I think slashdot moderators are among the most intelligent, hard working, thought provoking, all around wonderful people who do the world a great deal of service by helping us less than worthy slashdot readers find the most insightful posts on any given topiic.
I cannot find words sufficient to express my appreciation and gratitude for this hard work from people who are not only above average in intelligence, but are handsome to boot.
and if that doesn't get a five, I will demand that Dale Carnegie gives me my money back.
The iframe tag is the ideal mechanism for delivering ads. An iframe does a better job of separating content from the ad than just about anything else I've found. The iframe seems to let the page render first with the proper size for the ad.
desalinzation on a massive scale, we could pump billions of gallons of water inland into the continents of Africa and Asia.
The efforts you suggest would change the climate. The climate change debate says that we need to stop change. It does not say that we need to work on technologies to make our lives better. If a place was covered with a glacier in 1976, then it needs to be covered with a glacier in 2076. If a place was covered with a barren desert in 1976, it needs to be covered with a desert in 2176.
Everything needs to stay the same. And it will stay the same, if we just moved real slow.
The reporting in the two articles looks pretty good. For that matter it even looks like the science behind the reports is pretty good.
Reading the press releases at CSIRO, it looks like the marketers for the organization are trying to establishes a connection to global warming politics (probably in an effort to get funding). The article I linked to says:
"research that will help them explain more accurately how the ocean governs global climate."
I am going to walk out on a limb here and reject the premise that purpose of the supergyre is to govern global climate. I will actually venture the statement that the supergyre really doesn't have a purpose in life, it is just the result of natural forces such as the spinning of the earth and the absorbing the energy of the sun, etc..
My saying that a force exists does not mean there are not countervailing forces. Zoning boards are such a force.
The real question with zoning boards is if they will effectively protect the poor.
My personal experience with zoning boards is that the boards are filled with rich powerful people with connections to other rich powerful people. In general, they tend to favor rich powerful people to poor, disenfranchised people.
Let's say there is a very strong demand for solar energy with a countering political force to keep spaces open. The effect of zoning boards is likely to lead to a situation where there are some solar panels in the rich hoods. The bulk of the energy producing boards will be in poor, disenfranchised neighborhoods.
On the whole, the NIMBY mantality of zoning boards will be a countervailing force to minimuze the impact of solar energy. Since zoning boards are pretty much designed to protect the interests of the wealthy and powerful, their effect will be simply to concentrate any negative effects of the technology onto poorer neighborhoods.
Re:Sunshine and the Public Commons
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Vertical Farming
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I prefer electricity to sunshine as well. I can control it. The interesting trend is that we are replacing something that we had for free (light from the sun) for something that we have to purchase.
Besides it's not like we won't leave a number of public parks open.
The need to leave parks, courtyards and other spaces open is the issue. If an investor had land adcancent to a park; he might decided to build a thousand foot tall tower to harvest the solar energy that would otherwise hit the park. This investor would be taking from a public commons. There would probably be a lawsuit. The heart of the lawsuit is the taking sunshine from the public commons.
If wins the lawsuit, which is unlikely, then we might see public parks ecclipsed.
We are likely to continue to see parks and open spaces precisely because we see such things as a public good.
The solar boom will create a situation where people start seeing sunlight as an economic good. This discussion will include others who argue for it as a public good.
Sunshine and the Public Commons
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Vertical Farming
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What I said was actually more relevant to solar panels than vertical farms. A vertical farm, after all, is really a solar panel made of biological material.
As people start seeing more economic value in sunshine, there will be a desire to exploit sunshine as a resource. Once this trend is in high gear, there will also start being a backlash to sun harvesting projects as people start debating the extent to which sunshine is a public good.
From a human perspective, I think that covering an area with greenery is preferable to covering it with silicon panels. There is still an access problem.
Re:and the bottom layers
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Vertical Farming
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
Boy, my not knowing that cities have skyscrapers means that I must really be stupid.
Since I have been proven stupid, the point I made about there being only a limited amount of sun hitting urban areas must be invalid, and the conclusion I made that there will be increased pressure on this limited resource in the upcoming solar boom must be flat out wrong.
