We have exactly that here in the states. It's not quite as pretty as the Gillete, but I think the triple blades are just as sharp and they don't cost a small fortune. CVS and Stop & Shop sell them.
Why is it that discount stores are always the most paranoid about shoplifting? You would think that the cheaper prices would make it *less* likely. Perhaps the not so bright shoplifters somehow think that stealing an item selling for $7.99 at Walmart will get them a lighter sentence than the same item selling for $10.99 at another store?
As a recent example that comes to mind, look at the overturning of the sodomy laws in a few US states that still had them on the books.
This looks like just another win for the record companies. After the last few $18.99 CDs I couldn't sit down for a week. Next thing you know rape will be legalized too. The RIAA is way too powerful.
Just count the number of vociferous posters in defense of copyright and the RIAA, how P2P is theft etc, on all or most relevant slashdot articles and multiply by some random fraction not too much less than 0.75:). I'm sure they only do it because it's part of their job description and are probably chuckling to themselves as they post the corporate line. Another day, another dollar or SSDD.
Simple solution: stop sharing copyrighted materials over P2P
Or in other words: STOP TRYING NEW MUSIC. Good advice. I like it. That's the reality for many of us. And no, the first 30 seconds of a few tracks is *not* enough to know the music. Without P2P, I and many of those like me would *never* again buy a CD from an artist that is not already a favorite. Never. Period. The RIAA will not succeed in turning the clock back. But they can try. All they will succeed in doing is making a lot of money for themselves (with the lawsuits) and needlessly (since it doesn't solve the "problem") destroying people's lives.
They're no different than people who drive over the speed limit.
Which happens to be the majority. Are you one of those annoying people with a line of 40 cars behind them on secondary roads and who drives in the left lane on highways at 50mph? Never mind the fact that some states have laws that require you to pull over when there are more than a certain number of cars behind you. So both types are breaking the "law".
At $2-$5 a pop return on those used CDs, that strategy would run out of money quick.
Not if you *buy* them used. The best strategy is to buy a used CD from a site like amazon.com and then resell it for virtually the same price after burning it to your hard drive.
Actually I think they are altering their business model to reflect the importance of lobbyists and government partnerships. As new laws are enacted to make it easier and cheaper, it becomes more and more profitable to sue and win lawsuits against the millions of file sharers.
Within 5 years, the majority of their profits may be from copyright "enforcement", taking the entire net worth of every individual whose IP address they get. They could end up with billions of dollars in revenue from this, far, far more than any CD sales. It wouldn't surprise me if they try to secretly encourage file sharing while officially opposing it. Any lawyers with relevant experience should be sending their resumes to the RIAA now. They will be even less inclined to pay artists a fair amount when they see how much more money they can make with lawsuits. The money will go to lawyers instead.
Yes, a large group of people can organize themselves to impose their will on a smaller group of people. That is called mob rule, and it is neither fair nor efficient
But the RIAA is a mob too. Especially since the government is so often with them, passing laws for them and just granting them favors in general. And who are you to decide what's "fair"?
I don't believe that the RIAA is fair, not to customers, not even to artists, although I would guess that they pay your salary in some way.
Current copyright law is most certainly not fair. Face it. Freenet and networks like it are the future. It is only a matter of time before networks like this as well as ISPs willing to delete IP address logs on an hourly basis come to pass.
These lawsuits will not stop file sharing any more than speeding tickets have stopped speeding. The rest just go on speeding past the unlucky guy who was pulled over. If the average person genuinely thought it was, wrong, that it was stealing etc, they wouldn't do it. Frankly, I don't believe in copyrights at all for non-commercial uses. You can't own patterns of zeros and ones. You can't own raw information per se. (It wants to be free:))
Of course if *everyone* stopped sharing, it wouldn't work. But don't worry, not everyone will. There will always be someone else.
So we can all feel lucky that not everyone takes your advice. BTW, your logic also applies to voting. I certainly hope you don't waste your time with that. I know I don't.
Better advice would be to switch to a sufficiently anonymous trading network like freenet etc. Such a system really isn't in place yet only because the majority of people still feel safe using the unsecured networks. If the RIAA is succesful with their gestapo tactics, this may change. A more secure network is the obvious choice. They may be inherently slow, but at least they are safe.
That's the "People's Republic of America" to you pal. Although this seems like a case (private lawsuits) of large corporations abusing their freedoms. The recent unjust laws just makes it cheaper and easier for them to do so. This is one of the few occasions when my views are more socialist than Libertarian. The power balance in favor of large corporations with money has just gotten out of hand. Wasn't there a time when judges were biased against large corporations in favor of the individual? Nowadays corporations and governments seem to agree on most things.
