We had comcast and the connection speed and reliability was a real problem especially during that 7 - 10 PM range when many people are accessing the internet. We switched to DSL, which has it's own set of quirks, but the speed and reliability are much more stable than comcast was. I expect that the various cable companies will be awful until they roll out a "much better" service at a premium rate - something that takes the core of the internet and tries to turn it into AOL with TV channels and an expensive version of Skype. SO you could have the internet with a totally shitty experience or the premium TV-Phone-"Internet" service that costs a bit more but generates a ton more revenue for the cable ISP. You'll get your streaming movie, music on demand, World of Warcraft, and maybe even Xbox live, along with phone and lots of TV shows. But the access to the internet will be strictly controlled by the ISP - much like the early days of the internet back when it was all Compuserve and AOL or Usenet. Sure you'll still be able to get to all of the regular internet, but the experience will be more and more painful until most people give up and go with the "Internet-3" controlled by Comcast, Charter, etc. Don't give me that "the internet routes around blockages" crap, the internet can't route around the ISP as customers of various ISP's in arguments with other ISP's have discovered.
You could also have technology that simply reported the location of the cow. My grandfather's cows had these colored ear tags that could be easily seen. I figure some interprising technology geek could come up with a durable, cheap, solar powered ear tag that simply reports to a scanner as it passes through a chute, or maybe one that phones home. The tags could talk to each other keeping a record of the other cows nearby. I imagine having a GPS locator on each cow could have saved my grandfather some time when a cow got lost.
- After people DIE, then it becomes a matter for the law - whether civil or criminal. Example: Peanut Corporation of America's failure to follow hygiene and food safety regulations resulted in 23 people dying in 2008.
ARe you willing to die so that I can sue on behalf of your decomposing corpse?
Corporations will lie to increase profits, they will break the law, they will kill people, they will over throw governments. These are facts not the idle speculation of a cynic.
The case of the contaminated peanut butter: that corporation had a history of ignoring regulations and lying about testing results, and being sued for it. Sure, people will likely go to jail and perhaps even be fined, but that isn't going to resurrect the dead. Massive corporations get involved in nefarious things whether this be oil companies, agrochemical companies, finance companies, car companies. The larger and more global the less the members of the company feel responsible for what goes on in someone else's part of the world. The harder it is to hold the perpetrators personally responsible.
SO yes, I want the government to TELL these people how to do their job. What tests to conduct, when to conduct them, where to publish the results for all the world to see. I don't want our food supply blindly trusted to the nefarious whims of greedy, evil people, who hide behind the protection of incorporation articles and skip off to other jurisdictions when the trouble begins.
Any time your job can cause the death or imprisonment of another person, then I expect that you will be held to public standards and that I can look over your shoulder any time I wish to ensure that the job your are doing is correct. That includes programers who write code for say. . . breathalizers, or heart monitoring equipment.
Global warming brought to you by the same people who can't tell you what the temperature will be next week, yet they can tell you what it will be a thousand years from now.
The NOAA guys can't forecast the weather more than a week out, yet this "Global warming" requires urgent action to regulate human activities. Like the REST of the planet has NOTHING to do with the climate.
It is not supposed to be fair, reasonable, or logical. It is supposed to be frightening, frustrating, and impossible so that you will pay the money they demand, sign the Admission of Eternal Guilt, the Waiver of Salvation, and commit yourself to the eternal damnation of Hell as a minion of the RIAA in the afterlife, as well as this one.
But after a few hours of the inane prattle, you'll log on to your shammy and hope you can get invited to a raid just so you can pretend to be killing that American Idol Devotee over and over again.
"Screw the fact the 4E actually did the right thing and decoupled roleplay from game mechanics. .."
Wait! You call that an improvement? That was how we played in First Edition and on into Second edition. What a lame edition. Glad I gave up D&D for WOW.
We are Americans. Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. Noam Chomsky is some sort of pinko-commie throw back to the spooky days of McCarthyism. I'm not afraid of some terrorist. I wasn't the day after 9-11 either. I am NOT afraid.
I am more than concerned that we may have to resort to violently removing our government for the crimes they have committed against us and the failure to do their sworn duty.
Democracy is two wolves and lamb voting on what's for lunch. Liberty is a well armed lamb contesting the vote.