Since Scrameustache is quick to point out how other people are stupid, he-she-or-it must be really super smart.
I know that I am too stupid to do such things, but I am going to go out on a limb here and predict that once solar energy hits that sweet spot where massive rollout of panels is cost effective, there will be an inundation of lawsuits regarding access to sunlight and solar panels. I also put forth the assertion people in urban areas will continue to see less of the sun.
Vertical farms would be competing for the same resource.
Of course, since I am too stupid to notice that this process is already underway in the skyscraper age, then my assertion that a trend people have complained about since the beginning of the skyscaper age is about to get worse must be way off base.
There is absolutely no indication that people today are exposed to less sunlight than they were a hundred years ago. Well, other than the fact that a century ago, just about everyone wore a hat.
and the bottom layers
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Vertical Farming
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· Score: 3, Interesting
"All the bottom layers are for growing mushrooms, cockroaches," and people.*
Just as the public really isn't welcomed to come out and recreate in existing farms, I doubt the new vertical farms will welcome the public.
Add to this a desire to cover urban landscape with solar panels, and we will probably quickly see a situation where access to sunlight is a commodity that is out of the reach of your standard urban dweller. While it will be great for people to make better use of solar resources hitting an urban area, these solar resources are still quite limited. A vertical farm works by blocking sun from the plebians in the tower's shadow.
You need to change this to read: "feed a cat". Google will feed your cat up until the index change after which it will start feeding another cat. To be grammatically precise: "a cat" will be fed. There is just no guarantee that it will be "the cat."
"What's the point in publishing a paper that you want no one to cite!?"
Vanity is a tricky business. You want people to cite you. You don't want them to copy so much of your stuff, that the people who cited you get the future citations for your work.
On the comments about timing... ah, it seems that companies want to go public when the market is going up... Rarely does a company want to go public right after a crash. Financial events often coincide because people make decisions based on financial stimulus.
I like the idea of an open sourced company being publicly owned. I have to admit, my fears are that the bureaucratic mindset that dominates the insurance companies and mutual funds that own this world will force another great company into mediocrity of the financial borg.
Risk of being bought out. - The best protection against this is fast growth.
I've seen a lot of fast growing companies get gobbled up. Often companies want to merge because they think their existing structure can't keep up with the pace of the growth. I guess it is also common for companies to seek a merger when the market expectation of their growth outpaces reality (I won't go into that).
I am just sad that going public seems to be prelude of a tragedy of another great company being sucked into the merger game.
This world really needs ways for companies to be publicly owned yet remain independent. The two ideas are
I suspect that power companies would be happy to give money to customers (as opposed to giving it to the energy companies). I suspect that they really don't care who they are buying energy from so long as they make enough to pay for the grid and their profit.
Power companies love to play games like buying up old refrigerators as it is great press. In general, businesses love to do things that support their customers.
The real question in my mind is if the politicians will so stupid as to demand that power companies buy back solar power at the cost that they sell power. The price for buying back energy needs to provide a sufficient differential to pay for the grid and the metering.
The only time you have "upfront payments" is when an investor is involved. The investor is only willing to make that upfront investment if they see an adequate return. An intelligent investor looks at the full run of the item that they purchased.
It is true that copyright debate is often dominated by the massive firms with gigantic libaries. These people want to protect their powerbase. The debate on copyright needs to be driven y what we want in the future. Of course, there is no future when nothing is done to protect the investments of the past, since all investment is based on the idea of applying the experience of the past to the future.
Let us examine this more closely. The "reporter out in the field" has been paid. The program has been paid for. By the advertising placed on the original broadcast of the material.
I take it that you learned business in a dotbomb start up. The web site was paid for by the investors, why does the site have to make money? It was already paid for upfront.
Investors who bought that idea lost all of their money.
In the world of writing, a great deal of stuff comes from freelancers. These people throw their own personal money into the game and then have to work like dogs to get paid for their efforts.
The assumption that everything is paid for in full in the first broadcast also seems suspect. If I were a producer, I would be looking at the full lifecycle of the product to determine my budget.
Even if everything was magically paid for in the first showing, you would find that YouTube actually takes viewers from that first showing. As a viewer, if I felt comfortable that the best parts of American Idol would be on YouTube, then I might prefer to wait a couple hours for people to start uploading snippets from the shows and not bother watching that first broadcast.
