I think this senator deserves the full support of the Slashdot-community and any other groups that are tech-savy enough to know what cripled CD's actually entail.
Of course his proposal is not enough to stop all horrible effects of the DMCA, but at least it's a step in the right direction. I hope that this proposal will also make sure that more people in legislation start noticing that there's a problem. If a bill can't be passed (today) to outlaw copy-protected CD's, then at least bright yellow tags on those CD's will make everyone more aware of the fact that there's a problem.
And as soon as legislators start thinking there's a problem, they will come running in heaps to (at least give the impression of) providing a solution. Perhaps DMCA will someday stand for Dumb Musicbusiness Controlfreak Act.
Yet Another Useless Initiative
on
More on MPEG4
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
You'd think corporations would have learned some lessons by now.
Lessons like:
There is not one example where micropayments created a profit
People aren't gonna start paying for something that they can have for free and that they always used to have for free
You can't possibly expect that your product will be The Final® and that nobody will ever come up with an even better solution way before you've recouped your investments.
Until companies learn this, there will always be some initiative to try and make money of things that will never be profitable. We've seen this with JPG, where as a result a lot of websites are switching to PGN, and now we will see this again with MPEG4.
Face the facts: things need to be scarce in order to make money of them. E.g. you can't sell air when you're outdoors. You can sell air to a colony on mars or to scubadivers. Likewise: you can't sell digital content because it cannot be made scarce once it's accessible on a PC. Infinite copies can and will be made. And again for al the corporations out there that try to make money of patenting hyperlinks: Whatever you're patent is, it will be copied (or remade or rebuilt or re-engineered or...) and you will loose the money you invested.
Isn't it time to face the fact that the spammers don't care about the legality of their actions?
As is mentioned in the article, and as has been shown over and over again, spammers don't have an inch of morals. It would even seem that (at least in Russia) they're usually part of bigger crime syndicates;
So it doesn't really matter whether you can find a law to outlaw spamming. The spammers will never care about such a law. As long as there's money to be made, these kinds of illegal activities will continue. And even if spam would be outlawed, as it doesn't seem like there will be a 100% working filter for spam in the near future, all the spammers have to do is remain somewhat anonymous (or out of jurisdiction) to avoid prosecution.
This is the text of the article, in case NYT gets/.-tted.
The Satellite Subversives By MICHAEL LEWIS
A few months ago, on Nov. 5, 2001, to be exact, The Wall Street Journal ran an odd report from Tehran. Thousands of young Iranians had taken to the streets to wave American flags and chant pro-American slogans. They had responded to the appeal of Reza Pahlavi, son of the former shah, who lives in Maryland and addressed the Iranian people via a call-in television talk show broadcast from North Hollywood, Calif. In Iran there were enough satellite television dishes and enough people watching what came through them that a man on a telephone call to Los Angeles could hijack a demonstration on the streets of Tehran.
A few weeks later, I drove down from the Bay Area to Los Angeles to watch Reza Pahlavi appear live on National Iranian Television -- or NITV, as it usually calls itself. I thought maybe there was a story in the surprising new political influence of the son of the former dictator. And there was. It just wasn't the best story. In this little hellhole of a TV station off a back street on the wrong end of Hollywood, something astonishing had happened.
NITV opened for business in March 2000. It was the brain wave of an Iranian-American man named Zia Atabay. Most people when they first meet Zia Atabay see a hard-bitten and cynical operator, the sort of guy who doesn't know what the short end of a deal looks like. But Atabay has an ability to shift without warning from cynicism to sentiment and from cold calculation to airy romance. In the old days, before the Iranian revolution, he was a rock star. He sold so many records in Iran that he thought nothing of flying to Paris with 50 grand in cash in his pocket and returning a week later to his mansion in Tehran empty-handed. Ayatollah Khomeini believed all music was sinful, and Atabay wound up fleeing on foot for his life with $4,000 stuffed inside his underpants. Since 1980, he has lived in Sweden, Spain and England, but until he reached California, he never really felt at home.
In Tarzana, a suburb of Los Angeles, Atabay became a United States citizen. His wife, also Iranian-American, made a small fortune in plastic surgery clinics. In the late 1990's, he had a modest critical success with his own Farsi-language local cable talk show -- and that flipped the switches in his mind that shut down his cold reason and turned on the steam. There are roughly four million Farsi speakers in the United States and Western Europe. Atabay thought they were underserved with Farsi-language entertainment. He would take his wife's plastic surgery profits and dump them into Farsi movies, music, cooking shows and perhaps a bit of tastefully exposed Persian female flesh. ''It was a dream,'' he says. ''I saw CNN, NBC, CBS. I saw that once a year they talk about Iran. If I have a Farsi-language network, I tell myself, I will show the world.'' He investigated the alternatives and discovered that the cheapest way to reach the United States and Western Europe -- cheaper even than shortwave radio -- was satellite television.
