure businesses protect customer data, than fining companies failing to comply with a statute requiring that they secure the network would work much better than allowing people to sue after the fact.
This is really no different that the Health Department making sure that restaurants are clean and people don't get sick when they eat there or the state enforcing speed limits to proactively encourage people to slow down. you can always sue the restaurant or the driver, but does that really help the family who's member gets sick or injured after eating bad food or getting hit by a reckless driver? And no, I'm not equating food poisoning to identity theft...I think ID theft might be worse in many cases.
AFAIK this was a requirement by the record labels before they would permit digital distribution of the music files. So is the anti-competitive behaviour Apple's or the RIAA cartel's?
Yes, that's right. Apple has no vested interest in copy protection. If it wasn't for the *IAA creeps/jerkwads/satanists, they'd be happy to sell one copy of each song and have everybody copy it their iPod. Neither the executives nor the shareholders even want the added profit of selling copyrighted media. They want information to be free!
And if you believe that, I've got this bridge here...
IANAL, but wouldn't software that ripped DVD's and keyed them with fairplay keys be DMCA-compliant? It wouldn't be "circumventing" digitally encrypted material, just format-shifting the security methods.
Of course, this is a lot of legal wrangling and development to do something would cannibalize the sale of new movies which would, presumably, be offered on the iTMS. Just thinking out loud here...
As I sit typing this, I am listening to my old Epia box sing its low-noise fan song. It sits in my living room, running as a local DNS, daapd, netatalk and web-based file server running on FreeBSD. I bought this for a media server a few years ago and it has served admirably well in this task.
Sure it never really gets put through its paces, but as far as a fire and forget server for my house, it has served me well. If I ever get less lazy (it's a disease) and decide to use a software router, I might get one of those dual ethernet versions.
The point is, they work great for an unobtrusive, relatively quiet server and everything's onboard, so you needn't have to deal with a parade of new hardware when you repurpose it.
Or the big, bad grandaddy of all "high-brow" (as it was put in an earlier post) Science Fiction writers, Kurt Vonnegut. Even C.S. Lewis wrote science fiction (quite good, too). Good writing is good writing and bad writing is bad. It is the same whether the setting is 100 years ago or 100 years hence.
And, by the way, am I the only Science Fiction Literature fan int he world who thinks Asimov only ever wrote bad space opera? I've read most of the Foundation trilogy. We were not impressed.
I remember a case in Roswell (or was it Alpharetta), GA where a car (Lexus?) dealership huffed and puffed and blew down the wishes of the people who wanted to keep the area as a nature preserve. That community lost the battle to the car dealership. Not related to telco, but none the less, an erosion of community rights, not to mention common sense.
Had the dealership already bought the property? If so, shouldn't they get to use the property they bought? Shouldn't the community have bought the property if they wanted it preserved?
It's all well and good to get upset about the "erosion of community rights", but shouldn't one aspect of community rights be respect for property ownership?
My problem with phone support is that is seems to take so long to establish that I know what i'm talking about, and trying to tell them what I need. It's rare that I call tech support and actually need them to diagnose a problem for me. It would be nice to have a customer profile that incorporates a product proficiency quotient(tm). so that I can go right to an engineer or product replacement on an issue I can diagnose myself.
My job is to provide phone support. Every user believes that they are an expert computer user. Some of them even are. But an expert user doesn't troubleshoot problems everyday, nor do they know the shortcuts that any phone tech is likely to know, if for no other reason than because we do it everyday.
Besides, it's not like we want to keep cranky, imperious know-it-alls on the phone any longer than we must (to keep our jobs).
One addendum to the mandatory web-link idea would be to have all links go to a trusted 3rd party site (e.g. no-spam.gov). This would allow you to opt-out of mail from (I hate that I am using this word here) legitimate spammers and yet prevent you from confirming your address with the "baddies".
I agree, though, that ultimately, this legalizes spam.
It's not just the doctors or the lawyers or the insurance companies or any other group you care to throw in. It's GREED!
Pure unadulterated greed in its (tasty?) crystalline form. Individuals may find that they can't get away with going too far beyond the bounds of good taste, but organizations (government, companies, etc.) can get away with quite a bit more. So I propose Elton's Law:
The Greed quotient of any organization is directly proportional to the number of people involved.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you for conflating me with the general opinions expressed on slashdot when you could instead look up all my posts.
ahh, slashdot.