Just saying -- the "it must be protected because it is valuable because it costs a lot" is a red herring.
This really isn't a red herring. The statement makes a great deal of sense if you look at it from the eyes of an investor. If you want to create content, you have to have a way to pay back the money you borrowed to create the content.
If there is no protection for content, then there is no way to ever get a positive return on creating expensive content. Therefore, all investments in expensive content will fail.
The reason that I brought up the distinction between expensive and cheap content is that, perhaps, the laws should take such things into account. Maybe there should be different classifications of content.
If you design the system for handling cheaply produced content, then you simply drive the production of expensive content out of the market. If you design the sytem for the most expense content, then you end up creating an onerous system that stymies the flow of this cheaply produced content.
Of what value is last years "American Idol"?
I suspect that there is a great deal of value in last years American Idol. I did a quick search in Amazon, the producers seem to be publishing a ton of DVDs and CDs with old Idol stuff. The DVDs and CDs all seem to have high sales ranks, and a large number of used copies in the mix. My guess is that there is a great deal of value in last year's American Idol.
For that matter, I would pretty much guess that if there was no value in last year's American Idol that there would be no value in promoting a snippet from the show?
Unfortunately, this YouTube case has some merit. What a news program does make money by providing a stream of data with snippets of content sandwiched between commercials. YouTube makes it money by providing a stream of data with snippets of content sandwiched between online ads. When you have a community site with people recording the snippets from TV and displaying them on YouTube, you've created a direct mechanism that does direct harm to the content creators.
This is unfortunate because there is great value in people having the ability to comment about what is going on TV.
What I really like about YouTube is that I not only see the content, but I get to see another person's comment on the content. The second rate economist inside of me screams that the commentary on content shouldn't undermine the ability of content makers to profit from their work. Making quality content is expensive, it can costs tens of thousands of dollars to get a few snippets of a reporter out in the field.
The commentary on content is valuable. However, commenting on another's content is something that is relatively inexpensive to do. Once you are set up, you can record, snip and publish till the cows come home. (NOTE, most of the content on cable news is just cheaply produced commentary. Commenting on commentary seems like a different issue than commenting on a report from the field or real research).
I don't think it is possible to derive the perfect copyright law from the aether. The way the legal system works is that when a massive community like YouTube starts directly affecting the ability of content makers to profit from their work, you have to have a lawsuit. I can't see a way out of this one.
The ultimate solution would involve complex mechanisms that classify different types of content, and that creates mechanisms that allow for rapid mass negotiation for use of the content. I doubt that a legal system is even capable of creating a really good solution.
The article says that all of the bdelloid rotifers are females.
Your point is refuted.
Re:he Individual Sense of Fairplay is the Best DRM
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I was working with Lotus Notes and other data replication technologies well before the Napster revolution. I went to conferences about the various technologies. What I experienced before the Napster revolution was a great deal of talk about finding ways to balance the needs of the content creator with the replication technology. What I experienced was a lot of thoughtful peopld engaged in quality discourse.
During the great file sharing revolution, I kept meeting people talking about stupid ideas like Napster spelling the end of property ownership. I had someone grab my CD collection and upload it on a Napster without asking my permission, much less the permission of the copyright owners. Where once there was discourse with people making effort to understand different positions on the issue, we went through a spell where any attempt to address the desire of artists to get paid for their creation was met with invective. For that matter did you notice how the other reply to my post was just anonymous swearing at me simply for suggesting that self restraint should be sufficient DRM.
BTW: I disagree with your assessment that there was no effort to balance the needs of content creator and consumers in copyright law. What I saw happen was a great deal of quality discourse that involved consumers, content creators and technology firms engaged in discourse on ways to bring the technology out to the public without having the market implode.
The quality discourse in the pre-Napster era was shouted down during the Napster idiocy. There was a period where you could not even mention both sides of the debate without being cursed at.
Yes, all of your posts are correct. There was a great deal of debate before Napster. Most of the technologies currently in play have roots in technologies before Napster. During Napster days, the quality debate was shouted down and we have been in action/reaction mode since.
