In terms of being a union of artists, the RIAA does a pretty horrible job of representing the average joe in their ranks.
The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) is not a union of artists, nor does it represent them. It is a trade organization, dominated by the same five international conglomerates that control the commercial distribution of more than 80% of music worldwide. When you think "RIAA," don't think Tony Bennett or Robert Plant or even Lars Ulrich -- think Bertlesmann AG, Time-Warner, Vivendi, Sony, and EMI. Kinda funny how underrepresented U.S. corporations are in this "American" trade association.
Pure speculation, but my guess is that the online distribution services are doing what they can to get profitable sales right now for the RIAA. When they've shored up their business model and have negotiated their next round of iron-clad, longer-term contracts, the online distributors may go into the business of replacing the RIAA with contracts directly with studios or artists directly.
The RIAA are the studios, though I believe the term label is appropo. Still, I think you're right that this whole battle... from day 1... has been about control of distribution. Prior to Napster, the RIAA-members who wield all the power had it locked up worldwide. Any kind of effective on-line distribution begins to rust that lock. In a few years, it might be possible for lesser-known recording artists than Pearl Jam to go it alone, whether completely independently or grouped into informal artists' collectives. Those types of things have always been around -- look at Elephant 6 -- but they don't get the wide exposure of a major-label artist who's label funnels money to Clear Channel so his song will be one of the 25 that Clear Channel's 1200 radio stations play this month, nor do they have the distribution clout to get their CDs into mall stores across the country. It will be much easier for them to break into one or more of the competing download services, which are going to have to start distinguishing themselves from each other to attract customers.
-With all due respect to Konqueror, Mozilla should be the default browser on the desktop.
Nah, I disagree. First off, Mozilla takes a long time to load. Firebird is great, but I think that keeping the consistent look of all KDE apps is a Good Thing (TM). Also, what specifically do you like about Mozilla that Konqueror doesn't have?
Though not the OP, my answer to that question is: Mozilla's cross-platform. It's what I use under WinXP, along with Moz Mail&News (though I don't use it as a newsreader in Windows). But for some reason, Moz under MEPIS sucks... blurry fonts, much slower and less responsive. Thunderbird was a bit faster, but even blurrier.
I'm sure that in the relatively near future (KDE 3.2, 3.3...) the Mepis config utilities will be obselete/assimilated into KDE.
One problem I had with the MEPIS config utility was trying to change my screen resolution... it simply wouldn't take. Eventually I found the KDE X config tool and changed it there, then it worked. Makes me wonder what will happen if I try to change over to Gnome -- I gather from various posts on the MEPIS support forums that doing so is not very easy.
I think it's no exaggeration to say that someone who already installed Windows can safely install e.g. a Mandrake.
Well...maybe a bit of an exaggeration. Last weekend I began my first foray out of Windows. First I reformatted and reinstalled WinXP... easy peasy. Slow, especially when you factor in all the updates necessary (SP1, etc.) and the certain amount of tweaking necessary to get rid of the more annoying "features," and of course reloading the hardware drivers. Nevertheless, straightforward. Then I installed the Debian-based MEPIS (I had previously booted it from the live CD-ROM, so I knew it would work). It is hard to imagine that installing any operating system could ever be easier. Absolutely flawless. Then I tried another Debian-based distro, Libranet. Absolute disaster... failed on almost every score, except I think it handled my NIC fine. Then I tried Mandrake... perfect hardware detection, but X wouldn't start. I got a lovely black screen and I don't know why and I haven't a clue what to do about it, especially as it correctly identified my monitor and video card. So I'm 1 for 3 and don't really know where to turn next.
MEPIS is great for getting a working system up fast, but my problem is I can't figure it out. The downside of these live CD distro's (and here I'm just guessing that Knoppix is pretty much the same) is that everything is tweaked, configured, and adjusted in ways that aren't documented, which make it difficult for the newbie (me!) to get a clear sense of how it all works. I've been pouring over Debian and other docs, then not finding the conf files where those docs indicate they would be. KDE help tools are nice for some things, but they don't explain too much more than how KDE works. All in all, the whole experience feels very much like Windows, but uglier, which isn't really what I was expecting (nor really what I want).
Really, what I would like to do is a minimal install of Debian, with MEPIS as a reference install, so I could build it up myself and not be so overwhelmed. But, I doubt I could get 'Woody' working, after my experiences with Libranet & Mandrake.
Not to mention wacky things like BraScape, where female scapers mailed network exec's their netherwear to show that the demographic did, indeed, include female viewers.
As Madame Chairman of Cross-Dressers for Farscape, I wish to highlight the important contributions made by our members in the campaign mentioned aboved. Not all Farscape fans who wear bras are women, ya know! We are an important, highly desireable demographic targeted by advertisers ranging from Gillette and Clinique (for all of their product lines) to Victoria's Secret. We feel that our support was instrumental in convincing the powers that be to go forward with producing the new shows.
I don't know why everyone thinks this is a victory against the RIAA.
Because chief among the RIAA's disingenous contentions was that P2P networks hurt the opportunities for "legitimate" online distribution. The RIAA publicly blamed P2P for the consumer disinterest in their member labels' own download services. Obviously, P2P wasn't the cause, since P2P is still as strong as ever and consumer uptake of commercial download services has been stronger than anyone expected.
RIAA has supported this idea from the start,
No, RIAA paid lip service to supporting the idea. Even Hilary Rosen, after she stepped down as RIAA's president, expressed dismay at the labels' inability and unwillingness to design a service that would appeal to consumers.
but as so many of you selectively note the RIAA is not a company. They can not start there own venture,
The RIAA is a trade organization essentially controlled by the five international conglomerates who distribute 80% of music worldwide. The RIAA acts as official mouthpiece for the positions of these companies -- and those are the companies that can and did start their own ventures, and failed with them. A "victory" or "defeat" for the RIAA is, in common parlance, a victory or defeat for those five companies. The fact that those companies have acted anti-competitively and illegally to maintain a lock on the distribution of music, and that lock is now rusting, is what people mean by a defeat for the RIAA.
Due to the lower price of distribution, imports, exports, tariffs etc. this method of providing music should stop the whiners,
It remains to be seen... we are talking mostly about the U.S. here. So far as I know, there is only one service currently available in Canada. How many in the rest of the world? With the commercial services in the U.S., the breadth and depth of music available even on Napster 2.0 (which has the largest catalog, for now) doesn't come close to what can be obtained on several P2P networks or through other channels like IRC or USENET. And the files are all lossily compressed, which isn't the case on USENET at least, where there are a substantial number of losslessly compressed files available. So, pay for substandard, lightly DRM'ed audio, or download the real thing for free? Hmmm...tough choice! Tariffs have rarely been an issue; the real issue is copyrights, and who will or won't allow their music to be available on these services (like what's left of The Beatles, for instance, who won't) and to what extent they will allow them to be sold. Hopefully, these are just growing pains, and eventually the holdouts will come around, and the confusing restrictions on what can be streamed vs. downloaded on Napster 2.0 that people are already complaining about will cease to be an issue. But you're being a tad optimistic, aren't you?
ahh well there's the pointless cut/copy/paste buttons
Pointless? You never cut/copy/paste data into or from an OGG tag. Oh, I forgot, you must use a proprietary, copy-protected format -- does AAC or whatever it's called have tags? Can you edit them, or is that a copyright violation?
and some new/save buttons that are completely generic.. what exactly am I saving? playlists? do I use the load button to load saved playlists or to load MP3s? why would I not want all my playlists to just appear all the time?
You would want all your playlists loaded all the time, all at once? You don't want to be able to pick and choose amongst your playlists? Or is that prohibited by the TOS?
What does "normal matching" mean??? what does "collection list" mean, is that my whole music collection.. list?
