Sounds smart. I am awfully poor compared to stock weenies but I put my money into my equipment and musical gear. I actually think it's kind of stupid to not put your money into building your own business, unless you have no skills. Most people who read Slashdot have skills: otherwise they wouldn't understand half the articles.
"Some people in the music business make a lot of money and put it up their nose. I put mine in my ear." -FZ
A corporation is not the same as an individual: the assertion is absurd. Sometimes the rules of the legal system are absurd: in the event that they are, they are fixed when it becomes obvious that they are broken.
No person would reasonably be able and permitted to do what Rambus has set out to do: hold an industry hostage by use of the courts as a weapon. Since Rambus, a corporation, is not only capable of doing this but has the fixed intent of using the legal system for vengeance instead of justice (not even vengeance really: for self-interested gain), it stands to reason that the judge will act in the interests of justice.
I only hope it contributes to a growing realisation that corporations are not individuals, are not remotely on a level with individuals in power and influence, and should be disenfranchised before they end up allowed to practice law themselves, and finally compete with humans to become judges. Is that what you meant when you said a corporation is the same as an individual and entitled to the same rights?
It might seem entertaining to picture Judge Hyundai stomping on Rambus, until you think about what Judge Microsoft, Judge Firestone, and Judge RIAA would be up to.
Corporations are legal fictions made up out of the rules of the game. UNMAKE THEM!
Just aerodynamically it's fascinating to check out this plane and see what's possible when you don't have to have a human pilot. It really is like a flying robot- where modern fighters have 'reflexes' like a robot (such as unstable planes with artificial stability via computers) this one even looks like a robot, given a complete stealth design and a menacing sleekness that comes from not needing a canopy. No tail- the jet exhaust is thrust vectored in the yaw direction and compensates for the obvious yaw instability, and in general that whole design is so unstable and flippy that only a computer and gyros could keep it flying stably. As a result I bet the damn thing can fly pretzels in the sky- very neat.
I would be nervous about flying civilian aircraft in its vicinity (or indeed future variations of this concept that are more autonomous) in case it took a dislike to my plane. But- if I was expecting attacks from anything from enemy aircraft to helicopters to missiles, I'd want to have some of these little suckers loose in the sky. It'd be "all civilian aircraft out of the sky NOW! OK- anything left is toast". I think the defensive capabilities of such a design, particularly as autonomous robots, could be really formidable. This is not exclusively an offensive weapon. It could be a hell of a defense against almost any air attack.
Oddly enough I just stayed up very late last night reading about a sort of politics: http://www.infoshop.org/faq/ is what I was reading, source of the Anarchist FAQ.
This has the effect of rendering all Jon's questions somewhat meaningless and replacing his answers with more questions. I think that's a useful effect...
Jon appears to be advocating a sort of populist control of authority- the classic 'vote in your pajamas' scenario. While the problem of political corruption is serious, I'd like to look for a second at some of the underlying assumptions- primarily, the assumption of a hierarchical authority.
If it is possible for invidivuals to specify their values so directly through technological means, might it be possible for this to take the place of hierarchical authority? True anarchism is not simply the destruction of government but a school of thought resisting _all_ imposed authority, governmental, economic and social: for this reason it is always somewhat socialist, for this reason it cannot be considered outside of a community.
Slashdot discussions are anarchy of communications, because while CmdrTaco and the Slashdot staff make the site available, in practice you do not have to get permission to speak- though an amount of authority still persists, it is far from what you'll find on a news.com or msn.com. "Permission" is a key concept to anarchy: it's not an abstract hypothesis for how to set up constant Darwinian struggle, it is a concept for community guidelines, and the question to ask is 'Whose permission must I get in order to do this?'
Whose permission must I get in order to make a post to slashdot?
Whose permission must I get in order to walk down the street?
Whose permission must I get in order to open a store?
Whose permission must I get in order to mug passersby?
Whose permission must I get in order to run an Internet server?
Whose permission must I get in order to buy a pair of shoes?
Whose permission must I get in order to listen to music?
Whose permission must I get in order to distribute music that I didn't compose?
Whose permission must I get in order to distribute music that is mine?
Plainly, for some of those actions there's going to be resistance from the community- permission to mug community members is not likely to be forthcoming even from an anarchist community, which may be a surprise to some! At the same time, this question reveals the power structures behind many current systems, and it's not always a pretty sight. For instance, if you wish to make a business selling productivity software to as many people as possible, you need to get the government's permission, sure (and it's largely a formality and some taxation) but you also need to get Microsoft's permission. Without it they will use their power to deprive you of resources and render you unable to conduct business.
If you produce music, you need the RIAA labels' permission to distribute it widely, as they have a lock on distribution- except that the internet has undercut this radically! To the anarchist community the idea of 'distribution without permission' has to be more exciting all by itself than the typical corollary of 'damaging record company income'. The record company income is not itself a problem- the fact that you have to get permission from their authority in order to access mass media _is_. If Microsoft seized control of online music so that it was all totally costless and administrated through special 'MS content producer accounts', it would be just as repugnant to anarchist thought even though MS is not (quite) government: in this event you would, practically, have to seek permission from Microsoft in order to distribute media.
In this light, it's interesting to look at Katz's questions again: what is being established and why? He is arguing for technology-implemented direct manipulation of authority- yet the authority we have in the USA is based on a concept of public servants, not a concept of fascism or divine rule. This is the strongest argument I can see for what Jon is advocating- the authority we have is in essence community facilitation on a large scale, and only as hierarchical as it is because technology hasn't permitted anything more decentralised.