As for your assertion that DRM is entirely about big business wanting to beat on and rape consumers. The original motivation for most DRM style applications prior to Napster was a belief that if you found effective ways to restrict the use of a product, that you would be able to sell it for less. For example, Movielink has two types of movie downloads. One is a "rent" program; where the file automatically deletes itself. The other is a more expensive "buy" action where you have the movie for as long as your hard drive lasts. The more restrictive thing where you have the movies for three days saves the consumer money.
Re:he Individual Sense of Fairplay is the Best DRM
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Personally, I saw DMCA (pdf), passed in 1998, as an attempt to clarify rules, to set industry standards. Most of the talk I heard on DMCA prior to its passing was about laws related to publishing software or making hardware specifically to circumvent copyright protection devices or to remove copyright information from works. The 1998 DCMA was about the computer industry trying to find a way to curb the development of technology specifically for violating copyrights. It was not really aimed at the individual. It was aimed at corporations.
The copyright-pirating as a culture war thing was a completely different issue. That was an attempt to simply swamp the whole system. The really ugly stuff like the DRM software embedded in music formats came after the piracy-revolution. If that revolution had not happened, I believe that we would be seeing a much saner industry today.
The piracy culture war was basically a statement that a radical group would not play by the rules passed. That gave the culture warriors on the right the chance to stomp on everybody's head.
Today's article seems to understand that individuals are not the threat to the welfare of copyright holders. It is only the mechanized violation of copyright that poses a threat.
The Individual Sense of Fairplay is the Best DRM
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DRM Causes Piracy
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The article introduces the reader to the reason to why the lack of DRM would not lead to mass piracy. It is because people in developed countries are (or at least used to) have a highly developed sense of ethics.
People do not generally "pirate" an electronic text in order to sell it for a profit. They do it in order to get the text itself, for their own use.
There is one major exception to this rule. But that involves people who can operate openly on a mass production scale in countries which do not enforce international intellectual property rights.
DRM came to play because there was a massive effort to engage in automated copyright infringement. We could have completely avoided DRM if cultural institutions, like Universities, came out against mass piracy. Instead the wanks in the academia came out spouting nonsense about how mass piracy was the new social revolution that would transform society.
Since our cultural institutions were lauding mass piracy, individuals wanted to be part of the technology revolution felt compelled to join in on the piracy frenzy.
The market for DRM was created by content owners looking at the mass piracy advocated by our social insitutations and decided that they needed excessively instrusive mechanisms to protect the content they created.
It was the mass automation of piracy coupled with social leaders egging people on that created the need for DRM. IMHO, if it were not for that idiocy, we could have gotten by enforcing copyright with the individual sense of ethics as this article contends.
Conversely, I would not be surprised if competitors really do not want to be on "the list."
Apparently, this list requires some sort of Microsoft certification. You probably have to pay Microsoft or buy Microsoft products. I can see why competitors would want to avoid that. If my software company already had a well known brand and a decent reputation for reliability, I might want find it more advantageous to be on the conspicuously missing list.
I would only want to be on "The List" if there was an immediate advantage. Being off the list shows independent thinking.
BTW: The same thing happens in politics. Candidates are generally reluctant to get endorsements from a president during the president's later terms. Politicians want to be on the list of rising stars, but are wise to show some independence from those that are in power.
Contracts with credit card companies prevent you from having discounts for other credit card companies. I think that they do allow discounts for cash. Of course, the problems with doing all of your business in cash is that bandits with guns rather than bandits with plastic cards take the money.
As a web designer, I haven't figured out how to get cash through the net. I tried letting them fax dollars in.
A gentleman from the Secret Service discussed the issue with me, and let me off saying that my collecting dollars through fax was the worst attempt at counterfeiting that he had ever seen.
The plural of "company" is "companies." In basic grammar, the plural of something generally means a group of somethings.
Yes, there are banks that have an extremely complex nexus of contracts that allow them to skim a sizeable profit off business. The complex nexus of contracts helps hide them. Referring to them as credit card companies is fine in my book.
Expanding on this thread. The credit card cartels actually benefit from the fraud since they can slam merchants with fees.
