Where I am that service only works on people who block their ID, not those who don't transmit it. There is a difference.
On your Caller ID box, a blocked ID shows as "private". The phone company knows the ID, you can *69 the caller, but you can't see it, and the blocking service blocks calls.
A not transmitted ID comes from another phone switch that decided not to give the caller ID. For example, the PBXs of most telemarketers of course refuse to provide this. It usually shows as "unavailable" and at least here, the "anonymous call block" function does NOT block those calls.
In other words, useless for blocking telemarketers. It only blocks ordinary people trying to protect their privacy. In fact, it's almost of negative utility. Not that you could not do it better.
It has been stagnant now for 15 years. One problem with USENET is nobody owns most newsgroups. The only way to get something done is to get everybody to agree, and that's almost impossible.
So there's no innovation in USENET.
Web sites have tons of innovation because each one belongs to a particular person. They are free to do what they want, and if people like it, they come, and if not they stay away.
Web sites are of course lousy at push and ineffecient. USENET is great at push and efficient if multiple people at a site read a newsgroup.
I don't know if this tool is ready to do this but I think this is the way to go. Do what USENET does, but let anybody create a channel, and have anybody subscribe, and make it efficient so that if 2 people on the same net subscribe, it is only sent once, and is reliable.
You think SMS spam is bad, soon we'll see voice spam. Yes, it's already illegal within most countries to call somebody to play a recording, but the price of the telecom infrastructure is getting low enough to make it productive to do from overseas.
Unlike email and SMS spam, content analysis, filters and bayes will not help you deal with voice spam. The only thing you can do is track high volume users and shut them down.
And caller-ID has less security than you think.
Voice spam will be a curse on VoIP where there are not per minute costs, just bandwidth costs. And while there is security there in the specs, it is rarely implemented.
It's important to note that these rates are the maximum a station would have to pay, which is why the RIAA thinks they are too low. After all, if you had a song, would you think $.0002 was sufficient payment for somebody to hear it?
But all players are free to negotiate any other terms, including lower terms, and including free for bands that want to get more play for their music and don't want the revenue.
This is a maximum because if they ask for more than the.07 or.02 cents, an internet radio station can just invoke the compulsory license and pay that lower amount.
Think this through again. The norm for copyright law is you can't perform somebody else's copyrighted work without permission. This ruling (common in the music industry but not elsewhere) says that you don't have to ask permission, you can just pay this fixed fee. If you go get permission you can arrange any fee both parties want. This ruling came down because people could not agree on fees.
In the end, this might mean that independent labels, which can now band together and declare lower fees for their music, dominate the airplay on internet radio stations. They might even declare free airplay for their stuff. This could mean independent labels begin to dominate the big labels on the internet.
Already projects like the Creative Commons are defining ways for works that want to allow free play to encode it right in the file.
Frankly, I don't think the government should be setting the price of music at all, however.
Yes, other things are subsidized too. But the airports are already there. Sure the rail seats are cheaper, but again, there is the land. This rail line is to cost 30 billion dollars. Assume it has 10,000 seats in use, that's 3 million per seat. I don't know how many seats it will have but for a 3 hour run, say every half hour, that would be six trains on the track at any given time each way, so that figure seems about right.
Land in California is expensive. And so is electricity. Planes pollute more and cost a fairly similar (about 20% higher) in energy per passenger-mile, but their total cost per passenger mile, because they don't need track, is considerably lower on the long haul.
Hey, we all would like to believe in the trains. They are cool, and on the surface the planes look inefficient. But the california maglev would require the buying of a 300 mile long strip of land and building an expensive railbed on it, all so that a train can use it 1% of the time.
Let's build high speed trains in our urban areas, and to our airports. But through the farms between cities? The economics are not the same.
High speed rail is great in dense Japan, but for California it's a waste. Rail's big cost is all that land and that fancy rail on it that, for any given piece of land, is only actively put to work a tiny fraction of the time.
They always talk about how the train would be competitive in downtown to downtown. That's because they ignore the fact you could put the high speed train from the downtown to the airport for a fraction of the price, and check you in on the train to drop you off in the secured area.