Ok, so this is what happens. The Website, let say, Slashdot, makes an agreement with XYZ internet media company to sell ads on the site. Those ads don't pay without a click through. The customer pays the ISP for the upload and download content bandwidth, maybe per gigabit, or "unlimited" bandwidth. The ISP reads all unencrypted packets (and perhaps has to retain such information for some regulated period of time in some country). So when the customer goes to the site, he may or may not get the ads for the site as the ads may be substituted by the ISP so that clicks go to the ISP instead of the site. And the ISP is free to send small or large ads depending upon what is economically advantageous to the ISP.
This is nothing more than the ISP asking for a blank check from the customer, while stealing ad revenue from the visited websites. But it would be very hard to detect from the website. How would you know your ads are being intercepted?
Another scenario. What is to stop the ISP from being paid by a political action group to simply replace all instances of an opposing group's ads with their own? Seems to me that is left up to the integrity of the ISP, which from my experience is not very high. These are the folks who will sell your phone records to the first PI that pretends to be you, and also to the first G-man to merely ask.
Another scenario. NOw that it has been demonstrated that every packet can be read and that this can be used to generate profits, what level of responsibility does the ISP take upon itself for the contents of the websites? ARe they liable for every underage relationship transmitted across their lines while they serve ads for condoms next to the sex talk? What about those instance where websites are serving information that could be used to commit a crime? Shouldn't the ISP, with it ability to completely read the subject's searches KNOW or should know that a crime is being researched? How many times will the internet be blamed for harm to a minor before the ISP gets held partially liable, or required to monitor the internet by the government?
The RIAA represents a group of companies whose primary business model for the last 30 years has been to repackage the same product and sell it to the same customers, over and over. The big boom in music sales was the CD as customers moved away from the fragile vinyl albums of yore. Once the majority of folks realized that CD's were very expensive, and just as fragile as vinyl, they were disappointed. New music, such as it is, has not been selling very well, as over prices songs compete with other forms of entertainment. For the most part, music is used to enhance some other activity, not as the primary entertainment.
During the time that most people were switching to the CD, the record companies, members of the RIAA, colluded to illegally fix prices, and frankly the artists saw none of that money.
Now, the with the customer able to obtain in a fast, easy, and durable form, the music that they want, for as little as 89 cents a track, the record companies are finding that their "buy the same stuff in a different format" business model, isn't working. Rather than attempt to adapt to the new market, arguably difficult and risky, they formed a different plan: litigation.
The cost of filing a suit is trivial. The fear of being ruined in a lawsuit is tremendous, and most people will spend 4-5K dollars to make it go away rather than risk a lifetime of ruin trying to dig out from under a multi-million dollar debt. The fact that RIAA does not gather enough evidence to go to court, and that the evidence gathered is probably wrong as often as 20% of the time, is significant.
The RIAA set up a call center based upon the the techniques of debt collectors, with out the restraint of actually having to be debt collectors. These settlements, as we have seen, are little more than the promise that the RIAA won't sue you again. BUT having admitted that you did violate the copyright, the victim has been set up for a second bite, once the music writers sue for infringement, and then the performers can sue again. So it appears that the business model of suing for millions based upon listening to music will be with us for a long time.
Using the legal system to extort money from people is wrong. Making it a business, is particularly evil.
Yep. Spend an hour with the mental health doc and get a prescription. A lot of routine 10 minute visits to renew your script and send you back to the drug store. How is this any different than spending some quality time with a drug dealer?
TV delivered to your phone costs money if you use service X. You can watch TV for free with a TV. This isn't stealing anymore than taping a show on ABC is stealing. MobilTV wants to add a charge to free TV to cover the convenience of having it delivered to your phone. They do so in such a way that everyone can use the service without much trouble.
Incredibly stupid business decisions should not be protected with a C&D to remove an entire forum thread. Free societies have already established that telling someone how to do something illegal is NOT the same as doing it. I can teach you how to circumvent security and not break any laws. If you use that knowledge to rob a bank, the crime is robbery and you will go to jail. I'm not going to be culpable for merely providing you with information on how security systems work. If people post about taking something that is a paid for service, then that is evidence of a crime, but the forum thread is protected speech.
