But to say the author's "ability to be paid" has been taken from him *still* relies on the very flawed assumption that the sale would have been completed absent the availability of the cheaper copy. I downloaded and use The GIMP for almost all of my graphic editing needs, so according to this line of reasoning I've deprived Adobe of a sale. But in reality I haven't, because I'm just not willing to pay the price Adobe is asking for their product. I would not have purchased Photoshop regardless of the circumstances, and the availability of the open source alternative didn't factor into that decision in the least. I'd really like to get a new copy of ELP's "Welcome Back My Friends, to the Show That Never Ends", but for me it's not worth the $20 that iTunes sells it for, and certainly not the even more expensive price one will pay in a record store. I'm quite content to do without rather than paying that price, so the only party that has deprived Warner of a sale is Warner itself.
The legality of AllOfMP3's downloads really doesn't factor into the argument, because from a purely economic standpoint the "lost sales" are solely the result of the RIAA members refusing to bring their prices in line with what the market has established they're willing to pay while someone else is quite happy to meet that price. I'm quite sure that if the same breadth of music were available on iTunes or any of the other licensed services for a comparable price, they'd see *vastly* increased sales. I know *I* would buy more. I do occasionally buy music via iTunes, but offer me a DRM-free album in the format of my choice for $3.99 instead of $9.99, and I will probably drop $50 or more per month on your service, instead of the one album every 2-3 months like I do now.
Even though it's not a shining example of talent, note sometime the difference between American Idol contestants early in the season, and compare that to how the very same artist performs at the end. The differences can be stark.
Yeah, turning the ol' Antares on can make quite a bit of difference...
Re:And once they stop "robbing" RIAA, sales go up?
on
Allofmp3 Shut Down, Again
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The thing is, you don't need the biggest and best studio to record a decent-sounding album. Yeah, it's nice to have a humongous SSL board with a full ProTools suite and lots of other high-end gear to add lots of sparkle, but it's far more important to have a decent engineer that understands how to work with what he's got. Contrary to popular belief, there are lots of good engineers out there that actually enjoy what they do, and don't charge ridiculous prices for their services. I personally can't see the justification for a $100K recording budget anymore, *especially* given how trite and simple a lot of the stuff that makes it onto the radio is.
The quality and capabilities of average off-the-shelf gear is far beyond what most people even 20 years ago could even hope to own, and was unthinkable just 30 years ago. Even with such primitive (by today's standards) studios back then, there was still quite a bit of good music being produced with excellent production values.
It will also mean more hydrogen which technically still exists, but is going nowhere: it's trapped in brown dwarfs that never start fusion, Jupiters, black holes, etc. Those things don't blow up, so basically short of some cataclismic event like head-on star collisions, it won't end up in a star.
There are *lots* of red dwarves to factor in there, though. Many of them will last for upwards of a trillion years or more, although there are good reasons to believe that even planets in the habitable zone would be difficult at best to live on. At least they represent a very long-lived (if not ultra-stable) source of heat and light for any civilization able to set their home up around one.
And of course, one of them happens to be the nearest star to us.:-)
A bunch of `photographers` stopping traffic, either foot or motor vehincle, is unwanted if it's amateur.
So when that happens, you charge the offenders appropriately, and fine them when convicted. Make the fines large enough, and people will stop getting in the way of everyone else.
That's not the same situation at all. Disneyland is private property, and the owners can set whatever rules they want. The discussion is about requiring permits for photography in *public* places, or prohibiting it altogether.
I think courts, even the current SCOTUS, would view setting different minimum prices for different manufacturers as an anti-trust violation.
Different distributors, I think you meant. I don't think the SCOTUS will have anything to say about this at all - after all, vendors already offer different pricing to different distributors based on stuff such as quantity ordered. The mom & pop stores will still have to sell at a higher price, if for no other reason that they won't be able to get the volume pricing a larger merchant will.
I don't think "look at how bendy our wings are" will create much of a positive image in the minds of passengers.
No, but the equivalent "We were completely unable to break our wings, even when subjecting them to stresses that are many times that which break the competition's" would sell much more effectively.
Excellent point. It's a mockery of the intent of "limited times" when a person can be born, live a longer-than-average life, and die entirely during the term of any given work's copyright.
Companies that make brain-dead, shortsighted, "can't see past the end
of my nose" decisions will be beaten in the end by companies that take a more long-term, holistic view.
That statement makes me think of the quote, "The meek shall inherit the earth. In the meantime, the strong will make a damn good living."
The problem with just assuming this issue will correct itself is that it's *extremely* detrimental to the domestic labor pool for those skills - who is going to want to assume $50K of debt for college to learn a skill in an industry where companies have driven wages down to levels more appropriate to semi-skilled labor? By the time the market "corrects itself", it will quite possibly have driven a large proportion of skilled domestic workers out of the field completely and discouraged a large number of potential workers from entering it in the first place.