To establish his product, Atabay decided he needed to give it away, at least to begin with. He also needed an anchor tenant, an Iranian personality big enough to attract the mass audience he craved. Buried in the hundreds of thousands of Iranians living in Los Angeles there was a neglected trove of aging Persian entertainers unwelcome in their home country. The Dan Rather of Iran now lived in Encino. The Frank Sinatra of Iran lived in Sherman Oaks. Atabay found the real star power he was looking for in a journalist named Ali Reza Meybodi, who also lived in Sherman Oaks. The Persians who live in Los Angeles describe Meybodi as the Larry King of Iran, but he's more dignified than that, a throwback to an earlier age of TV talk shows. He's more like the David Frost of Iran. Or was, until he, too, was forced to flee Iran for his life. Meybodi, who still speaks little English, then earned his living on Farsi-language radio programs in the United States. Atabay agreed to pay Meybodi three times what he made on his radio call-in shows -- and six months' salary in advance -- to be the host of a three-hour TV talk show with call-ins, and Meybodi came aboard.
It was during Meybodi's show in September 2000 that this story really begins. As always, calls were coming in from across the United States and Western Europe. And then a call came that didn't sound like the others; it clicked weirdly, like an Iranian phone line. The caller said he was in Isfahan, a city in central Iran, and that he was picking up NITV's satellite signal. Meybodi didn't believe him.
''Who am I?'' Meybodi asked.
''I don't know,'' said the caller. ''But I see you on my TV.''
Meybodi still didn't believe him; nobody did. He asked for the caller's phone number and said he would call him back. Still on the air, Meybodi phoned Isfahan, and sure enough the caller picked up. But Meybodi still didn't believe his story.
Meybodi held up an apple on TV.
''What am I holding?'' he asked the caller. Atabay and a few others drifted into the studio.
''An apple,'' the caller said. Now everyone who worked at NITV was in the studio. They were all Iranians; most of them were middle-aged men; most of them had not been home in more than 20 years; most of them assumed that they would never go home. They were not just physically but also imaginatively cut off from their pasts.
Meybodi picked up a pen. ''What am I holding now?'' he asked.
''A pen,'' the caller said.
''When he said it was a pen,'' Atabay says, ''that's when we began to weep.'' Men with faces that looked as if they had been carved from stone broke down and cried, oblivious of the fact that they were on live television.
All of a sudden -- just like that -- there was a new connection between Iranians in exile and the home country. The effect was electric, but unsettling, as if someone had plugged a 120-volt appliance into a 240-volt socket. Atabay says it took six hours before the whole of Iran knew there was something new on TV and another six before they all tried to send him faxes. ''These people wrote to say that everybody start like crazy to buy satellite dishes,'' Atabay recalls. ''They sell their carpets. They sell cars. We had one story from someone who sold a kidney.'' Atabay was right about Farsi-language programming, for the wrong reasons. There were indeed many people in the world who felt starved for Farsi entertainment. But just about all of them still lived in Iran. And yet when he beamed his free signal into the sky he never imagined it would reach them.
Neither, apparently, did the Iranian government. A black market in satellite dishes thrived ever since the government banned them back in 1995. For some reason no one could explain, the regime turned a blind eye to it, until, in late September 2000, it discovered NITV.
In a way, this is sad. Helpdesk functions have been a way for new people to pick up experience for technology-oriented jobs. As these functions become more and more automated (and less helpdesk-people are required), it will become harder for people to use a helpdesk function as a stepping stone in a career.
I'm enough of a realist to understand that the evolution of swapping jobs with technology is unstoppable but still: With the current recession, that's not really a thing to be looking forward to.
I read some rumours (can't find the link right now) that the next generation of this device would include a color display. I sure hope this is true: it would usage of the video-displaying capabilities even more fun - not to mention the increase in coolness.
I used to have a handheld with a color display though and frankly the battery life of that thing sucked. If they make a Treo with color display, I sure hope that battery life will still be acceptable (showing off to my collegues for 1 hour per battery-loading seems sufficient for me).
The recession that is spreading throughout the world has a lot of effects on employment. This is not only true in the IT sector, but just about everywhere.
If you're still looking for an IT-job, the smart thing to do right now is to be searching for an IT job in a non-IT sector. Think banking, insurance, consultancy,...
