Detecting whether a interviewee has MacOS experience prior to OS X: yell "Frog blast the vent core!" If they run, yes.
That's a really bad test. Not everybody with old-school MacOS skills played Marathon. A better test would be to say "I have a MacTCP control panel that needs configuring."
That's faulty logic. If no one bought any product, the producers of it would be in the same "spot", but that doesn't justify stealing a hit artist's CDs from Wal-Mart or the latest bestseller from Barnes & Noble any more than it does downloading the same books and music online. And in the book case, the middlemen have already been paid when that book is stolen, but I'll bet you they still care about "shrinkage".
No matter what arcane rationalization you dream up, there's no justification for refusing to buy something offered for sale and taking the benefit from it anyway. The only legally supportable position is to refuse to pay money and do without.
There's value, but what I'm asserting is that the value of being a physical record store is not enough in itself to sustain an independent shop financially.
Well, if there's not enough value to sustain it, then there's just not enough value. Maybe some people will miss it, but apparently they won't miss it enough to put in the effort and money to save it.
Yeah, that tends to be the case with a lot of things. It amazes me how many people gripe about say, Wal-Mart putting local stores out of business but still shop there.
Of course, that's assuming it tries to stay a "physical record store." I imagine if this were to happen a lot of these shops would change and survive. For example, I can imagine them specializing in vinyl, or selling memorabilia, or even becoming a coffee house/performance venue or something. There might be fewer shiny discs, but the community would still survive.
It's a possibility. In fact it's a strong possibility that some would go that way. People would probably still complain about "how it used to be" but myself, I'd actually like a coffee shop/record store better than what most of them are now.
No, it's not hard. But it's hard to deliver high-quality content reliably. It takes a lot of money to pay for the infrastructure to do that even if you yourself aren't shipping every bit.
Oh, I thought you were talking about the business side of it. For this issue, I have only one word: BitTorrent.
BitTorrent won't solve all bandwidth problems. Even if you're no longer bottlenecked by a single site as the origin of the data, there are still bottlenecks like the ISP's head end for most people (even with massive networks like Sprint or AT&T, there are peering points and local NOCs to consider). The Internet as it exists today is not ready to carry music, TV and movies to every single household -- the reason it works for a few people is that it's still a relatively tiny few who do that kind of stuff. No matter where the data is coming from, the fundamental issue is still the volume of data. This is a solvable problem, but one that will still take a significant amount of physical deployment to solve.
...the existence of these other "good" things like indie artists touring and indie record shops selling those artists' work and yes, even online services selling those indie artists' work is totally predicated on the existence of this gigantic flow of mainstream crap...
Wow, what economic theory is this? I've never heard about it, and I'm very skeptical of it, but if you've got some evidence that this is the case I'd be very interested in reading it.
I'm not sure what kind of formal treatment it may have in economics, but it's a pretty well-known effect. The classic example in modern times is Starbucks vs. smaller chains and independent coffee houses. Until Starbucks came along with some slick marketing and made fancy espresso drinks a part of yuppie culture, the coffeehouse business was about dead and coffee itself was an also-ran drink. Along came Starbucks and created demand where none previously existed, and in the process the entire industry underwent a business renaissance. At the same time Starbucks has very much an adversarial relationship with those independents and smaller chains that its creation of increased demand allows to exist. Sometimes it manages to kill them with clustering tactics, sometimes local sensibilities win out.
I can't find the original article I read about this, which had quotes from coffeeshop owners about their love-hate relationship with the Green Straw, but there's this article in the New Yorker that touches on it in terms of the decline and re-establishment of the coffee industry. If Starbucks goes away tomorrow, it potentially throws the entire coffee industry into a tailspin (especially since coffee prices have been a bit unstable in recent years).
It's true on the supply side. All the artist has to do is upload it once to a BitTorrent tracker and, if it's popular, the listeners will handle the rest of the distribution themselves. Sure, they're still paying for their own Internet access, but they'd be doing that anyway.
Like anything else, the Internet will cost more when there is scarcity. When the "pipes" are so choked with music downloads that service degrades, the providers will charge more and more money until they find the point at which demand = supply.
Besides, in the long term the Internet could very well consist of a huge wireless mesh, with each user running their own node and routing traffic for their neighbors. Then, if they powered it with solar power or something, it really would be free!
I doubt that will happen on any kind of practical level. If it does I doubt it will happen in either of our lifetimes. Besides, you're omitting the cost and environmental impact of solar cells...
Now hold on a minute! Either there's value, or there's not. If there's value (and the business manager is competant), then the store will find a way to make money and will stay in business. If there's not value, then the store will go out of business and nobody will miss it.... What I'm saying is that keeping the status quo to give record stores business is like going around breaking windows to keep window makers in business. It's a stupid reason in either case.
There's value, but what I'm asserting is that the value of being a physical record store is not enough in itself to sustain an independent shop financially. There has to be a constant flow of large volumes of mainstream product to provide the majority of the support to keep that business alive. If you dismantled the major labels tonight, the independent record store would be dead by next week.
There's no reason whatsoever the music services can't scale even with courting artists manually. And there's not even a reason to do that -- just come up with a few standard package deals (e.g. X amount of promotion for Y% of revenue), let the artists sign themselves up for whichever package they want using a website form, and manage the whole thing automatically with a database. It's not that hard!