The really annoying thing is that the ridiculous number of H-1Bs issued for IT positions is largely due to shills such as the ITAA that have out-and-out lied to Congress about a "shortage" of qualified workers in these fields that demonstrably does not exist. I've been a professional software developer for 18 years, and I've seen *plenty* of situations where resumes of completely qualified domestics were presented to the HR manager and the company ended up hiring an H-1B instead.
Eta Carinae's not a supernova yet.:-) The crosshairs you're seeing are called "diffraction spikes", and are caused by the diffraction of light around the secondary mirror supports in the telescope. Reflecting scopes with two or four vanes supporting the secondary mirror will result in 4 spikes, and three-vaned scopes (like mine) will give you six spikes. Refractors, Schmidt-Cassegrains, and other scopes without support vanes aren't prone to the issue.
Guess you haven't looked for a job lately. Most places where I've worked ask about one's *arrest* record in addition to convictions. If you have been arrested, you of course could lie about it, but if the company does any kind of background check on you it most definitely will show up unless you were a juvenile at the time, and even then, "sealed" doesn't always mean sealed.
And FYI: The Soviet-designed SA-2 missile? 4-4.5 Mach. That's faster than a Blackbird.
Everything I've seen on the SA-2 indicates a top speed of about Mach 3-3.5, and that's only sustainable for about 20 seconds or so. The records set by the Blackbird are 2,193 mph (Mach 3) and 85,000 feet (right at the edge of the SR-2's envelope), and the SR can maintain that speed/altitude for quite a bit longer than 20 seconds. Practically, I don't see SA-2s being a real threat.
We'll ignore for the moment that the USAF hasn't ever been in the habit of broadcasting the true capabilities of the higher-performance aircraft it operates, and let's just say that I have good reason to believe that the Blackbird's records are not representative of what the aircraft was capable of. I'm also pretty sure you won't be able to corroborate that on the Web. Believe what you will.:-)
My favorite ad was one I received in the mail from Genicom back in 1992 or 1993. It consisted of a medium-size green box with the following text on the front: "I dunno what happened. The printer was working just fine a minute ago". Open the box, and there was a real Stanley ball-peen hammer fastened inside, and "Deny everything" on the inside of the box lid. I still have the hammer, BTW.:-)
I think what the parent poster was trying to say is that if an ISP has no intention of offering a truly unmetered service, then they shouldn't advertise it as such - not that they shouldn't make a real one available in their offerings. The problem isn't that the offered services are metered or un-metered, it's that what's being sold isn't what's being delivered to the customer, and the customer has no way of knowing exactly what it is he's bought. The major ISPs won't even divulge their true usage limits, which makes it impossible for the customer to make fair comparisons between providers.
I agree with the parent poster that unmetered plans shouldn't be offered, since the ISPs have absolutely no intention of providing unmetered service. In the absence of an unmetered service, customers should be allowed to choose a plan that most closely meets their needs. I can choose and pay for an appropriate amount of bandwidth for my server at the colo, why not for my home?
VoIP isn't terribly bandwidth-hungry (about 80K or so per sec/channel for G.711 and much less for other codecs), but it's extremely sensitive to latency and packet jitter, and that's where the problems arise.
IANAL, but it sounds to me like TW is making a clear "material change" to their service that works to their customers' detriment, and as I understand it that should be reason enough for cancellation. Your lawyer could give you better info than Slashdot in any case.
Try going into a bar in Scotland or Wales and telling everybody in a loud voice how it's great to come and visit England....
Don't laugh - I had to have a discussion with my wife about that before we visited Edinburgh and the Highlands last year. I also used to get a real kick calling a Scottish friend of mine "English" on a regular basis a number of years ago. No, really - he'd often kick me.:-)
Its not the universities job to protect the students from being caught.
It's also not the university's job to save the RIAA thousands of dollars by handing over students' personal information that the RIAA has not followed proper legal process to obtain. When the RIAA can provide evidence that can actually survive scrutiny in court, and goes through the correct and accepted procedures to serve a correct and proper subpoena, then I'll change my mind.
It's not about the kids copying music - it's about the fact that the colleges are giving out private information that they shouldn't be under the flimsiest of justifications.