If there were competition in the credit card business, then merchants could choose different merchant services, or have more say in which cards get used.
One way for merchants to deal with credit card fraud would be for merchants to tack different service fees on to different cards. A merchant might charge a 1 percent fee on checks or debit cards, a 3 percent fee on card A, a 4% fee on card B (which seems more prone to fraud), a 5% fee on card D (which requires higher merchant fees).
As it stands, of course, the credit card companies prevent merchants from the one logical course of action in the light of credit card fraud... charging fees based on the performance of the payment method.
The power of a cartel is that what goes around never comes around. And you you get to take a percent of what goes around.
Slashdot Mirror
I think slashdot moderators are among the most intelligent, hard working, thought provoking, all around wonderful people who do the world a great deal of service by helping us less than worthy slashdot readers find the most insightful posts on any given topiic.
I cannot find words sufficient to express my appreciation and gratitude for this hard work from people who are not only above average in intelligence, but are handsome to boot.
and if that doesn't get a five, I will demand that Dale Carnegie gives me my money back.
The iframe tag is the ideal mechanism for delivering ads. An iframe does a better job of separating content from the ad than just about anything else I've found. The iframe seems to let the page render first with the proper size for the ad.
Too bad it was deprecated by the W3C.
The efforts you suggest would change the climate. The climate change debate says that we need to stop change. It does not say that we need to work on technologies to make our lives better. If a place was covered with a glacier in 1976, then it needs to be covered with a glacier in 2076. If a place was covered with a barren desert in 1976, it needs to be covered with a desert in 2176.
Everything needs to stay the same. And it will stay the same, if we just moved real slow.
The reporting in the two articles looks pretty good. For that matter it even looks like the science behind the reports is pretty good.
Reading the press releases at CSIRO, it looks like the marketers for the organization are trying to establishes a connection to global warming politics (probably in an effort to get funding). The article I linked to says:
I am going to walk out on a limb here and reject the premise that purpose of the supergyre is to govern global climate. I will actually venture the statement that the supergyre really doesn't have a purpose in life, it is just the result of natural forces such as the spinning of the earth and the absorbing the energy of the sun, etc..
My saying that a force exists does not mean there are not countervailing forces. Zoning boards are such a force.
The real question with zoning boards is if they will effectively protect the poor.
My personal experience with zoning boards is that the boards are filled with rich powerful people with connections to other rich powerful people. In general, they tend to favor rich powerful people to poor, disenfranchised people.
Let's say there is a very strong demand for solar energy with a countering political force to keep spaces open. The effect of zoning boards is likely to lead to a situation where there are some solar panels in the rich hoods. The bulk of the energy producing boards will be in poor, disenfranchised neighborhoods.
On the whole, the NIMBY mantality of zoning boards will be a countervailing force to minimuze the impact of solar energy. Since zoning boards are pretty much designed to protect the interests of the wealthy and powerful, their effect will be simply to concentrate any negative effects of the technology onto poorer neighborhoods.
I prefer electricity to sunshine as well. I can control it. The interesting trend is that we are replacing something that we had for free (light from the sun) for something that we have to purchase.
The need to leave parks, courtyards and other spaces open is the issue. If an investor had land adcancent to a park; he might decided to build a thousand foot tall tower to harvest the solar energy that would otherwise hit the park. This investor would be taking from a public commons. There would probably be a lawsuit. The heart of the lawsuit is the taking sunshine from the public commons.
If wins the lawsuit, which is unlikely, then we might see public parks ecclipsed.
We are likely to continue to see parks and open spaces precisely because we see such things as a public good.
The solar boom will create a situation where people start seeing sunlight as an economic good. This discussion will include others who argue for it as a public good.
What I said was actually more relevant to solar panels than vertical farms. A vertical farm, after all, is really a solar panel made of biological material.
As people start seeing more economic value in sunshine, there will be a desire to exploit sunshine as a resource. Once this trend is in high gear, there will also start being a backlash to sun harvesting projects as people start debating the extent to which sunshine is a public good.
From a human perspective, I think that covering an area with greenery is preferable to covering it with silicon panels. There is still an access problem.
Boy, my not knowing that cities have skyscrapers means that I must really be stupid.