Stealing is ingrained into our species. We steal when we can get away with it and always have. People steal on an individual level and on a group level. You are deluded if you think that theft will ever vanish from our species-it has provided an advantage to us for far too long. (Nations invade and conquer, thus stealing the land and resources of their neighbor; American settlers in the late 1800's "squatted" on public land and converted it into private holdings in violation of the law; Corporations regularly violate the law for economic or political gain as Enron and AT&T are both examples as is Microsoft.) These behaviors are neither unique to our times nor represent some sort of "moral decay" in human society. Nor do I suspect will such behaviors have any impact upon how our species will respond to any looming crises: We will do what we always do: fight, kill, steal, and generally survive. Those that are unwilling to do what ever it takes to survive a massive crisis will die. Same shit different century.
Not always good advice. I've got a project that is in JAVA and the developer community isn't very good. Just because it's a stable mainstream language doesn't mean you can get someone to work with it.
e. Lobby Congress for a law stating that file sharing is a crime punishable by death or life in prison, and civil penalties of *Dr. Evil voice* "One Treeeellion dollars" per file shared. Also, "making available" any file for sharing is a felony somewhere between pedophilia and being caught with a dead cop in your trunk along with fifty kilos of crack cocaine.
I've listened to his show. Years ago back before he was the poster child for what's wrong with the war on drugs. It wasn't that I dissagreed with his point of view, it was that it was so obviously shallow and completely lacking in anything beyond the moment's sensationalist vocal vomit, that I couldn't stand him. After claiming for years that drug users should be treated harshly, we find that this is just a bunch of hypocrisy, Rush would be the first to condemn the poor to suffer and the first in line for welfare and unemployment if he needed it.
The unlimited part of the connection comes from the old dial up days when you were billed per minute of connection time. AOL and other like providers charged each customer for the amount of time they were connected in minutes. Once services began to allow full months of service at one low price, they called these services "unlimited" which now some decades later is being misconstrued as "unlimited bandwidth" which is not true. The speed and the connection times were sold separately. That the bundling of connection speed and connection time have mislead consumers to believe that they have bought an unlimited in any way service is sad, but the logical consequence of bundle marketing done years ago.
The problem with this whole scenario is not the publication of information about the case, which in this particular instance was rubbish, but rather the whole: "trust us, he was dirty, but we can't let you see that evidence as it would compromise national security" attitude that is joined with this issue.
Politicians are forever advocating the censure of the opposite opinion. Humans have never created a society that had secret trials and secret evidence that was anything other than a fear based tyranny. So we a political hack starts mumbling about security of the state, and secrets, and censorship while trashing someone's life, I recognize the dark shadow of tyranny rising up.
I see that another music business genius with the foresight to not fire his best act has stood up to the internet fiends and cried "Foul!"
Where was this genius of integrity when the customers paying for U2 albums were being raped by the music industry they licensed their music to? Silently cashing the checks, I imagine. I don't recall U2 making a public speech about how bad the CD price fixing scandal was.
Not so very long ago Sam Walton of Walmart fame demonstrated that if you give the customer what he wants at a fair price, you will become rich beyond the dreams of ordinary men. Henry Ford did the same. The ubiquitous convenience store, with its over priced soft drinks shows that customers will pay more for convenience.
Arrogant businesses on their way towards a serious market crunch treat their customers like thieves. Walmart lost a lot of customers over checking receipts at the door. After a decade of price fixing, literally stealing from their customers, the recorded music industry is in a slump. The economy is in a recession, gas, food, electricity are all up, and yet it is the internet that is the source of record music's woes? What about suing customers, producing fewer and crappier albums, attacking the general populace at large by calling anyone with an internet account a thief? Yeah buddy, I want to patronize your business.
The music business got soft and lazy and forgot about the customer to focus on price fixing, and shoving shitty albums on the market. Innovation is the antithesis of monopoly and the solution to problems that a monopoly is too busy making money to care about. Music lovers want music: quickly, easily, cheaply. They'll pay a fair price. It's up to the music makers to deliver. Pissing about not being able to deliver what the customer wants is a blatant demonstration of stupidity.