No, it's not hard. But it's hard to deliver high-quality content reliably. It takes a lot of money to pay for the infrastructure to do that even if you yourself aren't shipping every bit. Akamai makes tons of money just shipping bits for popular websites. And what happens when those services do manage to grow? They have huge investments to protect and huge costs to pay for. In effect they become the greedy distributors they replaced.
I'm not advocating "keeping" mainstream music in business as though it were some sort of corporate charity -- I'm saying that eliminating mainstream music distribution would have far-reaching effects that most of those who do the "fight the man" thing don't even consider. My initial comment was a response to your assertion that the distributors don't have a right to get paid. Well, no, in an absolute sense they don't -- they have a right to get paid for what they produce, in a free market transaction. Currently the law is structured such that they have a right of exclusivity over music copying and distribution, by law and by contract. But if the laws change to abolish copyright and they don't get paid, they will cease to exist -- and that will take down a whole host of other "good" music-related commerce that people want.
So I'm not asserting that they are good or bad, per se -- I'm asserting that they arose as the inevitable result of economic forces, and that the existence of these other "good" things like indie artists touring and indie record shops selling those artists' work and yes, even online services selling those indie artists' work is totally predicated on the existence of this gigantic flow of mainstream crap (if you will) that mainstream consumers trade their dollars
Copyright, as it is today, is no longer useful. In fact, just the opposite -- it's a drain on society, funneling capital to middlemen that could be better spent elsewhere. Because of that, it should be abolished (or at least greatly modified).
Modifying copyright is a position worth pursuing, but I think your ire at the vast music publishing industry conspiracy is a bit unproductive. If you look at what it is and why it is, you can get a lot of useful things done without causing collateral damage to everything in your path.
Unrestricted Internet distribution has infinite economies of scale.
Absolute bull. That's only true if bandwidth is infinite and/or free, neither of which is or likely ever will be the case.
As a result, every brick-and-mortar record store would be in critical danger of going out of business -- even independents, whose model often depends on moving large quantities of mainstream product to stay alive and allow them to serve the niche markets in their community.
Then the brick-and-mortar record stores should go out of business, because they've been rendered obsolete. This is not a problem. All the money and manpower that went to running those stores will be reallocated into doing something more useful. (If you think otherwise, look up the "broken window fallacy".)
Congratulations, you just killed thriving local music scenes in thousands of American cities that are based around local independent record shops. Despite what many in the so-called Internet generation seem to feel, there is value to physical presence, physical possession, and physical rarity. I'm not sure what you're trying to argue with reference to the broken windows fallacy, since no one is being forced to buy music a priori the same way the shopkeeper is forced to buy a new windowpane -- they're only being forced to pay for music they wish to own. And what's your replacement for indie record-store culture? Streaming audio? Podcasts?
Even online services would have a rough time, because instead of negotiating agreements with a couple of major labels, they'd have to go to thousands of individual artists.
Are you kidding?! Online services (including iTMS) do this anyway already! In fact, some services carry only music from "unsigned" bands. They aren't having a problem now, and they won't be having a problem later.
Until they want to grow to serve more customers. Those services can never pass beyond a certain size unless there's a top-down consolidated distribution infrastructure for them to tap. iTMS does the vast, vast majority of its business with mainstream music customers buying mainstream music. A major reason iTMS can exist is because Apple was able to negotiate with half a dozen record labels and tap a catalog of hundreds of thousands (millions?) of tracks. If they had to go to each one of the artists instead of the label, iTMS would be about where some of those "unsigned-artist" services are today, instead of a service millions of people use daily.
Artists would have to assume all the costs of their individual touring budgets, which means a lot of artists who currently tour nationally as openers for mainstream acts would never tour at all.
So maybe we'll have more regional artists, at the expense of national ones. Whoop-de-do.
No, what you'll see is no national acts (barring the occasional dark-horse national sensation like the Dave Matthews Band breaking out of Charlottesville, VA in the early 90s) and very few acts that even tour multi-state. Basically your local music scene will be whoever lives in your town, and whoever happens to already be rich enough to drive there from wherever else they are.
In a scenario like that, what happens? Artists start forming collectives to negotiate distribution agreements and split touring expenses. Over time, that's going to evolve back to r
My point flew right by you. I'm not talking about the network from the viewpoint of this professor providing content -- I'm talking about the network from the viewpoint of the IT staff at his college, who have to worry about hundreds of dorm rats queueing up downloads and running BT 24/7 if they allow it. Since the academic use of BT is vanishly small to nonexistent among college students, from their point of view rather than throttling it, it's easier just to block it and make the occasional rare exception for bona fide academic uses.
Also the prof is frankly either not that bright (unlikely for a CS prof at Waterloo) or has an agenda, because if he wanted a BitTorrent version, he could easily carry his 400 MB file home, put it up on a tracker, and voila. So, for that matter, could anyone on Slashdot and I saw several comments talking about doing so. Why he chose to whinge rather than do the minimal amount of work involved is beyond me, unless he has some reason for wishing to heap misdirected scorn on Waterloo's IT staff.
It wasn't perceived the same, because it wasn't the same. If you make a mix tape, chances are you own the original item (record, cassette, CD, whatever) that the songs came from. You're also putting some degree of time and artistry into selecting and arranging the songs on the tape, and maybe even making a nice label and case liner. You're also doing it one time for one person. It's a very personal expression -- "here's some stuff I think you'd like" -- and if the person does like what you give them, they'll (presumably, in at least some cases) go out and buy more of it themselves.