It appears to me that JuK is ideally suited for people who keep their music in folders, say album folders for example (which looks like the example pictured in the screenshots). Suits me, since that's how I like to organize my collection. But you could also organize it by genre, era, etc. Juk will apparently pick up on how you like to organize your music, rather than dictate to you the way it wants you organize your music. Why is this a bad thing? Are you so determined to be told how to do things by Apple that the thought of making your own decisions scares you?
And I would guess that "normal matching" is as opposed to "regex" matching. Can you search using regular expressions in iTunes?
why the separate "pause" and "stop" buttons. when I want the music to stop, which should I press?
From the full text of the ruling (.pdf, unfortunately):
Several commenters sought an exemption for works that are either public domain, open source or "open access," but to which access controls are applied. The commenters addressing open source and open access works provided absolutely no information in support of their requests. Aside from a proposal relating to the public domain material on DVDs, their was a paucity of information relating to other public domain works.
These commenters have overlooked that if a work that is entirely in the public domain is protected by an access control measure, the prohibition on circumvention will not be applicable. Therefore, no exemption is needed.
Ok, so if you have a DVD that consists entirely of material that is in the public domain, it is legal for you to use DeCSS to access that material, yes? Am I reading this incorrectly?: "the prohibition on circumvention will not be applicable." So how can it be illegal to post DeCSS to a website, if the code can be used for legitimate purposes? The premise of the MPAA's case against 2600 was that DeCSS violated the DMCA by providing an illegal circumvention technique. But if this circumvention is only illegal when misused by the end-user, isn't DeCSS more akin to the FastTrack network -- or, for that matter, to VCRs, MP3 players, Xerox machines, etc.
In other words, if there are instances in which the prohibition on circumventing CSS is not applicable, then telling someone else how to circumvent CSS should not be illegal, yes? What am I not getting here?
On a tangental note, I'm curious to know what happens to the copyrights of old games made by companies that no longer exist.
When companies go out of business, any tangible assets get divided up by the owners. So someone owns those copyrights; therefore, redistributing the games without the copyright holder's permission is still illegal.
For instance, in the publishing industry it is possible for a company to sit on a book that has gone stale for decades only to republish it someday when it looks to be profitable again.
Could you cite an example? Overwhelmingly, the copyrights on books are held by the books' authors, not by the original publishers. After a publisher puts a book out-of-print, the publishing rights revert to the author, or whomever has inherited his estate. If the book is republished at a later time, it's because the copyright holders resells the publishing rights. Publishers don't "sit on a book" -- they can't, they will lose the right to publish it.
I don't think the situation is analogous. A software company that holds the copyright to a particular piece of software that it has abandoned still has the right to prevent anyone else from exploiting that software, if it wishes. It can also make it clear that it doesn't care what anyone does with the software. What the Librarian of Congress has done is allowed a DMCA exemption that permits cracking encryption on obsolete software so that it is still accessible; the exemption doesn't by itself remove the copyright holder's privilege.
However the last time I spent $18 US on an album, there was only ONE song on the album that I liked. I paid $18 US for one track.
Two suggestions:
1. Find someplace else to shop. The last time I paid US$18 for an album was... wait, I have never paid that much. Most CDs I buy, I buy used -- usually locally, but online as well -- for $8/CD, give or take ("give" only for the "rare/OOP" type album). If there's something I want that I can't find used, I'll spring for it new, but never for $18. I don't even know a record store that charges that much for a single-disc album.
2. You may want to think about refining your tastes a bit. It takes a little work, but it really pays off in the end. I read this kind of criticism of the music biz (writ large) all the time... "I'm sick of buying a whole CD for one or two good songs blah blah blah." I always wonder what the hell those people are buying. Sure, I've bought my share of CDs that have been disappointments, but never any that have only one or two good songs. I buy the CDs of recording artists I like -- none are incapable of producing inferior work, but none habitually include throwaways on any of their albums. And sure, there are recording artists out there who've had one or two songs I kinda like, amidst a lot of other songs I don't. But I wouldn't buy their albums, I wouldn't even consider it -- at most, I might buy a single if I really have to own that song -- chances are, there'll be a couple of good remixes along with it. As a rule, I tend to think that people who habitually fall prey to "one-hit-wonder" types of performer really aren't music fans. A service like iTunes would certainly satisfy that craving, but I have to wonder how viable a music service will be that caters to people who don't listen to all that much music.
You just purchase a license to listen to the music.
It's amazing how often this particular misapprehension gets repeated, particularly in places frequented by the more technologically inclined. I guess the idea comes from software licenses. There is no "license" of any sort involved in a consumer's purchase of an audio CD. Just because the music comes on a shiny plastic disc does not mean you've licensed it, any more than you "license" a book when you buy one of those.
Probably not though. I certainly wouldn't count on it. The only thing that approaches how unreasonable the RIAA can be is the demands of the gimmie something for nothing crowd.
While no doubt you're using exaggeration as a rhetorical device, I think you're mischaracterizing the demands many of us would make on a download service we'd use, whether for pay or not. I've no interest in paying for something and then having to demonstrate that I have paid for it time-and-time-again in order to make use of it. I really don't care how "seamless" doing so is, nor how easy it is to get around -- it remains an irritation that I would rather avoid. I've no interest in paying for digital audio of demonstrably lower quality than I can buy on commercial CDs. I really don't care what percentage of the population can't tell the difference, I care only about whether I can tell the difference and how convenient it is for me to know when that might be. I've certainly no interest in paying $10 for less fidelity than I can get for $8 or less by buying used CDs, which are plentiful both locally and online.
I don't think that everyone who greets iTunes's introduction to Windows with a great big 'ho-hum' falls into the gimme-something-for-nothing crowd. Is it really unreasonable of consumers to expect substantial cost savings from digital distribution? If one is willing to accept the reduction in quality inherent in all commercial services to date, is it unreasonable to expect even more substantial cost savings? Is it unreasonable to want access to files in one's preferred format, without having to burn & re-encode those files? How exactly does that make iTunes more convenient and a better value proposition than buying unencumbered, uncompromised CDs for less money than you'd pay Apple?
Obviously, there are plenty of people who find that iTunes suits their needs, and that's great for them, great for Apple, and one hopes that it might be good for the recording industry. But saying that people who don't are as "unreasonable" as the RIAA doesn't make any sense.
Then explain to me how selling stripped books is illegal, in a way that is self-consistent with what you just said.
It's not illegal, necessarily. If a bookstore sells a stripped book that it was supposed to destroy, it's a violation of the retail agreement the bookstore has with the book's publisher. The illegality of that situation has nothing to do with copyright law or licenses. It is perfectly legal for consumers to resell a stripped book they might have in their possession. The same is true of advance readers' copies, which often become collectors' items. They are typically sent to key accounts and reviewers well in advance of publication. They almost always say "Not for resale," but that is simply to make sure the bookstores that receive them don't put them on the shelves. Second-hand and rare book dealers can and do sell them all the time. (For that matter, so do reviewers.)
An instance of a copyright involves an implicitly granted license. If this license is returned or revoked, the object (ie book) may no longer be legally used.
No, no, no...if that were true, then it would be illegal to resell the original editions of books that are out-of-print (but still in copyright), or to resell previous editions of a particular author's work when he changes publishers. Actually, if what you're saying was true, it would be illegal even to read those editions. You've just destroyed the entire aftermarket for books (and CDs, etc.)! The only license involved in copyright is between the creator and the distributor of his creation -- and that isn't an "implicit" license, it's an actual binding agreement, a.k.a. a contract.
