There is no free market in the entertainment industry. CD and DVD prices are obviously fixed, and every media company worth it's salt will only sign exclusive agreements with authors to distribute their materials...so there's never any competition. Musicians are the perfect example. Bands sign their lives away to record labels, and then the record labels (not the artists) have a monopoly over their music.
Regardless of the industry, free markets do not remain free naturally. There will always be a tendency for companies to congolmerate in a free market because it gives them greater control over the market (making it less free for us and more profitable for them). This trend toward a controlled market can only be reversed by an enternal entity (i.e. the government). That's why anti-trust laws were invented...it'd just be nice if someone would bother to enforce them.
What if independent authors can't afford the copyright tax? Large publishers and media companies (like Disney) always would. All that's going to do is tip the scales even further toward big media, and I've had quite enough of that already.
I'd say just go with what the Science Advisor says, unless we need something specific like Iron Working for Swordsmen or Democracy for the trade bonus.
This is basic information theory. A particular peice of information only has value when it is significantly different from other information. Since nobody has yet been able to develop technology that distinguishes "Dog Bites Man" from "Man Bites Dog" at the semantic level, you need people to sift through it for you. This is why you hire a lawyer, watch the nightly news, or read slashdot...because getting information in bulk form in bulk is way too time consuming.
Don't get me wrong here, I'm all for transparent government, but if nobody has the time or energy to sift through the mountians of info, it isn't going to do you a damn bit of good.
-1: Install Linux on my workstation
0: Configure it
Both of which are significantly more difficult than if autoplay doesn't work in Windows. If the only reason to run linux is to play the games that I can already play just fine in Windows, then what's the point?
I'm sure it does, but what exactly are the details involved in getting it to work on Linux(Using WINE, right?) I don't know, and I don't want to bother finding out. Call me lazy if you want, but I'd rather spend my limited free time actually playing the game than doing to research to figure out how to play it on an operating system that I don't even have installed. Maybe when Win2k gets too old to use, and I have to re-install my OS anyway, I'll think about it. But until then, i'm just a lazy user who doesn't care that it's POSSIBLE to play WC3 on Linux, just that it's not as easy as Windows.
Warcraft III ...and all the other PC games that I can't do without. I'm a Java developer, so when it comes to my professional life, I couldn't care less what OS I work on (whatever's cheapest usually wins). But when it comes to my personal life, I choose Windows because I'm a gamer, and windows makes gaming easy (at least, easier than it would be on Linux or a Mac)
Here's how it works in Missouri
on
Indecision 2002
·
· Score: 2
As an undergrad in college, I worked on some of the software written to tally votes in Missouri (back when I was a pascal coder!). The way the system worked is as follows:
All the individual polls fed their ballots into punch-card readers. When completed, those readers would then dial up and connect to a central server over plain ol' voice line. They would then upload a tab-delimited ASCII file to the server which would then collate the votes and print a report. There was (as far as I could tell) no system to authenticate that the tallies recieved by the server were from the polls that they were supposed to be from. If you wanted to, there's a million ways you could defraud this system that have nothing to do with paper vs. electronic ballots. At some point, all the votes get counted by a computer, and if you want to fix an election "h4x0r" style, that's where you would do it, regardless of how the votes were collected in the first place.
Electronic ballots reduce the rate of ballot error, not voter fraud; Which is a human problem, not a technical one.
I know everyone likes to brag about how many dozens of hours they worked in a row to finish some critical project. I know that most programmers think they can live on coffee and pizza and Mountian Dew (and no sleep) for days and days and still stay razor sharp...but unfortunatly reality disagrees with you. My experience has shown that almost all programmers start to lose effiency after the 10 hour mark, and by the time you hit 18 hours or so, you're better off just getting some sleep and picking it back up in the morning. Now I'm sure I'm going to get barraged with anecdotes of projects saved from disaster by marathon coding sessions, but ask yourself this important question...Why was it necessary to do this in the first place? When it comes to software development, it's not like it sneaks up on you. Yeah, sure, deadlines get pushed up and requirements gets changed, but the software industry is not the only one that has to deal with the slings and arrows of trying to get shit done in the real world. Which begs the question, why does it happen? The reason it happens is because we let it happen. Some of us almost WANT it to happen so we can get our marathon coding merit badge and show it off as some trophy of programming prowess. Whenever a manager makes some comment like "Well, I don't think we can make the schedule, but hopefully we'll pull it together at the end" my resume starts shooting out of the office printer. Don't tolerate it. It's simply not professional. If shit happens...adjust the schedule or trim functionality. As demonstrated by Brooks in "The Mythical Man Month", those are pretty much your only two reasonable options. Turning your development staff into a bunch of zombies is just Bad Form. DON'T put up with it.
