Anyway, all the corporations would need to do is bribe individuals, rather than those they elect. Probably happening subtly already in industrialised societies (notice how "green" the oil companies' advertisements are these days; well it's ok to keep on burning stuff then, they got it all under control), less so elsewhere.
A bought-out majority of individuals is capable of drowning the voice of a worthy minority, whatever the forum.
I can only imagine decentralised decision-making succeeding if an individual were deciding where their tax money went (dividing their tax across a mind-map of issues and/or services) and even then there would need to be some kind of external control on the weighting an individual could apply (maybe over an extended period). If they could control how their money was spent locally, they would be less likely to pay grants to corporations that screw individuals or for bombs to be dropped on another country (statistically).
Actually, they're not paying for it, are they? How much of all this recent aggression has been funded by debt? Governments are living beyond their means in order to do right. Who is the money borrowed from again? These people understand, don't they, that doing the right thing is more important than money?
Anyway, who's gonna lobby for all these wacky ideas?
You can be sure that he has a problem with copyrighted material being available without payment to the industry on YouTube. The fact that he mentions YouTube in the same sentence as radio stations as a means for making copyrighted material available to the public suggests that he has either witnessed or participated in conversations (possibly in a basement night club in the early hours) where industry execs convinced themselves that they'll still get paid at the end of the month (and that's the important thing, isn't it?). So is Google going to pay them a fee to cover royalties for copyrighted content? I presume it'd be something similar to what radio stations pay.
First off, I didn't read the article; the summary was good and the comments filled in some blanks for me (I hope!).
I thought Bowie had embraced the Internet - not completely, obviously. And we all know what Madonna thinks.
As musicians (and/or their representatives) come to understand and appreciate the power of the Internet, maybe we'll see fewer dissatisfied fans. And even if they end up paying more for future gigs than they do today, I'm sure they would do so willingly if they knew what they were getting.
An artist/band could possibly put on a show (or tour) where the fans picked the playlist (at least content-wise, if not order) - possibly even on a show-by-show basis (if you're good musicians and not afraid to show it, like the Chilis;-)
What's more, fans could even bid against each other for tickets for these "oldies" shows, so bored musicians would be monetarily compensated for having to play "that song" again...
A down-side to this idea would apply to promoters who wouldn't be able to pay themselves the same level of big bucks no matter whether the stuff they're delivering is good or not (by using one musician to compensate for another financially). And of course, musicians would know sooner if they were going out of fashion...
...or not to see this if searching for "xxx"? I don't have an objection to a country requiring its porn suppliers to use a specified domain, just not that one. How about using the ".se" domain instead? It almost spells "sex" and that's a very naughty word:-)
because CD's can be copied. So as they begin to promote a more restricted format, they'll make sure that it's very competitively priced, relative to CD's, and convince a volume of people to switch - thus maintaining their revenue.
Record companies don't make money from CD's, they make it from the stuff they put on them. If they can ship it cheaper, it's better for them. Ideally, they'd like to sell you a "hard" copy of their wares by having you download them from a peer-to-peer network and burn them to disk, or whatever, yourself. You could print the sleeve, etc. Number of burns restricted by DRM, as well as playable devices, if possible (you could burn a copy for each of a set of devices you have registered online, maybe). No shops, not even second-hand ones.
It's possible that Google might achieve the Win95 effect if they released an OS. "Everything your Windows PC does but for free" is what they would need to offer, tho.
On a side note, there has been a lot of talk about the benefits for Ubuntu from a close association with Google - what's in it for Google? If they keep on knocking out good products, they'll have a presence on Windows desktops. Are they worried about MS crippling products that they compete against? Doubt it. So, if they're not just to benefit in some future life from their philantrophy, what can they get in this one? All I can think of is bandwidth and CPU cycles. I'm not suggesting that there's some Google conspiracy to hijack our computers but if they can think of a way of a way of using and trading in these commodities, then they'll ask nicely.