Online music downloading is completely different. There's no art to it at all. It's not one-to-one where both people know each other and it's a one-time exchange. There's no guarantee that the person you get the song from paid for it themselves -- in fact rather the opposite probably tends to be true. Likewise somebody downloading stuff for free, and finding a track they like, is just going to go download more for free. So of course it's perceived much differently than mix-tape trading.
By the time you have the chance to buy or steal a CD, the artist and all the technical people you mention above have already been paid for the performance recorded on that CD, and most probably won't be paid for it again no matter how well it sells.
They wouldn't get paid at all if no one stood to make money from creating and selling the music.
1. If the consumer environment is such that people download music for free instead of paying for it in some way, no money flows back up the chain and no more music is made on a scale that pays any of those people. The music industry contracts to what individual artists can support out of their own budgets.
2. If the record labels make a reasonable effort to keep people from enjoying their product for free, then they can justify charging money for it to the people who are willing to pay. This is where we are now.
3. If, on the other hand, some people pay, and a large number of other people don't pay, and the producers allow that to exist without fighting the people who don't pay, eventually no one will pay and you're back in scenario 1.
What our society seems to have forgotten is that the consumer does not have a God-given right to have product!...We, as a society, will be much better off if we remember this fact, and the sooner the better!
What exactly are you proposing? Distorting the market to try and push publishers out of existence, out of some misguided idea that you'll suddenly get all your music for free? The market (by which I mean the suppliers and the consumers) has arrived at the current distribution model over time. If major publishers die off, the result will not be today's music distribution system with artists at the top instead of publishers: it will be something radically different and much smaller.
If you take away major record labels, you destroy the economies of scale that allow them to efficiently move product to the mainstream music consumer. As a result, every brick-and-mortar record store would be in critical danger of going out of business -- even independents, whose model often depends on moving large quantities of mainstream product to stay alive and allow them to serve the niche markets in their community. At a minimum the cost of music would rise in proportion to the missing efficiency. Even online services would have a rough time, because instead of negotiating agreements with a couple of major labels, they'd have to go to thousands of individual artists. Artists would have to assume all the costs of their individual touring budgets, which means a lot of artists who currently tour nationally as openers for mainstream acts would never tour at all.
In a scenario like that, what happens? Artists start forming collectives to negotiate distribution agreements and split touring expenses. Over time, that's going to evolve back to record labels, who will then consolidate into a few majors and assorted minors and niche or vanity labels... just like today.
Face it: music is a commodity. Economics tells us that in the absence of outside intervention, commodities in a free market end up controlled by a few large players who shape the business landscape, and lesser players who serve niche markets and never grow beyond a certain size as a result.
Disallowing P2P at institutions of higher learning is often nothing to do with copyright at all -- it's about saving the network bandwidth for true academic uses. There may be a smidge of academic use of BT, but even at a university I really don't think anyone's going to try and seriously assert all those kids downloading music in the dorms are doing it for research purposes. Bandwidth is neither infinite or free -- in fact in the real world it's often pretty damn scarce.
I'm sure that if there were a pressing need to use BitTorrent for something academic that could not easily be done any other way, that an exception would be made (but the only thing I can think of that would fall into this category would be research on BitTorrent itself).
I suspect Gmail uses a combination of automated classification and tweaks based on what users actually classify as spam. My Gmail account gets anywhere from 30-100 spam messages per day, and I've noticed a couple of patterns:
One of the mailing lists I'm on had a certain poster who would send things to the list via Bcc:. Gmail classified his mail as spam for a couple of days, but after I pulled his mail back to the Inbox a couple times during that initial period it never did again.
Spam goes in waves: for a few days I'll get none or one or two a day in my Inbox, then a new variant will come out (sort of like viruses) and I'll get 10 that day.
The phishing warning seems to be set pretty cautiously. I have many messages in my spam folder that are clearly phishing attempts (following the same pattern as earlier attempts), but are not marked as such -- more so than in years past. I suspect the assignment of the "phishing attempt" tag is based on user participation, and the userbase is getting complacent over time.
Gmail, I suspect, is taking a brute-force approach to classifying e-mail as spam: if a large number of hundreds of thousands (millions?) of users say it's spam using the Report Spam function, it probably is.
I always liked Stephen King's version: "The Jaunt". The rules are:
1) You can't go through conscious: intelligent beings that go through conscious end up psychologically broken and typically drop dead right after they come out the other end. It appears that going through conscious is equivalent to spending several million (billion?) years in sensory-deprivation limbo.
2) You have to have a receive station set at the transmission end to get anywhere. But: the transmit end can be set to NULL for the destination. You go in, but you don't come out anywhere. (There's a vignette of a man accused of murdering his wife by Jaunting her to NULL. His lawyer tries to get him off by saying "well, she's not really dead...", which backfires as the jury is so horrified they convict with the maximum sentence.)
Granted we have more than our fair share of bloated hogs here, but don't take those CDC "obesity" figures at face value. For one, they're based on BMI, which is a faulty way of indexing "fatness" to begin with, and some years ago they lowered the index for "obesity" so overnight millions of overweight Americans became obese without gaining an ounce.
Actually, you're wrong. Computer systems working properly (which is the big sticking point) can drive the car in a more efficient manner that will minimize wear. You know how teenagers love to gun it coming out of a light? Hello engine wear. Or aggressive drivers trying to jump forward into a spot that closes up so they have to slam on the brakes -- they're wasting gas, wearing out their brakes, wearing out engine parts... to say nothing of the time they go to panic-stop and suddenly nothing happens because a brake line sprung a leak from overuse.