"All fair use is not piracy, but neither is all piracy fair use," Mehlman said.
NO fair use is piracy, that's why it's called FAIR use! The two are mutually exclusive...either you're breaking the law, or you aren't. This is not a good sign. If assistant Secretary of Commerce doesn't understand this, what hope do we have for the general public?
Your freedom to speech stops when it promotes violence and hatred towards other people.
Violence? Yes. Hatred? Of course not. You can't yell fire in a crowded theatre but you're free to tell everyone that you think the director of the film is a complete asshole. Some people may think hate speech against certian groups is offensive (Eminem, for example), but nobody's forcing you to listen to it, and it is certinally not illegal. Nor should it be...that's not how we operate here in the U.S. (regardless of what those nutcases over at Reporters Without Borders say).
I completely agree. I think that these problems are compounded by the fact that there is a disproportionate number of bad programmers in the market today. Every discipline has it's 3 standard deviations, tip of the curve, top-tier professionals and...everyone else...but software development has many, many more in the "everyone else" catagory because:
1) Dotcoms gave jobs to people who had no business being programmers and encouraged students to drop out of school to take high paying jobs that are non-existant now.
and
2) Most people do not have a clear understanding of what software development is all about. They equate computer use with computer science, and then are surprised to find out (after 4 years of college) that it's not at all what they expected.
This leads to more crappy software, less general understanding of effective software development techniques, and a whole hell of a lot of people who have no clue what they're talking about.
This point is to provide a starting point for investigators, and create doubt in the minds of criminals. Obviously, no halfway intelligent criminal is going to walk into a Wal-Mart, buy a registered gun, and go rob a bank with it. But when someone buys a gun off the street, he won't know whether or not the gun has ever been registered. If it has, and he commits a crime with it, then investigators will have a place to start looking; "So you sold your gun at a gun show two years ago to a guy...." And even if it hasn't been registed, the fact that it could be registered might discourage a criminal from actually _using_ the gun while committing a crime, because it might get traced back to him.
The constitution gives you the right to own guns. It does not give you the right to own them anonymously.
Seriously! What? It's like he lost the password to his encrypted pr0n archive, and ever since then he's just been bitter. Or maybe he's just jealous that the NSA could crack everything and his agency never could.
Economic advantage is not in and of itself a valid purpose or justification for copyright or patent laws.
This is the most important point in this article. If you take this as true (and I think it's clear that the framers did), then everything the media giants have done to copyright in the last 50 years seems downright immoral. The public needs to be reminded that the purpose of copyright is to help spread new ideas, not make money.
And to add insult to injury, we're all paying for the Baby Boomers' retirement in the form of social security. We all know none of us are ever going to see a dime of that money when we retire because Social Security is a pyramid scheme. Maybe I'm too cynical, but I think the baby boomer generation is the first one in history to care more about themselves than they do their offspring. But since GenX'ers are too apathetic to vote, the boomers are going to continue to screw us over until they die and leave us with a fucked up country.
While reading articles about new technology from various mainstream media sources, I get the impression that they have absolutly no idea what they're talking about. It's clear to me that the average mainstream journalist has, at best, a minimal understanding of the techology that he or she is reporting on.
What impact does this have on the public's perception and awareness of new technoloy, and will this lack of understanding dissapear as older journalists are replaced by a younger, more tech-savvy breed?
Jini is a java based service delivery system that is a great alternative to UPnP. I'm currently working on a network based music player so I can play mp3's on my home stereo and control it from anywhere with a web browser.
Wow...DRM technology protected by lame patent law and made by Microsoft. Who'll gimme odds that when they turn it on for the first time it opens a gateway to Hell?