You seem to be unclear about the distinctions between a software EULA and copyright law. A typical EULA is much more restrictive with regard to the user's rights and privileges than copyright law would dictate. You're right about not being able (legally) to use the software you found on a hard drive you bought off eBay, but that is because of the EULA. If you bought a trunk off eBay that happened to contain some books, you would be able to read or resell those books, legally.
If you ask me, it was the AOL execs who were "taken for a ride".
No, you had it right when you said "it was AOL that took Time Warner." AOL took over TW at just the right moment, before its overvalued stock started its nosedive. It wasn't long before TW shareholders saw more than 80% of their assets disappear into AOL's black hole, leading to former TW CEO Gerald Levin's, uh, resignation.
As to whether AOL didn't get what it thought it was getting with the acquisition, the problem was that there was never really any plan -- there were lots of press releases about synergies and blah blah blah, but it was never clear just how it would all work. There was a general recognition of certain complementary factors, like AOL had subscribers, the magazines had subscribers, TW Cable had subscribers; or like AOL could benefit from content, TW had content. But no one at either entity could agree on how to take advantage of this. AOL seemed to expect that it would get exclusive content from, say, Money just for the asking; Money execs expected (and were already generating) revenue from any on-line content redistribution agreements. TW Cable already had Road Runner and was doing extremely well with it; AOL had AOL-TV, which was a bust, and no clear idea of what it wanted to do with broadband. It still doesn't, despite its "World Wide Wow" campaign. I don't think you can blame AOL's failure to become a broadband player on TW -- AOL is still stymied by the fact that they make much more per dial-up subscriber than they ever will per broadband subscriber. (Furthermore, for a big portion of AOL's customer base, dial-up is anything but dead. We aren't talking about people who could be characterized as "early adopters" here, and there is every likelihood that many of the millions who just aren't interested in broadband are currently on AOL.)
The other problem is a corporate culture clash that makes the former merger of Time & Warner, which was not without its bumps, look like a meeting of the minds. AOL and TW were like oil & water. The people who were supposed to be working on bringing things together couldn't stand each other, across almost every department. I know a Human Resources VP at CNN who got so fed up he just stopped taking calls from anyone in AOL HR. There was a perception among AOL types that TW types were old-fashioned, uncooperative, and pompous; TW people generally thought AOL people were arrogant, demanding, and stupid. While I'm sure there was some truth to all of this, mostly it was just a bad match, but not the sort-of thing that shows up on paper.
At the end of the day, it was really only the TW shareholders who were taken for ride.
No, really I'm talking about the chilling effects of overly long copyright terms on society and culture. If you believe that life + 70 years constitutes, for all practical purposes, a "limited time" (as specified in the U.S. Constitution), or if you believe, like MPAA head Jack Valenti, that copyright should last forever minus one day, then you won't have a problem with this.
...is, like going to make our society so much, like, better and stuff?
I think that being able to purchase inexpensive paperback editions of mid-20th Century books (or being able to download them for free from Project Gutenberg) would improve our culture, yes. I think that being able legally to download Welles's "Citizen Kane" or Wilder's "The Apartment" would improve our culture. Hell, I even think being able legally to download The Beatles's albums would improve things. The chances are much greater that those things people still find worthwhile 30 years after they were produced actually might be worthwhile. How many people do you think will be interested in Britney Spears's music 30 years from now? Maybe a song or two will have a resonate nostalgia factor, but I doubt there will be much interest beyond that.
The point is -- what's the bigger problem? The fact that some kids download copies of Eminem/Linkin Park/'N Sync etc. without paying for them, or the fact that cultural expression is being stomped on by out-of-control copyright enforcement? I've yet to see a real-world example of a recording artist whose career has been ruined or livelihood denied him because of file-sharing. I have seen plenty of real-world examples of frivolous, expensive lawsuits, C&D notices, and unreasonable restrictions of free-market pricing owing to the practices of the copyright cartels.
''I really don't think they understand or believe that illegal file-sharing is the same thing as going into Tower [Records], grabbing a CD off the rack, and running out the door with it,'' said Scott Hervey, chairman of California Bar's cyberspace law committee.
Um, that's because file-sharing isn't shoplifting.
''We have to somehow fix the culture that thinks it's OK to rip off people's intellectual property rights,'' [UC Berkeley' CIO & Assc. Vice Chancellor Jack]McCredie said.
As opposed to fixing the culture that thinks it's OK to rip off the public domain? Which, ultimately, costs the public, society, and culture more: KaZaa, or obscene copyright terms? Why are we in a place now where even university officials are more willing to attack the integrity of their own students than to criticize the practices of a small cartel of international media conglomerates that withhold creative output from the public domain for longer than most of their students will be alive? What is the bigger problem? Why not address that problem, instead of focusing on what is little more than one of it's side-effects?
History shows humans to be fairly resistant to various roadblocks being thrown at us,...
I guess I don't understand how metering bandwidth is a "roadblock." I don't really understand why it's any different from metering electricity consumption -- a concept history shows humans willing to accept. If I don't expect my electricity bill to be subsidized by neighbors who use less electricity that me, then why should I expect my bandwidth usage to be subsidized by neighbors who use less bandwidth than me?
If all ISP's adopt similarly priced metering plans that are reasonable, I don't expect very many people would see that as a roadblock. In fact, I'd expect a lot of people to see it as a break, since people who don't engage in a lot of file-transfering (via P2P or other methods) ought to see their rates decline substantially. If ISP pricing plans turn out to be unreasonable, then I hope you're right about geeks finding a way around them, as long as the rest of us can tag along.:-)
You're also probably right about "all-you-can-eat" plans never going away completely. There are plenty of well-off customers who'd be willing to pay for the privilege of never having to worry about any bandwidth limitations. I imagine ISP's pricing plans will begin very shortly to resemble the types of plans currently available from premium USENET services.
I don't think blacklists are good, bad, or indifferent. The questions are how fairly are they implemented, how rigorously are the claims against the blacklisted party checked out, and how accessible are the administrators of blacklists for appeals. Obviously, there are problems with some of the implementations, as detailed in the Washington Post article -- and these particular problems read to me less like the typical growing pains of any developing concept than like design features. I wouldn't trust any blacklist who's operators hide behind a veil of secrecy anymore than I'd trust ad-ware.
Still, how effective can a blacklist, however well implemented & maintained, really be? Isn't this one of the easier types of blocks for spammers to get around?
If everyone would just stop trying to grow their penises, turn $5 into $5000, and visit XXChristyXX in her all-nude sorority, spam would wither and die. Lately, I've received some very helpful emails about how to stop spam and make money in the process, secrets I will be sharing with about 16 million fellow computer users very shortly.
The issues of copyright and distribution licences does NOT arise if I walk into a record store in Manhattan with my UK Visa Card and my South American home address. Why should it arise on the Internet?
Because if you order online, you did not physically walk into a record store in Manhattan or anywhere else in the U.S. It has nothing to do with where your VISA card is issued, it has to do with where you can claim to be making the purchase. If Apple has cleared the rights to sell these songs only in the U.S., then it can sell them only in the U.S., and anyone who happens to be a U.S. resident can buy them, regardless of his country of origin or citizenship. If I were a U.S. citizen with a credit card issued in the U.S., but I happened to be living elsewhere and didn't have a U.S. address, then I wouldn't be able to purchase songs from Apple's service either.
While I respect their freedom to make those choices, I never understood it.
Well, I have a TV, but I don't have cable, so, effectively, I don't have TV. I live in a high-density area which prevents me from receiving broadcast signals. I do rent a video once in a while, which is the only reason I still keep the set around.
While I agree with you that there is good TV and bad TV, when you're in the position of having to pay for any TV, you begin to consider what it's worth to you. I enjoy spending time on a variety of other leisure activities much more than I enjoy watching television. Those include outdoor activities, but when I'm home I'd rather be reading books, listening to music, or spending time online. About 2 1/2 years ago, after paying two cable bills in a row without having turned on the television once in those two months, I cancelled my cable subscription.