The complete history of recorded music is a mere 130 years. Songs have been written through out the thousands of years of human history. Music is a human experience and no amount of digital down loading will destroy it. Sure, Bono and company won't necessarily be able to sell billions of CD's and make billions of dollars, but is this the end of recorded music? As the guys says: Concert revenues are up. Duh. A couple hundred years ago, live music was the ONLY game in town. Music thrived. So "dude" your business model isn't in recordings, its in making music people want to hear and putting on a great concert.
It's a damn shame that the only response so far is: "Stop thief!"
An just an FYI, Mr U2 manager man, internet accounts don't cost $25 bucks a month, more like $50, and the parents are paying, not the kids.
If your so hot at business, why haven't you adjusted for the changing times? Hmmmm? Maybe you're not so hot. Anyway, you guys have just joined the same list as Metallica. I don't buy U2 anymore. Thanks for calling me a thief, you slanderous bastards.
Then music becomes "giving the customers what they want" more than "buy this latest stuff we put out."
What the record labels need to do is build up a reputation for finding and collecting the artists and music that people want to hear and sell it to them in a cheap and convenient format. People will pay to have music that they like brought together into an simple and easy place. The hardest part about music is finding something new that I like. Radio does a poor job of this, but unless I am devoted to downloading and listening to clips of lots and lots of stuff, I just don't have the time to spend on going out and hunting down new music that I would like.
So if the labels can build a community around music and keep that community happy, they will be able to find away to get that community to pay for the music. It may not be the music, but the convenience of the service. People will pay extra for convenience. Always have. Always will.
Music easier and simpler than they pirates. Not THAT hard to accomplish.
What does walmart sell in any large quantity that is patented to the point that there is nothing similar right next to it on the shelf? I really can't think of many things that might enjoy such a position, but that would be a unique situation and certainly not something the majority of suppliers would enjoy. I mean even though the Super soaker is patented, there are a lot of water pistols and such in the toy section competing with the Super Soaker.
Walmart's business model doesn't seem to invite the kind of pressure that a single patent holder can exert. Unless Acacia has a patent on making suppliers put RFiD tags on all incoming shipments.
Slashdot Mirror
We had comcast and the connection speed and reliability was a real problem especially during that 7 - 10 PM range when many people are accessing the internet. We switched to DSL, which has it's own set of quirks, but the speed and reliability are much more stable than comcast was. I expect that the various cable companies will be awful until they roll out a "much better" service at a premium rate - something that takes the core of the internet and tries to turn it into AOL with TV channels and an expensive version of Skype. SO you could have the internet with a totally shitty experience or the premium TV-Phone-"Internet" service that costs a bit more but generates a ton more revenue for the cable ISP. You'll get your streaming movie, music on demand, World of Warcraft, and maybe even Xbox live, along with phone and lots of TV shows. But the access to the internet will be strictly controlled by the ISP - much like the early days of the internet back when it was all Compuserve and AOL or Usenet. Sure you'll still be able to get to all of the regular internet, but the experience will be more and more painful until most people give up and go with the "Internet-3" controlled by Comcast, Charter, etc. Don't give me that "the internet routes around blockages" crap, the internet can't route around the ISP as customers of various ISP's in arguments with other ISP's have discovered.
You could also have technology that simply reported the location of the cow. My grandfather's cows had these colored ear tags that could be easily seen. I figure some interprising technology geek could come up with a durable, cheap, solar powered ear tag that simply reports to a scanner as it passes through a chute, or maybe one that phones home. The tags could talk to each other keeping a record of the other cows nearby. I imagine having a GPS locator on each cow could have saved my grandfather some time when a cow got lost.
- After people DIE, then it becomes a matter for the law - whether civil or criminal. Example: Peanut Corporation of America's failure to follow hygiene and food safety regulations resulted in 23 people dying in 2008.
ARe you willing to die so that I can sue on behalf of your decomposing corpse?
Corporations will lie to increase profits, they will break the law, they will kill people, they will over throw governments. These are facts not the idle speculation of a cynic.
The case of the contaminated peanut butter: that corporation had a history of ignoring regulations and lying about testing results, and being sued for it. Sure, people will likely go to jail and perhaps even be fined, but that isn't going to resurrect the dead. Massive corporations get involved in nefarious things whether this be oil companies, agrochemical companies, finance companies, car companies. The larger and more global the less the members of the company feel responsible for what goes on in someone else's part of the world. The harder it is to hold the perpetrators personally responsible.