Slashdot Mirror
But to say the author's "ability to be paid" has been taken from him *still* relies on the very flawed assumption that the sale would have been completed absent the availability of the cheaper copy. I downloaded and use The GIMP for almost all of my graphic editing needs, so according to this line of reasoning I've deprived Adobe of a sale. But in reality I haven't, because I'm just not willing to pay the price Adobe is asking for their product. I would not have purchased Photoshop regardless of the circumstances, and the availability of the open source alternative didn't factor into that decision in the least. I'd really like to get a new copy of ELP's "Welcome Back My Friends, to the Show That Never Ends", but for me it's not worth the $20 that iTunes sells it for, and certainly not the even more expensive price one will pay in a record store. I'm quite content to do without rather than paying that price, so the only party that has deprived Warner of a sale is Warner itself.
The legality of AllOfMP3's downloads really doesn't factor into the argument, because from a purely economic standpoint the "lost sales" are solely the result of the RIAA members refusing to bring their prices in line with what the market has established they're willing to pay while someone else is quite happy to meet that price. I'm quite sure that if the same breadth of music were available on iTunes or any of the other licensed services for a comparable price, they'd see *vastly* increased sales. I know *I* would buy more. I do occasionally buy music via iTunes, but offer me a DRM-free album in the format of my choice for $3.99 instead of $9.99, and I will probably drop $50 or more per month on your service, instead of the one album every 2-3 months like I do now.
But that's still not stealing. :-)
Even though it's not a shining example of talent, note sometime the difference between American Idol contestants early in the season, and compare that to how the very same artist performs at the end. The differences can be stark.
Yeah, turning the ol' Antares on can make quite a bit of difference...
The thing is, you don't need the biggest and best studio to record a decent-sounding album. Yeah, it's nice to have a humongous SSL board with a full ProTools suite and lots of other high-end gear to add lots of sparkle, but it's far more important to have a decent engineer that understands how to work with what he's got. Contrary to popular belief, there are lots of good engineers out there that actually enjoy what they do, and don't charge ridiculous prices for their services. I personally can't see the justification for a $100K recording budget anymore, *especially* given how trite and simple a lot of the stuff that makes it onto the radio is.
The quality and capabilities of average off-the-shelf gear is far beyond what most people even 20 years ago could even hope to own, and was unthinkable just 30 years ago. Even with such primitive (by today's standards) studios back then, there was still quite a bit of good music being produced with excellent production values.
If the RIAA are a bunch of crooks earning BMWs off the labor of others, what exactly is allofmp3.com?
Why, it's The Market(tm) at work, of course! Aren't we supposed to be opposed to government interference in commerce, after all?
It will also mean more hydrogen which technically still exists, but is going nowhere: it's trapped in brown dwarfs that never start fusion, Jupiters, black holes, etc. Those things don't blow up, so basically short of some cataclismic event like head-on star collisions, it won't end up in a star.
:-)
There are *lots* of red dwarves to factor in there, though. Many of them will last for upwards of a trillion years or more, although there are good reasons to believe that even planets in the habitable zone would be difficult at best to live on. At least they represent a very long-lived (if not ultra-stable) source of heat and light for any civilization able to set their home up around one.
And of course, one of them happens to be the nearest star to us.
A bunch of `photographers` stopping traffic, either foot or motor vehincle, is unwanted if it's amateur.
So when that happens, you charge the offenders appropriately, and fine them when convicted. Make the fines large enough, and people will stop getting in the way of everyone else.
That's not the same situation at all. Disneyland is private property, and the owners can set whatever rules they want. The discussion is about requiring permits for photography in *public* places, or prohibiting it altogether.
I think courts, even the current SCOTUS, would view setting different minimum prices for different manufacturers as an anti-trust violation.
Different distributors, I think you meant. I don't think the SCOTUS will have anything to say about this at all - after all, vendors already offer different pricing to different distributors based on stuff such as quantity ordered. The mom & pop stores will still have to sell at a higher price, if for no other reason that they won't be able to get the volume pricing a larger merchant will.
I don't think "look at how bendy our wings are" will create much of a positive image in the minds of passengers.
No, but the equivalent "We were completely unable to break our wings, even when subjecting them to stresses that are many times that which break the competition's" would sell much more effectively.
But there's a hell of a marketing opportunity there.
Excellent point. It's a mockery of the intent of "limited times" when a person can be born, live a longer-than-average life, and die entirely during the term of any given work's copyright.
Or perhaps the folks at the University of Washington simply don't feel comfortable using their network as a haven for illegal filesharing.
Perhaps not, but they appear to have no problem doing the RIAA's legwork for them for free based on the flimsiest of flimsy evidence.
Companies that make brain-dead, shortsighted, "can't see past the end of my nose" decisions will be beaten in the end by companies that take a more long-term, holistic view.
That statement makes me think of the quote, "The meek shall inherit the earth. In the meantime, the strong will make a damn good living."