The holy grail is cars that talk to each other to get around more efficiently yet. If the traffic up ahead narrows from four lanes to two because of construction, and car computers can talk to each other and say "Hey, you're two miles back but get ready for this", then orderly traffic flow can be maintained as the cars merge into the remaining lanes and decelerate. This in turn saves gas, etc.
Hell, think how much money you'd save if you car just automatically avoided potholes if it could. Tires, struts, shocks, suspension, all those would last much longer. Look at the figures on how much money it costs drivers annually in a city like Baltimore that's infested with chuckholed roads.
JonMartin wrote [on older drivers' insurance rates]:
...they pay low insurance rates because that is all they can afford. If the rates were any higher they would have to stop driving, giving the insurance companies no money at all.
Insurance companies are businesses, and businesses exist to maximize profit. For a given group of people they will charge whatever will make them the most profit.
Your conclusion doesn't follow from your premise. It doesn't make sense for insurance companies to ever undercut their rates. We're not talking about people buying toasters here -- by selling you insurance, the insurance company is assuming future liability up to a certain amount. If they sell insurance to older drivers at a "discounted" rate, the math dictates they will eventually lose money on them and actually were better off not taking their money to begin with.
Competition in the insurance industry doesn't result in simply lowering prices across the board. Beyond things like reducing overhead, insurance companies attract new drivers by finding pockets of low risk and offering those drivers a lower rate. Watch the insurance company ads -- they promote this stuff all the time. Discounts for good grades, discounts for multiple vehicles, discounts for driver training... But even with the discount, they're still charging you enough money to make a profit.
You completely missed the point of this and at least two other studies done on driving while talking on a cell: it is just as impairing as driving drunk, and it does not matter if you use a hands-free unit, you're just as distracted and drive just as badly.
I'm assuming this thing is (or will be) slightly larger and more powerful than a smart phone at its eventual price point. As far as using it, about half my day consists of waiting for people to call in issues, so forward office phone to cell phone, and take a walk, relying on this thing for e-mail and remote access when an issue arises. If it's one of the rare issues I can't deal with in a minute or two, walk back to the office. Although since most days I'd do that I'd be hanging out in a coffeeshop browsing the web, a laptop might still be more useful. But dammit, the thing looks cool!
For Euro 1000, this thing should have some sort of antipersonnel weapon built in. When the price comes down, this might be practical as a daily computer -- I know that with wireless Internet on one at a $500 price point I'd spend a lot more time out of the office.
I seem to recall various incidents in the past few years (a DVR maker comes to mind, though I can't remember which) where commercial products used GPL software unchanged, failed to distribute source (pointing people to the maintainer of the software), and the FSF and community raised a fuss. So I don't understand why this is suddenly such a light-bulb moment.
I have a D610, I love it and it's built pretty sturdily (the screen hinges are stiff enough to hold the screen stable, it doesn't flex when you pick it up by a corner of the base, etc.) A co-worker thought I was in for a stinker because our now-former boss had a D600, but he was impressed by my 610. (Now-former-boss's 600 is, in a word, wobbly -- the screen waggles, the case flexes, things just don't quite fit together right any more.)
Of course his 600 is now over 3 years old, while my 610 is just six months, but according to my co-worker it was flimsy out of the box. Given what I saw on someone's Compaq Presario laptop (even flimsier construction), I think the electrical problems and the lack of stiffness are linked -- that machine would blue-screen if you picked it up unevenly.
That's a faulty analogy for your purposes, though. If you fed everyone a small amount of gasoline, you'd kill the ones that are sensitive to it for whatever reason. Eventually the rest of humanity (let's say 90%) will reproduce back up to the old population level, but now everybody will be slighly more resistant to gasoline poisoning than the old population was. Now to kill off 10% of humanity you have to dose them with even more gasoline than before, so you still have (from the perspective of someone trying to exterminate humanity using gasoline) a negative outcome. If you do that long enough (thousands of generations), I would bet that eventually you'd end up with humans that can deal with being force-fed enough gasoline to fill their stomachs.
This is the same thing we see with premature stoppage of antibiotics. You haven't killed all the bacteria, just the weaker strains. The Wikipedia article you cite also notes that triclosan-resistant strains of bacteria do exist, althought they are not believed to be a case of "acquired" resistance, by which I assume they're referring to acquired heritable resistance. Of course it's not -- that's Lysenkoism, and it's just as bogus now as it was 50 years ago. Resistance across generations is never "acquired", it's a result of pre-existing genetic traits being selected for, or of the next generation physically adapting individually to the environment the same way their parents did).
No matter what the physical mechanism, the fact that we've introduced a selective force into the environment of a set of bacteria (the germs on your hands) is going to have selection effects. The fact that we haven't reliably measured them (yet) may simply be a result of the weakness of that selection pressure in typical daily use of antibacterial soaps, and the relatively short time triclosan's been in widespread use.
Not at all true. Soap by itself is just a surfactant. While that does a good job removing bacteria (because they're a foreign body just like a dirt particle), some bacteria (and dirt) remains. Anti-bacterial soaps typically contain triclosan, which is a bona-fide bactericide. It may kill some of what's left, but in doing so it breeds resistance because no bactericide is 100% effective, and triclosan does not kill "on contact" so is therefore even less effective in typical use of anti-bacterial soap.