SO yes, I want the government to TELL these people how to do their job. What tests to conduct, when to conduct them, where to publish the results for all the world to see. I don't want our food supply blindly trusted to the nefarious whims of greedy, evil people, who hide behind the protection of incorporation articles and skip off to other jurisdictions when the trouble begins.
Any time your job can cause the death or imprisonment of another person, then I expect that you will be held to public standards and that I can look over your shoulder any time I wish to ensure that the job your are doing is correct. That includes programers who write code for say. . . breathalizers, or heart monitoring equipment.
Global warming brought to you by the same people who can't tell you what the temperature will be next week, yet they can tell you what it will be a thousand years from now.
The NOAA guys can't forecast the weather more than a week out, yet this "Global warming" requires urgent action to regulate human activities. Like the REST of the planet has NOTHING to do with the climate.
It is not supposed to be fair, reasonable, or logical. It is supposed to be frightening, frustrating, and impossible so that you will pay the money they demand, sign the Admission of Eternal Guilt, the Waiver of Salvation, and commit yourself to the eternal damnation of Hell as a minion of the RIAA in the afterlife, as well as this one.
Gleemax, the site for all of the Glee Club wanabees. I can just imagine the middle school crowd of undesirables.
Yep. The name did it.
The brain in the jar, DUH!
Oh yeah! Crackhouse is a good analogy.
But after a few hours of the inane prattle, you'll log on to your shammy and hope you can get invited to a raid just so you can pretend to be killing that American Idol Devotee over and over again.
"Screw the fact the 4E actually did the right thing and decoupled roleplay from game mechanics. . ."
Wait! You call that an improvement? That was how we played in First Edition and on into Second edition. What a lame edition. Glad I gave up D&D for WOW.
Wizards being owned by HAZBRO has had a more deleterious effect on D&D than WOW.
We are Americans. Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. Noam Chomsky is some sort of pinko-commie throw back to the spooky days of McCarthyism. I'm not afraid of some terrorist. I wasn't the day after 9-11 either. I am NOT afraid.
I am more than concerned that we may have to resort to violently removing our government for the crimes they have committed against us and the failure to do their sworn duty.
Democracy is two wolves and lamb voting on what's for lunch. Liberty is a well armed lamb contesting the vote.
Ok, so this is what happens. The Website, let say, Slashdot, makes an agreement with XYZ internet media company to sell ads on the site. Those ads don't pay without a click through. The customer pays the ISP for the upload and download content bandwidth, maybe per gigabit, or "unlimited" bandwidth. The ISP reads all unencrypted packets (and perhaps has to retain such information for some regulated period of time in some country). So when the customer goes to the site, he may or may not get the ads for the site as the ads may be substituted by the ISP so that clicks go to the ISP instead of the site. And the ISP is free to send small or large ads depending upon what is economically advantageous to the ISP.
This is nothing more than the ISP asking for a blank check from the customer, while stealing ad revenue from the visited websites. But it would be very hard to detect from the website. How would you know your ads are being intercepted?
Another scenario. What is to stop the ISP from being paid by a political action group to simply replace all instances of an opposing group's ads with their own? Seems to me that is left up to the integrity of the ISP, which from my experience is not very high. These are the folks who will sell your phone records to the first PI that pretends to be you, and also to the first G-man to merely ask.
Another scenario. NOw that it has been demonstrated that every packet can be read and that this can be used to generate profits, what level of responsibility does the ISP take upon itself for the contents of the websites? ARe they liable for every underage relationship transmitted across their lines while they serve ads for condoms next to the sex talk? What about those instance where websites are serving information that could be used to commit a crime? Shouldn't the ISP, with it ability to completely read the subject's searches KNOW or should know that a crime is being researched? How many times will the internet be blamed for harm to a minor before the ISP gets held partially liable, or required to monitor the internet by the government?
The RIAA represents a group of companies whose primary business model for the last 30 years has been to repackage the same product and sell it to the same customers, over and over. The big boom in music sales was the CD as customers moved away from the fragile vinyl albums of yore. Once the majority of folks realized that CD's were very expensive, and just as fragile as vinyl, they were disappointed. New music, such as it is, has not been selling very well, as over prices songs compete with other forms of entertainment. For the most part, music is used to enhance some other activity, not as the primary entertainment.
