The thing is, if you've got an address, it is to communicate with people. Some of which will be trustworthy, and some of which won't. Just imagine a quarrel about sth, a desire of revenge, and sb will rat the offender out. I'd say the probability of that happening is much larger than 100K to 1.
So you use one address for stalking on MySpace, another, registered, one for your buddies/enemies, etc.
So when they only have bought 5 songs out of a thousand on their iPod (like the average iPod owner has), that's a hassle, but when they rip another 500, suddenly they can switch to a Zune.
The fantasy of iTunes lock in is rather weak. Anyone downloading iTS music is unlikely to be freaked out by some hypothetical loss in quality from buring to a CD and reimporting it.
It's not quality loss that's the disincentive, just the hassle. Not a lot of hassle, but enough to discourage many from bothering. The ones who could work out how to burn and re-rip probably are exactly those who would worry about quality loss and just get high bitrate MP3s from P2P instead.
Again why would Apple care that people don't buy from iTMS anymore, they already bought a song from the iTMS and can't switch anymore.
If people aren't buying (new) iTunes, they are buying or ripping music elsewhere, unless they're happy playing the same music forever. So the proportion of iTunes music in their collection is only reducing; the hassle of switching to a new player is less.
I do remember reading that Apple operated ITMS at a loss in order to sell iPods. So, I agree, who cares.
But if people are rolling their own MP3s, they can easily move to any other iPod clone. If they have a big iTunes collection, they're pretty much locked in to iPod (I know, there are ways, but nor as simple as copying an MP3.)
More than that, The Register is not exactly a trustworthy news source.
To the contrary. I think it's more authoritative than 95% of the "news" that's linked from here. (John Dvorak -- give me a break.) You may disagree with their opinion pieces, but that's another issue. And Slashdot submitters, thorough malice or stupidity, have submitted many of their joke pieces as straight news. They're not to blame for the non-existence of Slashdot's vetting system.
First, let's say that you upgrade some hardware. There will be no way for the OS to know that there's new hardware unless it goes through the hardware detection and configuration stages of bootup
If we assume that the power must be interrupted to install new hardware, it would be trivial to have a switch that recognised that. A dead man's switch, so to speak. (Using the "feature" that most mobos seem to have now that turning "off" still leaves the mobo powered, unless you actually pull the plug.) This wouldn't be foolproof, but most PCs go for years without any hardware changes. I don't know if more recent Windows handles USB devices better, I use Win2k and generally have to reboot if I attach anything more complex than a storage device. Macs of course "just work".
if you are a poor 3rd-world peasant, 100 dollars worth of food or medicine or electrical wiring may be the far better deal.
A far better deal that doesn't exist. Peasants aren't being offered $100 of whatever goods they want. Or even $100. Negroponte doesn't know anything about delivering food or medicine, if he wasn't working on the OLPC, he'd be doing something geeky in California, not joining Jimmy Carter and Bono to build Third World housing or dig wells in Somalia.
If you want to say that instead of X, invest in agriculture, etc, fine. How about instead of: buying billions of dollars worth of arms; gold plated Mercedes for government ministers; flying in hookers and cocaine, etc, etc... why choose to pick on an education project that is at least targeted at poorer students? We can all quibble about how the OLPC might not be terribly useful, but there are so many things that cost much more that are quite evil and destructive you could take money away from if you had the guts to face the power brokers instead of picking on the most defenceless level of society.
It doesn't take a damned expert to figure out what's wrong, ask any geek that's in high school or recently graduated. Our problem is cultural, there's such an anti-intellectual problem in schools and the rest of society
But that is expressed in terms of money. If you pay football coaches 10 times what you pay the science teachers, then that's where anyone who wants to get ahead will focus.
Anderson has a website with his theory explained in a series of PDFs. My take is that first he has to show that his idea is internally consistent. But there are uncountable (literally...) numbers of consistent, but useless theories. I don't see how it can have any practical significance -- just asserting 1/0 = nullity doesn't solve any problems that I can see. Certainly I don't see how it's relevant to computing, that can't handle real numbers like pi (without approximation), let alone infinity which does have a long established mathematical pedigree and use in analysis.