I don't really think that my horizons have diminished as a result. There is far, far better news programming on broadcast radio than on broadcast/cable TV, and I do still read the newspaper. The Internet is ideal for researching and investigating stories that interest me, and offers more in-depth means of staying informed than TV. It also offers alternative means of accessing most of the televised entertainment that might appeal to me, since most of the TV shows I might conceivably be interested in are readily available for download, commercial free. So far, though, I've only found a few that actually do interest me, and none currently are still being made (the most recent was "Farscape," which has just concluded). The only thing I can think of that I'm really missing are the little well-produced gems that one might catch on the Discovery Channel or the Science Channel or some such while channel-surfing. But it's just not worth the $40+ per month I'd have to pay, especially considering that I'd have to pay it to a subsidiary of AOL Time Warner, a company I'd rather not do business with.
Anyway, channel-surfing is something you do when you're in the habit of watching TV, not something you do when you don't turn it on for two months. Really, I think that's what it boils down to. None of us -- not even retired folk, the leisure class, or shut-ins -- has the time to partake of all the means of infotainment on offer in our media-saturated world: 500+ TV channels, 10s of 1,000s of pages of new reading material published everyday, 100s or 1000s of hours of new music to listen to every week, and the seeming infinity that is the Internet. At some point, whether by design or (more often) by default, you decide one thing or another just isn't as important to you as the others.
What gets me is that you rarely get the same "shock and awe" reaction to someone saying "I don't read books" or "I don't listen to music" as to someone saying "I don't watch TV" -- and, increasingly -- "I don't use the Internet." I've come to expect this from devotees of the boob tube, but it's a shame to see that attitude seeping into the wired community as well.
Liberal Arts? Really? Hmmm. I've got one of them valuable degrees. Had to go back and get a Master's in Computer Science it was so useful.
That strikes me as a prime example of the same attitude that has kept computer science basics out of consideration as a component of a liberal arts education. Getting a solid liberal arts degree isn't supposed to be "useful" for a specific application, it's supposed to useful for the development of your capacity to think, reason, and understand. And the great technological divide we have in American society is partly a result not just of non-geeks lacking basic knowledge about how computers work and what the policy implications of that might be, but of geeks being unable to explain (and often uninterested in explaining) that in terms that actually render it comprehensible.
The students will need to learn how to remain creative and original in spite of the conveniences of a computer automating the drudgery of composing notes, sentences, graphics, etc...
If you seriously mean to imply that you get no joy from the act of composing a sentence, then how on Earth do you think someone not particularly interested in the inner workings of a computer feels when expected to use the arcane symbols associated with computer code? One of my best friends has a Masters in comp. lit., speaks four languages fluently and is learning a fifth, and is working on a novel, yet I can't get him to understand some of the most basic concepts of computer usage. He manages to use Word Perfect, and he can look up his stock quotes and even access investment research, but you have no idea how hard it was for him to figure out where a file went when he downloaded it. And he uses AOL, unsurprisingly. Yet, how many people in the U.S. who grew up speaking English at home can't even converse, let alone write, in a language other than English? How many Americans, geeks and non-geeks alike, can barely write a grammatical English sentence, let alone an elegant one, that actually manages to convey their thoughts?
A course like K's is meant to start building bridges. I hope those bridges carry traffic in both directions. We might not be faced with legislation like the DMCA nor with some of the more absurd software patents had computer science not grown up as a relatively isolated field of specialization. The point isn't to label non-geeks as stupid because they don't know how Java works nor geeks as stupid because they've not read Mark Twain or Plato, the point is to fit the basics of computers within the basics of a broad and, yes, useful understanding of how our world is shaped.
It seems that the right hand doesn't see what the left hand is doing. That's the USA federal government for you.
With all due respect to your example, I would rather each department of the government be allowed to implement its own solutions, at least based on my experiences working for large corporations (where the right hand often doesn't know what the right middle finger is doing). The most productive situations arise when divisions and departments are allowed to solve their own problems, rather than having some senior-level executive decided, "okay, this worked for marketing, so now everyone has to do it this way." Information sharing is important, of course, but forcing one-size-fits-all "solutions" can be counter-productive.
As more and more people make purchases on the internet (and don't properly report for tax purposes) they will eventually end up loosing $45 Billion in tax revenues.
See, that's exactly what the way the report phrased the statement wants you to think. They won't "lose" any tax revenues because they are not currently set up to collect sales tax on Internet sales. If I buy a book from Amazon.com instead of a local bookstore, the state loses the sales tax they would have made if I had bought the book locally instead. But most the books I buy from Amazon.com are not available locally, or they are only available new locally and I buy them from Amazon.com used. These are purchases the state would not collect sales tax on unless they start taxing Internet sales. I would not make these purchases locally, regardless of the tax situation.
Also, the report says specifically that all 50 states would "lose more than $45 billion in Internet sales tax revenue," not "in local sales tax revenue lost to Internet purchases." This makes it sound like a foregone conclusion that states ought to be taxing Internet purchases, rather than making it sound like a new tax, which is what it really is. If the state doesn't impose a special tax on widgets, is it "losing" widget tax revenue? Or is it opting not to impose one of any number of new taxes it could impose at its whim?
About "inventing copyright laws", I ment that some silly guys in the U.S. invented the DCMA and that some more silly guys over at the E.U. are adopting it and are trying to make it even more stupid
Ah, the DMCA! It does seem to me that the U.S. did take the lead on the most annoying provision of the DMCA, namely making it illegal to publish information that allows someone to break an encryption lock. But I don't know that for sure because I am unfamiliar with the laws of various E.U. and Asian nations on this score, to say nothing of the Commonwealth. What provisions of the DMCA do you think the E.U. or other European nations are going to adopt? Here in the U.S., two legislators have already introduced bills in Congress that would restore our fair use rights. These bills would make it legal, for instance, for someone who uses a Linux OS to crack the encryption on a DVD so that he can play it on his computer.
What I don't understand is why you would blame the U.S. for any of this. Can you not think for yourselves? Taiwan, for example, has rejected copyright term extensions of Europe and the U.S. New Zealand does not require that region encoding for DVDs be enforced at all. It is possible to reject these outrages, if there is sufficient political will. I do understand how the existence of the DMCA in the U.S. makes it easier for media conglomerate lobbyists to pressure other governments to adopt some of its provisions - that is what happened here with regard to copyright term extensions that had already been adopted in Europe. But I don't think "it's Europe's fault" that we adopted them. Our Congress had the power to reject Europe's bad ideas, but it didn't. Who do you think has more influence about these issues in the E.U. - the U.S. government, an American company like Disney, or a French company like Vivendi, a German company like Bertlesmann? Why are copy-protected CDs sold in Europe by these companies, but not sold in the U.S.? It seems to me that all of these companies believe there is less resistance in Europe to these things than there is in the U.S., and you might be better off asking yourself why than by trying to blame the U.S. for these problems.
Yes, the idea of copyright extensions originated in Europe. Until the mid-1980s, the maximum U.S. copyright term was 76 years (26 years, renewable once for an additional 26 years, and under certain circumstances renewable for a third term of 24 years. In the U.S., copyright term was not tied to the year of the creator's death, it was tied to the date of publication or release). At that time, the British & European copyright term was life-of-the-creator + 50 years. I worked for a U.S. book publisher at that time and we were able to publish many books that were public domain in the U.S., but still under copyright in the U.K. and Europe. At some point in the late '80s or early '90s, Europe extended its copyright term to life + 70 years. Meanwhile, the U.S. had changed to the European system of life + 50 years. Then, three years ago, the U.S. again followed Europe's lead and extended the term to life + 70 years. This term was absolutely not the invention of the U.S.