The iTunes Music Store has the capability of only selling the album and not the individual tracks. These artists and bands know that. This is about staking out a negotiating posture to try and get more money. I wish all negoating parties good luck.
Let the games begin.
There is big difference between the artist getting to choose the method of presentation and dictating audience behavior. Requiring that you buy the whole album (or making all songs on the album one big track, for instance) is the artist's choice of presentation. If you then want to buy the product and break it up into tracks or only listen to one song, go for it.
If you don't want to buy the album for one song, then you have two choices:
1. Complain to the artist and maybe they'll change their mind for a customer, or
2. Vote with your feet.
If you really like the one song and want to hear it but don't want the rest, then you've got a decision to make. Buck up and make it.
And yet, artists should be able to decide that they only prefer people to consume their work in the context of the artists' choosing. This is the "rights" part of copyright. I think it is only appropriate. The creator should be allowed to put out his/her work in whatever format they'd like (vinyl, tape, CD, MP3, only live performances, etc). If the artist needs more money and thinks that they can get more by selling individual tracks, then it is their right to decide whether they will break up their work into smaller segments or only sell the work as a whole. The onus is on the creator, which is as it should be.
And, yeah, I know we can start talking about how the big, bad music industry exploits all but the most recognized artists. Heck, I'd even agree with this statement. But taking away control from the artist (by forcing them to sell individual tracks, either through legislation or market pressures) doesn't give them more clout, pull or power. It just takes away what little oversight they might have in that decision and takes the balance from the publisher. The exploitation of artists by corporate members of the RIAA is a problem in and of itself, not an argument for making all artists sell by the track.
They might well lose money. But it's their right to lose those sales and keep the work together if they so choose.
My folks use Mac portables with a Netgear wireless router. We have to use WEP and not any WPA because they have one of the HP all-in-one scanner/fax/printers with wireless access. My understanding is that ASCII WEP passwords are hashed on the client side and submitted as hexadecimal values to the router. Because the algorithm that Netgear uses to convert their text password into the hexadecimal password isn't the same one that Apple uses, the ASCII password fails and only the 28-character hexadecimal password works when attempting to have the Macs (or the printer) join the network. I'd forgotten about WPA, which is substantially better, but its a moot point because the HP device doesn't support WPA.
I concede that my understanding of how 802.11 device pass WEP passwords is inference-based, so I may be way off base.
Do the upcoming offerings provide working cross-platform hashing algorithms? Meaning, if I have a LinkSys/Netgear/Foo 802.11x router, will I be able to use the password I entered or will I have to type out an increasingly lengthy hexadecimal equivalent on my MacBook? Try explaining to Mom why, after setting the cat's name as the password on the wireless router, they can't type that in when the system asks for the network password.
Fix this stuff first, then get the speed and latency stuff worked out. Sheesh!
I will preface all I am about to say with this. I, hands down, prefer the claims of science over all religious faiths. That said...
To say that science threatens faith is to misunderstand the nature of science. Science is a faith, folks. Get used to the idea. Any given world view (Kuhn called it a paradigm) has a basic set of assumptions and beliefs that are unquestioned. Sound familiar? Like, say, religion. To a devout Christian, aspects of science are, simply, heretical. The reverse is true for any staunch scientist.
However, in this modern world of ours, we've gotten used to holding oppositional beliefs in our heads, such that people make claims regarding their ability to reconcile scientific knowledge with their religious beliefs. These claims always fall apart upon inspection and/or challenge.
If there is anything that makes science superior, it is in its ability to better predict natural phenomenon. How well it can do this is debatable, as is a determination of what is lost in transition from faith in a god to faith in the sciences. This sort of understanding is key to the modern philosophy of science.
Of course, scientists and clerics alike typically ignore all this and go on about their business. They leave the pondering up to the goofy philosophers.
Truth: 0
Misrepresentation of the truth by a Slashdot editor: 9,462,783.14159
I just made a mess in my pants. This is like manna from heaven for the research I do.
For sounding like Kurtz from Apocalypse Now.
Seriously, the guy sounds downright creepy: "These are aging industries run by aging men, and they're up against 17-year-olds who have turned themselves into electronic Hezbollah because they resent the content industry for its proprietary practices."
Creepy!