It may be possible to use technology in the service of community to approximate the anarchist ideal as it intersects with the American Dream: one day the state I live in, Vermont, might (for instance) reject the authority of the RIAA and DMCA and force them to negotiate from a position of equality, rather than an IP-derived position of assumed authority. One thing is for sure- using technology, it becomes much more practical to ascertain the status of USE: it may be difficult to search for 'patent information' denoting the property of ideas, but it's easy to search for usage information. Since usage rights are central to anarchist thought (as a community-derived replacement for hierarchical authority) it's plainly handy to be able to quickly access all information about how a thing is used- something that has historically been a lot more subjective.
I hope in between all their havering about 'monetizing the artists' they manage to implement one little simple obvious thing- the ability for any random person to submit a song and be directed to the official website of the artist- whether that means a major label site, a 'You're Under Arrest' page, or a page that simply says 'Here is more music like that for you to download'.
Nothing in this technology _stops_ it from being usable in the last sense- a way to quickly be pointed to the rest of an artist's freely available (typically low bit rate) catalog. That, not 'monetization', is the new concept: the idea that for the first time a good but poorly resourced artist would have the same information distribution resources as the majors- the majors fight and spend billions to try and get some produced 'artist's name into peoples' ears, so that the consumer knows what they're hearing and where to buy more (at your local CD store, of course). For the first time this might be truly decentralised so that anyone, anywhere, who was listening to some anonymous and obscure song they liked, would be able to get the information. So it's on the radio? Hold up a mike and tape the radio. Pirate radio? Same deal. Old cassette tape that never had a label? No problem. mp3 marked "Metallica-One.mp3" erroneously? No problem...
At that point, you start having a free market again- at that point good local or indie bands or musicians, or really specialised musicians (noise, trad jazz, ragtime, serial composition) can begin shortcircuiting the lines of distribution and undercutting the majors by the simple expedient of 'who cares if I can't make money at this, nobody does but _I_ can afford to voluntarily give out mp3s etc. and FIND MY AUDIENCE'. At a stroke, the barriers to entry for an entire industry fall, and genres like jazz can survive (contrast this with at the major labels, which not only will not support jazz but are known to actually destroy irreplaceable master tapes to save storage costs- refusing to allow anyone to salvage the masters).
I really hope these people have enough sense to become this type of general resource. The risk is that the majors will not permit information to be stored for any music other than major label 'protected' music, and so the more obscure or indie stuff will turn up as 'no matches'.
The funny thing is (as I said in another post, but it's a good enough point to reiterate), for the computer it would be easy as pie to align all 2D windows with the viewing angle so they are shown exactly as a 2D WM would have them- only you'd be moving in a 3D way around them.
Nobody does this, possibly because people are more interested in making spectacularly 3D-looking screenshots than in making screenshots of a 3D window manager where you could actually _read_ Netscape and _use_ the GIMP. Without trapezoid windows the only cues it was 3D would be _movement_ cues. In use it would be shockingly different, but in screenshots it would be 2D-like.
Actually, I'm surprised that nobody seems to have realised that you can have 2D windows in a 3D environment without ever having a problem with oblique viewing angles and difficulty of reading text.
Simply have all the 2D panes permanently aligned to face the viewer, no matter where the viewer is located. Then you have 3D positioning but all information remains entirely readable, plus it's much fewer polys and VRAM.
Sure, real pages can't automatically align themselves to the optimal reading angle while you move around- but so what? Virtual pages can:)
Good luck! I think the interesting challenge of 3Dsia will be this- what type of interaction does the new interface make possible that wouldn't otherwise be possible?
It looks pretty obvious that being a straight filesystem isn't an optimal use for this tech. Yes, you can have a kinesthetic concept for the location of a file- though this is substantially impeded by the lack of scenery- but this is no advantage over realworld filekeeping, or the conceptual abstraction of 'folders' and contents.
However, what _can't_ you do in the realworld? One possibility is have your papers crawling after you and reminding you of their presence. You could have a concept where your ignored files would tend to follow you about pestering you:) that, or the opposite- if you work with mostly certain files and put them down where you stand, your 'back burner' would be an identifiable virtual location- anywhere that's not near where you're working. You could go over and literally look at the files that you haven't been doing much with, or evolve several 'work areas' where you accumulate files that are meant to be 'handy'. This situation could evolve out of the reality of having to sort of files by '3D location' and keep them somewhere.
Signposts or other identifiers need to be taken seriously in the concept- there's little point in a 3D world if it's just a huge heap of little blocks all of which look alike. You could have color and shape codings that result in 'signposts' very like the concepts of Neuromancer's visualisation of cyberspace. The 3D nature of this is to some extent useful, but frankly the only way any of this is going to become a significant improvement is if the objects are made to be dynamic, able to _do_ more than just sit there like a flat file system. You need to be able to tell a term paper, "If I haven't worked on you by the 25th, start chasing me around!". You should be able to look over your dataspace and see where you've been putting your efforts by how brightly those objects are glowing- and spot areas you've been neglecting by seeing that they are guttering and going dim. Your presence in an area should perk it up and make it more vivid. For the concept to be good it needs to be like a mental Palm Pilot- maybe it takes some getting used to but once you have the 'cyberspace' keeping track of things for you and coordinating with you, you should be able to do substantially more than you otherwise would.
I've only done minor work in this area. I wrote a reminder-program called Staccato that I use to this day to keep track of daily events, and it did make a massive improvement in my ability to keep tabs on things and be undistracted.