According to Gartner, the only IT-sector that is currently booming, and that will continue to do so with almost absolute certainty, is the anti-virus sector. Jobs over there are however relativily scarce as there aren't a lot of (big) companies in this sector. Not something to place your bets on.
All in all, take what you can for the time being. While searching for the perfect job for over a year shows a lot of tenacity, corporations usually value things like experience a lot higher.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course his proposal is not enough to stop all horrible effects of the DMCA, but at least it's a step in the right direction. I hope that this proposal will also make sure that more people in legislation start noticing that there's a problem. If a bill can't be passed (today) to outlaw copy-protected CD's, then at least bright yellow tags on those CD's will make everyone more aware of the fact that there's a problem.
And as soon as legislators start thinking there's a problem, they will come running in heaps to (at least give the impression of) providing a solution. Perhaps DMCA will someday stand for Dumb Musicbusiness Controlfreak Act.
Lessons like:
There is not one example where micropayments created a profit
People aren't gonna start paying for something that they can have for free and that they always used to have for free
You can't possibly expect that your product will be The Final® and that nobody will ever come up with an even better solution way before you've recouped your investments.
Until companies learn this, there will always be some initiative to try and make money of things that will never be profitable. We've seen this with JPG, where as a result a lot of websites are switching to PGN, and now we will see this again with MPEG4.
Face the facts: things need to be scarce in order to make money of them. E.g. you can't sell air when you're outdoors. You can sell air to a colony on mars or to scubadivers. Likewise: you can't sell digital content because it cannot be made scarce once it's accessible on a PC. Infinite copies can and will be made. And again for al the corporations out there that try to make money of patenting hyperlinks: Whatever you're patent is, it will be copied (or remade or rebuilt or re-engineered or ...) and you will loose the money you invested.
As is mentioned in the article, and as has been shown over and over again, spammers don't have an inch of morals. It would even seem that (at least in Russia) they're usually part of bigger crime syndicates;
So it doesn't really matter whether you can find a law to outlaw spamming. The spammers will never care about such a law. As long as there's money to be made, these kinds of illegal activities will continue. And even if spam would be outlawed, as it doesn't seem like there will be a 100% working filter for spam in the near future, all the spammers have to do is remain somewhat anonymous (or out of jurisdiction) to avoid prosecution.
Sad but true: nothing can be done against them.
This is the text of the article, in case NYT gets /.-tted.
The Satellite Subversives
By MICHAEL LEWIS
A few months ago, on Nov. 5, 2001, to be exact, The Wall Street Journal ran an odd report from Tehran. Thousands of young Iranians had taken to the streets to wave American flags and chant pro-American slogans. They had responded to the appeal of Reza Pahlavi, son of the former shah, who lives in Maryland and addressed the Iranian people via a call-in television talk show broadcast from North Hollywood, Calif. In Iran there were enough satellite television dishes and enough people watching what came through them that a man on a telephone call to Los Angeles could hijack a demonstration on the streets of Tehran.
A few weeks later, I drove down from the Bay Area to Los Angeles to watch Reza Pahlavi appear live on National Iranian Television -- or NITV, as it usually calls itself. I thought maybe there was a story in the surprising new political influence of the son of the former dictator. And there was. It just wasn't the best story. In this little hellhole of a TV station off a back street on the wrong end of Hollywood, something astonishing had happened.
NITV opened for business in March 2000. It was the brain wave of an Iranian-American man named Zia Atabay. Most people when they first meet Zia Atabay see a hard-bitten and cynical operator, the sort of guy who doesn't know what the short end of a deal looks like. But Atabay has an ability to shift without warning from cynicism to sentiment and from cold calculation to airy romance. In the old days, before the Iranian revolution, he was a rock star. He sold so many records in Iran that he thought nothing of flying to Paris with 50 grand in cash in his pocket and returning a week later to his mansion in Tehran empty-handed. Ayatollah Khomeini believed all music was sinful, and Atabay wound up fleeing on foot for his life with $4,000 stuffed inside his underpants. Since 1980, he has lived in Sweden, Spain and England, but until he reached California, he never really felt at home.
In Tarzana, a suburb of Los Angeles, Atabay became a United States citizen. His wife, also Iranian-American, made a small fortune in plastic surgery clinics. In the late 1990's, he had a modest critical success with his own Farsi-language local cable talk show -- and that flipped the switches in his mind that shut down his cold reason and turned on the steam. There are roughly four million Farsi speakers in the United States and Western Europe. Atabay thought they were underserved with Farsi-language entertainment. He would take his wife's plastic surgery profits and dump them into Farsi movies, music, cooking shows and perhaps a bit of tastefully exposed Persian female flesh. ''It was a dream,'' he says. ''I saw CNN, NBC, CBS. I saw that once a year they talk about Iran. If I have a Farsi-language network, I tell myself, I will show the world.'' He investigated the alternatives and discovered that the cheapest way to reach the United States and Western Europe -- cheaper even than shortwave radio -- was satellite television.