This makes a lot of sense to me, for intuitive, anecdotal and logical reasons:
Intuitive: I figure your immune system is like anything else in your body -- if it doesn't get a regular workout it becomes less efficient and when you stress it, it may behave unpredictably.
Anecdotal: I grew up playing outside a lot. My favorite thing to do was hydraulic engineering on mud-puddles. I built dams, canals, locks with gates, stirred up mud to see how it behaved, etc. I was out in the woods a fair bit, got the occasional tick (this was before Lyme disease was such a concern, and as long as you caught the ticks the same day, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever was nothing to worry about). We had cats, our relatives had dogs, etc. To this day I have relatively little issue with allergies or illnesses of any kind. Yes, dust makes me sneeze, but it honestly puzzles me why people stampede to get flu shots every year -- I've had the flu maybe twice in my life, it sucked, it lasted about three days each time, and I got over it. People look at me like I'm nuts -- "You're not getting a flu shot? WHY NOT???"
On the other hand, just about all the people I know with allergies, constant colds, etc. are the ones with a horror of anything that might be less than perfectly fresh and germ-free. I drink milk that's a few days past the sell-by, I eat stuff that's been in the fridge a couple days, I have lunch at greasy spoons where the kitchen staff maybe doesn't wash their hands every time they touch their own face. I don't go out of my way to find "dangerous" food or items, but neither do I avoid things that may have tiny amounts of "harmful" stuff on them like my life is at risk every time I eat a sandwich.
Logical: I won't use antibacterial soaps unless there's no alternative. Why? Because using them indiscriminately breeds resistant bacteria. This is just logic backed up by known scientific observation of microbial evolution. It's the reason your doctor won't (or at least, shouldn't) prescribe you antibiotics every time you have a fever -- if it's not bacterial, the drugs wouldn't do you any good and would breed resistance in bacteria that aren't causing you any issues yet. Then those resistant strains would take over and now you have a problem, and it's a tough problem because the doctor has to give you massive doses, or use a different antibiotic -- and there are only so many antibiotics out there. Trying to sterilize the environment is the same thing on a grander scale.
If more parents let their kids go ahead and, for example, chew on the cat's tail, the kid's immune system would get exposed to a few new agents (and learn to deal with them), and the cat would swat the kid who would then learn "don't chew on kitty, it hurts". That's two problems solved. Don't let them play in raw sewage, but don't keep them in a plastic bubble either.
Slashdot Mirror
Detecting whether a interviewee has MacOS experience prior to OS X: yell "Frog blast the vent core!" If they run, yes.
That's a really bad test. Not everybody with old-school MacOS skills played Marathon. A better test would be to say "I have a MacTCP control panel that needs configuring."
...the word you're looking for is fascism.
No matter what arcane rationalization you dream up, there's no justification for refusing to buy something offered for sale and taking the benefit from it anyway. The only legally supportable position is to refuse to pay money and do without.
Well, if there's not enough value to sustain it, then there's just not enough value. Maybe some people will miss it, but apparently they won't miss it enough to put in the effort and money to save it.
Yeah, that tends to be the case with a lot of things. It amazes me how many people gripe about say, Wal-Mart putting local stores out of business but still shop there.
Of course, that's assuming it tries to stay a "physical record store." I imagine if this were to happen a lot of these shops would change and survive. For example, I can imagine them specializing in vinyl, or selling memorabilia, or even becoming a coffee house/performance venue or something. There might be fewer shiny discs, but the community would still survive.
It's a possibility. In fact it's a strong possibility that some would go that way. People would probably still complain about "how it used to be" but myself, I'd actually like a coffee shop/record store better than what most of them are now.
No, it's not hard. But it's hard to deliver high-quality content reliably. It takes a lot of money to pay for the infrastructure to do that even if you yourself aren't shipping every bit.
Oh, I thought you were talking about the business side of it. For this issue, I have only one word: BitTorrent.
BitTorrent won't solve all bandwidth problems. Even if you're no longer bottlenecked by a single site as the origin of the data, there are still bottlenecks like the ISP's head end for most people (even with massive networks like Sprint or AT&T, there are peering points and local NOCs to consider). The Internet as it exists today is not ready to carry music, TV and movies to every single household -- the reason it works for a few people is that it's still a relatively tiny few who do that kind of stuff. No matter where the data is coming from, the fundamental issue is still the volume of data. This is a solvable problem, but one that will still take a significant amount of physical deployment to solve.
Wow, what economic theory is this? I've never heard about it, and I'm very skeptical of it, but if you've got some evidence that this is the case I'd be very interested in reading it.
I'm not sure what kind of formal treatment it may have in economics, but it's a pretty well-known effect. The classic example in modern times is Starbucks vs. smaller chains and independent coffee houses. Until Starbucks came along with some slick marketing and made fancy espresso drinks a part of yuppie culture, the coffeehouse business was about dead and coffee itself was an also-ran drink. Along came Starbucks and created demand where none previously existed, and in the process the entire industry underwent a business renaissance. At the same time Starbucks has very much an adversarial relationship with those independents and smaller chains that its creation of increased demand allows to exist. Sometimes it manages to kill them with clustering tactics, sometimes local sensibilities win out.
I can't find the original article I read about this, which had quotes from coffeeshop owners about their love-hate relationship with the Green Straw, but there's this article in the New Yorker that touches on it in terms of the decline and re-establishment of the coffee industry. If Starbucks goes away tomorrow, it potentially throws the entire coffee industry into a tailspin (especially since coffee prices have been a bit unstable in recent years).
