I know several independent artists who got money from MP3.com. If you could get in the top ten of a genre, you would walk away with a few thousand bucks.
The sad thing was that a new technology was wiped out in a futile copyright battle.
I know several bands which have gotten exposure and can now charge more for gigs by posting songs on the internet.
Why not abolish all property? Saying that I shouldn't have rights to the works I create while I have ownership of my car, my computer, my house, my clothes, my skin and my brain seems like a bunch of petty mindless ranking?
Of course, when none of us are allowed to own anything including ourselves then we are all wards of the states. That is we are all slaves. When you are prevented from owning anything, you become a defacto slave. But the ultimate conclusion of the dialectics is that freedom is slavery and slavery is freedom. Nothing new here.
This patent deserves its spot in the top of the list of patent abusers. Essentially this is a patent for defining a relation between tables in a relational database...uh, isn't that the way a relational database works? This is not a patent for the table design, but for the idea of having a relation between tables.
I suspect that there is a great deal of prior art of databases with defined relations between people.
Come to think of it, all I have to do is whip out my handy black book with the names the hot babes I knew in school. ahhhg, come to think of it, this patent implies that I would have to be included in the black books of the hot babes to be considered a friend...
I thought IBM's marketing strategy was based on the principle of the black hole (or I should say the big blue hole). Companies start revolving around the big blue gravity cluster. Then, suddenly, they are sucked in and never heard from again.
I think the ultimate point is to destroy the "work for hire" industry. Think of this as a scheme to liberate you from your job. Of course, the problem with programs that intend to undermine the tax base with tax subsidies is that once they have destroyed the tax base, well, the tax base is destroyed and the deductions are no longer worth anything.
It is funny. The Canadians that can afford it come to the US for the doctors. The US citizens who can't afford the local health care buy their medicine from pharmacies in Canada.
The US has a great health care infrastructure and the best doctors. All of the problems with the US system are summed up in a single word: "Insurance." Insurance is big business at its absolute worst. Insurance is a highly regulated and politicized industry that has taken the ability to control health care expenses from the individual and given it to the bureaucrats.
Insurance is very much like this quasi government controlled content funding scheme where you introduce a corrupt middle layer into content purchases.
IMHO, the biggest problem with the current music industry is that there is a massive group of media conglomerates that have taken control of the industry. The media moguls have inserted themselves between the musicians and audience. They define what is popular and take the lion share of the profit. The same is true with health care. The problems lie with the middle layer.
I would think the solutions to our problems is to find ways around these middle layers, and to find better ways for the public to buy directly from musicians and to remove the expensive and ultimately oppressive middle layer of insurance companies and media moguls.
The RIAA and music shares are focussed almost exclusively on the top 40 artists. No one seems to be noticing that thousands opon thousands of artists in the free market are now hawking limited run CDs. Anymore, you can cast an extra vote for your favorite local bands by buying a CD directly from the band when you attend their concerts.
The problem we have now is that a left leaning sub group is intent on undermining the music community by building an expectation that all music must be free...just like roads, health care and sex must be free.
IMHO, the best model that has appeared in the Internet was the original MP3...that distributed works of unsigned artists. It was a shame that they destroyed their company trying to capture the lame top 40 crowd.
Get this!!! I hear that websites actually track what pages you visit!!! I'm not kidding!!!
There is a very big difference between tracking what is going on on your server, and tracking what is going on an end user's program. Essentially, the web server at company XYZ is the property of company XYZ. They are tracking usage on their computer, for their use. XYZ pays for the computer, bandwidth, etc..
Spyware puts tracking software on a machine that they do not own. They use someone else's resources to gather information about a person's personal habits with the intention of manipulating that person.
How else are these guys going going to be able to tell what songs are popular, show what other people who share your tastes are listening to, etc. etc.
The free market doesn't care about what songs people listen to...it cares about what they purchase. The transaction provides enough information for the seller. The company who sold you your mattress has no business tracking what you do on said mattress.
I'll be satisfied if they just tell me what the prices for individual items are
The talking cart could eliminate the problems stores have trying to keep the prices on the shelves current (a major expense and a major peave when the prices are mismatched.) It is always a mystery, but such errors tend to run in the store's favor. Not having to maintain prices would pay for a good chunk of the computer costs. Of course, you would then get into a nightmare of the stores changing prices hourly.