Have you ever "written your congressman" and gotten him to change his views and his vote? Just curious, because I've never heard of this actually happening. Voting is a different story, but that only applies at election times, and even then, you can't change the candidates. All you can do is vote for the Libertarian if there is one running. Although on this issue, Libertarians may not be of much help. Should we wait for a "pro-P2P" candidate? We could be waiting a very long time for that.
You could even encrypt the music directory on your hardrive with a stenographic plausible deniability app like rubberhose, bestcrypt etc. So even if they get a warrant (or buy a law to gain access to all computers) to search your computer they will find nothing. Although you have to be careful to not just delete but to do enough random overwrites to the original data, preferably from one of the newer ultra high aureal density PRML drives (60 or 80 GB/platter). It is extremely difficult to recover ghost data from these newer drives, especially after it's been overwritten 30 times with (pseudo)random data.
Perhaps you should have convinced him to convert to WAV, FLAC, or APE instead. Hard drive space is cheap these days. Otherwise he may as well have just made copies on analog tape. Lossy compression sucks.
This is a good point. I cannot even buy *any* of the music that I like at a local CD store. They just don't carry anything even slightly unusual. I can now only buy CDs on the internet. The days of the brick and mortar record store seems to be at an end. And since I am buying over the internet anyway, I may as well buy a used CD, rip it and then resell it again. Now that's what I call real filesharing with redbook quality:).
And let's not mention how quickly CDs go out of print when they are not mainstream. If it doesn't sell well enough they never even bother with a second pressing. I have a number of songs that are *only* available on P2P.
Agreed. But the vast majority of the public does not know about or care about the difference. Although why these same people would even consider buying the overpriced CD when they can quickly and easily download the same songs for free is beyond me. Those ethical arguments just make me laugh--hard.
The "quality" argument would seem like a good way to differentiate CDs from the free MP3s. It seemed to work in the painful migration from analog cassette to CD, as well as the popular migration from VHS to DVD (laserdiscs never caught on in the mainstream). I remember back in the early 80s when everyone figured the more expensive CDs would never be able to compete.
I wonder why the industry is not even attempting to make this argument. It seemed to work surprisingly well in the past.
Just keep in mind that Cryptonomicon really isn't even scifi. It's more like some kind of historical fiction. The fact that he uses "finux" in the story doesn't make it scifi. I actually don't particularly like reading scifi.
I happen to love Stephenson's writing style, which is very distinct, and he is actually one of the few serious writers that I find funny. I did read Snow Crash, and I did not particularly like it. I could almost see how you could come to some of your conclusions based on Snow Crash or some of his earlier novels, but they just don't apply to Cryptonomicon in my view.
I guess it just goes to show how different people's tastes are. I like the way that Stephenson writes so much that I could read almost anything that he would care to write.
I believe that he improved a great deal as a writer from his first books (about which I would agree with your criticisms) to Snow Crash (about which I would also agree to some extent), to Cryptonomicon, where he really seemed to figure out how to do everything well (except an ending of course). Care to name a still living non-scifi author who you think is better? Most modern authors that I see at my local bookstore are just so clearly bad and imitative that I can't read their stuff.
Have you actually read Cryptonomicon? I think the writing speaks for itself. I don't mean the plotting. I mean the writing itself, his use of language. It's poetry in the form of prose IMHO. Pretty much all plots have been done by now. It's the writer's skill with language that makes the difference for me. I can relate to what you are saying here in general terms, but I just don't agree that it applies to our beloved Neal.
Exactly. It's just another example of private corporations using the government to enforce their flawed business models.
In my new business model, I am going to write a short story and send it to every home in America. Anyone who does not pay me $5000 for my hard labor of writing the story for them is a thief, a criminal, and deserves to die of HIV from getting sodomized in prison. The only problem is contributing enough to political campaign funds to pass the appropriate laws to make the business model work. There are obviously lots of business models that would work given the appropriate laws.
Yeah, right. How old are you? Have you ever even paid taxes? Or maybe you work for the IRS. Try more than $4000 when you make $14000. At that income, Social Security taxes make up almost half of your taxes. And that $4000 doesn't even take state VAT and income tax into account.
Compression can be lossy without having any audible effect on the sound.
Oh if only this were true. It would save me a lot of money on audio equipment and on CDs. I could download all my music and listen to everything on a cheap walkman with stock headphones or motherboard audio connected to $10 computer speakers. I would save a lot of money. Of course, I would save even more money by not listening to music at all.