Well, searching for "Deep Throat" might get you a movie, anyway.:-)
From what I understand about how Freenet works, simple browsing is unlikely to yield much in the way of useful or dangerous suppressed or secret information. That's why I mentioned that a reporter would need to be tipped off. An anonymous phone call from a telephone booth is all that's needed.
Slashdot Mirror
In terms of being a union of artists, the RIAA does a pretty horrible job of representing the average joe in their ranks.
The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) is not a union of artists, nor does it represent them. It is a trade organization, dominated by the same five international conglomerates that control the commercial distribution of more than 80% of music worldwide. When you think "RIAA," don't think Tony Bennett or Robert Plant or even Lars Ulrich -- think Bertlesmann AG, Time-Warner, Vivendi, Sony, and EMI. Kinda funny how underrepresented U.S. corporations are in this "American" trade association.
Pure speculation, but my guess is that the online distribution services are doing what they can to get profitable sales right now for the RIAA. When they've shored up their business model and have negotiated their next round of iron-clad, longer-term contracts, the online distributors may go into the business of replacing the RIAA with contracts directly with studios or artists directly.
The RIAA are the studios, though I believe the term label is appropo. Still, I think you're right that this whole battle ... from day 1 ... has been about control of distribution. Prior to Napster, the RIAA-members who wield all the power had it locked up worldwide. Any kind of effective on-line distribution begins to rust that lock. In a few years, it might be possible for lesser-known recording artists than Pearl Jam to go it alone, whether completely independently or grouped into informal artists' collectives. Those types of things have always been around -- look at Elephant 6 -- but they don't get the wide exposure of a major-label artist who's label funnels money to Clear Channel so his song will be one of the 25 that Clear Channel's 1200 radio stations play this month, nor do they have the distribution clout to get their CDs into mall stores across the country. It will be much easier for them to break into one or more of the competing download services, which are going to have to start distinguishing themselves from each other to attract customers.
Michael
-With all due respect to Konqueror, Mozilla should be the default browser on the desktop. Nah, I disagree. First off, Mozilla takes a long time to load. Firebird is great, but I think that keeping the consistent look of all KDE apps is a Good Thing (TM). Also, what specifically do you like about Mozilla that Konqueror doesn't have?
Though not the OP, my answer to that question is: Mozilla's cross-platform. It's what I use under WinXP, along with Moz Mail&News (though I don't use it as a newsreader in Windows). But for some reason, Moz under MEPIS sucks ... blurry fonts, much slower and less responsive. Thunderbird was a bit faster, but even blurrier.
I'm sure that in the relatively near future (KDE 3.2, 3.3...) the Mepis config utilities will be obselete/assimilated into KDE.
One problem I had with the MEPIS config utility was trying to change my screen resolution ... it simply wouldn't take. Eventually I found the KDE X config tool and changed it there, then it worked. Makes me wonder what will happen if I try to change over to Gnome -- I gather from various posts on the MEPIS support forums that doing so is not very easy.
Michael
I think it's no exaggeration to say that someone who already installed Windows can safely install e.g. a Mandrake.
Well...maybe a bit of an exaggeration. Last weekend I began my first foray out of Windows. First I reformatted and reinstalled WinXP ... easy peasy. Slow, especially when you factor in all the updates necessary (SP1, etc.) and the certain amount of tweaking necessary to get rid of the more annoying "features," and of course reloading the hardware drivers. Nevertheless, straightforward. Then I installed the Debian-based MEPIS (I had previously booted it from the live CD-ROM, so I knew it would work). It is hard to imagine that installing any operating system could ever be easier. Absolutely flawless. Then I tried another Debian-based distro, Libranet. Absolute disaster ... failed on almost every score, except I think it handled my NIC fine. Then I tried Mandrake ... perfect hardware detection, but X wouldn't start. I got a lovely black screen and I don't know why and I haven't a clue what to do about it, especially as it correctly identified my monitor and video card. So I'm 1 for 3 and don't really know where to turn next.
MEPIS is great for getting a working system up fast, but my problem is I can't figure it out. The downside of these live CD distro's (and here I'm just guessing that Knoppix is pretty much the same) is that everything is tweaked, configured, and adjusted in ways that aren't documented, which make it difficult for the newbie (me!) to get a clear sense of how it all works. I've been pouring over Debian and other docs, then not finding the conf files where those docs indicate they would be. KDE help tools are nice for some things, but they don't explain too much more than how KDE works. All in all, the whole experience feels very much like Windows, but uglier, which isn't really what I was expecting (nor really what I want).
Really, what I would like to do is a minimal install of Debian, with MEPIS as a reference install, so I could build it up myself and not be so overwhelmed. But, I doubt I could get 'Woody' working, after my experiences with Libranet & Mandrake.
Michael
Not to mention wacky things like BraScape, where female scapers mailed network exec's their netherwear to show that the demographic did, indeed, include female viewers.
As Madame Chairman of Cross-Dressers for Farscape, I wish to highlight the important contributions made by our members in the campaign mentioned aboved. Not all Farscape fans who wear bras are women, ya know! We are an important, highly desireable demographic targeted by advertisers ranging from Gillette and Clinique (for all of their product lines) to Victoria's Secret. We feel that our support was instrumental in convincing the powers that be to go forward with producing the new shows.
Yours sincerely,
Victor/Victoria
I don't know why everyone thinks this is a victory against the RIAA.
Because chief among the RIAA's disingenous contentions was that P2P networks hurt the opportunities for "legitimate" online distribution. The RIAA publicly blamed P2P for the consumer disinterest in their member labels' own download services. Obviously, P2P wasn't the cause, since P2P is still as strong as ever and consumer uptake of commercial download services has been stronger than anyone expected.
RIAA has supported this idea from the start,
No, RIAA paid lip service to supporting the idea. Even Hilary Rosen, after she stepped down as RIAA's president, expressed dismay at the labels' inability and unwillingness to design a service that would appeal to consumers.
but as so many of you selectively note the RIAA is not a company. They can not start there own venture,
The RIAA is a trade organization essentially controlled by the five international conglomerates who distribute 80% of music worldwide. The RIAA acts as official mouthpiece for the positions of these companies -- and those are the companies that can and did start their own ventures, and failed with them. A "victory" or "defeat" for the RIAA is, in common parlance, a victory or defeat for those five companies. The fact that those companies have acted anti-competitively and illegally to maintain a lock on the distribution of music, and that lock is now rusting, is what people mean by a defeat for the RIAA.
Due to the lower price of distribution, imports, exports, tariffs etc. this method of providing music should stop the whiners,
It remains to be seen ... we are talking mostly about the U.S. here. So far as I know, there is only one service currently available in Canada. How many in the rest of the world? With the commercial services in the U.S., the breadth and depth of music available even on Napster 2.0 (which has the largest catalog, for now) doesn't come close to what can be obtained on several P2P networks or through other channels like IRC or USENET. And the files are all lossily compressed, which isn't the case on USENET at least, where there are a substantial number of losslessly compressed files available. So, pay for substandard, lightly DRM'ed audio, or download the real thing for free? Hmmm...tough choice! Tariffs have rarely been an issue; the real issue is copyrights, and who will or won't allow their music to be available on these services (like what's left of The Beatles, for instance, who won't) and to what extent they will allow them to be sold. Hopefully, these are just growing pains, and eventually the holdouts will come around, and the confusing restrictions on what can be streamed vs. downloaded on Napster 2.0 that people are already complaining about will cease to be an issue. But you're being a tad optimistic, aren't you?
and should have no need for illegal P2P.
P2P isn't illegal.