To establish his product, Atabay decided he needed to give it away, at least to begin with. He also needed an anchor tenant, an Iranian personality big enough to attract the mass audience he craved. Buried in the hundreds of thousands of Iranians living in Los Angeles there was a neglected trove of aging Persian entertainers unwelcome in their home country. The Dan Rather of Iran now lived in Encino. The Frank Sinatra of Iran lived in Sherman Oaks. Atabay found the real star power he was looking for in a journalist named Ali Reza Meybodi, who also lived in Sherman Oaks. The Persians who live in Los Angeles describe Meybodi as the Larry King of Iran, but he's more dignified than that, a throwback to an earlier age of TV talk shows. He's more like the David Frost of Iran. Or was, until he, too, was forced to flee Iran for his life. Meybodi, who still speaks little English, then earned his living on Farsi-language radio programs in the United States. Atabay agreed to pay Meybodi three times what he made on his radio call-in shows -- and six months' salary in advance -- to be the host of a three-hour TV talk show with call-ins, and Meybodi came aboard.
It was during Meybodi's show in September 2000 that this story really begins. As always, calls were coming in from across the United States and Western Europe. And then a call came that didn't sound like the others; it clicked weirdly, like an Iranian phone line. The caller said he was in Isfahan, a city in central Iran, and that he was picking up NITV's satellite signal. Meybodi didn't believe him.
''Who am I?'' Meybodi asked.
''I don't know,'' said the caller. ''But I see you on my TV.''
Meybodi still didn't believe him; nobody did. He asked for the caller's phone number and said he would call him back. Still on the air, Meybodi phoned Isfahan, and sure enough the caller picked up. But Meybodi still didn't believe his story.
Meybodi held up an apple on TV.
''What am I holding?'' he asked the caller. Atabay and a few others drifted into the studio.
''An apple,'' the caller said. Now everyone who worked at NITV was in the studio. They were all Iranians; most of them were middle-aged men; most of them had not been home in more than 20 years; most of them assumed that they would never go home. They were not just physically but also imaginatively cut off from their pasts.
Meybodi picked up a pen. ''What am I holding now?'' he asked.
''A pen,'' the caller said.
''When he said it was a pen,'' Atabay says, ''that's when we began to weep.'' Men with faces that looked as if they had been carved from stone broke down and cried, oblivious of the fact that they were on live television.
All of a sudden -- just like that -- there was a new connection between Iranians in exile and the home country. The effect was electric, but unsettling, as if someone had plugged a 120-volt appliance into a 240-volt socket. Atabay says it took six hours before the whole of Iran knew there was something new on TV and another six before they all tried to send him faxes. ''These people wrote to say that everybody start like crazy to buy satellite dishes,'' Atabay recalls. ''They sell their carpets. They sell cars. We had one story from someone who sold a kidney.'' Atabay was right about Farsi-language programming, for the wrong reasons. There were indeed many people in the world who felt starved for Farsi entertainment. But just about all of them still lived in Iran. And yet when he beamed his free signal into the sky he never imagined it would reach them.
Neither, apparently, did the Iranian government. A black market in satellite dishes thrived ever since the government banned them back in 1995. For some reason no one could explain, the regime turned a blind eye to it, until, in late September 2000, it discovered NITV.
And to say that the Canadian government could have used that money to make extra episodes of the X-files.
I'm enough of a realist to understand that the evolution of swapping jobs with technology is unstoppable but still: With the current recession, that's not really a thing to be looking forward to.
I used to have a handheld with a color display though and frankly the battery life of that thing sucked. If they make a Treo with color display, I sure hope that battery life will still be acceptable (showing off to my collegues for 1 hour per battery-loading seems sufficient for me).
If you're still looking for an IT-job, the smart thing to do right now is to be searching for an IT job in a non-IT sector. Think banking, insurance, consultancy, ...
According to Gartner, the only IT-sector that is currently booming, and that will continue to do so with almost absolute certainty, is the anti-virus sector. Jobs over there are however relativily scarce as there aren't a lot of (big) companies in this sector. Not something to place your bets on.
All in all, take what you can for the time being. While searching for the perfect job for over a year shows a lot of tenacity, corporations usually value things like experience a lot higher.