Since I am not going to convince you otherwise, my replying seems a waste of time. Let's try this from a different angle:
We are now back in time. Music is only available on vinyl disks. If you want one, you have to go buy one. If you have a friend who is generous and sharing, he lets you borrow his disks which you record for your own personal use on a reel-to-reel tape recorder. Cumbersome, but it works. The quality degrades, but only once removed from the original vinyl it is still quite listenable.
You manage to acquire a vinyl pressing facility for dirt cheap and proceed to take purchased vinyl records and make bootleg copies of them. Selling them is a problem because of the shipping costs plus you actually have to come up with money to make them, and the fact that this is clearly stealing; you have goods - disks - that are not legal.
Fast forward a few years. We know have digitized media. All sorts. Protecting it from theft is quite impossible. Publishers try all kinds of things to protect themselves but to no avail. They ultimately have no alternative but to go after a minute % of those they can identify as egregiously illegally sharing copyrighted material they have no right to.
Your rant about unjust laws and tactics by publishers overlooks the fact that these tactics are in direct reaction to the downloading/sharing phenomenon that has undisputably taken money out of their pockets. I bet you would have to look long and hard for someone who was sued for making cassette copies of albums they owned so they could listen to them in their car.
Record comapanies have been screwing artists forever. It is their game. It is what they do. No artist is compelled to sign a contract with them, but most can't wait to do it anyway. Please explain how your position on the morality of taking something from media publishers without compensating them aids the plight of the poor artist whose labors you are enjoying for nothing?
"Getting back at The Man" as an excuse seems so 60's.
Are those things yours to share? If so, says who? The people who created them? I doubt it. if you are sharing something you got from another who got it from another, so there is no money or even perceived monetary loss to you or the friend who shared it with you in the first place, this makes it all moral? It is acceptable to pluck the fruit from the branch of a tree that reaches over your side of the fence, quite another to reach over the fence and snag what you know is not yours. How do you rationalize sharing that which you know was created by another at great cost without the permission of those who created it?
The mind is a great thing. You can convince yourself that doing just about anything you can think of is OK.
You are making a very inaccurate comparison when you create an analogy between the physical world and the cyberworld.
If indeed, you had to find a Toyota gas station on a busy street corner only to find stations run by Ford, Honda, Chevy, and Subaru which you could not use on each corner, you would indeed be very inconvenienced at having to perhaps dig out your map and navigate your way to the nearest Toyota station.
Finding your way to either the Rhapsody or iTunes store requires nothing more than deciding which you prefer and clicking on the Favorite in your browser that takes you there.
True to form, the real rub that everyone has with Apple is that Steve Jobs figured out how to convince the music people that he could make them money for nothing as long as he could control what happened (within the music people's range of consent) to the music he let people download. Then, he had the genius to come up with the best software and music players ever conceived to make this appealing to consumers.
The comparison to Windows is commonplace, but that too is inaccurate. Windows dominates in spheres where there is no alternative. Enterprise software that millions of people HAVE to use is written for Windows applications. You can't use Mac or Linux to access many large corporation's vendor applications. It is just the way it is. Not 'fair' perhaps, but many things in life are not fair.
No one needs to buy a music player. No one has to buy an iPod. Having Apple operate as they do with iTunes harms no one. Don't like them? Buy something else. Can't compete with your piece of shit you are trying to sell? Come up with a better alternative! Is it reason enough that because they do something many people don't like that they should be forced to change their ways? If it was strictly altruistic, well maybe. But this has very little to do with altruism. This is about making money, and politicians bowing to whining business men who were/aren't as smart as the Apple folks.
Norway is just doing to Apple what they have been doing to their citizens for 50 years of Socialist Democratic rule; slowing down the aggressive, successful members of society so that the less aggressive, less successful members of their society don't get completely left in the dust. Not necessarily a bad thing, but sometimes it would seem their vision gets a little clouded.
Blue Sky refers to any endeavor where the future gain is all based on hope. In my business, the car business, you often see used car lots that say "we finance". What they are doing in acutality is selling you a car for $3,995 or some similar number for which they paid $995. They then require a $995 down payment. So they are whole from day 1. Any payments that you make to the seller are profit on that car. The profit is all "Blue Sky". They hope that you will make perhaps half or slightly more of the payments you promised and then default on the balance so they can repo your car and sell it again.
You can see how a proposal to use a Worm Hole as a means of moving through space could/should be referred to as a Blue Sky project.
Why is it so obvious to the RIAA that the slowdown in CD sales is only the result of P2P piracy? There is a recession going on, last I heard. In my business, autosales, business sucks right now. No amount of cheap money can get people over their skittishness about the near future. Regardless of your opinion on the merits of going after Saddam, Iraq looms as a big unknown.