So run the high speed rail within the bay area and the L.A. basin where it makes sense, but seriously, are we going to see the desired traffic from Fresno to Modesto to justify the cost?
And it's an even worse terrorist target than the planes, since you can't guard the whole track, and a slight problem can cause a catastrophe at that speed.
Jack Valenti admits that he tapes shows all the time, fast forwards over the commercials, and that his son is building a nice tape library.
He feels guilty about it, admits it's infringement but doesn't worry because copyright infringement is not a crime, and he doesn't plan to sue any householders, (especially himself.)
I could only sit thinking, "Stop me before I tape again!"
While it's all very interesting inside, if all they ever do with these chips is emulate a Pentium, then all they are to the market is a low power pentium.
Thus all the market will care about is how much does it cost, how much power does it use and how fast is it compared to the offerings from Intel and AMD.
Is that a battle Transmeta can win? Intel can always pretend to have a better low power pentium around the corner, and they might not even be pretending.
Now, if they could use it to make a machine which can run both Mac PowerPC and x86 software are high performance, that might be something that would bring in users.
I have always felt that the message, unless you oppose copyright altogether, was that copyright owners should not be trying to sue away the technology (such as Gnutella, web sites, newsgroups) but rather be using their copyrights properly to punish those who actually make infringing copies of their works.
Ie. punish the infringer, not the tool.
But that's what this automatic scanning system is doing. Looking for actual infringements -- people offering up their copyright files or songs to anybody at all.
So should we not say, "that's great, this is what you should have been doing all along?"
I haven't seen the EU law text but all the proposed laws in the USA like this have made it illegal to send an E-mail offering goods or services for money. I would think that would include asking for work, promoting your job skills etc.
Not that there isn't job search spam, but the key isn't that it's commercial, it's that it's sent in bulk. All spam is sent in bulk, and not all spam is commercial.
In Europe, would the following message be illegal?
"Hi. I've been following your company for a while and I think it's doing great work. In particular, what you're doing in the field of XXXX is exactly what I want to do with my career and I think your company is going to win. Do you have any openings for somebody with YYYY skills? I've got a lot of experience doing that."
I suspect this message would now be illegal unless it was sent in response to a job solicitation. With smaller companies and departments that don't have an explicit HR department, how would one send a message if you were genuinely interested in the company? I know people who have been hired this way.
You may be right about other people, but I am serious in making that claim. Watching TV without ads on my Tivo is absolutely tremendous, and I would indeed gladly pay the studios to do it.
It's much better than the old style of PBS or HBO, where the lack of commercials is sometimes annoying because you need a break. TV with no commercials and the pause button is just what I want.
We watch about 1-2 hours a day (which takes 40 to 80 minutes), and I would gladly hand over the $18/month that would imply, or $36/month for two if they charged that way (which in theory they would have to, but in reality they would just average things out.)
I already pay more than that for Cable and other services. Most people pay more than $18/month for the depreciation on their TV.
It is the large family which is more concern. They are the ones who hit that average of 6 hours/day and would find the bill unmanageable and want a way to subsidize it.
As explained in the article, that's a short summation of the deal. Of course the $1.20 per hour is paid by the advertisers to the station/network/studio. What that means, however, is that in exchange for being exposed to 60 minutes of advertising, we get a program with a market value of about $1.20. If we could arrange to pay them directly for the show, and that could be done as efficiently as selling ads is, that's what we would pay for the show.
We are thus "paid" $1.20 per hour of advertising we are exposed to because we are given $1.20 worth of programming in exchange.
Of course we don't watch that whole hour. We do change channels and leave the room etc. I explore this in the essay. But even if we watch only 1/4 of the ads, it's still minimum wage.
Turns out only a fairly small minority of the public ever taped shows on VCRs to watch later, probably skipping ads. The Tivo makes it different. On a Tivo you hardly ever watch live TV. (That's why "pauses live TV" is the wrong message.)