For a 3D environment to make a comparable difference, it would need to latch onto the tasks that are relevant to one's computer use, and allow you to 'offload' other stuff, more than just reminders of things to do. It would need to dynamically adjust, following your priorities, sometimes challenging them by reminding you of things you thought very important two months ago and causing you to remember them and question whether you need to devote attention to them. It can't be just 'remind me of everything I ever did, periodically'... you could even go with an algorithm that was alphabetical (today is Forgotten Project beginning with R day! Remember this one? Feel like bringing it up to date, or letting it gather more dust?) as long as the requirements were met: allowing the user to be aware of more than they can hold in their brain at one time, and keeping only a limited amount on the front burner at any one time. You'd have to be able to trust that the environment would get around to reminding you of everything you consider important- but not all at once!
It may well be that a 3D environment can be used in this sort of way. I think using the 3D environment as _conceptual_ space rather than simulated realspace would be the important thing. However, this conceptual space would have to be _concrete_... not vague or drifting, but something you could orient yourself around just as easily as you remember what side of the room your desk is on. This doesn't mean the 3dspace must have a 'desk'. Perhaps it might have a 'drudgery tower', or 'creative outbursts sphere'. Just so long as it's predictable and consistent...
Thanx- serves me right for trying to be flippant. Actually your insult prompted me to look over the post (which I'd saved for my own use as well) and I spotted a misspelling- 'sceptical' should really be spelled 'skeptical'.
Seeing as I've stuck that post on my own site (here), I must thank you for the flame as you've helped to correct a spelling error:)
To the other AC- no, I am not on the 3Dsia mailing list:) however, they are welcome to any of my stuff if it will help them. I don't always have the capacity to implement on all of my ideas so the least I can do is let others do so if they want:)
I use 'r3a77y k3w7' UI myself, quite often- usually more for decoration than anything else. I'm currently using a window theme on MacOS (with 'Kaleidoscope') called 'ISA Shock Absorber' and the sides of my windows have big shocks with yellow springs that stretch out as the window is expanded. It's fun to look at and nicely photorealistic and of course has no function but I like it anyway.
That said, I've thought about the '3D desktop' myself but the only way I could realize _my_ notion of it is on Linux- which I'm not good enough to program for, at this time. But I can clearly spell it out- this is my notion of 'functionally k3w7'.
Start with a virtual desktop, preferably one that has some depth like a large nature photograph (or a warehouse interior- anything that has depth). Make note of the color of the distance, you'll need it later.
The desktop must be a single tiled picture- total picture several times the size of the screen, scrolling to be done in sub-screen increments to preserve familiarity with your location (or smooth scrolling- anything but jumping to an entirely changed view). This picture ideally will have reference points- for instance in a woodland scene you might habitually put system monitor information by the stream:)
Over this 'deep' background goes- xterms. Nothing but xterms- CLI only. Not even window borders- just rects with a border the color of the default text, click to focus. I already have MacOS and don't need variations of it in Linux. We've done all that, this is about coming up with a genuinely different approach that has benefits that you would not get on Win or MacOS or anything like them. (...though MacOSX might be heading in this direction...)
These terms are manipulated with the mouse in 3D space as follows- horizontal and vertical movement moves them laterally. A scrollwheel is required (for ideal UI) and rolling the scrollwheel _into_ the screen makes the term scale down smaller, fade its colors subtly towards the 'background color', and go behind other term windows, all at the same time. There is no 'over-ride' for any of this- it's one linear process.
That's the gist of it- now here's the 'why' of it.
Windowing systems are a pain- MDI is ugly and awkward, and Mac-style windowing forces you to constantly work on a 'front window' and remember what is going on in other ones, perhaps check them from time to time. You can stagger them to sort of vaguely see at least movement or new information in the unobscured region of such a window, but this is a crude hack. You can (particularly on MacOS) run extra monitors to put other windows on, but this is still somewhat klugey- wastes energy- and confuses some applications.
My notion of a flat 3D (depth 3D?) windowing system (particularly when heavily term-centric) is about being able to visually scan really _large_ amounts of data and intuitively deal with it all in a natural way. The assumption is that you'll have lots of different terms, and will visually recognise one from another by the pattern of text on it. 'pico' does not look like 'bash' does not look like 'root-tail', especially if you have color involved and some messages are coming up in color.
Another important assumption is that you'll have a large collection of font sizes, ranging from the customary ones to 'flyspeck' sizes. It doesn't have to be able to produce a smooth animation of a zooming window- the only requirement is that it _must_ be possible to zoom a window so far back that the individual characters are down to about 2x3 pixels in size- as well as down to one pixel in size. New fonts need to be made to do this (if I knew how I would have done it already. I can do it in MacOS but can't use the result...)
When a term is zoomed out so far that it is postage-stamp sized, there is one major difference between it and an icon- it's 'live'. The pattern of text will be recognizable. If there is a 'postage stamp' window with system messages and suddenly there's a message in red that must be attended to, the visual scan of the whole desktop area will suddenly return a little red line on the 'postage stamp', a sure sign that something is up. This happens immediately and is its own 'notification system'. If something runs amok and a monitor window begins scrolling wildly with error messages, that 'postage stamp' becomes animated! In quieter times, a private IRC or muck conversation that's waiting on a response can be zoomed to the back- when a reply comes, the 'postage stamp' image will visibly alter and scroll a bit, and then you can zoom it forward and see what the message was.
I don't know of any system that would so directly give access and monitoring to a very large number of processes. None of it is at all new technology- changing term font sizes is well established, virtual desktops are well established, playing with the colors of terms is well established. It's just a matter of putting it together in this way. The result would be CLI-lovers heaven- the mouse reduced to strictly an xterm manager, its role so intuitively obvious that there's nothing to learn about the windowing system, no hidden behavior at all, and everything else focussed on the xterms and the many, many programs that can interact and display things textually- and of course writing your own programs for the console is simpler than writing them for X.