I have yet to see any scientifically valid, double-blind test in which users could distinguish between a CD and an MP3 at 320kbps
I'm not sure what you consider "scientifically valid" but I have done blind testing with my own equipment and I can hear a difference between 320kbps MP3s (yes encoded with lame, not that it matters) and WAVs. I think the differences are quite clear on sufficiently good equipment. It is mostly a loss of "life", "richness",a certain airiness or "soundstage", and high frequency detail that is apparent. I cannot tell the difference unless I am listening from an at least half decent source with a good pair of headphones or speakers.
People use the term compression "artifacts", but I feel that is misleading. What I notice the most is what I don't hear, what I'm missing. Of course I can only notice this when I also have the original uncompressed music to compare it with. Without that I certainly cannot tell the difference between compressed music and just a bad recording.
In a vain attempt to sound and feel superior, they complain about a format that satisfies so many others
I don't think it's the format that they are complaining about but rather the removal of 80% of the music that they were enjoying, based on what some computer program decided wasn't "important". Just because you may not hear something doesn't mean that others are attempting to "sound and feel superior" because they do.
They understand that the compression is "lossy" and, therefore, convince themselves that they hear losses even though they cannot.
Another rationalization on your part because you don't want to believe that anyone else is better than you are in a perceptual sense. That anyone can distinguish differences that you cannot.You do realize that all of these points would apply just as well to 64kbps or 32kbps MP3 files as well. "Properly encoded" (I love that phrase)64kpbs MP3s sound just fine to many people with poor audio equipment, insensitive hearing or both. If you disagree, you are just being a snob, trying to feel superior, and convincing yourself that it sounds bad because you know its compressed.
It reminds me of the high-end audio market, which is based on the power of suggestion, people's vanity, and the insecurity that makes many people unwilling to admit that they can't hear a difference.
I'm not sure what you consider "high end", but most audiophiles are quite willing to admit that for a given product there are price points above which the law of diminishing returns starts to apply. I suspect that you simply have poor audio equipment and don't want to spend any money on anything better and feel the need to rationalize this. The reason that you cannot hear a difference is because your cheap equipment masks the differences that would otherwise be quite obvious. It also depends on the type of music you listen to. Certain genres like heavy metal or, say, rap, would not lose much from lossy compression.
Slashdot Mirror
But George was British. Oh wait... he was talking about a world government I guess.
We have exactly that here in the states. It's not quite as pretty as the Gillete, but I think the triple blades are just as sharp and they don't cost a small fortune. CVS and Stop & Shop sell them.
Why is it that discount stores are always the most paranoid about shoplifting? You would think that the cheaper prices would make it *less* likely. Perhaps the not so bright shoplifters somehow think that stealing an item selling for $7.99 at Walmart will get them a lighter sentence than the same item selling for $10.99 at another store?
As a recent example that comes to mind, look at the overturning of the sodomy laws in a few US states that still had them on the books.
This looks like just another win for the record companies. After the last few $18.99 CDs I couldn't sit down for a week. Next thing you know rape will be legalized too. The RIAA is way too powerful.
Do you have a link for that? I did a google search and came up with very little.
How many RIAA Agents^H^H^H^H^H^HMembers read /.?
:). I'm sure they only do it because it's part of their job description and are probably chuckling to themselves as they post the corporate line. Another day, another dollar or SSDD.
Just count the number of vociferous posters in defense of copyright and the RIAA, how P2P is theft etc, on all or most relevant slashdot articles and multiply by some random fraction not too much less than 0.75
Simple solution: stop sharing copyrighted materials over P2P
Or in other words: STOP TRYING NEW MUSIC. Good advice. I like it. That's the reality for many of us. And no, the first 30 seconds of a few tracks is *not* enough to know the music. Without P2P, I and many of those like me would *never* again buy a CD from an artist that is not already a favorite. Never. Period. The RIAA will not succeed in turning the clock back. But they can try. All they will succeed in doing is making a lot of money for themselves (with the lawsuits) and needlessly (since it doesn't solve the "problem") destroying people's lives.
They're no different than people who drive over the speed limit.
Which happens to be the majority. Are you one of those annoying people with a line of 40 cars behind them on secondary roads and who drives in the left lane on highways at 50mph? Never mind the fact that some states have laws that require you to pull over when there are more than a certain number of cars behind you. So both types are breaking the "law".
At $2-$5 a pop return on those used CDs, that strategy would run out of money quick.
Not if you *buy* them used. The best strategy is to buy a used CD from a site like amazon.com and then resell it for virtually the same price after burning it to your hard drive.
Actually I think they are altering their business model to reflect the importance of lobbyists and government partnerships. As new laws are enacted to make it easier and cheaper, it becomes more and more profitable to sue and win lawsuits against the millions of file sharers.