Hard to believe, since I bet the typical/.er taped a lot of shows before getting the Tivo, but among the public, it was not a big issue.
Where I am that service only works on people who block their ID, not those who don't transmit it. There is a difference.
On your Caller ID box, a blocked ID shows as "private". The phone company knows the ID, you can *69 the caller, but you can't see it, and the blocking service blocks calls.
A not transmitted ID comes from another phone switch that decided not to give the caller ID. For example, the PBXs of most telemarketers of course refuse to provide this. It usually shows as "unavailable" and at least here, the "anonymous call block" function does NOT block those calls.
In other words, useless for blocking telemarketers. It only blocks ordinary people trying to protect their privacy. In fact, it's almost of negative utility. Not that you could not do it better.
It has been stagnant now for 15 years. One problem with USENET is nobody owns most newsgroups. The only way to get something done is to get everybody to agree, and that's almost impossible.
So there's no innovation in USENET.
Web sites have tons of innovation because each one belongs to a particular person. They are free to do what they want, and if people like it, they come, and if not they stay away.
Web sites are of course lousy at push and ineffecient. USENET is great at push and efficient if multiple people at a site read a newsgroup.
I don't know if this tool is ready to do this but I think this is the way to go. Do what USENET does, but let anybody create a channel, and have anybody subscribe, and make it efficient so that if 2 people on the same net subscribe, it is only sent once, and is reliable.
You think SMS spam is bad, soon we'll see voice spam. Yes, it's already illegal within most countries to call somebody to play a recording, but the price of the telecom infrastructure is getting low enough to make it productive to do from overseas.
Unlike email and SMS spam, content analysis, filters and bayes will not help you deal with voice spam. The only thing you can do is track high volume users and shut them down.
And caller-ID has less security than you think.
Voice spam will be a curse on VoIP where there are not per minute costs, just bandwidth costs. And while there is security there in the specs, it is rarely implemented.
Solutions will be harder to find here.
But all players are free to negotiate any other terms, including lower terms, and including free for bands that want to get more play for their music and don't want the revenue.
This is a maximum because if they ask for more than the .07 or .02 cents, an internet radio station can just invoke the compulsory license and pay that lower amount.
Think this through again. The norm for copyright law is you can't perform somebody else's copyrighted work without permission. This ruling (common in the music industry but not elsewhere) says that you don't have to ask permission, you can just pay this fixed fee. If you go get permission you can arrange any fee both parties want. This ruling came down because people could not agree on fees.
In the end, this might mean that independent labels, which can now band together and declare lower fees for their music, dominate the airplay on internet radio stations. They might even declare free airplay for their stuff. This could mean independent labels begin to dominate the big labels on the internet.
Already projects like the Creative Commons are defining ways for works that want to allow free play to encode it right in the file.
Frankly, I don't think the government should be setting the price of music at all, however.
Yes, other things are subsidized too. But the airports are already there. Sure the rail seats are cheaper, but again, there is the land. This rail line is to cost 30 billion dollars. Assume it has 10,000 seats in use, that's 3 million per seat. I don't know how many seats it will have but for a 3 hour run, say every half hour, that would be six trains on the track at any given time each way, so that figure seems about right.
Land in California is expensive. And so is electricity. Planes pollute more and cost a fairly similar (about 20% higher) in energy per passenger-mile, but their total cost per passenger mile, because they don't need track, is considerably lower on the long haul.
Hey, we all would like to believe in the trains. They are cool, and on the surface the planes look inefficient. But the california maglev would require the buying of a 300 mile long strip of land and building an expensive railbed on it, all so that a train can use it 1% of the time.
Let's build high speed trains in our urban areas, and to our airports. But through the farms between cities? The economics are not the same.
High speed rail is great in dense Japan, but for California it's a waste. Rail's big cost is all that land and that fancy rail on it that, for any given piece of land, is only actively put to work a tiny fraction of the time.
They always talk about how the train would be competitive in downtown to downtown. That's because they ignore the fact you could put the high speed train from the downtown to the airport for a fraction of the price, and check you in on the train to drop you off in the secured area.