During the time that most people were switching to the CD, the record companies, members of the RIAA, colluded to illegally fix prices, and frankly the artists saw none of that money.
Now, the with the customer able to obtain in a fast, easy, and durable form, the music that they want, for as little as 89 cents a track, the record companies are finding that their "buy the same stuff in a different format" business model, isn't working. Rather than attempt to adapt to the new market, arguably difficult and risky, they formed a different plan: litigation.
The cost of filing a suit is trivial. The fear of being ruined in a lawsuit is tremendous, and most people will spend 4-5K dollars to make it go away rather than risk a lifetime of ruin trying to dig out from under a multi-million dollar debt. The fact that RIAA does not gather enough evidence to go to court, and that the evidence gathered is probably wrong as often as 20% of the time, is significant.
The RIAA set up a call center based upon the the techniques of debt collectors, with out the restraint of actually having to be debt collectors. These settlements, as we have seen, are little more than the promise that the RIAA won't sue you again. BUT having admitted that you did violate the copyright, the victim has been set up for a second bite, once the music writers sue for infringement, and then the performers can sue again. So it appears that the business model of suing for millions based upon listening to music will be with us for a long time.
Using the legal system to extort money from people is wrong. Making it a business, is particularly evil.
Yep. Spend an hour with the mental health doc and get a prescription. A lot of routine 10 minute visits to renew your script and send you back to the drug store. How is this any different than spending some quality time with a drug dealer?
Oh yeah, it's legal.
TV delivered to your phone costs money if you use service X. You can watch TV for free with a TV. This isn't stealing anymore than taping a show on ABC is stealing. MobilTV wants to add a charge to free TV to cover the convenience of having it delivered to your phone. They do so in such a way that everyone can use the service without much trouble.
Incredibly stupid business decisions should not be protected with a C&D to remove an entire forum thread. Free societies have already established that telling someone how to do something illegal is NOT the same as doing it. I can teach you how to circumvent security and not break any laws. If you use that knowledge to rob a bank, the crime is robbery and you will go to jail. I'm not going to be culpable for merely providing you with information on how security systems work. If people post about taking something that is a paid for service, then that is evidence of a crime, but the forum thread is protected speech.
Stealing is ingrained into our species. We steal when we can get away with it and always have. People steal on an individual level and on a group level. You are deluded if you think that theft will ever vanish from our species-it has provided an advantage to us for far too long. (Nations invade and conquer, thus stealing the land and resources of their neighbor; American settlers in the late 1800's "squatted" on public land and converted it into private holdings in violation of the law; Corporations regularly violate the law for economic or political gain as Enron and AT&T are both examples as is Microsoft.) These behaviors are neither unique to our times nor represent some sort of "moral decay" in human society. Nor do I suspect will such behaviors have any impact upon how our species will respond to any looming crises: We will do what we always do: fight, kill, steal, and generally survive. Those that are unwilling to do what ever it takes to survive a massive crisis will die. Same shit different century.
Not always good advice. I've got a project that is in JAVA and the developer community isn't very good. Just because it's a stable mainstream language doesn't mean you can get someone to work with it.
e. Lobby Congress for a law stating that file sharing is a crime punishable by death or life in prison, and civil penalties of *Dr. Evil voice* "One Treeeellion dollars" per file shared. Also, "making available" any file for sharing is a felony somewhere between pedophilia and being caught with a dead cop in your trunk along with fifty kilos of crack cocaine.
I've listened to his show. Years ago back before he was the poster child for what's wrong with the war on drugs. It wasn't that I dissagreed with his point of view, it was that it was so obviously shallow and completely lacking in anything beyond the moment's sensationalist vocal vomit, that I couldn't stand him. After claiming for years that drug users should be treated harshly, we find that this is just a bunch of hypocrisy, Rush would be the first to condemn the poor to suffer and the first in line for welfare and unemployment if he needed it.
Followed by the family cats and dogs.
The unlimited part of the connection comes from the old dial up days when you were billed per minute of connection time. AOL and other like providers charged each customer for the amount of time they were connected in minutes. Once services began to allow full months of service at one low price, they called these services "unlimited" which now some decades later is being misconstrued as "unlimited bandwidth" which is not true. The speed and the connection times were sold separately. That the bundling of connection speed and connection time have mislead consumers to believe that they have bought an unlimited in any way service is sad, but the logical consequence of bundle marketing done years ago.