Michael
ahh well there's the pointless cut/copy/paste buttons
Pointless? You never cut/copy/paste data into or from an OGG tag. Oh, I forgot, you must use a proprietary, copy-protected format -- does AAC or whatever it's called have tags? Can you edit them, or is that a copyright violation?
and some new/save buttons that are completely generic .. what exactly am I saving? playlists? do I use the load button to load saved playlists or to load MP3s? why would I not want all my playlists to just appear all the time?
You would want all your playlists loaded all the time, all at once? You don't want to be able to pick and choose amongst your playlists? Or is that prohibited by the TOS?
What does "normal matching" mean??? what does "collection list" mean, is that my whole music collection .. list?
It appears to me that JuK is ideally suited for people who keep their music in folders, say album folders for example (which looks like the example pictured in the screenshots). Suits me, since that's how I like to organize my collection. But you could also organize it by genre, era, etc. Juk will apparently pick up on how you like to organize your music, rather than dictate to you the way it wants you organize your music. Why is this a bad thing? Are you so determined to be told how to do things by Apple that the thought of making your own decisions scares you?
And I would guess that "normal matching" is as opposed to "regex" matching. Can you search using regular expressions in iTunes?
why the separate "pause" and "stop" buttons. when I want the music to stop, which should I press?
You are really desperate here, aren't you?
Michael
Ok, so if you have a DVD that consists entirely of material that is in the public domain, it is legal for you to use DeCSS to access that material, yes? Am I reading this incorrectly?: "the prohibition on circumvention will not be applicable." So how can it be illegal to post DeCSS to a website, if the code can be used for legitimate purposes? The premise of the MPAA's case against 2600 was that DeCSS violated the DMCA by providing an illegal circumvention technique. But if this circumvention is only illegal when misused by the end-user, isn't DeCSS more akin to the FastTrack network -- or, for that matter, to VCRs, MP3 players, Xerox machines, etc.
In other words, if there are instances in which the prohibition on circumventing CSS is not applicable, then telling someone else how to circumvent CSS should not be illegal, yes? What am I not getting here?
Michael
On a tangental note, I'm curious to know what happens to the copyrights of old games made by companies that no longer exist.
When companies go out of business, any tangible assets get divided up by the owners. So someone owns those copyrights; therefore, redistributing the games without the copyright holder's permission is still illegal.
Michael
For instance, in the publishing industry it is possible for a company to sit on a book that has gone stale for decades only to republish it someday when it looks to be profitable again.
Could you cite an example? Overwhelmingly, the copyrights on books are held by the books' authors, not by the original publishers. After a publisher puts a book out-of-print, the publishing rights revert to the author, or whomever has inherited his estate. If the book is republished at a later time, it's because the copyright holders resells the publishing rights. Publishers don't "sit on a book" -- they can't, they will lose the right to publish it.
I don't think the situation is analogous. A software company that holds the copyright to a particular piece of software that it has abandoned still has the right to prevent anyone else from exploiting that software, if it wishes. It can also make it clear that it doesn't care what anyone does with the software. What the Librarian of Congress has done is allowed a DMCA exemption that permits cracking encryption on obsolete software so that it is still accessible; the exemption doesn't by itself remove the copyright holder's privilege.
Michael
However the last time I spent $18 US on an album, there was only ONE song on the album that I liked. I paid $18 US for one track.
Two suggestions:
1. Find someplace else to shop. The last time I paid US$18 for an album was ... wait, I have never paid that much. Most CDs I buy, I buy used -- usually locally, but online as well -- for $8/CD, give or take ("give" only for the "rare/OOP" type album). If there's something I want that I can't find used, I'll spring for it new, but never for $18. I don't even know a record store that charges that much for a single-disc album.
2. You may want to think about refining your tastes a bit. It takes a little work, but it really pays off in the end. I read this kind of criticism of the music biz (writ large) all the time ... "I'm sick of buying a whole CD for one or two good songs blah blah blah." I always wonder what the hell those people are buying. Sure, I've bought my share of CDs that have been disappointments, but never any that have only one or two good songs. I buy the CDs of recording artists I like -- none are incapable of producing inferior work, but none habitually include throwaways on any of their albums. And sure, there are recording artists out there who've had one or two songs I kinda like, amidst a lot of other songs I don't. But I wouldn't buy their albums, I wouldn't even consider it -- at most, I might buy a single if I really have to own that song -- chances are, there'll be a couple of good remixes along with it. As a rule, I tend to think that people who habitually fall prey to "one-hit-wonder" types of performer really aren't music fans. A service like iTunes would certainly satisfy that craving, but I have to wonder how viable a music service will be that caters to people who don't listen to all that much music.
Michael
You just purchase a license to listen to the music.
It's amazing how often this particular misapprehension gets repeated, particularly in places frequented by the more technologically inclined. I guess the idea comes from software licenses. There is no "license" of any sort involved in a consumer's purchase of an audio CD. Just because the music comes on a shiny plastic disc does not mean you've licensed it, any more than you "license" a book when you buy one of those.
Michael
Probably not though. I certainly wouldn't count on it. The only thing that approaches how unreasonable the RIAA can be is the demands of the gimmie something for nothing crowd.
While no doubt you're using exaggeration as a rhetorical device, I think you're mischaracterizing the demands many of us would make on a download service we'd use, whether for pay or not. I've no interest in paying for something and then having to demonstrate that I have paid for it time-and-time-again in order to make use of it. I really don't care how "seamless" doing so is, nor how easy it is to get around -- it remains an irritation that I would rather avoid. I've no interest in paying for digital audio of demonstrably lower quality than I can buy on commercial CDs. I really don't care what percentage of the population can't tell the difference, I care only about whether I can tell the difference and how convenient it is for me to know when that might be. I've certainly no interest in paying $10 for less fidelity than I can get for $8 or less by buying used CDs, which are plentiful both locally and online.
I don't think that everyone who greets iTunes's introduction to Windows with a great big 'ho-hum' falls into the gimme-something-for-nothing crowd. Is it really unreasonable of consumers to expect substantial cost savings from digital distribution? If one is willing to accept the reduction in quality inherent in all commercial services to date, is it unreasonable to expect even more substantial cost savings? Is it unreasonable to want access to files in one's preferred format, without having to burn & re-encode those files? How exactly does that make iTunes more convenient and a better value proposition than buying unencumbered, uncompromised CDs for less money than you'd pay Apple?
Obviously, there are plenty of people who find that iTunes suits their needs, and that's great for them, great for Apple, and one hopes that it might be good for the recording industry. But saying that people who don't are as "unreasonable" as the RIAA doesn't make any sense.
Michael
Then explain to me how selling stripped books is illegal, in a way that is self-consistent with what you just said.
It's not illegal, necessarily. If a bookstore sells a stripped book that it was supposed to destroy, it's a violation of the retail agreement the bookstore has with the book's publisher. The illegality of that situation has nothing to do with copyright law or licenses. It is perfectly legal for consumers to resell a stripped book they might have in their possession. The same is true of advance readers' copies, which often become collectors' items. They are typically sent to key accounts and reviewers well in advance of publication. They almost always say "Not for resale," but that is simply to make sure the bookstores that receive them don't put them on the shelves. Second-hand and rare book dealers can and do sell them all the time. (For that matter, so do reviewers.)
An instance of a copyright involves an implicitly granted license. If this license is returned or revoked, the object (ie book) may no longer be legally used.