Within 5 years, the majority of their profits may be from copyright "enforcement", taking the entire net worth of every individual whose IP address they get. They could end up with billions of dollars in revenue from this, far, far more than any CD sales. It wouldn't surprise me if they try to secretly encourage file sharing while officially opposing it. Any lawyers with relevant experience should be sending their resumes to the RIAA now. They will be even less inclined to pay artists a fair amount when they see how much more money they can make with lawsuits. The money will go to lawyers instead.
Yes, a large group of people can organize themselves to impose their will on a smaller group of people. That is called mob rule, and it is neither fair nor efficient
:))
But the RIAA is a mob too. Especially since the government is so often with them, passing laws for them and just granting them favors in general. And who are you to decide what's "fair"?
I don't believe that the RIAA is fair, not to customers, not even to artists, although I would guess that they pay your salary in some way.
Current copyright law is most certainly not fair. Face it. Freenet and networks like it are the future. It is only a matter of time before networks like this as well as ISPs willing to delete IP address logs on an hourly basis come to pass.
These lawsuits will not stop file sharing any more than speeding tickets have stopped speeding. The rest just go on speeding past the unlucky guy who was pulled over. If the average person genuinely thought it was, wrong, that it was stealing etc, they wouldn't do it. Frankly, I don't believe in copyrights at all for non-commercial uses. You can't own patterns of zeros and ones. You can't own raw information per se. (It wants to be free
Of course if *everyone* stopped sharing, it wouldn't work. But don't worry, not everyone will. There will always be someone else.
So we can all feel lucky that not everyone takes your advice. BTW, your logic also applies to voting. I certainly hope you don't waste your time with that. I know I don't.
Better advice would be to switch to a sufficiently anonymous trading network like freenet etc. Such a system really isn't in place yet only because the majority of people still feel safe using the unsecured networks. If the RIAA is succesful with their gestapo tactics, this may change. A more secure network is the obvious choice. They may be inherently slow, but at least they are safe.
That's the "People's Republic of America" to you pal. Although this seems like a case (private lawsuits) of large corporations abusing their freedoms. The recent unjust laws just makes it cheaper and easier for them to do so. This is one of the few occasions when my views are more socialist than Libertarian. The power balance in favor of large corporations with money has just gotten out of hand. Wasn't there a time when judges were biased against large corporations in favor of the individual? Nowadays corporations and governments seem to agree on most things.
Have you ever "written your congressman" and gotten him to change his views and his vote? Just curious, because I've never heard of this actually happening. Voting is a different story, but that only applies at election times, and even then, you can't change the candidates. All you can do is vote for the Libertarian if there is one running. Although on this issue, Libertarians may not be of much help. Should we wait for a "pro-P2P" candidate? We could be waiting a very long time for that.
You could even encrypt the music directory on your hardrive with a stenographic plausible deniability app like rubberhose, bestcrypt etc. So even if they get a warrant (or buy a law to gain access to all computers) to search your computer they will find nothing. Although you have to be careful to not just delete but to do enough random overwrites to the original data, preferably from one of the newer ultra high aureal density PRML drives (60 or 80 GB/platter). It is extremely difficult to recover ghost data from these newer drives, especially after it's been overwritten 30 times with (pseudo)random data.
Perhaps you should have convinced him to convert to WAV, FLAC, or APE instead. Hard drive space is cheap these days. Otherwise he may as well have just made copies on analog tape. Lossy compression sucks.
This is a good point. I cannot even buy *any* of the music that I like at a local CD store. They just don't carry anything even slightly unusual. I can now only buy CDs on the internet. The days of the brick and mortar record store seems to be at an end. And since I am buying over the internet anyway, I may as well buy a used CD, rip it and then resell it again. Now that's what I call real filesharing with redbook quality:).
And let's not mention how quickly CDs go out of print when they are not mainstream. If it doesn't sell well enough they never even bother with a second pressing. I have a number of songs that are *only* available on P2P.
Agreed. But the vast majority of the public does not know about or care about the difference. Although why these same people would even consider buying the overpriced CD when they can quickly and easily download the same songs for free is beyond me. Those ethical arguments just make me laugh--hard.
The "quality" argument would seem like a good way to differentiate CDs from the free MP3s. It seemed to work in the painful migration from analog cassette to CD, as well as the popular migration from VHS to DVD (laserdiscs never caught on in the mainstream). I remember back in the early 80s when everyone figured the more expensive CDs would never be able to compete.
I wonder why the industry is not even attempting to make this argument. It seemed to work surprisingly well in the past.