Retailers of all sorts are worried about the xmas season. The spin from the media is that sales are robust, but a visit to the malls would indicate otherwise.
The RIAA also doesn't seem to want to address other possibilities - high prices vs. low quality, people buying less music, but not necessarily downloading, constant poor press on music industry shenanigans.
Sure, folks do download music that they probably ought to be paying for, but I suspect that a lot of the downloaded music is replacing music these people have or had on vinyl or cassette. You might want to listen to it on your mp3 player, but most likely would not go out and re-purchase these albums (assuming you can find them). Personally, I put tons of my money in the Beatle's pockets long before the PC was invented. How much do I owe them?
I find it interesting that the record companies get away with blaming the decrease in CD sales on piracy , and the government and perhaps even the general public buy into it. Seems that we are in a recession last I heard. The stock market is sideways, all the dot-com folks that were flush with cash are no longer so, and economic activity is generally flat.
In my busines - automobiles, things are down, way down. I don't think that any of the car manufactureres are blaming sales losses on piracy or gray market imports.
Sprint got up and going here in Salt Lake City a couple of years ago, but have discontinued their service. Seemed odd as the local geography was ideal - high mountains on each side of the valley, very few trees in the valley. LOS was available to a huge area from one access point. For a while, you would see all these diamond shaped antennae being mounted to people's chimneys, or if there was an LOS due to a tree or something, they would be on 15-20' poles. Then is just stopped. Weird.
Who do you think your employer picked? The highest bidder? Every year my employer is approached by the big guns in health care in Salt Lake City clamoring for our business. Cost is way up there in the determination as to who gets it.
Range for 80211.b is completely dependent on line-of-sight and antennas employed. With high gain directional antennas on each end of a link, 20 miles is not impossible, although aiming those things would require near wizardry to accomplish. Laptop cards connecting to an Access Point inside a house (probably accounting for 95% of all situations)have trouble going much more than 100' depending on construction and number of walls or floors you are trying to penetrate. For endless discussions on this topic, see alt.internet.wireless
I understand the general drift of your arguments, but think that you are somewhat confused as to the relevancy of variou points.
The USPS is a service for all Americans, not just the few who live in urban areas. A 34 cent stamp to deliver any letter to any place in the US is not a business model that your courier services would seek to emulate.
Competition is a good thing as all will agree. There are some things that do not benefit from competition such as your example of airport security. While the federalizing of security personell seems somewhat knee-jerk in light of recent events, did you feel more secure in the past knowing that as you boarded an airplane that your safety was put in the hands of people who were willing to work for the least amount of money?
For whatever reason, the roll out of broadband has been hit and miss. I consider myself lucky that ATT chose Salt Lake City as one of their first markets to introduce cable broadband. In spite of the demise of @home, my service has been very reliable and the transition from @home was only three days in my case. But this is not the rule across the country. The telecommunications act of 96 forced the ILECs to cooperate with the CLECs. What CLECs like Rythyms and Jato as well as a host of others failed to forsee was that the cooperation was going to be grudging, slow, and only to the letter as required by law. In hindsight their failures seemed obvious. With the CLECs out of the way, the roll out has slowed to a crawl. There are many areas of the country where you cannot get any broadband of any kind other than sattelite which is very expensive and not particularly satisfying to use.
Getting back to the USPS example. If the private sector is unwilling to provide a service that in the future will seem as necessary as electricity is today, then perhaps the local community should step in.
Oh, indeed is does sound familiar. Did the words "credit application" sound familiar to you when they had you fill one out before letting you take their goods without payment?
There is an element of trust based on past behavior that applies to all things, not just buying shit. The unscrupulous will take advantage of the trusting, be it in business or in relationships. eBay's feedback mechanism is based on this idea, and works very well, but no solution is perfect.
Let's see.... You are torqued because PayPal didn't protect you in a transaction. If I understand the purpose of Paypal, it allows you to "send money to anyone anywhere". Winning an eBay auction is the most common. So you ask them to deduct money from your checking account or charge your credit card, and then have them send the money off to whoever you designate.
Let's contrast this with a snail method. Let us suppose that you won an auction for an item on eBay. The seller only accepts cashier's checks. Off you go to the bank. In exchange for funds drawn on your checking account, they issue you a cashier's check that you mail off to your seller. Eegads!!! He stiffs you! Are you going to go off to the bank and demand your money back??? Visualize being laughed at.
Give me a break. Did you whine to the principal when you failed a class in high school?