I reckon that if they knowingly shipped software whose p2p component fails to uninstall, then they have betrayed their customers to a greater extent than Sony did with their rootkit; Sony's transgression could possibly lead to a victm's bandwidth being used by zombie processes such as spam, Sky's will result in the victim's bandwidth being used to distribute content on Sky's behalf. In terms of money, it's clear that Sky is ripping off their customers (even those customers who only try the service for a while). I think legal systems can easily identify lawbreakers when they can identify who is taking whose money, and for what;-)
Why would Sky treat their customers - and internet users in general - so badly? Because they are not really an ISP, they are a content distribution company and in the world of content distribution the customer is the enemy.
As far as I can make out, there is no cost to customers at the moment (service is only available to customers who have signed up to full movie or sport TV packages) but I'd imagine that this is likely to change in the future. Sky would do well to appreciate that if they are not actually distributing the content that they are selling, then they are not actually selling content but merely licences to view that content and to reflect this in their pricing.
The coolest thing is that (1st?)ers have a pretty bad reputation, so your (1st?) ably illustrates your point. Your post is most definitely on-topic and insightful. Well done:-)
Not sure how well one of these would do 10 feet from the wall: the specs are here (pdf), I don't get them.
Can't copy-n-paste from the PDF but the figures I read included the following:
Video-style images, typical image diagonal and brightness, for a 16:9 aspect ratio image: 15" @ 200 candles/m squared (equivalent brightness to typical laptop screen).
They have a "full brightness" figure but this seems to be less bright than the "laptop" value! Can anyone explain?
... we might have heard about this patent sooner. I reckon these dudes would rather go after hardware manufacturers' money than chase down fly-by-night software companies/cabals or joe end user. Not only has MPEG4 got into our living rooms but portable devices such as PSP and the Video iPod thingy support it (either in hardware or firmware - don't they? If not, there are a multitude of other examples, I'm sure). Now these guys have addresses to send their bills to!
They're excuses, and not even plausible ones. They're not the only ones making fanciful excuses and getting away with it, though.
Rulers depend to a large extent on peoples' reluctance either to take responsibility (in democratic systems) or risk the well-being of their families (in more dictatorial systems) - or a mix of the above. If it means a better standard of living (or just living), you will most likely get peoples' votes, tears, etc...
I read a quote somewhere: "Technology is something that isn't finished yet". These frameworks are bloating because people aren't creating the correct kinds of tools; their developers haven't yet identified what they want the frameworks to do, or else they're just solving the wrong problems. Hopefully, this bloat won't lead to Java being abandoned in favour of the next half-baked set of ideas. Java is simple to work with and its object model is easily applied to real-world problems (i.e. whatever you want your program to represent, bar interfaces with external systems, including end users). I firmly believe that once the corrrect objects/interfaces are defined in "problem" areas (such as User Interfaces - or "presentation layer" as some might call it), then programming as a whole will benefit. This is where "patterns" are leading us. Some will fall by the wayside, just like some frameworks.
Hibernate looks pretty cool.
I like the look of Echo 2, will be looking at it again...
I'm not sure, but I think the "on" version applies when the thing you're fighting against is an abstract concept, rather than a concrete entity. Hence Bush is waging a war on terror against people in Iraq.
This post started out as a joke but it's not funny any more...
... which means that it's a war against an emotion, not a tactic. Or is it a war against a noun? Better chance of success if it were against an action-based one like "terrorism" than an abstract one like "terror".
Actually, doesn't he call it "War On Terra" these days?
The article states - although not in its misleading headline (repeated as a misleading headline for this topic) - that, in short, if a company is violating the GPL it is violating Sarbanes-Oxley and hence committing a federal offence (of course, I don't have any idea what Sarbanes-Oxley is:-). The only bad news I can see in the article is the headline - which is erroneous.
On a side note, I'm not sure how easy it is to unwittingly violate the GPL these days, so the article is cutting GPL violators quite a bit of slack!
Slashdot Mirror
They should have patented the idea; then they wouldn't have had to deal with the problem of other people actually implementing it.
Anyway, all the corporations would need to do is bribe individuals, rather than those they elect. Probably happening subtly already in industrialised societies (notice how "green" the oil companies' advertisements are these days; well it's ok to keep on burning stuff then, they got it all under control), less so elsewhere.
A bought-out majority of individuals is capable of drowning the voice of a worthy minority, whatever the forum.