, presumably under threat of lawsuit by DC comics over the Superman trademark. Not exactly Disney but very similar none the less and a good example of Copyright is used as a weapon
No, it's not. As you said, "Superman" is a TRADEMARK. Trademark law is not copyright law. You have to pay to file a trademark registration, and while it can last indefintely, if not used and defended, it can lapse. That's why you see the little circled R after all the Star Wars characters in their ads. Patents, trademanrks and copyright are all distinct ways of protecting intellectual property.
have good friends who are musicians, and they are seeing huge declines in their incomes from music sales, even though they seem to have larger fan bases and draw greater crowds at concerts.... Any ideas for how to effectively stop illegal downloads?
Sure. Filter every byte to stop people sharing music. Nothing else will work.
Perhaps your musician friends could try to make what they sell more atractive, eg, nice printed liner notes in the CD case, vouchers for concerts, t-shirts, etc; other extras that can't easily be copied and downloaded. You can argue about the justice of it, but the fact is that something that can easily be copied for almost nothing can't be sold at a premium price.
I have no love for the music industry, but I don't think we should ignore certain forms of illegal activity simply because we don't agree with the enforcement approach taken by it's sponsors.
As you've mentioned, copyright can last for a century or more. Violating the copyright of someone who's been dead for 50 years is "illegal", would you support enforcing that to the full extent of the law, 10 years jail, etc, etc? When laws are unjust or unreasonable, they invite lack of respect.
Holding every US citizen responsible for Bush's actions is no different than holding every German responsible for Hitler's
Yes, but that's how a lot of people think. My original statement was about how "the world" sees America, not me, not the Dalai Lama. And being of the white-skinned, English-speaking persuasion myself, there are countries I would be unwise to visit now, as I would be treated as a target because I look like an American to them. Though my own country, Australia, has sadly been complicit in Bush's adventurism.
Huh, and here I thought we just had the most hated administration. Yes, I have been working hard...but for the last twelve years to get neo-cons out of office twelve years. I guess you can call me a "neo" liberal, though, because I do think you should be hate countries that deprive women of the right to vote and stone homosexuals to death more than the US.
I wasn't talking about myself, personally. Some of my best friends are American. But "you", collectively voted in the administration, and confirmed it 4 years later. So you get some collective responsibility. And as for your examples of countries to hate; I could cite any number of human rights abuses in the USA, and a shitload throughout the world that it has encouraged by giving dictators a pass as long as they signed on to the War On Terror. Hundreds have been disappeared in places like Pakistan, for instance. Not to mention Abu Ghraib, renditions, Guantanamo....
It's pretty common now to call Microsoft Word just Word.
On the one hand, it's less of a mouthful. On the other, like "Windows", ".doc", "Office" it continues the practice of making generic terms imply Microsoft products, and anything else is just an imitation. But still MS products all default to creating absurdly long folder names like "c:\Program files\Microsoft Office\..."; though they're not alone there. I override these as much as I'm allowed to use 8-letter max, no spaces; 8.3 letters should be enough for any filename....
What I would like to see is an update of FrameMaker for the Mac, come on Adobe, you know it is a good product if only you were to maintain it properly and give it a current GUI... or release it to the open software community).
Adobe is letting FrameMaker and PageMaker gradually become obsolete, incorporating features that they think are saleable into ID. Before long they'll stop updating FM and PM at all. But they'll never release the code. Adobe has bought up lots of innovative apps to gain a feature they wanted for their flagship products, and taken them off the market. Eg, Ares font applications about 10 years ago.
The issue comes when the kids wants to load on some Windows software that all their friends are using, then suddenly the operating system matters dramatically. "I put in the CD that came with my iPod, but the computer isn't working." "I got this cool game for my birthday, but it's not working.
It's an issue, if you think the main function of a PC is to play games. My daughter has a GameBoy to play games. If a kid wants a game machine, they can save up and buy one.