Since I have been proven stupid, the point I made about there being only a limited amount of sun hitting urban areas must be invalid, and the conclusion I made that there will be increased pressure on this limited resource in the upcoming solar boom must be flat out wrong.
Since Scrameustache is quick to point out how other people are stupid, he-she-or-it must be really super smart.
I know that I am too stupid to do such things, but I am going to go out on a limb here and predict that once solar energy hits that sweet spot where massive rollout of panels is cost effective, there will be an inundation of lawsuits regarding access to sunlight and solar panels. I also put forth the assertion people in urban areas will continue to see less of the sun.
Vertical farms would be competing for the same resource.
Of course, since I am too stupid to notice that this process is already underway in the skyscraper age, then my assertion that a trend people have complained about since the beginning of the skyscaper age is about to get worse must be way off base.
There is absolutely no indication that people today are exposed to less sunlight than they were a hundred years ago. Well, other than the fact that a century ago, just about everyone wore a hat.
"All the bottom layers are for growing mushrooms, cockroaches," and people.*
Just as the public really isn't welcomed to come out and recreate in existing farms, I doubt the new vertical farms will welcome the public.
Add to this a desire to cover urban landscape with solar panels, and we will probably quickly see a situation where access to sunlight is a commodity that is out of the reach of your standard urban dweller. While it will be great for people to make better use of solar resources hitting an urban area, these solar resources are still quite limited. A vertical farm works by blocking sun from the plebians in the tower's shadow.
You need to change this to read: "feed a cat". Google will feed your cat up until the index change after which it will start feeding another cat. To be grammatically precise: "a cat" will be fed. There is just no guarantee that it will be "the cat."
Vanity is a tricky business. You want people to cite you. You don't want them to copy so much of your stuff, that the people who cited you get the future citations for your work.
On the comments about timing ... ah, it seems that companies want to go public when the market is going up... Rarely does a company want to go public right after a crash. Financial events often coincide because people make decisions based on financial stimulus.
I like the idea of an open sourced company being publicly owned. I have to admit, my fears are that the bureaucratic mindset that dominates the insurance companies and mutual funds that own this world will force another great company into mediocrity of the financial borg.
I've seen a lot of fast growing companies get gobbled up. Often companies want to merge because they think their existing structure can't keep up with the pace of the growth. I guess it is also common for companies to seek a merger when the market expectation of their growth outpaces reality (I won't go into that).
I am just sad that going public seems to be prelude of a tragedy of another great company being sucked into the merger game.
This world really needs ways for companies to be publicly owned yet remain independent. The two ideas are
I suspect that power companies would be happy to give money to customers (as opposed to giving it to the energy companies). I suspect that they really don't care who they are buying energy from so long as they make enough to pay for the grid and their profit.
Power companies love to play games like buying up old refrigerators as it is great press. In general, businesses love to do things that support their customers.
The real question in my mind is if the politicians will so stupid as to demand that power companies buy back solar power at the cost that they sell power. The price for buying back energy needs to provide a sufficient differential to pay for the grid and the metering.
The only time you have "upfront payments" is when an investor is involved. The investor is only willing to make that upfront investment if they see an adequate return. An intelligent investor looks at the full run of the item that they purchased.
It is true that copyright debate is often dominated by the massive firms with gigantic libaries. These people want to protect their powerbase. The debate on copyright needs to be driven y what we want in the future. Of course, there is no future when nothing is done to protect the investments of the past, since all investment is based on the idea of applying the experience of the past to the future.
I take it that you learned business in a dotbomb start up. The web site was paid for by the investors, why does the site have to make money? It was already paid for upfront.
Investors who bought that idea lost all of their money.
In the world of writing, a great deal of stuff comes from freelancers. These people throw their own personal money into the game and then have to work like dogs to get paid for their efforts.
The assumption that everything is paid for in full in the first broadcast also seems suspect. If I were a producer, I would be looking at the full lifecycle of the product to determine my budget.
Even if everything was magically paid for in the first showing, you would find that YouTube actually takes viewers from that first showing. As a viewer, if I felt comfortable that the best parts of American Idol would be on YouTube, then I might prefer to wait a couple hours for people to start uploading snippets from the shows and not bother watching that first broadcast.