I hope to use this interface someday- many of the things I do would be suited to it. So much of what I do is processing information in text form- so much reading, typing, more reading etc... it would help me to have an interface like this so I could keep more tasks in my 'field of view' at one time.
It would also be a wonderful mingling of form and function- with the primary task simply being display of an xterm, it would be simple to incorporate all sorts of decorative touches, such as allowing semitransparent term backgrounds for a 'frosted glass' effect, pixmaps to add more decorative borders for the term rects, terms in different colors for different tasks (or with the color dynamically changing to convey information like 'you haven't worked on me in days'). You could have dozens of projects scattered all over your virtual desktop- not icons, but the actual projects, right there ready to be pulled closer and immediately worked on.
I guess it's strange for a Mac dude to be wanting such a full-on CLI environment, but it's not that strange really. Being a longtime Mac dude causes you to look at stuff like Eazel more sceptically. It's like 'been there done that', and now that I do know what I'm doing, what would be the most efficient, streamlined way to do that?
Maybe I can make a demo of it on MacOS, seeing as I know I can make the requisite fonts. I might not be able to make actual terms but it should be possible to code up 'sticky notes' that at least _look_ the way they should:)
I am a pretty dedicated Mac user, and have programmed quite a bit with 'REALbasic' (_very_ popular and successful on the Mac), and I disagree with an important part of your conclusions. Here's what I've found.
As far as just plain solving problems, I can't beat REALbasic. I've done things like write 'AIFF unclippers' in a couple of hours, just puzzling out the format and writing an app to turn all the 'clip' values into 'clip-1' values to make a file safe for digital glass mastering. There is a lot of stuff that can be very easily built on a RB foundation.
However! There is no way to translate this ease and ability to do RAD work to deeper levels of programming. I can tell you that it sure doesn't translate to C programming, or Codewarrior, or GCC: the most basic concepts might be the same, there might even be parallels to things like pointer math ('memoryblocks') but the whole approach to RB is not the approach to more low-level languages such as were used to make RB itself, to make its nice sophisticated bugfree 'objects'. It's possible this is just a matter of degree, but the more you program in RB (or Visual Basic, or some such veryhighlevel language- possibly even MSVS depending on just how drag and drop it really is) the less capable you are of popping the hood and building your own engines, something that is almost obligatory with lowlevel languages.
I concede that most people cannot deal on this low level, but I'm also saying that these very easy candy languages _make_ people unable to deal on the low level. It's almost like a judgement call, a decision you have to make- do you go for getting lots of tasks done, or do you learn to actually program? Using the highlevel stuff can be great if you frequently run into a problem that must have a programming solution and cannot find or buy one, but the problems had better be 'amateur' problems. No matter how exciting your vision you're not going to program Quake in RB- in fact if you're very highlevel you might be entirely unable to cope with the Quake source even if you licensed it. Yet if you go totally lowlevel you might not see the actual problems because you're totally caught up in implementation. It's quite a puzzle.
We do need high level languages. I'm just concerned that this is not only indoctrinating people with particular habits and expectations (i.e. MS for everything), it is also taking a toll of people who might otherwise be able to do creative and productive work at the low levels- which are never going to go away. There is always going to be need for them, and I'd just as soon not have all the people in the world who can hack low level code paid to sit on their hands at Redmond- or debug VB:P
For instance, television is one-to-many information distribution. Benefit: a lot of people didn't have such good access to information before TV came along. Downside: those people have no way of putting information back into the system, it's one-way only. Message: the role of the public is to consume only, on every level.
Now, let's look at the Internet. Benefit: a lot of people now have two-way communication, even to the point that they can get 'slashdotted', their ideas given massive media exposure in various ways. Downside: this communication can be and is being spied on, recorded, censored, controlled and manipulated by powerful entities both in government and private industry. It is becoming very natural to be spied on, controlled, manipulated by outside forces with no accountability. This is taken as natural and desirable by most.
Half a point to anyone who can spot _that_ message (as spelled out in classic literature). Hint: the concept of government we're accustomed to is being steadily replaced by this new concept, illustrating a significant shift in the world's power balance.
Does this mean that no matter what language you use, you now have to use a Microsoft compiler? Or does it mean that no matter what language you use they are dependent upon MS for the spec to be 'compatible' with.NET- which is being specified in rather _general_ terms that aren't useful to a person writing a compiler for another programming language?
You see, this is the whole, central absurdity of.NET- at some point you have to stop crying out "Cross language object reuse is easily done!" and actually IMPLEMENT it. It's all very well saying that, but what evidence is there that this makes any sort of sense in the real world?
Here, I'll answer you with an equal counter-argument: In CORBA, cross-language objects give you freshly baked chocolate chip cookies unlike in selfish, mean old.NET, which cries like a little baby when it can't get people's undivided attention.
How is your nonsensical, hypothetical claim any different from my nonsensical, hypothetical claim? Are you claiming freshly baked chocolate chip cookies don't exist? *g*
If so, what category would the class be filed under? CS, or Philosophy? Or perhaps they could go whole hog and file it under Ethics;P
It _would_ be very appropriate for a first class (for some values of appropriate) because there is NO actual content or technical information involved..NET is nothing but an idea, and the idea is "If everyone uses Microsoft products for everything, you can use any language you could possibly want, solve any problem ever, and be part of the rest of the world all of which is using Microsoft products for everything you could possibly imagine".
This is a very primitive concept, thus it makes perfect sense for a 'first class in CS'. It's kind of like, 'these are the axioms, now read on'. The fact that it makes no sense and belongs to religion more than computer science is not likely to upset many universities at this point o_O
Very interesting. This is exactly the problem Gelernter ran into with his Grand Concept, the name of which I forget even though I read his book "Mirror Worlds" which is basically one long advertisement for it. (That's what happens when you're doing entirely handwaving- people can come away without any reference points and end up not remembering a damn thing about your hype. I keep thinking of 'Mindstorms' but that's not what he called it...)