So run the high speed rail within the bay area and the L.A. basin where it makes sense, but seriously, are we going to see the desired traffic from Fresno to Modesto to justify the cost?
And it's an even worse terrorist target than the planes, since you can't guard the whole track, and a slight problem can cause a catastrophe at that speed.
Jack Valenti admits that he tapes shows all the time, fast forwards over the commercials, and that his son is building a nice tape library.
He feels guilty about it, admits it's infringement but doesn't worry because copyright infringement is not a crime, and he doesn't plan to sue any householders, (especially himself.)
I could only sit thinking, "Stop me before I tape again!"
While it's all very interesting inside, if all they ever do with these chips is emulate a Pentium, then all they are to the market is a low power pentium.
Thus all the market will care about is how much does it cost, how much power does it use and how fast is it compared to the offerings from Intel and AMD.
Is that a battle Transmeta can win? Intel can always pretend to have a better low power pentium around the corner, and they might not even be pretending.
Now, if they could use it to make a machine which can run both Mac PowerPC and x86 software are high performance, that might be something that would bring in users.
I have always felt that the message, unless you oppose copyright altogether, was that copyright owners should not be trying to sue away the technology (such as Gnutella, web sites, newsgroups) but rather be using their copyrights properly to punish those who actually make infringing copies of their works.
Ie. punish the infringer, not the tool.
But that's what this automatic scanning system is doing. Looking for actual infringements -- people offering up their copyright files or songs to anybody at all.
So should we not say, "that's great, this is what you should have been doing all along?"
I haven't seen the EU law text but all the proposed laws in the USA like this have made it illegal to send an E-mail offering goods or services for money. I would think that would include asking for work, promoting your job skills etc.
Not that there isn't job search spam, but the key isn't that it's commercial, it's that it's sent in bulk. All spam is sent in bulk, and not all spam is commercial.
In Europe, would the following message be illegal?
"Hi. I've been following your company for a while and I think it's doing great work. In particular, what you're doing in the field of XXXX is exactly what I want to do with my career and I think your company is going to win. Do you have any openings for somebody with YYYY skills?
I've got a lot of experience doing that."
I suspect this message would now be illegal unless it was sent in response to a job solicitation. With smaller companies and departments that don't have an explicit HR department, how would one send a message if you were genuinely interested in the company? I know people who have been hired this way.
You may be right about other people, but I am serious in making that claim. Watching TV without ads on my Tivo is absolutely tremendous, and I would indeed gladly pay the studios to do it.
It's much better than the old style of PBS or HBO, where the lack of commercials is sometimes annoying because you need a break. TV with no commercials and the pause button is just what I want.
We watch about 1-2 hours a day (which takes 40 to 80 minutes), and I would gladly hand over the $18/month that would imply, or $36/month for two if they charged that way (which in theory they would have to, but in reality they would just average things out.)
I already pay more than that for Cable and other services. Most people pay more than $18/month for the depreciation on their TV.
It is the large family which is more concern. They are the ones who hit that average of 6 hours/day and would find the bill unmanageable and want a way to subsidize it.
As explained in the article, that's a short summation of the deal. Of course the $1.20 per hour is paid by the advertisers to the station/network/studio. What that means, however, is that in exchange for being exposed to 60 minutes of advertising, we get a program with a market value of about $1.20. If we could arrange to pay them directly for the show, and that could be done as efficiently as selling ads is, that's what we would pay for the show. We are thus "paid" $1.20 per hour of advertising we are exposed to because we are given $1.20 worth of programming in exchange. Of course we don't watch that whole hour. We do change channels and leave the room etc. I explore this in the essay. But even if we watch only 1/4 of the ads, it's still minimum wage. Turns out only a fairly small minority of the public ever taped shows on VCRs to watch later, probably skipping ads. The Tivo makes it different. On a Tivo you hardly ever watch live TV. (That's why "pauses live TV" is the wrong message.) Hard to believe, since I bet the typical /.er taped a lot of shows before getting the Tivo, but among the public, it was not a big issue.