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Since I am not going to convince you otherwise, my replying seems a waste of time. Let's try this from a different angle:
We are now back in time. Music is only available on vinyl disks. If you want one, you have to go buy one. If you have a friend who is generous and sharing, he lets you borrow his disks which you record for your own personal use on a reel-to-reel tape recorder. Cumbersome, but it works. The quality degrades, but only once removed from the original vinyl it is still quite listenable.
You manage to acquire a vinyl pressing facility for dirt cheap and proceed to take purchased vinyl records and make bootleg copies of them. Selling them is a problem because of the shipping costs plus you actually have to come up with money to make them, and the fact that this is clearly stealing; you have goods - disks - that are not legal.
Fast forward a few years. We know have digitized media. All sorts. Protecting it from theft is quite impossible. Publishers try all kinds of things to protect themselves but to no avail. They ultimately have no alternative but to go after a minute % of those they can identify as egregiously illegally sharing copyrighted material they have no right to.
Your rant about unjust laws and tactics by publishers overlooks the fact that these tactics are in direct reaction to the downloading/sharing phenomenon that has undisputably taken money out of their pockets. I bet you would have to look long and hard for someone who was sued for making cassette copies of albums they owned so they could listen to them in their car.
Record comapanies have been screwing artists forever. It is their game. It is what they do. No artist is compelled to sign a contract with them, but most can't wait to do it anyway. Please explain how your position on the morality of taking something from media publishers without compensating them aids the plight of the poor artist whose labors you are enjoying for nothing?
"Getting back at The Man" as an excuse seems so 60's.
You can't be serious.
Are those things yours to share? If so, says who? The people who created them? I doubt it. if you are sharing something you got from another who got it from another, so there is no money or even perceived monetary loss to you or the friend who shared it with you in the first place, this makes it all moral? It is acceptable to pluck the fruit from the branch of a tree that reaches over your side of the fence, quite another to reach over the fence and snag what you know is not yours. How do you rationalize sharing that which you know was created by another at great cost without the permission of those who created it? The mind is a great thing. You can convince yourself that doing just about anything you can think of is OK.
You are making a very inaccurate comparison when you create an analogy between the physical world and the cyberworld.
If indeed, you had to find a Toyota gas station on a busy street corner only to find stations run by Ford, Honda, Chevy, and Subaru which you could not use on each corner, you would indeed be very inconvenienced at having to perhaps dig out your map and navigate your way to the nearest Toyota station.
Finding your way to either the Rhapsody or iTunes store requires nothing more than deciding which you prefer and clicking on the Favorite in your browser that takes you there.
True to form, the real rub that everyone has with Apple is that Steve Jobs figured out how to convince the music people that he could make them money for nothing as long as he could control what happened (within the music people's range of consent) to the music he let people download. Then, he had the genius to come up with the best software and music players ever conceived to make this appealing to consumers.
The comparison to Windows is commonplace, but that too is inaccurate. Windows dominates in spheres where there is no alternative. Enterprise software that millions of people HAVE to use is written for Windows applications. You can't use Mac or Linux to access many large corporation's vendor applications. It is just the way it is. Not 'fair' perhaps, but many things in life are not fair.
No one needs to buy a music player. No one has to buy an iPod. Having Apple operate as they do with iTunes harms no one. Don't like them? Buy something else. Can't compete with your piece of shit you are trying to sell? Come up with a better alternative! Is it reason enough that because they do something many people don't like that they should be forced to change their ways? If it was strictly altruistic, well maybe. But this has very little to do with altruism. This is about making money, and politicians bowing to whining business men who were/aren't as smart as the Apple folks.
Norway is just doing to Apple what they have been doing to their citizens for 50 years of Socialist Democratic rule; slowing down the aggressive, successful members of society so that the less aggressive, less successful members of their society don't get completely left in the dust. Not necessarily a bad thing, but sometimes it would seem their vision gets a little clouded.
Blue Sky refers to any endeavor where the future gain is all based on hope. In my business, the car business, you often see used car lots that say "we finance". What they are doing in acutality is selling you a car for $3,995 or some similar number for which they paid $995. They then require a $995 down payment. So they are whole from day 1. Any payments that you make to the seller are profit on that car. The profit is all "Blue Sky". They hope that you will make perhaps half or slightly more of the payments you promised and then default on the balance so they can repo your car and sell it again.
You can see how a proposal to use a Worm Hole as a means of moving through space could/should be referred to as a Blue Sky project.