No, no, no...if that were true, then it would be illegal to resell the original editions of books that are out-of-print (but still in copyright), or to resell previous editions of a particular author's work when he changes publishers. Actually, if what you're saying was true, it would be illegal even to read those editions. You've just destroyed the entire aftermarket for books (and CDs, etc.)! The only license involved in copyright is between the creator and the distributor of his creation -- and that isn't an "implicit" license, it's an actual binding agreement, a.k.a. a contract.You seem to be unclear about the distinctions between a software EULA and copyright law. A typical EULA is much more restrictive with regard to the user's rights and privileges than copyright law would dictate. You're right about not being able (legally) to use the software you found on a hard drive you bought off eBay, but that is because of the EULA. If you bought a trunk off eBay that happened to contain some books, you would be able to read or resell those books, legally.
--Michael
If you ask me, it was the AOL execs who were "taken for a ride".
No, you had it right when you said "it was AOL that took Time Warner." AOL took over TW at just the right moment, before its overvalued stock started its nosedive. It wasn't long before TW shareholders saw more than 80% of their assets disappear into AOL's black hole, leading to former TW CEO Gerald Levin's, uh, resignation.
As to whether AOL didn't get what it thought it was getting with the acquisition, the problem was that there was never really any plan -- there were lots of press releases about synergies and blah blah blah, but it was never clear just how it would all work. There was a general recognition of certain complementary factors, like AOL had subscribers, the magazines had subscribers, TW Cable had subscribers; or like AOL could benefit from content, TW had content. But no one at either entity could agree on how to take advantage of this. AOL seemed to expect that it would get exclusive content from, say, Money just for the asking; Money execs expected (and were already generating) revenue from any on-line content redistribution agreements. TW Cable already had Road Runner and was doing extremely well with it; AOL had AOL-TV, which was a bust, and no clear idea of what it wanted to do with broadband. It still doesn't, despite its "World Wide Wow" campaign. I don't think you can blame AOL's failure to become a broadband player on TW -- AOL is still stymied by the fact that they make much more per dial-up subscriber than they ever will per broadband subscriber. (Furthermore, for a big portion of AOL's customer base, dial-up is anything but dead. We aren't talking about people who could be characterized as "early adopters" here, and there is every likelihood that many of the millions who just aren't interested in broadband are currently on AOL.)
The other problem is a corporate culture clash that makes the former merger of Time & Warner, which was not without its bumps, look like a meeting of the minds. AOL and TW were like oil & water. The people who were supposed to be working on bringing things together couldn't stand each other, across almost every department. I know a Human Resources VP at CNN who got so fed up he just stopped taking calls from anyone in AOL HR. There was a perception among AOL types that TW types were old-fashioned, uncooperative, and pompous; TW people generally thought AOL people were arrogant, demanding, and stupid. While I'm sure there was some truth to all of this, mostly it was just a bad match, but not the sort-of thing that shows up on paper.
At the end of the day, it was really only the TW shareholders who were taken for ride.
--Michael
No, really I'm talking about the chilling effects of overly long copyright terms on society and culture. If you believe that life + 70 years constitutes, for all practical purposes, a "limited time" (as specified in the U.S. Constitution), or if you believe, like MPAA head Jack Valenti, that copyright should last forever minus one day, then you won't have a problem with this.
I think that being able to purchase inexpensive paperback editions of mid-20th Century books (or being able to download them for free from Project Gutenberg) would improve our culture, yes. I think that being able legally to download Welles's "Citizen Kane" or Wilder's "The Apartment" would improve our culture. Hell, I even think being able legally to download The Beatles's albums would improve things. The chances are much greater that those things people still find worthwhile 30 years after they were produced actually might be worthwhile. How many people do you think will be interested in Britney Spears's music 30 years from now? Maybe a song or two will have a resonate nostalgia factor, but I doubt there will be much interest beyond that.
The point is -- what's the bigger problem? The fact that some kids download copies of Eminem/Linkin Park/'N Sync etc. without paying for them, or the fact that cultural expression is being stomped on by out-of-control copyright enforcement? I've yet to see a real-world example of a recording artist whose career has been ruined or livelihood denied him because of file-sharing. I have seen plenty of real-world examples of frivolous, expensive lawsuits, C&D notices, and unreasonable restrictions of free-market pricing owing to the practices of the copyright cartels.
--Michael
''I really don't think they understand or believe that illegal file-sharing is the same thing as going into Tower [Records], grabbing a CD off the rack, and running out the door with it,'' said Scott Hervey, chairman of California Bar's cyberspace law committee.
Um, that's because file-sharing isn't shoplifting.
''We have to somehow fix the culture that thinks it's OK to rip off people's intellectual property rights,'' [UC Berkeley' CIO & Assc. Vice Chancellor Jack]McCredie said.
As opposed to fixing the culture that thinks it's OK to rip off the public domain? Which, ultimately, costs the public, society, and culture more: KaZaa, or obscene copyright terms? Why are we in a place now where even university officials are more willing to attack the integrity of their own students than to criticize the practices of a small cartel of international media conglomerates that withhold creative output from the public domain for longer than most of their students will be alive? What is the bigger problem? Why not address that problem, instead of focusing on what is little more than one of it's side-effects?
--Michael
History shows humans to be fairly resistant to various roadblocks being thrown at us,...
I guess I don't understand how metering bandwidth is a "roadblock." I don't really understand why it's any different from metering electricity consumption -- a concept history shows humans willing to accept. If I don't expect my electricity bill to be subsidized by neighbors who use less electricity that me, then why should I expect my bandwidth usage to be subsidized by neighbors who use less bandwidth than me?
If all ISP's adopt similarly priced metering plans that are reasonable, I don't expect very many people would see that as a roadblock. In fact, I'd expect a lot of people to see it as a break, since people who don't engage in a lot of file-transfering (via P2P or other methods) ought to see their rates decline substantially. If ISP pricing plans turn out to be unreasonable, then I hope you're right about geeks finding a way around them, as long as the rest of us can tag along. :-)
You're also probably right about "all-you-can-eat" plans never going away completely. There are plenty of well-off customers who'd be willing to pay for the privilege of never having to worry about any bandwidth limitations. I imagine ISP's pricing plans will begin very shortly to resemble the types of plans currently available from premium USENET services.
--Michael
Still, how effective can a blacklist, however well implemented & maintained, really be? Isn't this one of the easier types of blocks for spammers to get around?
If everyone would just stop trying to grow their penises, turn $5 into $5000, and visit XXChristyXX in her all-nude sorority, spam would wither and die. Lately, I've received some very helpful emails about how to stop spam and make money in the process, secrets I will be sharing with about 16 million fellow computer users very shortly.
--MichaelBecause if you order online, you did not physically walk into a record store in Manhattan or anywhere else in the U.S. It has nothing to do with where your VISA card is issued, it has to do with where you can claim to be making the purchase. If Apple has cleared the rights to sell these songs only in the U.S., then it can sell them only in the U.S., and anyone who happens to be a U.S. resident can buy them, regardless of his country of origin or citizenship. If I were a U.S. citizen with a credit card issued in the U.S., but I happened to be living elsewhere and didn't have a U.S. address, then I wouldn't be able to purchase songs from Apple's service either.
MichaelWell, I have a TV, but I don't have cable, so, effectively, I don't have TV. I live in a high-density area which prevents me from receiving broadcast signals. I do rent a video once in a while, which is the only reason I still keep the set around.
While I agree with you that there is good TV and bad TV, when you're in the position of having to pay for any TV, you begin to consider what it's worth to you. I enjoy spending time on a variety of other leisure activities much more than I enjoy watching television. Those include outdoor activities, but when I'm home I'd rather be reading books, listening to music, or spending time online. About 2 1/2 years ago, after paying two cable bills in a row without having turned on the television once in those two months, I cancelled my cable subscription.