Like anything else, the Internet will cost more when there is scarcity. When the "pipes" are so choked with music downloads that service degrades, the providers will charge more and more money until they find the point at which demand = supply.
Besides, in the long term the Internet could very well consist of a huge wireless mesh, with each user running their own node and routing traffic for their neighbors. Then, if they powered it with solar power or something, it really would be free!
I doubt that will happen on any kind of practical level. If it does I doubt it will happen in either of our lifetimes. Besides, you're omitting the cost and environmental impact of solar cells...
Now hold on a minute! Either there's value, or there's not. If there's value (and the business manager is competant), then the store will find a way to make money and will stay in business. If there's not value, then the store will go out of business and nobody will miss it.... What I'm saying is that keeping the status quo to give record stores business is like going around breaking windows to keep window makers in business. It's a stupid reason in either case.
There's value, but what I'm asserting is that the value of being a physical record store is not enough in itself to sustain an independent shop financially. There has to be a constant flow of large volumes of mainstream product to provide the majority of the support to keep that business alive. If you dismantled the major labels tonight, the independent record store would be dead by next week.
There's no reason whatsoever the music services can't scale even with courting artists manually. And there's not even a reason to do that -- just come up with a few standard package deals (e.g. X amount of promotion for Y% of revenue), let the artists sign themselves up for whichever package they want using a website form, and manage the whole thing automatically with a database. It's not that hard!
No, it's not hard. But it's hard to deliver high-quality content reliably. It takes a lot of money to pay for the infrastructure to do that even if you yourself aren't shipping every bit. Akamai makes tons of money just shipping bits for popular websites. And what happens when those services do manage to grow? They have huge investments to protect and huge costs to pay for. In effect they become the greedy distributors they replaced.
I'm not advocating "keeping" mainstream music in business as though it were some sort of corporate charity -- I'm saying that eliminating mainstream music distribution would have far-reaching effects that most of those who do the "fight the man" thing don't even consider. My initial comment was a response to your assertion that the distributors don't have a right to get paid. Well, no, in an absolute sense they don't -- they have a right to get paid for what they produce, in a free market transaction. Currently the law is structured such that they have a right of exclusivity over music copying and distribution, by law and by contract. But if the laws change to abolish copyright and they don't get paid, they will cease to exist -- and that will take down a whole host of other "good" music-related commerce that people want.
So I'm not asserting that they are good or bad, per se -- I'm asserting that they arose as the inevitable result of economic forces, and that the existence of these other "good" things like indie artists touring and indie record shops selling those artists' work and yes, even online services selling those indie artists' work is totally predicated on the existence of this gigantic flow of mainstream crap (if you will) that mainstream consumers trade their dollars
Modifying copyright is a position worth pursuing, but I think your ire at the vast music publishing industry conspiracy is a bit unproductive. If you look at what it is and why it is, you can get a lot of useful things done without causing collateral damage to everything in your path.
Unrestricted Internet distribution has infinite economies of scale.
Absolute bull. That's only true if bandwidth is infinite and/or free, neither of which is or likely ever will be the case.
As a result, every brick-and-mortar record store would be in critical danger of going out of business -- even independents, whose model often depends on moving large quantities of mainstream product to stay alive and allow them to serve the niche markets in their community.
Then the brick-and-mortar record stores should go out of business, because they've been rendered obsolete. This is not a problem. All the money and manpower that went to running those stores will be reallocated into doing something more useful. (If you think otherwise, look up the "broken window fallacy".)
Congratulations, you just killed thriving local music scenes in thousands of American cities that are based around local independent record shops. Despite what many in the so-called Internet generation seem to feel, there is value to physical presence, physical possession, and physical rarity. I'm not sure what you're trying to argue with reference to the broken windows fallacy, since no one is being forced to buy music a priori the same way the shopkeeper is forced to buy a new windowpane -- they're only being forced to pay for music they wish to own. And what's your replacement for indie record-store culture? Streaming audio? Podcasts?
Even online services would have a rough time, because instead of negotiating agreements with a couple of major labels, they'd have to go to thousands of individual artists.
Are you kidding?! Online services (including iTMS) do this anyway already! In fact, some services carry only music from "unsigned" bands. They aren't having a problem now, and they won't be having a problem later.
Until they want to grow to serve more customers. Those services can never pass beyond a certain size unless there's a top-down consolidated distribution infrastructure for them to tap. iTMS does the vast, vast majority of its business with mainstream music customers buying mainstream music. A major reason iTMS can exist is because Apple was able to negotiate with half a dozen record labels and tap a catalog of hundreds of thousands (millions?) of tracks. If they had to go to each one of the artists instead of the label, iTMS would be about where some of those "unsigned-artist" services are today, instead of a service millions of people use daily.
Artists would have to assume all the costs of their individual touring budgets, which means a lot of artists who currently tour nationally as openers for mainstream acts would never tour at all.
So maybe we'll have more regional artists, at the expense of national ones. Whoop-de-do.
No, what you'll see is no national acts (barring the occasional dark-horse national sensation like the Dave Matthews Band breaking out of Charlottesville, VA in the early 90s) and very few acts that even tour multi-state. Basically your local music scene will be whoever lives in your town, and whoever happens to already be rich enough to drive there from wherever else they are.