I could imagine the check out scenario..."Yes, that was the price of a can o beans when you started shopping 15 minutes ago. The price of a can o beans is now..."
Most stores would chase you away if you entered the store with a scanner, although you could make an interesting consumer product that let you scan in the products (after the purchase) at home. This would be really good for people with alergies or diabetes, as the computer could make sure there weren't any nasty ingredients in the mix.
With computers tracking every grocery item purchased, I thought it would be really cool if they would give you a sum total of nutritional value of your grocery purchases. Assuming that you actually eat what you purchase, this would give you an idea if you are getting the RDA of the different nutrients you need. Technology could actually help us eat a balanced diet. Imagine how cool it would be if the grocery cart told you that it looked like you were getting too many carbs and not enough protein...
Unfortunately, all of this technology is being used to make the quick short term gain of tricking people into more and more impulse buys and having the overall effect of decreasing the quality of the modern diet.
I suspect the talking cart will be a grocery store annoyance on par with screaming kids in the playland carts that are the current fad.
Could there be a more appropriate quote that shows how the DMCA is ultimately an anti-competition and anti-capitalist tool?
It is an anti-competition tool, but is not an anti-capitalist tool. Stop confusing capitalism with the free market. Capitalism is system where capital is used to create more capital. The DMCA defends the capital of the megacorporations...so it is pro capitalism. Owning a political organization or a set of laws is like owning any other capital asset. You invest x amount in elected officials and you receive y amount in return. The DMCA is capitalism at its finest. Corporations invest in a law, then receive a return from that law.
Unfortunately, the debate between communism and capitalism was so loud, that we never really had the debate between capitalism and the free market.
Including a price tag is an odd way to end an article on the wonders of free software.
BTW, free software often exists for less than pure motives...such as an attempt to cut a competitor from a potential revenue source, or in an attempt to gain an advantage in another area. The best example is ie. Smaller examples are contractors who OSS a project with the hope that someone else will take over the less lucrative act of support while the make the big bucks on the glamorous initial sales.
PS, I don't claim a monetary value to the stuff I put in forums.
As for the SCO challenge, they are just a hot wind machine that will say whatever they can for the cash. They would be blowing steam regardless of the GPL license.
Too much of the economic infrastructure is depedent on steam power.
The whole online forum industry seems to be run by hot air. The legal industry is run by hot air as well...so it looks like the steam industry hasn't died.
My point was that OSS has a better end game. It has a crappy starting plan for the first quarter, but has a great end game.
The projects this user refers to were generally small enough that the companies were able to realize the cost of the software with a few sales.
The fact that programmers were over paid a few years ago, and it was easier to afford idealistic OSS development, doesn't mean that it will continue that way.
One thing that scares me about the OSS lifecycle. The OSS derides property rights and support contracts. However, I've noticed that many OSS developers end up using obscurity to accomplish the samething that is accomplished with property rights.
So you will see an OSS developer set up a system. During the honeymoon, they laud their moral superiority to property owners, but when the difficult maintenance issues come along, they come out saying: "Well, I am the only one who knows the root password, and I charge $xxx.00 per hour."
I prefer clear contracts to having to play political games for a paycheck.
BTW the thing that killed off a great deal of the software development prior to the 1980s was the emergence of Windows. Suddenly every program required a GUI. MS had raised the bar of entry into the software world, they gave out weird specs that did not pan through...
It was not the end game that killed, but tortuous upgrade paths. For that matter a great deal of interest in OSS came from people needing to upgrade older software that fell apart during the Microsoft upgrade fiascos. OSS seems to have weathered unpredictible upgrades better than propriety code.
Thanks for pointing out that the OSS generation is not the first to prepare for the life cycle of a company.
Personally, I think the best way to design a programming company is to come out of the gate as a proprietary technology, then to have an end game where the technology turns into open source as the technology matures. The paradigm where things start and end free just means developers never get paid.
There is a problem that we are taking carbon that is sequestered in the earth and putting it in the atmosphere. This is a commons resource that we are consuming. Trees don't really pull the carbon out as fast as we would like. The wicked fire years we've had of late show that trees are still pretty much on the surface of the earth. It is only when carbon gets buried is it sequestered again.