The courts are eventually publicly accountable.
The problem with this whole scenario is not the publication of information about the case, which in this particular instance was rubbish, but rather the whole: "trust us, he was dirty, but we can't let you see that evidence as it would compromise national security" attitude that is joined with this issue.
Politicians are forever advocating the censure of the opposite opinion. Humans have never created a society that had secret trials and secret evidence that was anything other than a fear based tyranny. So we a political hack starts mumbling about security of the state, and secrets, and censorship while trashing someone's life, I recognize the dark shadow of tyranny rising up.
I see that another music business genius with the foresight to not fire his best act has stood up to the internet fiends and cried "Foul!"
Where was this genius of integrity when the customers paying for U2 albums were being raped by the music industry they licensed their music to? Silently cashing the checks, I imagine. I don't recall U2 making a public speech about how bad the CD price fixing scandal was.
Not so very long ago Sam Walton of Walmart fame demonstrated that if you give the customer what he wants at a fair price, you will become rich beyond the dreams of ordinary men. Henry Ford did the same. The ubiquitous convenience store, with its over priced soft drinks shows that customers will pay more for convenience.
Arrogant businesses on their way towards a serious market crunch treat their customers like thieves. Walmart lost a lot of customers over checking receipts at the door. After a decade of price fixing, literally stealing from their customers, the recorded music industry is in a slump. The economy is in a recession, gas, food, electricity are all up, and yet it is the internet that is the source of record music's woes? What about suing customers, producing fewer and crappier albums, attacking the general populace at large by calling anyone with an internet account a thief? Yeah buddy, I want to patronize your business.
The music business got soft and lazy and forgot about the customer to focus on price fixing, and shoving shitty albums on the market. Innovation is the antithesis of monopoly and the solution to problems that a monopoly is too busy making money to care about. Music lovers want music: quickly, easily, cheaply. They'll pay a fair price. It's up to the music makers to deliver. Pissing about not being able to deliver what the customer wants is a blatant demonstration of stupidity.
The complete history of recorded music is a mere 130 years. Songs have been written through out the thousands of years of human history. Music is a human experience and no amount of digital down loading will destroy it. Sure, Bono and company won't necessarily be able to sell billions of CD's and make billions of dollars, but is this the end of recorded music? As the guys says: Concert revenues are up. Duh. A couple hundred years ago, live music was the ONLY game in town. Music thrived. So "dude" your business model isn't in recordings, its in making music people want to hear and putting on a great concert.
It's a damn shame that the only response so far is: "Stop thief!"
An just an FYI, Mr U2 manager man, internet accounts don't cost $25 bucks a month, more like $50, and the parents are paying, not the kids.
If your so hot at business, why haven't you adjusted for the changing times? Hmmmm? Maybe you're not so hot. Anyway, you guys have just joined the same list as Metallica. I don't buy U2 anymore. Thanks for calling me a thief, you slanderous bastards.
Then music becomes "giving the customers what they want" more than "buy this latest stuff we put out."
What the record labels need to do is build up a reputation for finding and collecting the artists and music that people want to hear and sell it to them in a cheap and convenient format. People will pay to have music that they like brought together into an simple and easy place. The hardest part about music is finding something new that I like. Radio does a poor job of this, but unless I am devoted to downloading and listening to clips of lots and lots of stuff, I just don't have the time to spend on going out and hunting down new music that I would like.
So if the labels can build a community around music and keep that community happy, they will be able to find away to get that community to pay for the music. It may not be the music, but the convenience of the service. People will pay extra for convenience. Always have. Always will.
Music easier and simpler than they pirates. Not THAT hard to accomplish.
What does walmart sell in any large quantity that is patented to the point that there is nothing similar right next to it on the shelf? I really can't think of many things that might enjoy such a position, but that would be a unique situation and certainly not something the majority of suppliers would enjoy. I mean even though the Super soaker is patented, there are a lot of water pistols and such in the toy section competing with the Super Soaker.
Walmart's business model doesn't seem to invite the kind of pressure that a single patent holder can exert. Unless Acacia has a patent on making suppliers put RFiD tags on all incoming shipments.