In a scenario like that, what happens? Artists start forming collectives to negotiate distribution agreements and split touring expenses. Over time, that's going to evolve back to r
Also the prof is frankly either not that bright (unlikely for a CS prof at Waterloo) or has an agenda, because if he wanted a BitTorrent version, he could easily carry his 400 MB file home, put it up on a tracker, and voila. So, for that matter, could anyone on Slashdot and I saw several comments talking about doing so. Why he chose to whinge rather than do the minimal amount of work involved is beyond me, unless he has some reason for wishing to heap misdirected scorn on Waterloo's IT staff.
Online music downloading is completely different. There's no art to it at all. It's not one-to-one where both people know each other and it's a one-time exchange. There's no guarantee that the person you get the song from paid for it themselves -- in fact rather the opposite probably tends to be true. Likewise somebody downloading stuff for free, and finding a track they like, is just going to go download more for free. So of course it's perceived much differently than mix-tape trading.
By the time you have the chance to buy or steal a CD, the artist and all the technical people you mention above have already been paid for the performance recorded on that CD, and most probably won't be paid for it again no matter how well it sells.
They wouldn't get paid at all if no one stood to make money from creating and selling the music.
1. If the consumer environment is such that people download music for free instead of paying for it in some way, no money flows back up the chain and no more music is made on a scale that pays any of those people. The music industry contracts to what individual artists can support out of their own budgets.
2. If the record labels make a reasonable effort to keep people from enjoying their product for free, then they can justify charging money for it to the people who are willing to pay. This is where we are now.
3. If, on the other hand, some people pay, and a large number of other people don't pay, and the producers allow that to exist without fighting the people who don't pay, eventually no one will pay and you're back in scenario 1.
What our society seems to have forgotten is that the consumer does not have a God-given right to have product! ...We, as a society, will be much better off if we remember this fact, and the sooner the better!
What exactly are you proposing? Distorting the market to try and push publishers out of existence, out of some misguided idea that you'll suddenly get all your music for free? The market (by which I mean the suppliers and the consumers) has arrived at the current distribution model over time. If major publishers die off, the result will not be today's music distribution system with artists at the top instead of publishers: it will be something radically different and much smaller.
If you take away major record labels, you destroy the economies of scale that allow them to efficiently move product to the mainstream music consumer. As a result, every brick-and-mortar record store would be in critical danger of going out of business -- even independents, whose model often depends on moving large quantities of mainstream product to stay alive and allow them to serve the niche markets in their community. At a minimum the cost of music would rise in proportion to the missing efficiency. Even online services would have a rough time, because instead of negotiating agreements with a couple of major labels, they'd have to go to thousands of individual artists. Artists would have to assume all the costs of their individual touring budgets, which means a lot of artists who currently tour nationally as openers for mainstream acts would never tour at all.
In a scenario like that, what happens? Artists start forming collectives to negotiate distribution agreements and split touring expenses. Over time, that's going to evolve back to record labels, who will then consolidate into a few majors and assorted minors and niche or vanity labels... just like today.
Face it: music is a commodity. Economics tells us that in the absence of outside intervention, commodities in a free market end up controlled by a few large players who shape the business landscape, and lesser players who serve niche markets and never grow beyond a certain size as a result.
I'm sure that if there were a pressing need to use BitTorrent for something academic that could not easily be done any other way, that an exception would be made (but the only thing I can think of that would fall into this category would be research on BitTorrent itself).
Gmail, I suspect, is taking a brute-force approach to classifying e-mail as spam: if a large number of hundreds of thousands (millions?) of users say it's spam using the Report Spam function, it probably is.
1) You can't go through conscious: intelligent beings that go through conscious end up psychologically broken and typically drop dead right after they come out the other end. It appears that going through conscious is equivalent to spending several million (billion?) years in sensory-deprivation limbo.
2) You have to have a receive station set at the transmission end to get anywhere. But: the transmit end can be set to NULL for the destination. You go in, but you don't come out anywhere. (There's a vignette of a man accused of murdering his wife by Jaunting her to NULL. His lawyer tries to get him off by saying "well, she's not really dead...", which backfires as the jury is so horrified they convict with the maximum sentence.)
Granted we have more than our fair share of bloated hogs here, but don't take those CDC "obesity" figures at face value. For one, they're based on BMI, which is a faulty way of indexing "fatness" to begin with, and some years ago they lowered the index for "obesity" so overnight millions of overweight Americans became obese without gaining an ounce.
The holy grail is cars that talk to each other to get around more efficiently yet. If the traffic up ahead narrows from four lanes to two because of construction, and car computers can talk to each other and say "Hey, you're two miles back but get ready for this", then orderly traffic flow can be maintained as the cars merge into the remaining lanes and decelerate. This in turn saves gas, etc.
Hell, think how much money you'd save if you car just automatically avoided potholes if it could. Tires, struts, shocks, suspension, all those would last much longer. Look at the figures on how much money it costs drivers annually in a city like Baltimore that's infested with chuckholed roads.
Insurance companies are businesses, and businesses exist to maximize profit. For a given group of people they will charge whatever will make them the most profit.
Your conclusion doesn't follow from your premise. It doesn't make sense for insurance companies to ever undercut their rates. We're not talking about people buying toasters here -- by selling you insurance, the insurance company is assuming future liability up to a certain amount. If they sell insurance to older drivers at a "discounted" rate, the math dictates they will eventually lose money on them and actually were better off not taking their money to begin with.