The brightly colored rocks in the desert suggest that there have been big swings in oxygen content on the surface of the earth in recent geologic history. The fact that in Salt Lake I look up and see old beaches of Lake Bonneville, and that in Missoula, you look up and see beaches of Lake Missoula...both things imply that there are geological and atmospheric changes.
yeah, because it's not like more oxygen isn't made every day...
I like posting jokes on/. because I know that I am often talking with some of the most brilliant thinkers of our day. It totally slipped my mind that oxygen is an atom. Burning gasoline is a chemical reaction. It is not an atomic reaction...so burning oil doesn't change the amount atoms. There is as much oxygen before and after the chemical reaction. All burning does is reconfigures molecules.
Here I am stuck on this petty molecular level thinking. I see a whole bunch of carbon that is sequestered in the earth's crust. In a relatively short geological time frame, we have taken a large amount of this sequestered carbon and pumped it into the atmosphere. This petty thinking leads to more petty ideas like "Hey, we are changing the chemical make up of the atmosphere."
I mean, if it were possible to change the chemical make up of the atmosphere, wouldn't the geological record show this by different layers of rock being different colors!
Truly holistic thinking looks at the number of oxygen models in the gravitational pull of the earth. Burning fuel doesn't change that. It simply changes the distribution of chemicals in the crust and atmosphere. This isn't atomic changes. It is just chemical changes. There is still the same number of oxygen atoms in the gravitional pull of the earth!
Oil won't be replaced by some magical happy juice that nobody has to pay for
You really devastated my attempt at humor with this one, 'cause I was trying to imply that oil is a magical happy fuel. Consumers pay for only half of the chemicals used in the combustion process. The O2 comes from the air. Cars externalize a portion of their cost onto the commons. But it isn't as if the oxygen is really "consumed" it is just transformed from 02 to CO2. It's still there, just in a slightly different molecular form.
Oh no! Teh Googli is gonna become another Evil Empire for Slashdot to fight!
It is really disconcerting, with adwords and other things, I've heard rumors that Google might actually even be profitable. I really try not to pay attention to such stuff.
I abandonned Yahoo and Altavista when they started all that corporate greed, we want to make money stuff. Lets not even get into that Goto/Overture garbage. Now Google is like doing the same thing!
I mean, if google comes out the door and makes money...Well, I think maybe the/. community should be thinking of an open source alternative to search engines where no one makes any money. I don't know, it seems like there should be some smart people with free time who would like to work on such a project.
Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil
Everyone knows that the oil age won't end when the oil runs out...it will end when the oxygen runs out. We will always find a way to make more carbon based fuels. Too much of the economic infrastructure is depedent on oil consumption. So we are likely to burn up the other end of the combustion equation first. Oxygen is a public commodity. It is the commons that is ripe for trashing. So I would expect to run out of it first.
Since the purpose of Gator is to give the marketers of Gator control of the end user's machines, why doesn't Gator just add some code to their program to prevent its users from seeing sites that tell the end user what Gator is.
Gator is spyware. They have a history of using drive by installs and misleading ads and trojan programs all designed with the purpose of making profiles of end users and manipulating the end user's browsing behavior.
This lawsuit is nothing but a stupid little word game played by shysters in a pathetic attempt to legitimize their game. They are like the spammers who put an opt out button in the spam with the idea that the opt out button legitimizes the spam.
Oh well, I hope slashdot and all of the users who responded to this post are ready to defend their free speach in a Gatorific round of lawsuits. I have looked at Gator, I've seen it in action. It is spyware.
After I wrote that, I realized the better scenario is a person's web server. A web server has hosting and maintenance fees, but might get sufficient ad revenues to cover that cost. After the owner dies, you essentially have this living entity consuming and earning.
The only advantage the trading model has over the web server model for discussions, is that you could imagine a program running a simple stock analysis tool that that has the preprogrammed goal of maximizing profit...making it more lifelike.
And the point of the post was that this type of scenario can exist with today's technology. It is not dependent on making a computer come to life.
It doesn't matter where the machines are. The question is: when will people be ready to accept machines as independent living entities. Imagine for a momemt that a programmer included his SPARC Workstation in his will. He leaves it 100k in cash and a program for trading stocks. Do we yank the cord, or leave the machine to its devices?