Oddly enough, I was hired to support some 500 Windows-based PCs. I'm also the only person actively advocating the possibility of moving some of those over to Linux. For that to happen, the OTHER THREE PEOPLE IN MY DEPARTMENT would need training.
Well, any book shop will have a shelf groaning with fat "Learn Linux Administration for Dummies in 24 Hours", etc; as well as hopefully some O'Reilly books.
It'll be much easier if you can find some human beings to talk to, not just web forums and newsgroups. With any luck there is a local Linux Users' Group. Some institutions (colleges, big companies) nearby probably are using Linux on their servers at least. Introduce yourself.
The power to simply inflict torture-level pain on people who have no broken any law without oversight or evidence
It'd be crazy if police or even army were allowed to use this on a whim. Tear gas, water cannons, not to mention batons, also provide varying degrees of (usually) non-lethal coercion. But they can't just inflict this on passers by without a lot of paperwork.
"The money could be better spent here on Earth," leaving out the last part of the phrase. ("The money could be bettter spent here on Earth getting pork for my constituents so I get re-elected and/or my party gains more seats.")
The money IS all spent on Earth. It'll be a while before it can be outsourced to Mars. As for pork, why do you think NASA is based in Houston? Answer: LBJ.
Newton was into mysticism. That by itself is not a reason to reject an idea. Religious bias does not radiate waves that change the past.
The "idea" being referred to is that ID is different from Creationism. It's not. All the ID literature is just Creationism after doing a search and replace to change "God" to "Designer".
Slashdot Mirror
So you use one address for stalking on MySpace, another, registered, one for your buddies/enemies, etc.
Right. Glad we cleared that up.
It's not quality loss that's the disincentive, just the hassle. Not a lot of hassle, but enough to discourage many from bothering. The ones who could work out how to burn and re-rip probably are exactly those who would worry about quality loss and just get high bitrate MP3s from P2P instead.
If people aren't buying (new) iTunes, they are buying or ripping music elsewhere, unless they're happy playing the same music forever. So the proportion of iTunes music in their collection is only reducing; the hassle of switching to a new player is less.
But if people are rolling their own MP3s, they can easily move to any other iPod clone. If they have a big iTunes collection, they're pretty much locked in to iPod (I know, there are ways, but nor as simple as copying an MP3.)
To the contrary. I think it's more authoritative than 95% of the "news" that's linked from here. (John Dvorak -- give me a break.) You may disagree with their opinion pieces, but that's another issue. And Slashdot submitters, thorough malice or stupidity, have submitted many of their joke pieces as straight news. They're not to blame for the non-existence of Slashdot's vetting system.
If we assume that the power must be interrupted to install new hardware, it would be trivial to have a switch that recognised that. A dead man's switch, so to speak. (Using the "feature" that most mobos seem to have now that turning "off" still leaves the mobo powered, unless you actually pull the plug.) This wouldn't be foolproof, but most PCs go for years without any hardware changes. I don't know if more recent Windows handles USB devices better, I use Win2k and generally have to reboot if I attach anything more complex than a storage device. Macs of course "just work".
Yeah, because two or three people modded his post up, that means 100% of Slashdot readers agree with him. Including you.
A far better deal that doesn't exist. Peasants aren't being offered $100 of whatever goods they want. Or even $100. Negroponte doesn't know anything about delivering food or medicine, if he wasn't working on the OLPC, he'd be doing something geeky in California, not joining Jimmy Carter and Bono to build Third World housing or dig wells in Somalia.
If you want to say that instead of X, invest in agriculture, etc, fine. How about instead of: buying billions of dollars worth of arms; gold plated Mercedes for government ministers; flying in hookers and cocaine, etc, etc ... why choose to pick on an education project that is at least targeted at poorer students? We can all quibble about how the OLPC might not be terribly useful, but there are so many things that cost much more that are quite evil and destructive you could take money away from if you had the guts to face the power brokers instead of picking on the most defenceless level of society.
But that is expressed in terms of money. If you pay football coaches 10 times what you pay the science teachers, then that's where anyone who wants to get ahead will focus.