This really isn't a red herring. The statement makes a great deal of sense if you look at it from the eyes of an investor. If you want to create content, you have to have a way to pay back the money you borrowed to create the content.
If there is no protection for content, then there is no way to ever get a positive return on creating expensive content. Therefore, all investments in expensive content will fail.
The reason that I brought up the distinction between expensive and cheap content is that, perhaps, the laws should take such things into account. Maybe there should be different classifications of content.
If you design the system for handling cheaply produced content, then you simply drive the production of expensive content out of the market. If you design the sytem for the most expense content, then you end up creating an onerous system that stymies the flow of this cheaply produced content.
I suspect that there is a great deal of value in last years American Idol. I did a quick search in Amazon, the producers seem to be publishing a ton of DVDs and CDs with old Idol stuff. The DVDs and CDs all seem to have high sales ranks, and a large number of used copies in the mix. My guess is that there is a great deal of value in last year's American Idol.
For that matter, I would pretty much guess that if there was no value in last year's American Idol that there would be no value in promoting a snippet from the show?
Unfortunately, this YouTube case has some merit. What a news program does make money by providing a stream of data with snippets of content sandwiched between commercials. YouTube makes it money by providing a stream of data with snippets of content sandwiched between online ads. When you have a community site with people recording the snippets from TV and displaying them on YouTube, you've created a direct mechanism that does direct harm to the content creators.
This is unfortunate because there is great value in people having the ability to comment about what is going on TV.
What I really like about YouTube is that I not only see the content, but I get to see another person's comment on the content. The second rate economist inside of me screams that the commentary on content shouldn't undermine the ability of content makers to profit from their work. Making quality content is expensive, it can costs tens of thousands of dollars to get a few snippets of a reporter out in the field.
The commentary on content is valuable. However, commenting on another's content is something that is relatively inexpensive to do. Once you are set up, you can record, snip and publish till the cows come home. (NOTE, most of the content on cable news is just cheaply produced commentary. Commenting on commentary seems like a different issue than commenting on a report from the field or real research).
I don't think it is possible to derive the perfect copyright law from the aether. The way the legal system works is that when a massive community like YouTube starts directly affecting the ability of content makers to profit from their work, you have to have a lawsuit. I can't see a way out of this one.
The ultimate solution would involve complex mechanisms that classify different types of content, and that creates mechanisms that allow for rapid mass negotiation for use of the content. I doubt that a legal system is even capable of creating a really good solution.
Your point is refuted.
I was working with Lotus Notes and other data replication technologies well before the Napster revolution. I went to conferences about the various technologies. What I experienced before the Napster revolution was a great deal of talk about finding ways to balance the needs of the content creator with the replication technology. What I experienced was a lot of thoughtful peopld engaged in quality discourse.
During the great file sharing revolution, I kept meeting people talking about stupid ideas like Napster spelling the end of property ownership. I had someone grab my CD collection and upload it on a Napster without asking my permission, much less the permission of the copyright owners. Where once there was discourse with people making effort to understand different positions on the issue, we went through a spell where any attempt to address the desire of artists to get paid for their creation was met with invective. For that matter did you notice how the other reply to my post was just anonymous swearing at me simply for suggesting that self restraint should be sufficient DRM.
BTW: I disagree with your assessment that there was no effort to balance the needs of content creator and consumers in copyright law. What I saw happen was a great deal of quality discourse that involved consumers, content creators and technology firms engaged in discourse on ways to bring the technology out to the public without having the market implode.
The quality discourse in the pre-Napster era was shouted down during the Napster idiocy. There was a period where you could not even mention both sides of the debate without being cursed at.
Yes, all of your posts are correct. There was a great deal of debate before Napster. Most of the technologies currently in play have roots in technologies before Napster. During Napster days, the quality debate was shouted down and we have been in action/reaction mode since.
As for your assertion that DRM is entirely about big business wanting to beat on and rape consumers. The original motivation for most DRM style applications prior to Napster was a belief that if you found effective ways to restrict the use of a product, that you would be able to sell it for less. For example, Movielink has two types of movie downloads. One is a "rent" program; where the file automatically deletes itself. The other is a more expensive "buy" action where you have the movie for as long as your hard drive lasts. The more restrictive thing where you have the movies for three days saves the consumer money.