The next question, what do we do when this machine carves out its spot in the Forbes 400?
Slashdot Mirror
I know several independent artists who got money from MP3.com. If you could get in the top ten of a genre, you would walk away with a few thousand bucks.
The sad thing was that a new technology was wiped out in a futile copyright battle.
I know several bands which have gotten exposure and can now charge more for gigs by posting songs on the internet.
Why not abolish all property? Saying that I shouldn't have rights to the works I create while I have ownership of my car, my computer, my house, my clothes, my skin and my brain seems like a bunch of petty mindless ranking?
Of course, when none of us are allowed to own anything including ourselves then we are all wards of the states. That is we are all slaves. When you are prevented from owning anything, you become a defacto slave. But the ultimate conclusion of the dialectics is that freedom is slavery and slavery is freedom. Nothing new here.
This patent deserves its spot in the top of the list of patent abusers. Essentially this is a patent for defining a relation between tables in a relational database...uh, isn't that the way a relational database works? This is not a patent for the table design, but for the idea of having a relation between tables.
I suspect that there is a great deal of prior art of databases with defined relations between people.
Come to think of it, all I have to do is whip out my handy black book with the names the hot babes I knew in school. ahhhg, come to think of it, this patent implies that I would have to be included in the black books of the hot babes to be considered a friend...
damn.
I thought IBM's marketing strategy was based on the principle of the black hole (or I should say the big blue hole). Companies start revolving around the big blue gravity cluster. Then, suddenly, they are sucked in and never heard from again.
I think the ultimate point is to destroy the "work for hire" industry. Think of this as a scheme to liberate you from your job. Of course, the problem with programs that intend to undermine the tax base with tax subsidies is that once they have destroyed the tax base, well, the tax base is destroyed and the deductions are no longer worth anything.
It is funny. The Canadians that can afford it come to the US for the doctors. The US citizens who can't afford the local health care buy their medicine from pharmacies in Canada.
The US has a great health care infrastructure and the best doctors. All of the problems with the US system are summed up in a single word: "Insurance." Insurance is big business at its absolute worst. Insurance is a highly regulated and politicized industry that has taken the ability to control health care expenses from the individual and given it to the bureaucrats.
Insurance is very much like this quasi government controlled content funding scheme where you introduce a corrupt middle layer into content purchases.
IMHO, the biggest problem with the current music industry is that there is a massive group of media conglomerates that have taken control of the industry. The media moguls have inserted themselves between the musicians and audience. They define what is popular and take the lion share of the profit. The same is true with health care. The problems lie with the middle layer.
I would think the solutions to our problems is to find ways around these middle layers, and to find better ways for the public to buy directly from musicians and to remove the expensive and ultimately oppressive middle layer of insurance companies and media moguls.
The RIAA and music shares are focussed almost exclusively on the top 40 artists. No one seems to be noticing that thousands opon thousands of artists in the free market are now hawking limited run CDs. Anymore, you can cast an extra vote for your favorite local bands by buying a CD directly from the band when you attend their concerts.
The problem we have now is that a left leaning sub group is intent on undermining the music community by building an expectation that all music must be free...just like roads, health care and sex must be free.
IMHO, the best model that has appeared in the Internet was the original MP3...that distributed works of unsigned artists. It was a shame that they destroyed their company trying to capture the lame top 40 crowd.
There is a very big difference between tracking what is going on on your server, and tracking what is going on an end user's program. Essentially, the web server at company XYZ is the property of company XYZ. They are tracking usage on their computer, for their use. XYZ pays for the computer, bandwidth, etc..
Spyware puts tracking software on a machine that they do not own. They use someone else's resources to gather information about a person's personal habits with the intention of manipulating that person.
The free market doesn't care about what songs people listen to...it cares about what they purchase. The transaction provides enough information for the seller. The company who sold you your mattress has no business tracking what you do on said mattress.
The talking cart could eliminate the problems stores have trying to keep the prices on the shelves current (a major expense and a major peave when the prices are mismatched.) It is always a mystery, but such errors tend to run in the store's favor. Not having to maintain prices would pay for a good chunk of the computer costs. Of course, you would then get into a nightmare of the stores changing prices hourly.