Competition in the insurance industry doesn't result in simply lowering prices across the board. Beyond things like reducing overhead, insurance companies attract new drivers by finding pockets of low risk and offering those drivers a lower rate. Watch the insurance company ads -- they promote this stuff all the time. Discounts for good grades, discounts for multiple vehicles, discounts for driver training... But even with the discount, they're still charging you enough money to make a profit.
You completely missed the point of this and at least two other studies done on driving while talking on a cell: it is just as impairing as driving drunk, and it does not matter if you use a hands-free unit, you're just as distracted and drive just as badly.
I'm assuming this thing is (or will be) slightly larger and more powerful than a smart phone at its eventual price point. As far as using it, about half my day consists of waiting for people to call in issues, so forward office phone to cell phone, and take a walk, relying on this thing for e-mail and remote access when an issue arises. If it's one of the rare issues I can't deal with in a minute or two, walk back to the office. Although since most days I'd do that I'd be hanging out in a coffeeshop browsing the web, a laptop might still be more useful. But dammit, the thing looks cool!
...can I connect my Optimus keyboard to it?
For Euro 1000, this thing should have some sort of antipersonnel weapon built in. When the price comes down, this might be practical as a daily computer -- I know that with wireless Internet on one at a $500 price point I'd spend a lot more time out of the office.
I seem to recall various incidents in the past few years (a DVR maker comes to mind, though I can't remember which) where commercial products used GPL software unchanged, failed to distribute source (pointing people to the maintainer of the software), and the FSF and community raised a fuss. So I don't understand why this is suddenly such a light-bulb moment.
Of course his 600 is now over 3 years old, while my 610 is just six months, but according to my co-worker it was flimsy out of the box. Given what I saw on someone's Compaq Presario laptop (even flimsier construction), I think the electrical problems and the lack of stiffness are linked -- that machine would blue-screen if you picked it up unevenly.
This is the same thing we see with premature stoppage of antibiotics. You haven't killed all the bacteria, just the weaker strains. The Wikipedia article you cite also notes that triclosan-resistant strains of bacteria do exist, althought they are not believed to be a case of "acquired" resistance, by which I assume they're referring to acquired heritable resistance. Of course it's not -- that's Lysenkoism, and it's just as bogus now as it was 50 years ago. Resistance across generations is never "acquired", it's a result of pre-existing genetic traits being selected for, or of the next generation physically adapting individually to the environment the same way their parents did).
No matter what the physical mechanism, the fact that we've introduced a selective force into the environment of a set of bacteria (the germs on your hands) is going to have selection effects. The fact that we haven't reliably measured them (yet) may simply be a result of the weakness of that selection pressure in typical daily use of antibacterial soaps, and the relatively short time triclosan's been in widespread use.
Not at all true. Soap by itself is just a surfactant. While that does a good job removing bacteria (because they're a foreign body just like a dirt particle), some bacteria (and dirt) remains. Anti-bacterial soaps typically contain triclosan, which is a bona-fide bactericide. It may kill some of what's left, but in doing so it breeds resistance because no bactericide is 100% effective, and triclosan does not kill "on contact" so is therefore even less effective in typical use of anti-bacterial soap.
Intuitive: I figure your immune system is like anything else in your body -- if it doesn't get a regular workout it becomes less efficient and when you stress it, it may behave unpredictably.
Anecdotal: I grew up playing outside a lot. My favorite thing to do was hydraulic engineering on mud-puddles. I built dams, canals, locks with gates, stirred up mud to see how it behaved, etc. I was out in the woods a fair bit, got the occasional tick (this was before Lyme disease was such a concern, and as long as you caught the ticks the same day, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever was nothing to worry about). We had cats, our relatives had dogs, etc. To this day I have relatively little issue with allergies or illnesses of any kind. Yes, dust makes me sneeze, but it honestly puzzles me why people stampede to get flu shots every year -- I've had the flu maybe twice in my life, it sucked, it lasted about three days each time, and I got over it. People look at me like I'm nuts -- "You're not getting a flu shot? WHY NOT???"
On the other hand, just about all the people I know with allergies, constant colds, etc. are the ones with a horror of anything that might be less than perfectly fresh and germ-free. I drink milk that's a few days past the sell-by, I eat stuff that's been in the fridge a couple days, I have lunch at greasy spoons where the kitchen staff maybe doesn't wash their hands every time they touch their own face. I don't go out of my way to find "dangerous" food or items, but neither do I avoid things that may have tiny amounts of "harmful" stuff on them like my life is at risk every time I eat a sandwich.
Logical: I won't use antibacterial soaps unless there's no alternative. Why? Because using them indiscriminately breeds resistant bacteria. This is just logic backed up by known scientific observation of microbial evolution. It's the reason your doctor won't (or at least, shouldn't) prescribe you antibiotics every time you have a fever -- if it's not bacterial, the drugs wouldn't do you any good and would breed resistance in bacteria that aren't causing you any issues yet. Then those resistant strains would take over and now you have a problem, and it's a tough problem because the doctor has to give you massive doses, or use a different antibiotic -- and there are only so many antibiotics out there. Trying to sterilize the environment is the same thing on a grander scale.
If more parents let their kids go ahead and, for example, chew on the cat's tail, the kid's immune system would get exposed to a few new agents (and learn to deal with them), and the cat would swat the kid who would then learn "don't chew on kitty, it hurts". That's two problems solved. Don't let them play in raw sewage, but don't keep them in a plastic bubble either.