The problem with just assuming this issue will correct itself is that it's *extremely* detrimental to the domestic labor pool for those skills - who is going to want to assume $50K of debt for college to learn a skill in an industry where companies have driven wages down to levels more appropriate to semi-skilled labor? By the time the market "corrects itself", it will quite possibly have driven a large proportion of skilled domestic workers out of the field completely and discouraged a large number of potential workers from entering it in the first place.
The really annoying thing is that the ridiculous number of H-1Bs issued for IT positions is largely due to shills such as the ITAA that have out-and-out lied to Congress about a "shortage" of qualified workers in these fields that demonstrably does not exist. I've been a professional software developer for 18 years, and I've seen *plenty* of situations where resumes of completely qualified domestics were presented to the HR manager and the company ended up hiring an H-1B instead.
Eta Carinae's not a supernova yet. :-) The crosshairs you're seeing are called "diffraction spikes", and are caused by the diffraction of light around the secondary mirror supports in the telescope. Reflecting scopes with two or four vanes supporting the secondary mirror will result in 4 spikes, and three-vaned scopes (like mine) will give you six spikes. Refractors, Schmidt-Cassegrains, and other scopes without support vanes aren't prone to the issue.
Guess you haven't looked for a job lately. Most places where I've worked ask about one's *arrest* record in addition to convictions. If you have been arrested, you of course could lie about it, but if the company does any kind of background check on you it most definitely will show up unless you were a juvenile at the time, and even then, "sealed" doesn't always mean sealed.
And FYI: The Soviet-designed SA-2 missile? 4-4.5 Mach. That's faster than a Blackbird.
:-)
Everything I've seen on the SA-2 indicates a top speed of about Mach 3-3.5, and that's only sustainable for about 20 seconds or so. The records set by the Blackbird are 2,193 mph (Mach 3) and 85,000 feet (right at the edge of the SR-2's envelope), and the SR can maintain that speed/altitude for quite a bit longer than 20 seconds. Practically, I don't see SA-2s being a real threat.
We'll ignore for the moment that the USAF hasn't ever been in the habit of broadcasting the true capabilities of the higher-performance aircraft it operates, and let's just say that I have good reason to believe that the Blackbird's records are not representative of what the aircraft was capable of. I'm also pretty sure you won't be able to corroborate that on the Web. Believe what you will.
The question will be, can you claim common carrier status when you're protecting the anonymity of your posters?
No, because ISPs generally are not common carriers to begin with.
My favorite ad was one I received in the mail from Genicom back in 1992 or 1993. It consisted of a medium-size green box with the following text on the front: "I dunno what happened. The printer was working just fine a minute ago". Open the box, and there was a real Stanley ball-peen hammer fastened inside, and "Deny everything" on the inside of the box lid. I still have the hammer, BTW. :-)
I think what the parent poster was trying to say is that if an ISP has no intention of offering a truly unmetered service, then they shouldn't advertise it as such - not that they shouldn't make a real one available in their offerings. The problem isn't that the offered services are metered or un-metered, it's that what's being sold isn't what's being delivered to the customer, and the customer has no way of knowing exactly what it is he's bought. The major ISPs won't even divulge their true usage limits, which makes it impossible for the customer to make fair comparisons between providers.
I agree with the parent poster that unmetered plans shouldn't be offered, since the ISPs have absolutely no intention of providing unmetered service. In the absence of an unmetered service, customers should be allowed to choose a plan that most closely meets their needs. I can choose and pay for an appropriate amount of bandwidth for my server at the colo, why not for my home?
VoIP isn't terribly bandwidth-hungry (about 80K or so per sec/channel for G.711 and much less for other codecs), but it's extremely sensitive to latency and packet jitter, and that's where the problems arise.
IANAL, but it sounds to me like TW is making a clear "material change" to their service that works to their customers' detriment, and as I understand it that should be reason enough for cancellation. Your lawyer could give you better info than Slashdot in any case.
Try going into a bar in Scotland or Wales and telling everybody in a loud voice how it's great to come and visit England....
:-)
Don't laugh - I had to have a discussion with my wife about that before we visited Edinburgh and the Highlands last year. I also used to get a real kick calling a Scottish friend of mine "English" on a regular basis a number of years ago. No, really - he'd often kick me.
Its not the universities job to protect the students from being caught.
It's also not the university's job to save the RIAA thousands of dollars by handing over students' personal information that the RIAA has not followed proper legal process to obtain. When the RIAA can provide evidence that can actually survive scrutiny in court, and goes through the correct and accepted procedures to serve a correct and proper subpoena, then I'll change my mind.
It's not about the kids copying music - it's about the fact that the colleges are giving out private information that they shouldn't be under the flimsiest of justifications.
Sounds like a great show, so long as Kari Byron is still in it.