If Microsoft really are going this direction they are in a hell of a lot of trouble. It's like implementation (always hard for them) proved so frustrating that they're abandoning it entirely and going with nothing _but_ 'mindshare'. I will be interested to see how far they get. It'll make a good litmus test for who can think and who just recites propaganda, since there are NO ideas in.NET, apparently.
Just because noncommercial copying could be as free as air does not mean commercial entities get the rights to do anything they want. It sounds like a lot of people are thinking in terms of vastly expanded fair use. There's still a place for copyright- to maintain artistic control over derivative works- but I don't think it means what you think it means. In particular, I think the common assumption, copyright == right to money, is astonishing and absurd. Copyright == your name engraved on the IP. Earning money off that is _your_ problem, and is much less likely if the copying is completely ubitiquous and costless. The problem becomes how to make money on having a reputation, which copyright will still protect.
True. I do think there is a place for some aspects of copyright law, however. Currently, I can do creative work to get attention for my ability to do that work- something I can charge for (not the IP but the doing of the work). It's easier if I can be certain that the stuff I produce is associated with me. I see the primary purpose of copyright law to make it illegal for someone to impersonate me and claim they did my work...
Nuh-uh! You can't have him! We'll be needing him in four years- and I'm sure he'll be very useful before then, haven't you been reading about our corporate abuses?
We need him more than you 'cos we're way more screwed up than you:P doneventhinkaboutit!
The Gore supporters who wanted to play radical and vote Nader out of some sort of 21st-century liberal paternalism can redeem themselves by voting for the guy they apparently wanted in the first place.
Real Nader supporters would still vote Nader. Haven't you even listened to anything the man said? I frankly don't think many Gore people voted Nader, whether they promised to or not. I think they made big promises and just like their candidate Gore, promptly ignored them.
The one good thing I can see coming out of this election is that _both_ parties are blatantly lame-duck parties. There is no consensus, no majority, no mandate. I hope the government stays in deadlock without causing too much damage for the next four years. And if the government refuses to give money to Nader next time around, I will just have to build it into my meager budget, save up, and give him money (and vital time and effort) myself. Screw the government.
This is a really good point. Current music IP is based on the concept that the means of distribution are costly brick and mortar facilities- when the cost of distribution drops so sharply some kind of change becomes necessary, but when this is combined with continued attempts to charge money on the now effortless distribution, change becomes irresistible.
Completely eliminate the income for the 'media' that is now equal to the cost of flipping a bunch of bits from 1 to 0, and the current music industry has _no_ model for income, yet a market remains for some kind of product, and that's not going to change- people treat music like it was a _staple_, I've seen people rating it right up there with food and water as necessities for their existence.
That said- as a previous resident of mp3.com's indie artist community I can tell you that ubitiquous music does NOT equal the current industry. It's not that places like mp3.com only have poor music- there's a mix, from the awful to the phenomenal. A lot of the stuff there is quirky but appealing- sort of unprofessional but honest. Some of it is fully 'label quality' in every sense, particularly for genres with poor record label support in the first place.
The problem is sorting through all that, and it's a problem few music listeners want to deal with. As technology advances it'll become easier to do this- but we're still talking about traditional music business models, in a way.
The thing is, musicians are not wholly reliant on IP. The biz is, but for all that IP, typically several to a lot of musicians, engineers, techs got together and produced the music that you listen to. The work they put in, to do that, is what can be charged for- and if the major label biz goes down the tubes and the world is rendered 'musicless', there will be immediate demand for something new. People won't sit around copying old music back and forth on Napster forever- they'll inevitably start to wonder what else is out there. That's the point where a performer- or studio player, or engineer- can start to earn possibly a quite respectable wage for practicing their specialised craft. If you need a guitar solo on a song you can't just hire a guy off the street- you seek out someone with that skill, and it makes a difference who you pick. You'll want someone who's got time to do the work, who you can afford, who can do just the right solo, who can work with your requirements.
It's really not that different from, say, hiring a web design professional. You could fake doing that in Frontpage or Word but it would be _awful_. How many people really need to produce- not read, _produce_- a really professional webpage? And yet the skills are in demand and it's commonly accepted that the most skilled performers get paid handsomely.
Get rid of the existing music industry and you'll see similar conditions in music. Currently things are so distorted by weird expectations and ruthless control of the means of distribution and publicity that there's little correlation between skilled music performers and wealth, but in the computer industry (particularly Web stuff- much of which is effectively public domain and a matter of taste), there is that correlation. Kill the existing industry and leave nothing but rampant 'piracy' in its place and it will quickly become more feasible for skilled musicians to practice their trade and earn money, just like web designers, on the basis of their skill.
The funniest thing about this whole topic is what isn't being said. Yes, universities are a 'rubber stamping' outfit- when I was in college there were a lot of people out to get the 'piece of paper' and I'm sure this is even more significant to CS majors.
Yet, at the same time, look at how many stories people are telling of "Oh, I had a good idea and the college was fighting me for it- so I dropped out and made a company and now I am Cisco" *g*
Okay, so that's exaggerated. But there are two points here:
As 'brain drain' from universities continue and corporate requirements on universities tighten, universities will be less and less able to provide an education that is worth money in the real world. It'll be like waving an McSE when applying for a serious admin job: the university degree will be evidence that the person isn't good enough to have dropped out and gone commercial.