I could imagine the check out scenario..."Yes, that was the price of a can o beans when you started shopping 15 minutes ago. The price of a can o beans is now ..."
Most stores would chase you away if you entered the store with a scanner, although you could make an interesting consumer product that let you scan in the products (after the purchase) at home. This would be really good for people with alergies or diabetes, as the computer could make sure there weren't any nasty ingredients in the mix.
RAMBLING CART: "...I see you are in the coffee aisle...you know I was written in Java by a programmer who drank five cups of coffee a day..."
With computers tracking every grocery item purchased, I thought it would be really cool if they would give you a sum total of nutritional value of your grocery purchases. Assuming that you actually eat what you purchase, this would give you an idea if you are getting the RDA of the different nutrients you need. Technology could actually help us eat a balanced diet. Imagine how cool it would be if the grocery cart told you that it looked like you were getting too many carbs and not enough protein...
Unfortunately, all of this technology is being used to make the quick short term gain of tricking people into more and more impulse buys and having the overall effect of decreasing the quality of the modern diet.
I suspect the talking cart will be a grocery store annoyance on par with screaming kids in the playland carts that are the current fad.
It is an anti-competition tool, but is not an anti-capitalist tool. Stop confusing capitalism with the free market. Capitalism is system where capital is used to create more capital. The DMCA defends the capital of the megacorporations...so it is pro capitalism. Owning a political organization or a set of laws is like owning any other capital asset. You invest x amount in elected officials and you receive y amount in return. The DMCA is capitalism at its finest. Corporations invest in a law, then receive a return from that law.
Unfortunately, the debate between communism and capitalism was so loud, that we never really had the debate between capitalism and the free market.
Including a price tag is an odd way to end an article on the wonders of free software.
BTW, free software often exists for less than pure motives...such as an attempt to cut a competitor from a potential revenue source, or in an attempt to gain an advantage in another area. The best example is ie. Smaller examples are contractors who OSS a project with the hope that someone else will take over the less lucrative act of support while the make the big bucks on the glamorous initial sales.
PS, I don't claim a monetary value to the stuff I put in forums.
As for the SCO challenge, they are just a hot wind machine that will say whatever they can for the cash. They would be blowing steam regardless of the GPL license.
The whole online forum industry seems to be run by hot air. The legal industry is run by hot air as well...so it looks like the steam industry hasn't died.
My point was that OSS has a better end game. It has a crappy starting plan for the first quarter, but has a great end game.
The projects this user refers to were generally small enough that the companies were able to realize the cost of the software with a few sales.
The fact that programmers were over paid a few years ago, and it was easier to afford idealistic OSS development, doesn't mean that it will continue that way.
One thing that scares me about the OSS lifecycle. The OSS derides property rights and support contracts. However, I've noticed that many OSS developers end up using obscurity to accomplish the samething that is accomplished with property rights. So you will see an OSS developer set up a system. During the honeymoon, they laud their moral superiority to property owners, but when the difficult maintenance issues come along, they come out saying: "Well, I am the only one who knows the root password, and I charge $xxx.00 per hour."
I prefer clear contracts to having to play political games for a paycheck.
BTW the thing that killed off a great deal of the software development prior to the 1980s was the emergence of Windows. Suddenly every program required a GUI. MS had raised the bar of entry into the software world, they gave out weird specs that did not pan through...
It was not the end game that killed, but tortuous upgrade paths. For that matter a great deal of interest in OSS came from people needing to upgrade older software that fell apart during the Microsoft upgrade fiascos. OSS seems to have weathered unpredictible upgrades better than propriety code.
Thanks for pointing out that the OSS generation is not the first to prepare for the life cycle of a company.
Personally, I think the best way to design a programming company is to come out of the gate as a proprietary technology, then to have an end game where the technology turns into open source as the technology matures. The paradigm where things start and end free just means developers never get paid.
No problems, I was in a surly mood this morning.
There is a problem that we are taking carbon that is sequestered in the earth and putting it in the atmosphere. This is a commons resource that we are consuming. Trees don't really pull the carbon out as fast as we would like. The wicked fire years we've had of late show that trees are still pretty much on the surface of the earth. It is only when carbon gets buried is it sequestered again.