Amazing, really. Whoever disagrees with FFFish is always in the wrong, no matter how right they are.
Supporter of DRM? Logic, rationality and common decency in a debate fall by the wayside, for they are pure evil.
Detractor of DRM? Logic, rationality and common decency in a debate fall by the wayside, for they are bringers of the light, the new religion.
Lighten up. It's an argument over copyright protection, not the Holocaust, Rhwanda or Darfur.
I think one reality to face here is that while strict liability may pressure large businesses to act immediately, many smaller businesses either won't know they need to act or will simply choose to roll the dice. If the goal is to make sure businesses protect customer data, than fining companies failing to comply with a statute requiring that they secure the network would work much better than allowing people to sue after the fact.
This is really no different that the Health Department making sure that restaurants are clean and people don't get sick when they eat there or the state enforcing speed limits to proactively encourage people to slow down. you can always sue the restaurant or the driver, but does that really help the family who's member gets sick or injured after eating bad food or getting hit by a reckless driver? And no, I'm not equating food poisoning to identity theft...I think ID theft might be worse in many cases.
Does the Pope shit in the woods?
And if he does, does he wipe with this new ruling?
AFAIK this was a requirement by the record labels before they would permit digital distribution of the music files. So is the anti-competitive behaviour Apple's or the RIAA cartel's?
Yes, that's right. Apple has no vested interest in copy protection. If it wasn't for the *IAA creeps/jerkwads/satanists, they'd be happy to sell one copy of each song and have everybody copy it their iPod. Neither the executives nor the shareholders even want the added profit of selling copyrighted media. They want information to be free!
And if you believe that, I've got this bridge here...
IANAL, but wouldn't software that ripped DVD's and keyed them with fairplay keys be DMCA-compliant? It wouldn't be "circumventing" digitally encrypted material, just format-shifting the security methods.
Of course, this is a lot of legal wrangling and development to do something would cannibalize the sale of new movies which would, presumably, be offered on the iTMS. Just thinking out loud here...
As I sit typing this, I am listening to my old Epia box sing its low-noise fan song. It sits in my living room, running as a local DNS, daapd, netatalk and web-based file server running on FreeBSD. I bought this for a media server a few years ago and it has served admirably well in this task.
Sure it never really gets put through its paces, but as far as a fire and forget server for my house, it has served me well. If I ever get less lazy (it's a disease) and decide to use a software router, I might get one of those dual ethernet versions.
The point is, they work great for an unobtrusive, relatively quiet server and everything's onboard, so you needn't have to deal with a parade of new hardware when you repurpose it.
Or the big, bad grandaddy of all "high-brow" (as it was put in an earlier post) Science Fiction writers, Kurt Vonnegut. Even C.S. Lewis wrote science fiction (quite good, too). Good writing is good writing and bad writing is bad. It is the same whether the setting is 100 years ago or 100 years hence.
And, by the way, am I the only Science Fiction Literature fan int he world who thinks Asimov only ever wrote bad space opera? I've read most of the Foundation trilogy. We were not impressed.
Fool me once, shame on...you...Fool me twice, I won't get fooled again.
It's all well and good to get upset about the "erosion of community rights", but shouldn't one aspect of community rights be respect for property ownership?
My job is to provide phone support. Every user believes that they are an expert computer user. Some of them even are. But an expert user doesn't troubleshoot problems everyday, nor do they know the shortcuts that any phone tech is likely to know, if for no other reason than because we do it everyday.
Besides, it's not like we want to keep cranky, imperious know-it-alls on the phone any longer than we must (to keep our jobs).
Can you direct me to the spamming wessel?
One addendum to the mandatory web-link idea would be to have all links go to a trusted 3rd party site (e.g. no-spam.gov). This would allow you to opt-out of mail from (I hate that I am using this word here) legitimate spammers and yet prevent you from confirming your address with the "baddies".
I agree, though, that ultimately, this legalizes spam.
It's not just the doctors or the lawyers or the insurance companies or any other group you care to throw in. It's GREED!
Pure unadulterated greed in its (tasty?) crystalline form. Individuals may find that they can't get away with going too far beyond the bounds of good taste, but organizations (government, companies, etc.) can get away with quite a bit more. So I propose Elton's Law:
The Greed quotient of any organization is directly proportional to the number of people involved.