By the same token, there's a subtler effect that I think is being largely ignored. 20 years ago it would have seemed radical to drop out of college and start a business- now you have colorful characters like Larry Ellison fulminating and inciting students to do this, AND he is an unbelievably rich man. It's becoming culturally expected for the _really_ sharp individuals to drop out and strike out on their own. This means that for the first time that I'm aware of, there is serious backing for a person's decision to drop out- and a lot of evidence to show doubters. It used to be a stigma. Now, if you're smart and trying to start a business (rather than dropping out due to apathy) your public image can be that of a potential Larry Ellison, and you can quote Ellison and recite lists of billionare dropouts to justify your decision.
Finally, at the same time as this cultural change, the universities themselves are making it substantially more difficult to justify using them as a step in your personal growth- not only is it very expensive, not only is it increasingly unlikely that you'll get anything resembling an unbiased and truthful education, but if you are trying to get a head start on your career by using your youth and energy to think and learn and invent new things to build your future on, the university will pirate your work out from under you. This forces you to only do useless work at university- in some cases it may force you to stop thinking entirely for fear that the uni will lay claim to what you invented on your own time. So you are paying them to impede your growth, progress and learning.
I dropped out of college myself- over 10 years ago- 'before it was fashionable' you might say, but I could also say 'before it was obligatory'! Honestly, reading this thread and the things people are saying, it's horrifying. I hope people are ready to educate themselves, and willing to put in some effort towards getting a well rounded education as well- because at this point I couldn't recommend higher education for anybody. Yes, it's hurtin' as things stand, funding is desperately bad and dedicated teachers etc. deserve some sympathy- but when you look at these appalling IP costs and risks the whole thing reminds me of the record industry- i.e. "just say YAAAAH! NO WAY!":P
Slashdot Mirror
"Some people in the music business make a lot of money and put it up their nose. I put mine in my ear." -FZ
No person would reasonably be able and permitted to do what Rambus has set out to do: hold an industry hostage by use of the courts as a weapon. Since Rambus, a corporation, is not only capable of doing this but has the fixed intent of using the legal system for vengeance instead of justice (not even vengeance really: for self-interested gain), it stands to reason that the judge will act in the interests of justice.
I only hope it contributes to a growing realisation that corporations are not individuals, are not remotely on a level with individuals in power and influence, and should be disenfranchised before they end up allowed to practice law themselves, and finally compete with humans to become judges. Is that what you meant when you said a corporation is the same as an individual and entitled to the same rights?
It might seem entertaining to picture Judge Hyundai stomping on Rambus, until you think about what Judge Microsoft, Judge Firestone, and Judge RIAA would be up to.
Corporations are legal fictions made up out of the rules of the game. UNMAKE THEM!
I'm kind of an anarchist. I like that kind of chaos _better_ than our kind of chaos ;P
"Man, if you got to ask, you'll never know..." -Louis Armstrong (originally about attempts to explain jazz)
I would be nervous about flying civilian aircraft in its vicinity (or indeed future variations of this concept that are more autonomous) in case it took a dislike to my plane. But- if I was expecting attacks from anything from enemy aircraft to helicopters to missiles, I'd want to have some of these little suckers loose in the sky. It'd be "all civilian aircraft out of the sky NOW! OK- anything left is toast". I think the defensive capabilities of such a design, particularly as autonomous robots, could be really formidable. This is not exclusively an offensive weapon. It could be a hell of a defense against almost any air attack.
This has the effect of rendering all Jon's questions somewhat meaningless and replacing his answers with more questions. I think that's a useful effect...
Jon appears to be advocating a sort of populist control of authority- the classic 'vote in your pajamas' scenario. While the problem of political corruption is serious, I'd like to look for a second at some of the underlying assumptions- primarily, the assumption of a hierarchical authority.
If it is possible for invidivuals to specify their values so directly through technological means, might it be possible for this to take the place of hierarchical authority? True anarchism is not simply the destruction of government but a school of thought resisting _all_ imposed authority, governmental, economic and social: for this reason it is always somewhat socialist, for this reason it cannot be considered outside of a community.
Slashdot discussions are anarchy of communications, because while CmdrTaco and the Slashdot staff make the site available, in practice you do not have to get permission to speak- though an amount of authority still persists, it is far from what you'll find on a news.com or msn.com. "Permission" is a key concept to anarchy: it's not an abstract hypothesis for how to set up constant Darwinian struggle, it is a concept for community guidelines, and the question to ask is 'Whose permission must I get in order to do this?'
- Whose permission must I get in order to make a post to slashdot?
- Whose permission must I get in order to walk down the street?
- Whose permission must I get in order to open a store?
- Whose permission must I get in order to mug passersby?
- Whose permission must I get in order to run an Internet server?
- Whose permission must I get in order to buy a pair of shoes?
- Whose permission must I get in order to listen to music?
- Whose permission must I get in order to distribute music that I didn't compose?
- Whose permission must I get in order to distribute music that is mine?
Plainly, for some of those actions there's going to be resistance from the community- permission to mug community members is not likely to be forthcoming even from an anarchist community, which may be a surprise to some! At the same time, this question reveals the power structures behind many current systems, and it's not always a pretty sight. For instance, if you wish to make a business selling productivity software to as many people as possible, you need to get the government's permission, sure (and it's largely a formality and some taxation) but you also need to get Microsoft's permission. Without it they will use their power to deprive you of resources and render you unable to conduct business.If you produce music, you need the RIAA labels' permission to distribute it widely, as they have a lock on distribution- except that the internet has undercut this radically! To the anarchist community the idea of 'distribution without permission' has to be more exciting all by itself than the typical corollary of 'damaging record company income'. The record company income is not itself a problem- the fact that you have to get permission from their authority in order to access mass media _is_. If Microsoft seized control of online music so that it was all totally costless and administrated through special 'MS content producer accounts', it would be just as repugnant to anarchist thought even though MS is not (quite) government: in this event you would, practically, have to seek permission from Microsoft in order to distribute media.