Why is it so obvious to the RIAA that the slowdown in CD sales is only the result of P2P piracy? There is a recession going on, last I heard. In my business, autosales, business sucks right now. No amount of cheap money can get people over their skittishness about the near future. Regardless of your opinion on the merits of going after Saddam, Iraq looms as a big unknown. Retailers of all sorts are worried about the xmas season. The spin from the media is that sales are robust, but a visit to the malls would indicate otherwise. The RIAA also doesn't seem to want to address other possibilities - high prices vs. low quality, people buying less music, but not necessarily downloading, constant poor press on music industry shenanigans. Sure, folks do download music that they probably ought to be paying for, but I suspect that a lot of the downloaded music is replacing music these people have or had on vinyl or cassette. You might want to listen to it on your mp3 player, but most likely would not go out and re-purchase these albums (assuming you can find them). Personally, I put tons of my money in the Beatle's pockets long before the PC was invented. How much do I owe them?
I find it interesting that the record companies get away with blaming the decrease in CD sales on piracy , and the government and perhaps even the general public buy into it. Seems that we are in a recession last I heard. The stock market is sideways, all the dot-com folks that were flush with cash are no longer so, and economic activity is generally flat. In my busines - automobiles, things are down, way down. I don't think that any of the car manufactureres are blaming sales losses on piracy or gray market imports.
Sprint got up and going here in Salt Lake City a couple of years ago, but have discontinued their service. Seemed odd as the local geography was ideal - high mountains on each side of the valley, very few trees in the valley. LOS was available to a huge area from one access point. For a while, you would see all these diamond shaped antennae being mounted to people's chimneys, or if there was an LOS due to a tree or something, they would be on 15-20' poles. Then is just stopped. Weird.
Who do you think your employer picked? The highest bidder? Every year my employer is approached by the big guns in health care in Salt Lake City clamoring for our business. Cost is way up there in the determination as to who gets it.
Range for 80211.b is completely dependent on line-of-sight and antennas employed. With high gain directional antennas on each end of a link, 20 miles is not impossible, although aiming those things would require near wizardry to accomplish. Laptop cards connecting to an Access Point inside a house (probably accounting for 95% of all situations)have trouble going much more than 100' depending on construction and number of walls or floors you are trying to penetrate. For endless discussions on this topic, see alt.internet.wireless
I understand the general drift of your arguments, but think that you are somewhat confused as to the relevancy of variou points.
The USPS is a service for all Americans, not just the few who live in urban areas. A 34 cent stamp to deliver any letter to any place in the US is not a business model that your courier services would seek to emulate. Competition is a good thing as all will agree. There are some things that do not benefit from competition such as your example of airport security. While the federalizing of security personell seems somewhat knee-jerk in light of recent events, did you feel more secure in the past knowing that as you boarded an airplane that your safety was put in the hands of people who were willing to work for the least amount of money? For whatever reason, the roll out of broadband has been hit and miss. I consider myself lucky that ATT chose Salt Lake City as one of their first markets to introduce cable broadband. In spite of the demise of @home, my service has been very reliable and the transition from @home was only three days in my case. But this is not the rule across the country. The telecommunications act of 96 forced the ILECs to cooperate with the CLECs. What CLECs like Rythyms and Jato as well as a host of others failed to forsee was that the cooperation was going to be grudging, slow, and only to the letter as required by law. In hindsight their failures seemed obvious. With the CLECs out of the way, the roll out has slowed to a crawl. There are many areas of the country where you cannot get any broadband of any kind other than sattelite which is very expensive and not particularly satisfying to use. Getting back to the USPS example. If the private sector is unwilling to provide a service that in the future will seem as necessary as electricity is today, then perhaps the local community should step in.
It does sound familiar. Do the words 'credit application' sound familiar too?
Oh, indeed is does sound familiar. Did the words "credit application" sound familiar to you when they had you fill one out before letting you take their goods without payment? There is an element of trust based on past behavior that applies to all things, not just buying shit. The unscrupulous will take advantage of the trusting, be it in business or in relationships. eBay's feedback mechanism is based on this idea, and works very well, but no solution is perfect.
Let's see.... You are torqued because PayPal didn't protect you in a transaction. If I understand the purpose of Paypal, it allows you to "send money to anyone anywhere". Winning an eBay auction is the most common. So you ask them to deduct money from your checking account or charge your credit card, and then have them send the money off to whoever you designate. Let's contrast this with a snail method. Let us suppose that you won an auction for an item on eBay. The seller only accepts cashier's checks. Off you go to the bank. In exchange for funds drawn on your checking account, they issue you a cashier's check that you mail off to your seller. Eegads!!! He stiffs you! Are you going to go off to the bank and demand your money back??? Visualize being laughed at. Give me a break. Did you whine to the principal when you failed a class in high school?