I don't really think that my horizons have diminished as a result. There is far, far better news programming on broadcast radio than on broadcast/cable TV, and I do still read the newspaper. The Internet is ideal for researching and investigating stories that interest me, and offers more in-depth means of staying informed than TV. It also offers alternative means of accessing most of the televised entertainment that might appeal to me, since most of the TV shows I might conceivably be interested in are readily available for download, commercial free. So far, though, I've only found a few that actually do interest me, and none currently are still being made (the most recent was "Farscape," which has just concluded). The only thing I can think of that I'm really missing are the little well-produced gems that one might catch on the Discovery Channel or the Science Channel or some such while channel-surfing. But it's just not worth the $40+ per month I'd have to pay, especially considering that I'd have to pay it to a subsidiary of AOL Time Warner, a company I'd rather not do business with.
Anyway, channel-surfing is something you do when you're in the habit of watching TV, not something you do when you don't turn it on for two months. Really, I think that's what it boils down to. None of us -- not even retired folk, the leisure class, or shut-ins -- has the time to partake of all the means of infotainment on offer in our media-saturated world: 500+ TV channels, 10s of 1,000s of pages of new reading material published everyday, 100s or 1000s of hours of new music to listen to every week, and the seeming infinity that is the Internet. At some point, whether by design or (more often) by default, you decide one thing or another just isn't as important to you as the others.
What gets me is that you rarely get the same "shock and awe" reaction to someone saying "I don't read books" or "I don't listen to music" as to someone saying "I don't watch TV" -- and, increasingly -- "I don't use the Internet." I've come to expect this from devotees of the boob tube, but it's a shame to see that attitude seeping into the wired community as well.
Michael
Liberal Arts? Really? Hmmm. I've got one of them valuable degrees. Had to go back and get a Master's in Computer Science it was so useful.
That strikes me as a prime example of the same attitude that has kept computer science basics out of consideration as a component of a liberal arts education. Getting a solid liberal arts degree isn't supposed to be "useful" for a specific application, it's supposed to useful for the development of your capacity to think, reason, and understand. And the great technological divide we have in American society is partly a result not just of non-geeks lacking basic knowledge about how computers work and what the policy implications of that might be, but of geeks being unable to explain (and often uninterested in explaining) that in terms that actually render it comprehensible.
The students will need to learn how to remain creative and original in spite of the conveniences of a computer automating the drudgery of composing notes, sentences, graphics, etc ...
If you seriously mean to imply that you get no joy from the act of composing a sentence, then how on Earth do you think someone not particularly interested in the inner workings of a computer feels when expected to use the arcane symbols associated with computer code? One of my best friends has a Masters in comp. lit., speaks four languages fluently and is learning a fifth, and is working on a novel, yet I can't get him to understand some of the most basic concepts of computer usage. He manages to use Word Perfect, and he can look up his stock quotes and even access investment research, but you have no idea how hard it was for him to figure out where a file went when he downloaded it. And he uses AOL, unsurprisingly. Yet, how many people in the U.S. who grew up speaking English at home can't even converse, let alone write, in a language other than English? How many Americans, geeks and non-geeks alike, can barely write a grammatical English sentence, let alone an elegant one, that actually manages to convey their thoughts?
A course like K's is meant to start building bridges. I hope those bridges carry traffic in both directions. We might not be faced with legislation like the DMCA nor with some of the more absurd software patents had computer science not grown up as a relatively isolated field of specialization. The point isn't to label non-geeks as stupid because they don't know how Java works nor geeks as stupid because they've not read Mark Twain or Plato, the point is to fit the basics of computers within the basics of a broad and, yes, useful understanding of how our world is shaped.
Michael
It seems that the right hand doesn't see what the left hand is doing. That's the USA federal government for you.
With all due respect to your example, I would rather each department of the government be allowed to implement its own solutions, at least based on my experiences working for large corporations (where the right hand often doesn't know what the right middle finger is doing). The most productive situations arise when divisions and departments are allowed to solve their own problems, rather than having some senior-level executive decided, "okay, this worked for marketing, so now everyone has to do it this way." Information sharing is important, of course, but forcing one-size-fits-all "solutions" can be counter-productive.
Michael
As more and more people make purchases on the internet (and don't properly report for tax purposes) they will eventually end up loosing $45 Billion in tax revenues.
See, that's exactly what the way the report phrased the statement wants you to think. They won't "lose" any tax revenues because they are not currently set up to collect sales tax on Internet sales. If I buy a book from Amazon.com instead of a local bookstore, the state loses the sales tax they would have made if I had bought the book locally instead. But most the books I buy from Amazon.com are not available locally, or they are only available new locally and I buy them from Amazon.com used. These are purchases the state would not collect sales tax on unless they start taxing Internet sales. I would not make these purchases locally, regardless of the tax situation.
Also, the report says specifically that all 50 states would "lose more than $45 billion in Internet sales tax revenue," not "in local sales tax revenue lost to Internet purchases." This makes it sound like a foregone conclusion that states ought to be taxing Internet purchases, rather than making it sound like a new tax, which is what it really is. If the state doesn't impose a special tax on widgets, is it "losing" widget tax revenue? Or is it opting not to impose one of any number of new taxes it could impose at its whim?
Michael
About "inventing copyright laws", I ment that some silly guys in the U.S. invented the DCMA and that some more silly guys over at the E.U. are adopting it and are trying to make it even more stupid
Ah, the DMCA! It does seem to me that the U.S. did take the lead on the most annoying provision of the DMCA, namely making it illegal to publish information that allows someone to break an encryption lock. But I don't know that for sure because I am unfamiliar with the laws of various E.U. and Asian nations on this score, to say nothing of the Commonwealth. What provisions of the DMCA do you think the E.U. or other European nations are going to adopt? Here in the U.S., two legislators have already introduced bills in Congress that would restore our fair use rights. These bills would make it legal, for instance, for someone who uses a Linux OS to crack the encryption on a DVD so that he can play it on his computer.
What I don't understand is why you would blame the U.S. for any of this. Can you not think for yourselves? Taiwan, for example, has rejected copyright term extensions of Europe and the U.S. New Zealand does not require that region encoding for DVDs be enforced at all. It is possible to reject these outrages, if there is sufficient political will. I do understand how the existence of the DMCA in the U.S. makes it easier for media conglomerate lobbyists to pressure other governments to adopt some of its provisions - that is what happened here with regard to copyright term extensions that had already been adopted in Europe. But I don't think "it's Europe's fault" that we adopted them. Our Congress had the power to reject Europe's bad ideas, but it didn't. Who do you think has more influence about these issues in the E.U. - the U.S. government, an American company like Disney, or a French company like Vivendi, a German company like Bertlesmann? Why are copy-protected CDs sold in Europe by these companies, but not sold in the U.S.? It seems to me that all of these companies believe there is less resistance in Europe to these things than there is in the U.S., and you might be better off asking yourself why than by trying to blame the U.S. for these problems.
Yes, the idea of copyright extensions originated in Europe. Until the mid-1980s, the maximum U.S. copyright term was 76 years (26 years, renewable once for an additional 26 years, and under certain circumstances renewable for a third term of 24 years. In the U.S., copyright term was not tied to the year of the creator's death, it was tied to the date of publication or release). At that time, the British & European copyright term was life-of-the-creator + 50 years. I worked for a U.S. book publisher at that time and we were able to publish many books that were public domain in the U.S., but still under copyright in the U.K. and Europe. At some point in the late '80s or early '90s, Europe extended its copyright term to life + 70 years. Meanwhile, the U.S. had changed to the European system of life + 50 years. Then, three years ago, the U.S. again followed Europe's lead and extended the term to life + 70 years. This term was absolutely not the invention of the U.S.
Michael
From what I understand about how Freenet works, simple browsing is unlikely to yield much in the way of useful or dangerous suppressed or secret information. That's why I mentioned that a reporter would need to be tipped off. An anonymous phone call from a telephone booth is all that's needed.
Michael