In this light, it's interesting to look at Katz's questions again: what is being established and why? He is arguing for technology-implemented direct manipulation of authority- yet the authority we have in the USA is based on a concept of public servants, not a concept of fascism or divine rule. This is the strongest argument I can see for what Jon is advocating- the authority we have is in essence community facilitation on a large scale, and only as hierarchical as it is because technology hasn't permitted anything more decentralised.
It may be possible to use technology in the service of community to approximate the anarchist ideal as it intersects with the American Dream: one day the state I live in, Vermont, might (for instance) reject the authority of the RIAA and DMCA and force them to negotiate from a position of equality, rather than an IP-derived position of assumed authority. One thing is for sure- using technology, it becomes much more practical to ascertain the status of USE: it may be difficult to search for 'patent information' denoting the property of ideas, but it's easy to search for usage information. Since usage rights are central to anarchist thought (as a community-derived replacement for hierarchical authority) it's plainly handy to be able to quickly access all information about how a thing is used- something that has historically been a lot more subjective.
Nothing in this technology _stops_ it from being usable in the last sense- a way to quickly be pointed to the rest of an artist's freely available (typically low bit rate) catalog. That, not 'monetization', is the new concept: the idea that for the first time a good but poorly resourced artist would have the same information distribution resources as the majors- the majors fight and spend billions to try and get some produced 'artist's name into peoples' ears, so that the consumer knows what they're hearing and where to buy more (at your local CD store, of course). For the first time this might be truly decentralised so that anyone, anywhere, who was listening to some anonymous and obscure song they liked, would be able to get the information. So it's on the radio? Hold up a mike and tape the radio. Pirate radio? Same deal. Old cassette tape that never had a label? No problem. mp3 marked "Metallica-One.mp3" erroneously? No problem...
At that point, you start having a free market again- at that point good local or indie bands or musicians, or really specialised musicians (noise, trad jazz, ragtime, serial composition) can begin shortcircuiting the lines of distribution and undercutting the majors by the simple expedient of 'who cares if I can't make money at this, nobody does but _I_ can afford to voluntarily give out mp3s etc. and FIND MY AUDIENCE'. At a stroke, the barriers to entry for an entire industry fall, and genres like jazz can survive (contrast this with at the major labels, which not only will not support jazz but are known to actually destroy irreplaceable master tapes to save storage costs- refusing to allow anyone to salvage the masters).
I really hope these people have enough sense to become this type of general resource. The risk is that the majors will not permit information to be stored for any music other than major label 'protected' music, and so the more obscure or indie stuff will turn up as 'no matches'.
Nobody does this, possibly because people are more interested in making spectacularly 3D-looking screenshots than in making screenshots of a 3D window manager where you could actually _read_ Netscape and _use_ the GIMP. Without trapezoid windows the only cues it was 3D would be _movement_ cues. In use it would be shockingly different, but in screenshots it would be 2D-like.
Simply have all the 2D panes permanently aligned to face the viewer, no matter where the viewer is located. Then you have 3D positioning but all information remains entirely readable, plus it's much fewer polys and VRAM.
Sure, real pages can't automatically align themselves to the optimal reading angle while you move around- but so what? Virtual pages can :)
It looks pretty obvious that being a straight filesystem isn't an optimal use for this tech. Yes, you can have a kinesthetic concept for the location of a file- though this is substantially impeded by the lack of scenery- but this is no advantage over realworld filekeeping, or the conceptual abstraction of 'folders' and contents.
However, what _can't_ you do in the realworld? One possibility is have your papers crawling after you and reminding you of their presence. You could have a concept where your ignored files would tend to follow you about pestering you :) that, or the opposite- if you work with mostly certain files and put them down where you stand, your 'back burner' would be an identifiable virtual location- anywhere that's not near where you're working. You could go over and literally look at the files that you haven't been doing much with, or evolve several 'work areas' where you accumulate files that are meant to be 'handy'. This situation could evolve out of the reality of having to sort of files by '3D location' and keep them somewhere.
Signposts or other identifiers need to be taken seriously in the concept- there's little point in a 3D world if it's just a huge heap of little blocks all of which look alike. You could have color and shape codings that result in 'signposts' very like the concepts of Neuromancer's visualisation of cyberspace. The 3D nature of this is to some extent useful, but frankly the only way any of this is going to become a significant improvement is if the objects are made to be dynamic, able to _do_ more than just sit there like a flat file system. You need to be able to tell a term paper, "If I haven't worked on you by the 25th, start chasing me around!". You should be able to look over your dataspace and see where you've been putting your efforts by how brightly those objects are glowing- and spot areas you've been neglecting by seeing that they are guttering and going dim. Your presence in an area should perk it up and make it more vivid. For the concept to be good it needs to be like a mental Palm Pilot- maybe it takes some getting used to but once you have the 'cyberspace' keeping track of things for you and coordinating with you, you should be able to do substantially more than you otherwise would.
I've only done minor work in this area. I wrote a reminder-program called Staccato that I use to this day to keep track of daily events, and it did make a massive improvement in my ability to keep tabs on things and be undistracted.
For a 3D environment to make a comparable difference, it would need to latch onto the tasks that are relevant to one's computer use, and allow you to 'offload' other stuff, more than just reminders of things to do. It would need to dynamically adjust, following your priorities, sometimes challenging them by reminding you of things you thought very important two months ago and causing you to remember them and question whether you need to devote attention to them. It can't be just 'remind me of everything I ever did, periodically'... you could even go with an algorithm that was alphabetical (today is Forgotten Project beginning with R day! Remember this one? Feel like bringing it up to date, or letting it gather more dust?) as long as the requirements were met: allowing the user to be aware of more than they can hold in their brain at one time, and keeping only a limited amount on the front burner at any one time. You'd have to be able to trust that the environment would get around to reminding you of everything you consider important- but not all at once!