Personally, I saw DMCA (pdf), passed in 1998, as an attempt to clarify rules, to set industry standards. Most of the talk I heard on DMCA prior to its passing was about laws related to publishing software or making hardware specifically to circumvent copyright protection devices or to remove copyright information from works. The 1998 DCMA was about the computer industry trying to find a way to curb the development of technology specifically for violating copyrights. It was not really aimed at the individual. It was aimed at corporations.
The copyright-pirating as a culture war thing was a completely different issue. That was an attempt to simply swamp the whole system. The really ugly stuff like the DRM software embedded in music formats came after the piracy-revolution. If that revolution had not happened, I believe that we would be seeing a much saner industry today.
The piracy culture war was basically a statement that a radical group would not play by the rules passed. That gave the culture warriors on the right the chance to stomp on everybody's head.
Today's article seems to understand that individuals are not the threat to the welfare of copyright holders. It is only the mechanized violation of copyright that poses a threat.
The article introduces the reader to the reason to why the lack of DRM would not lead to mass piracy. It is because people in developed countries are (or at least used to) have a highly developed sense of ethics.
DRM came to play because there was a massive effort to engage in automated copyright infringement. We could have completely avoided DRM if cultural institutions, like Universities, came out against mass piracy. Instead the wanks in the academia came out spouting nonsense about how mass piracy was the new social revolution that would transform society.
Since our cultural institutions were lauding mass piracy, individuals wanted to be part of the technology revolution felt compelled to join in on the piracy frenzy.
The market for DRM was created by content owners looking at the mass piracy advocated by our social insitutations and decided that they needed excessively instrusive mechanisms to protect the content they created.
It was the mass automation of piracy coupled with social leaders egging people on that created the need for DRM. IMHO, if it were not for that idiocy, we could have gotten by enforcing copyright with the individual sense of ethics as this article contends.
I would stipulate that exclusion is primarily the choice of the software vendors not to participate in this program.
Conversely, I would not be surprised if competitors really do not want to be on "the list."
Apparently, this list requires some sort of Microsoft certification. You probably have to pay Microsoft or buy Microsoft products. I can see why competitors would want to avoid that. If my software company already had a well known brand and a decent reputation for reliability, I might want find it more advantageous to be on the conspicuously missing list.
I would only want to be on "The List" if there was an immediate advantage. Being off the list shows independent thinking.
BTW: The same thing happens in politics. Candidates are generally reluctant to get endorsements from a president during the president's later terms. Politicians want to be on the list of rising stars, but are wise to show some independence from those that are in power.
Contracts with credit card companies prevent you from having discounts for other credit card companies. I think that they do allow discounts for cash. Of course, the problems with doing all of your business in cash is that bandits with guns rather than bandits with plastic cards take the money.
As a web designer, I haven't figured out how to get cash through the net. I tried letting them fax dollars in.
A gentleman from the Secret Service discussed the issue with me, and let me off saying that my collecting dollars through fax was the worst attempt at counterfeiting that he had ever seen.
A cartel is a "consortia of members".
The plural of "company" is "companies." In basic grammar, the plural of something generally means a group of somethings.
Yes, there are banks that have an extremely complex nexus of contracts that allow them to skim a sizeable profit off business. The complex nexus of contracts helps hide them. Referring to them as credit card companies is fine in my book.
Expanding on this thread. The credit card cartels actually benefit from the fraud since they can slam merchants with fees.
... charging fees based on the performance of the payment method.
If there were competition in the credit card business, then merchants could choose different merchant services, or have more say in which cards get used.
One way for merchants to deal with credit card fraud would be for merchants to tack different service fees on to different cards. A merchant might charge a 1 percent fee on checks or debit cards, a 3 percent fee on card A, a 4% fee on card B (which seems more prone to fraud), a 5% fee on card D (which requires higher merchant fees).
As it stands, of course, the credit card companies prevent merchants from the one logical course of action in the light of credit card fraud
The power of a cartel is that what goes around never comes around. And you you get to take a percent of what goes around.