Slashdot Mirror
There is no free market in the entertainment industry. CD and DVD prices are obviously fixed, and every media company worth it's salt will only sign exclusive agreements with authors to distribute their materials...so there's never any competition. Musicians are the perfect example. Bands sign their lives away to record labels, and then the record labels (not the artists) have a monopoly over their music.
Regardless of the industry, free markets do not remain free naturally. There will always be a tendency for companies to congolmerate in a free market because it gives them greater control over the market (making it less free for us and more profitable for them). This trend toward a controlled market can only be reversed by an enternal entity (i.e. the government). That's why anti-trust laws were invented...it'd just be nice if someone would bother to enforce them.
Does it transmit data when you rip a CD?
It has been my experience that poor managers do not employ this seemingly useful and effective technique for three reasons:
1) They don't have enough understanding of the business market/human resources/financial situation to know if a given set of goals are reasonable.
2) They don't know the work routine of their employees enough to tell when one person has contributed more than another, and
3) They certianly don't know enough about it to codify a reward system months in advance of the actual competion of the work.
This is particularly common in small companies with rapidly shifting company goals and projects.
What if independent authors can't afford the copyright tax? Large publishers and media companies (like Disney) always would. All that's going to do is tip the scales even further toward big media, and I've had quite enough of that already.
but does it support ogg? Otherwise I don't...oh wait....
I'd say just go with what the Science Advisor says, unless we need something specific like Iron Working for Swordsmen or Democracy for the trade bonus.
This is basic information theory. A particular peice of information only has value when it is significantly different from other information. Since nobody has yet been able to develop technology that distinguishes "Dog Bites Man" from "Man Bites Dog" at the semantic level, you need people to sift through it for you. This is why you hire a lawyer, watch the nightly news, or read slashdot...because getting information in bulk form in bulk is way too time consuming.
Don't get me wrong here, I'm all for transparent government, but if nobody has the time or energy to sift through the mountians of info, it isn't going to do you a damn bit of good.
You forgot steps number -1 and 0, which are:
-1: Install Linux on my workstation
0: Configure it
Both of which are significantly more difficult than if autoplay doesn't work in Windows. If the only reason to run linux is to play the games that I can already play just fine in Windows, then what's the point?
I'm sure it does, but what exactly are the details involved in getting it to work on Linux(Using WINE, right?) I don't know, and I don't want to bother finding out. Call me lazy if you want, but I'd rather spend my limited free time actually playing the game than doing to research to figure out how to play it on an operating system that I don't even have installed. Maybe when Win2k gets too old to use, and I have to re-install my OS anyway, I'll think about it. But until then, i'm just a lazy user who doesn't care that it's POSSIBLE to play WC3 on Linux, just that it's not as easy as Windows.
Warcraft III
...and all the other PC games that I can't do without. I'm a Java developer, so when it comes to my professional life, I couldn't care less what OS I work on (whatever's cheapest usually wins). But when it comes to my personal life, I choose Windows because I'm a gamer, and windows makes gaming easy (at least, easier than it would be on Linux or a Mac)
Right Here.
As an undergrad in college, I worked on some of the software written to tally votes in Missouri (back when I was a pascal coder!). The way the system worked is as follows:
All the individual polls fed their ballots into punch-card readers. When completed, those readers would then dial up and connect to a central server over plain ol' voice line. They would then upload a tab-delimited ASCII file to the server which would then collate the votes and print a report. There was (as far as I could tell) no system to authenticate that the tallies recieved by the server were from the polls that they were supposed to be from. If you wanted to, there's a million ways you could defraud this system that have nothing to do with paper vs. electronic ballots. At some point, all the votes get counted by a computer, and if you want to fix an election "h4x0r" style, that's where you would do it, regardless of how the votes were collected in the first place.
Electronic ballots reduce the rate of ballot error, not voter fraud; Which is a human problem, not a technical one.
I know everyone likes to brag about how many dozens of hours they worked in a row to finish some critical project. I know that most programmers think they can live on coffee and pizza and Mountian Dew (and no sleep) for days and days and still stay razor sharp...but unfortunatly reality disagrees with you. My experience has shown that almost all programmers start to lose effiency after the 10 hour mark, and by the time you hit 18 hours or so, you're better off just getting some sleep and picking it back up in the morning.