Just keep in mind that Cryptonomicon really isn't even scifi. It's more like some kind of historical fiction. The fact that he uses "finux" in the story doesn't make it scifi. I actually don't particularly like reading scifi.
I happen to love Stephenson's writing style, which is very distinct, and he is actually one of the few serious writers that I find funny. I did read Snow Crash, and I did not particularly like it. I could almost see how you could come to some of your conclusions based on Snow Crash or some of his earlier novels, but they just don't apply to Cryptonomicon in my view.
I guess it just goes to show how different people's tastes are. I like the way that Stephenson writes so much that I could read almost anything that he would care to write.
I believe that he improved a great deal as a writer from his first books (about which I would agree with your criticisms) to Snow Crash (about which I would also agree to some extent), to Cryptonomicon, where he really seemed to figure out how to do everything well (except an ending of course). Care to name a still living non-scifi author who you think is better? Most modern authors that I see at my local bookstore are just so clearly bad and imitative that I can't read their stuff.
The real reward was getting the call from Neal. That must have been cool. Gotta wonder what they talked about.
Have you actually read Cryptonomicon? I think the writing speaks for itself. I don't mean the plotting. I mean the writing itself, his use of language. It's poetry in the form of prose IMHO. Pretty much all plots have been done by now. It's the writer's skill with language that makes the difference for me. I can relate to what you are saying here in general terms, but I just don't agree that it applies to our beloved Neal.
Exactly. It's just another example of private corporations using the government to enforce their flawed business models.
In my new business model, I am going to write a short story and send it to every home in America. Anyone who does not pay me $5000 for my hard labor of writing the story for them is a thief, a criminal, and deserves to die of HIV from getting sodomized in prison. The only problem is contributing enough to political campaign funds to pass the appropriate laws to make the business model work. There are obviously lots of business models that would work given the appropriate laws.
Yeah, right. How old are you? Have you ever even paid taxes? Or maybe you work for the IRS. Try more than $4000 when you make $14000. At that income, Social Security taxes make up almost half of your taxes. And that $4000 doesn't even take state VAT and income tax into account.
Compression can be lossy without having any audible effect on the sound.
Oh if only this were true. It would save me a lot of money on audio equipment and on CDs. I could download all my music and listen to everything on a cheap walkman with stock headphones or motherboard audio connected to $10 computer speakers. I would save a lot of money. Of course, I would save even more money by not listening to music at all.
I have yet to see any scientifically valid, double-blind test in which users could distinguish between a CD and an MP3 at 320kbps
I'm not sure what you consider "scientifically valid" but I have done blind testing with my own equipment and I can hear a difference between 320kbps MP3s (yes encoded with lame, not that it matters) and WAVs. I think the differences are quite clear on sufficiently good equipment. It is mostly a loss of "life", "richness",a certain airiness or "soundstage", and high frequency detail that is apparent. I cannot tell the difference unless I am listening from an at least half decent source with a good pair of headphones or speakers.
People use the term compression "artifacts", but I feel that is misleading. What I notice the most is what I don't hear, what I'm missing. Of course I can only notice this when I also have the original uncompressed music to compare it with. Without that I certainly cannot tell the difference between compressed music and just a bad recording.
In a vain attempt to sound and feel superior, they complain about a format that satisfies so many others
I don't think it's the format that they are complaining about but rather the removal of 80% of the music that they were enjoying, based on what some computer program decided wasn't "important". Just because you may not hear something doesn't mean that others are attempting to "sound and feel superior" because they do.
They understand that the compression is "lossy" and, therefore, convince themselves that they hear losses even though they cannot.
Another rationalization on your part because you don't want to believe that anyone else is better than you are in a perceptual sense. That anyone can distinguish differences that you cannot.You do realize that all of these points would apply just as well to 64kbps or 32kbps MP3 files as well. "Properly encoded" (I love that phrase)64kpbs MP3s sound just fine to many people with poor audio equipment, insensitive hearing or both. If you disagree, you are just being a snob, trying to feel superior, and convincing yourself that it sounds bad because you know its compressed.
It reminds me of the high-end audio market, which is based on the power of suggestion, people's vanity, and the insecurity that makes many people unwilling to admit that they can't hear a difference.
I'm not sure what you consider "high end", but most audiophiles are quite willing to admit that for a given product there are price points above which the law of diminishing returns starts to apply. I suspect that you simply have poor audio equipment and don't want to spend any money on anything better and feel the need to rationalize this. The reason that you cannot hear a difference is because your cheap equipment masks the differences that would otherwise be quite obvious. It also depends on the type of music you listen to. Certain genres like heavy metal or, say, rap, would not lose much from lossy compression.