I can only imagine decentralised decision-making succeeding if an individual were deciding where their tax money went (dividing their tax across a mind-map of issues and/or services) and even then there would need to be some kind of external control on the weighting an individual could apply (maybe over an extended period). If they could control how their money was spent locally, they would be less likely to pay grants to corporations that screw individuals or for bombs to be dropped on another country (statistically).
Actually, they're not paying for it, are they? How much of all this recent aggression has been funded by debt? Governments are living beyond their means in order to do right. Who is the money borrowed from again? These people understand, don't they, that doing the right thing is more important than money?
Anyway, who's gonna lobby for all these wacky ideas?
You can be sure that he has a problem with copyrighted material being available without payment to the industry on YouTube. The fact that he mentions YouTube in the same sentence as radio stations as a means for making copyrighted material available to the public suggests that he has either witnessed or participated in conversations (possibly in a basement night club in the early hours) where industry execs convinced themselves that they'll still get paid at the end of the month (and that's the important thing, isn't it?). So is Google going to pay them a fee to cover royalties for copyrighted content? I presume it'd be something similar to what radio stations pay.
:-)
Here is a particularly insightful post from that blog. I RTFA
I'm afraid you are wrong - a metre stick is a 3-D object ;-)
Do you mean: "Whoever didn't create the creator created us"?
First off, I didn't read the article; the summary was good and the comments filled in some blanks for me (I hope!).
;-)
I thought Bowie had embraced the Internet - not completely, obviously. And we all know what Madonna thinks.
As musicians (and/or their representatives) come to understand and appreciate the power of the Internet, maybe we'll see fewer dissatisfied fans. And even if they end up paying more for future gigs than they do today, I'm sure they would do so willingly if they knew what they were getting.
An artist/band could possibly put on a show (or tour) where the fans picked the playlist (at least content-wise, if not order) - possibly even on a show-by-show basis (if you're good musicians and not afraid to show it, like the Chilis
What's more, fans could even bid against each other for tickets for these "oldies" shows, so bored musicians would be monetarily compensated for having to play "that song" again...
A down-side to this idea would apply to promoters who wouldn't be able to pay themselves the same level of big bucks no matter whether the stuff they're delivering is good or not (by using one musician to compensate for another financially). And of course, musicians would know sooner if they were going out of fashion...
It's like the last line of your post. And it was!
...or not to see this if searching for "xxx"? I don't have an objection to a country requiring its porn suppliers to use a specified domain, just not that one. How about using the ".se" domain instead? It almost spells "sex" and that's a very naughty word :-)
because CD's can be copied. So as they begin to promote a more restricted format, they'll make sure that it's very competitively priced, relative to CD's, and convince a volume of people to switch - thus maintaining their revenue.
Record companies don't make money from CD's, they make it from the stuff they put on them. If they can ship it cheaper, it's better for them. Ideally, they'd like to sell you a "hard" copy of their wares by having you download them from a peer-to-peer network and burn them to disk, or whatever, yourself. You could print the sleeve, etc. Number of burns restricted by DRM, as well as playable devices, if possible (you could burn a copy for each of a set of devices you have registered online, maybe). No shops, not even second-hand ones.
Maybe I should patent that distribution model...
...the first thing I did when I saw this topic's heading was scroll away. Now I'm posting without reading any of it just to complete the job...
It's possible that Google might achieve the Win95 effect if they released an OS. "Everything your Windows PC does but for free" is what they would need to offer, tho.
On a side note, there has been a lot of talk about the benefits for Ubuntu from a close association with Google - what's in it for Google? If they keep on knocking out good products, they'll have a presence on Windows desktops. Are they worried about MS crippling products that they compete against? Doubt it. So, if they're not just to benefit in some future life from their philantrophy, what can they get in this one? All I can think of is bandwidth and CPU cycles. I'm not suggesting that there's some Google conspiracy to hijack our computers but if they can think of a way of a way of using and trading in these commodities, then they'll ask nicely.