The brightly colored rocks in the desert suggest that there have been big swings in oxygen content on the surface of the earth in recent geologic history. The fact that in Salt Lake I look up and see old beaches of Lake Bonneville, and that in Missoula, you look up and see beaches of Lake Missoula...both things imply that there are geological and atmospheric changes.
I like posting jokes on /. because I know that I am often talking with some of the most brilliant thinkers of our day. It totally slipped my mind that oxygen is an atom. Burning gasoline is a chemical reaction. It is not an atomic reaction...so burning oil doesn't change the amount atoms. There is as much oxygen before and after the chemical reaction. All burning does is reconfigures molecules.
Here I am stuck on this petty molecular level thinking. I see a whole bunch of carbon that is sequestered in the earth's crust. In a relatively short geological time frame, we have taken a large amount of this sequestered carbon and pumped it into the atmosphere. This petty thinking leads to more petty ideas like "Hey, we are changing the chemical make up of the atmosphere."
I mean, if it were possible to change the chemical make up of the atmosphere, wouldn't the geological record show this by different layers of rock being different colors!
Truly holistic thinking looks at the number of oxygen models in the gravitational pull of the earth. Burning fuel doesn't change that. It simply changes the distribution of chemicals in the crust and atmosphere. This isn't atomic changes. It is just chemical changes. There is still the same number of oxygen atoms in the gravitional pull of the earth!
You really devastated my attempt at humor with this one, 'cause I was trying to imply that oil is a magical happy fuel. Consumers pay for only half of the chemicals used in the combustion process. The O2 comes from the air. Cars externalize a portion of their cost onto the commons. But it isn't as if the oxygen is really "consumed" it is just transformed from 02 to CO2. It's still there, just in a slightly different molecular form.
It is really disconcerting, with adwords and other things, I've heard rumors that Google might actually even be profitable. I really try not to pay attention to such stuff.
I abandonned Yahoo and Altavista when they started all that corporate greed, we want to make money stuff. Lets not even get into that Goto/Overture garbage. Now Google is like doing the same thing!
I mean, if google comes out the door and makes money...Well, I think maybe the /. community should be thinking of an open source alternative to search engines where no one makes any money. I don't know, it seems like there should be some smart people with free time who would like to work on such a project.
Yeah, what tripe...from the /. lead in:
Everyone knows that the oil age won't end when the oil runs out...it will end when the oxygen runs out. We will always find a way to make more carbon based fuels. Too much of the economic infrastructure is depedent on oil consumption. So we are likely to burn up the other end of the combustion equation first. Oxygen is a public commodity. It is the commons that is ripe for trashing. So I would expect to run out of it first.
Since the purpose of Gator is to give the marketers of Gator control of the end user's machines, why doesn't Gator just add some code to their program to prevent its users from seeing sites that tell the end user what Gator is.
Gator is spyware. They have a history of using drive by installs and misleading ads and trojan programs all designed with the purpose of making profiles of end users and manipulating the end user's browsing behavior.
This lawsuit is nothing but a stupid little word game played by shysters in a pathetic attempt to legitimize their game. They are like the spammers who put an opt out button in the spam with the idea that the opt out button legitimizes the spam.
Oh well, I hope slashdot and all of the users who responded to this post are ready to defend their free speach in a Gatorific round of lawsuits. I have looked at Gator, I've seen it in action. It is spyware.
After I wrote that, I realized the better scenario is a person's web server. A web server has hosting and maintenance fees, but might get sufficient ad revenues to cover that cost. After the owner dies, you essentially have this living entity consuming and earning.
The only advantage the trading model has over the web server model for discussions, is that you could imagine a program running a simple stock analysis tool that that has the preprogrammed goal of maximizing profit...making it more lifelike.
And the point of the post was that this type of scenario can exist with today's technology. It is not dependent on making a computer come to life.
BTW, here is an absurd tale of what will happen when the cows wake up
It doesn't matter where the machines are. The question is: when will people be ready to accept machines as independent living entities. Imagine for a momemt that a programmer included his SPARC Workstation in his will. He leaves it 100k in cash and a program for trading stocks. Do we yank the cord, or leave the machine to its devices?
The next question, what do we do when this machine carves out its spot in the Forbes 400?