Anderson has a website with his theory explained in a series of PDFs. My take is that first he has to show that his idea is internally consistent. But there are uncountable (literally...) numbers of consistent, but useless theories. I don't see how it can have any practical significance -- just asserting 1/0 = nullity doesn't solve any problems that I can see. Certainly I don't see how it's relevant to computing, that can't handle real numbers like pi (without approximation), let alone infinity which does have a long established mathematical pedigree and use in analysis.
No, it's not. As you said, "Superman" is a TRADEMARK. Trademark law is not copyright law. You have to pay to file a trademark registration, and while it can last indefintely, if not used and defended, it can lapse. That's why you see the little circled R after all the Star Wars characters in their ads. Patents, trademanrks and copyright are all distinct ways of protecting intellectual property.
Sure. Filter every byte to stop people sharing music. Nothing else will work.
Perhaps your musician friends could try to make what they sell more atractive, eg, nice printed liner notes in the CD case, vouchers for concerts, t-shirts, etc; other extras that can't easily be copied and downloaded. You can argue about the justice of it, but the fact is that something that can easily be copied for almost nothing can't be sold at a premium price.
As you've mentioned, copyright can last for a century or more. Violating the copyright of someone who's been dead for 50 years is "illegal", would you support enforcing that to the full extent of the law, 10 years jail, etc, etc? When laws are unjust or unreasonable, they invite lack of respect.
Yes, but that's how a lot of people think. My original statement was about how "the world" sees America, not me, not the Dalai Lama. And being of the white-skinned, English-speaking persuasion myself, there are countries I would be unwise to visit now, as I would be treated as a target because I look like an American to them. Though my own country, Australia, has sadly been complicit in Bush's adventurism.
I wasn't talking about myself, personally. Some of my best friends are American. But "you", collectively voted in the administration, and confirmed it 4 years later. So you get some collective responsibility. And as for your examples of countries to hate; I could cite any number of human rights abuses in the USA, and a shitload throughout the world that it has encouraged by giving dictators a pass as long as they signed on to the War On Terror. Hundreds have been disappeared in places like Pakistan, for instance. Not to mention Abu Ghraib, renditions, Guantanamo....
You really want to maintain your position as the most hated country in the world? I suppose you've worked hard to earn it the last five years.
On the one hand, it's less of a mouthful. On the other, like "Windows", ".doc", "Office" it continues the practice of making generic terms imply Microsoft products, and anything else is just an imitation. But still MS products all default to creating absurdly long folder names like "c:\Program files\Microsoft Office\..."; though they're not alone there. I override these as much as I'm allowed to use 8-letter max, no spaces; 8.3 letters should be enough for any filename....
There was Ami Pro Word, the forst Windows word processor (before MS Word). And the .doc suffix used to be generic too, usually plain text.
Adobe is letting FrameMaker and PageMaker gradually become obsolete, incorporating features that they think are saleable into ID. Before long they'll stop updating FM and PM at all. But they'll never release the code. Adobe has bought up lots of innovative apps to gain a feature they wanted for their flagship products, and taken them off the market. Eg, Ares font applications about 10 years ago.
It's an issue, if you think the main function of a PC is to play games. My daughter has a GameBoy to play games. If a kid wants a game machine, they can save up and buy one.
Well, any book shop will have a shelf groaning with fat "Learn Linux Administration for Dummies in 24 Hours", etc; as well as hopefully some O'Reilly books.
It'll be much easier if you can find some human beings to talk to, not just web forums and newsgroups. With any luck there is a local Linux Users' Group. Some institutions (colleges, big companies) nearby probably are using Linux on their servers at least. Introduce yourself.
It'd be crazy if police or even army were allowed to use this on a whim. Tear gas, water cannons, not to mention batons, also provide varying degrees of (usually) non-lethal coercion. But they can't just inflict this on passers by without a lot of paperwork.
The money IS all spent on Earth. It'll be a while before it can be outsourced to Mars. As for pork, why do you think NASA is based in Houston? Answer: LBJ.
The "idea" being referred to is that ID is different from Creationism. It's not. All the ID literature is just Creationism after doing a search and replace to change "God" to "Designer".