I reckon that if they knowingly shipped software whose p2p component fails to uninstall, then they have betrayed their customers to a greater extent than Sony did with their rootkit; Sony's transgression could possibly lead to a victm's bandwidth being used by zombie processes such as spam, Sky's will result in the victim's bandwidth being used to distribute content on Sky's behalf. In terms of money, it's clear that Sky is ripping off their customers (even those customers who only try the service for a while). I think legal systems can easily identify lawbreakers when they can identify who is taking whose money, and for what ;-)
Why would Sky treat their customers - and internet users in general - so badly? Because they are not really an ISP, they are a content distribution company and in the world of content distribution the customer is the enemy.
As far as I can make out, there is no cost to customers at the moment (service is only available to customers who have signed up to full movie or sport TV packages) but I'd imagine that this is likely to change in the future. Sky would do well to appreciate that if they are not actually distributing the content that they are selling, then they are not actually selling content but merely licences to view that content and to reflect this in their pricing.
The coolest thing is that (1st?)ers have a pretty bad reputation, so your (1st?) ably illustrates your point. Your post is most definitely on-topic and insightful. Well done :-)
Not sure how well one of these would do 10 feet from the wall: the specs are here (pdf), I don't get them.
Can't copy-n-paste from the PDF but the figures I read included the following: Video-style images, typical image diagonal and brightness, for a 16:9 aspect ratio image: 15" @ 200 candles/m squared (equivalent brightness to typical laptop screen).
They have a "full brightness" figure but this seems to be less bright than the "laptop" value! Can anyone explain?
America doesn't do business with countries who torture prisoners, for example...
... we might have heard about this patent sooner. I reckon these dudes would rather go after hardware manufacturers' money than chase down fly-by-night software companies/cabals or joe end user. Not only has MPEG4 got into our living rooms but portable devices such as PSP and the Video iPod thingy support it (either in hardware or firmware - don't they? If not, there are a multitude of other examples, I'm sure). Now these guys have addresses to send their bills to!
They're excuses, and not even plausible ones. They're not the only ones making fanciful excuses and getting away with it, though.
Rulers depend to a large extent on peoples' reluctance either to take responsibility (in democratic systems) or risk the well-being of their families (in more dictatorial systems) - or a mix of the above. If it means a better standard of living (or just living), you will most likely get peoples' votes, tears, etc...
On the "invited guest" issue: I think people are confusing the law with the rules for vampires :-)
I think Zoep is "Soup" in Nederlands? Doesn't really clear things up :-)
... and Spring. Hear people are raving about it, saying that it's saving them days' worth of meaningless coding ...
I read a quote somewhere: "Technology is something that isn't finished yet". These frameworks are bloating because people aren't creating the correct kinds of tools; their developers haven't yet identified what they want the frameworks to do, or else they're just solving the wrong problems. Hopefully, this bloat won't lead to Java being abandoned in favour of the next half-baked set of ideas. Java is simple to work with and its object model is easily applied to real-world problems (i.e. whatever you want your program to represent, bar interfaces with external systems, including end users). I firmly believe that once the corrrect objects/interfaces are defined in "problem" areas (such as User Interfaces - or "presentation layer" as some might call it), then programming as a whole will benefit. This is where "patterns" are leading us. Some will fall by the wayside, just like some frameworks.
Hibernate looks pretty cool.
I like the look of Echo 2, will be looking at it again...
I'm not sure, but I think the "on" version applies when the thing you're fighting against is an abstract concept, rather than a concrete entity. Hence Bush is waging a war on terror against people in Iraq.
This post started out as a joke but it's not funny any more...
I suppose the interesting thing about tracing cash is that human interaction is necessary in order to pass it on.
Using GPS to track, for example, a security guard might skew the figures a bit...
... which means that it's a war against an emotion, not a tactic. Or is it a war against a noun? Better chance of success if it were against an action-based one like "terrorism" than an abstract one like "terror".
Actually, doesn't he call it "War On Terra" these days?
The article states - although not in its misleading headline (repeated as a misleading headline for this topic) - that, in short, if a company is violating the GPL it is violating Sarbanes-Oxley and hence committing a federal offence (of course, I don't have any idea what Sarbanes-Oxley is :-). The only bad news I can see in the article is the headline - which is erroneous.
On a side note, I'm not sure how easy it is to unwittingly violate the GPL these days, so the article is cutting GPL violators quite a bit of slack!