Now I'm sure I'm going to get barraged with anecdotes of projects saved from disaster by marathon coding sessions, but ask yourself this important question...Why was it necessary to do this in the first place? When it comes to software development, it's not like it sneaks up on you. Yeah, sure, deadlines get pushed up and requirements gets changed, but the software industry is not the only one that has to deal with the slings and arrows of trying to get shit done in the real world. Which begs the question, why does it happen?
The reason it happens is because we let it happen. Some of us almost WANT it to happen so we can get our marathon coding merit badge and show it off as some trophy of programming prowess. Whenever a manager makes some comment like "Well, I don't think we can make the schedule, but hopefully we'll pull it together at the end" my resume starts shooting out of the office printer. Don't tolerate it. It's simply not professional. If shit happens...adjust the schedule or trim functionality. As demonstrated by Brooks in "The Mythical Man Month", those are pretty much your only two reasonable options. Turning your development staff into a bunch of zombies is just Bad Form. DON'T put up with it.
NO fair use is piracy, that's why it's called FAIR use! The two are mutually exclusive...either you're breaking the law, or you aren't. This is not a good sign. If assistant Secretary of Commerce doesn't understand this, what hope do we have for the general public?
...for these companies.
VC: "So what's your great new idea?"
Future CEO: "Oh, we don't need a great new idea...we just patented an great old idea."
VC: "And how are you going to make money off an old idea?"
Future CEO: "Simple...we just sue everybody. No engineers, no tech support, no salespeople, no advertising, just lawsuits"
VC: "Brilliant! We'll make millions! [to secretary] Lisa, Get my army of lawyers in here...and call my congressman, I need to pass a few new laws."
I completely agree. I think that these problems are compounded by the fact that there is a disproportionate number of bad programmers in the market today. Every discipline has it's 3 standard deviations, tip of the curve, top-tier professionals and...everyone else...but software development has many, many more in the "everyone else" catagory because:
1) Dotcoms gave jobs to people who had no business being programmers and encouraged students to drop out of school to take high paying jobs that are non-existant now.
and
2) Most people do not have a clear understanding of what software development is all about. They equate computer use with computer science, and then are surprised to find out (after 4 years of college) that it's not at all what they expected.
This leads to more crappy software, less general understanding of effective software development techniques, and a whole hell of a lot of people who have no clue what they're talking about.
This point is to provide a starting point for investigators, and create doubt in the minds of criminals. Obviously, no halfway intelligent criminal is going to walk into a Wal-Mart, buy a registered gun, and go rob a bank with it. But when someone buys a gun off the street, he won't know whether or not the gun has ever been registered. If it has, and he commits a crime with it, then investigators will have a place to start looking; "So you sold your gun at a gun show two years ago to a guy...." And even if it hasn't been registed, the fact that it could be registered might discourage a criminal from actually _using_ the gun while committing a crime, because it might get traced back to him.
The constitution gives you the right to own guns. It does not give you the right to own them anonymously.
Seriously! What? It's like he lost the password to his encrypted pr0n archive, and ever since then he's just been bitter. Or maybe he's just jealous that the NSA could crack everything and his agency never could.
I'll just have to add that one to The List
And to add insult to injury, we're all paying for the Baby Boomers' retirement in the form of social security. We all know none of us are ever going to see a dime of that money when we retire because Social Security is a pyramid scheme. Maybe I'm too cynical, but I think the baby boomer generation is the first one in history to care more about themselves than they do their offspring. But since GenX'ers are too apathetic to vote, the boomers are going to continue to screw us over until they die and leave us with a fucked up country.
While reading articles about new technology from various mainstream media sources, I get the impression that they have absolutly no idea what they're talking about. It's clear to me that the average mainstream journalist has, at best, a minimal understanding of the techology that he or she is reporting on.
What impact does this have on the public's perception and awareness of new technoloy, and will this lack of understanding dissapear as older journalists are replaced by a younger, more tech-savvy breed?
Jini is a java based service delivery system that is a great alternative to UPnP. I'm currently working on a network based music player so I can play mp3's on my home stereo and control it from anywhere with a web browser.
Wow...DRM technology protected by lame patent law and made by Microsoft. Who'll gimme odds that when they turn it on for the first time it opens a gateway to Hell?