It may well be that a 3D environment can be used in this sort of way. I think using the 3D environment as _conceptual_ space rather than simulated realspace would be the important thing. However, this conceptual space would have to be _concrete_... not vague or drifting, but something you could orient yourself around just as easily as you remember what side of the room your desk is on. This doesn't mean the 3dspace must have a 'desk'. Perhaps it might have a 'drudgery tower', or 'creative outbursts sphere'. Just so long as it's predictable and consistent...
Seeing as I've stuck that post on my own site (here), I must thank you for the flame as you've helped to correct a spelling error :)
To the other AC- no, I am not on the 3Dsia mailing list :) however, they are welcome to any of my stuff if it will help them. I don't always have the capacity to implement on all of my ideas so the least I can do is let others do so if they want :)
I use 'r3a77y k3w7' UI myself, quite often- usually more for decoration than anything else. I'm currently using a window theme on MacOS (with 'Kaleidoscope') called 'ISA Shock Absorber' and the sides of my windows have big shocks with yellow springs that stretch out as the window is expanded. It's fun to look at and nicely photorealistic and of course has no function but I like it anyway.
That said, I've thought about the '3D desktop' myself but the only way I could realize _my_ notion of it is on Linux- which I'm not good enough to program for, at this time. But I can clearly spell it out- this is my notion of 'functionally k3w7'.
Start with a virtual desktop, preferably one that has some depth like a large nature photograph (or a warehouse interior- anything that has depth). Make note of the color of the distance, you'll need it later.
The desktop must be a single tiled picture- total picture several times the size of the screen, scrolling to be done in sub-screen increments to preserve familiarity with your location (or smooth scrolling- anything but jumping to an entirely changed view). This picture ideally will have reference points- for instance in a woodland scene you might habitually put system monitor information by the stream :)
Over this 'deep' background goes- xterms. Nothing but xterms- CLI only. Not even window borders- just rects with a border the color of the default text, click to focus. I already have MacOS and don't need variations of it in Linux. We've done all that, this is about coming up with a genuinely different approach that has benefits that you would not get on Win or MacOS or anything like them. (...though MacOSX might be heading in this direction...)
These terms are manipulated with the mouse in 3D space as follows- horizontal and vertical movement moves them laterally. A scrollwheel is required (for ideal UI) and rolling the scrollwheel _into_ the screen makes the term scale down smaller, fade its colors subtly towards the 'background color', and go behind other term windows, all at the same time. There is no 'over-ride' for any of this- it's one linear process.
That's the gist of it- now here's the 'why' of it.
Windowing systems are a pain- MDI is ugly and awkward, and Mac-style windowing forces you to constantly work on a 'front window' and remember what is going on in other ones, perhaps check them from time to time. You can stagger them to sort of vaguely see at least movement or new information in the unobscured region of such a window, but this is a crude hack. You can (particularly on MacOS) run extra monitors to put other windows on, but this is still somewhat klugey- wastes energy- and confuses some applications.
My notion of a flat 3D (depth 3D?) windowing system (particularly when heavily term-centric) is about being able to visually scan really _large_ amounts of data and intuitively deal with it all in a natural way. The assumption is that you'll have lots of different terms, and will visually recognise one from another by the pattern of text on it. 'pico' does not look like 'bash' does not look like 'root-tail', especially if you have color involved and some messages are coming up in color.
Another important assumption is that you'll have a large collection of font sizes, ranging from the customary ones to 'flyspeck' sizes. It doesn't have to be able to produce a smooth animation of a zooming window- the only requirement is that it _must_ be possible to zoom a window so far back that the individual characters are down to about 2x3 pixels in size- as well as down to one pixel in size. New fonts need to be made to do this (if I knew how I would have done it already. I can do it in MacOS but can't use the result...)
When a term is zoomed out so far that it is postage-stamp sized, there is one major difference between it and an icon- it's 'live'. The pattern of text will be recognizable. If there is a 'postage stamp' window with system messages and suddenly there's a message in red that must be attended to, the visual scan of the whole desktop area will suddenly return a little red line on the 'postage stamp', a sure sign that something is up. This happens immediately and is its own 'notification system'. If something runs amok and a monitor window begins scrolling wildly with error messages, that 'postage stamp' becomes animated! In quieter times, a private IRC or muck conversation that's waiting on a response can be zoomed to the back- when a reply comes, the 'postage stamp' image will visibly alter and scroll a bit, and then you can zoom it forward and see what the message was.
I don't know of any system that would so directly give access and monitoring to a very large number of processes. None of it is at all new technology- changing term font sizes is well established, virtual desktops are well established, playing with the colors of terms is well established. It's just a matter of putting it together in this way. The result would be CLI-lovers heaven- the mouse reduced to strictly an xterm manager, its role so intuitively obvious that there's nothing to learn about the windowing system, no hidden behavior at all, and everything else focussed on the xterms and the many, many programs that can interact and display things textually- and of course writing your own programs for the console is simpler than writing them for X.
I hope to use this interface someday- many of the things I do would be suited to it. So much of what I do is processing information in text form- so much reading, typing, more reading etc... it would help me to have an interface like this so I could keep more tasks in my 'field of view' at one time.
It would also be a wonderful mingling of form and function- with the primary task simply being display of an xterm, it would be simple to incorporate all sorts of decorative touches, such as allowing semitransparent term backgrounds for a 'frosted glass' effect, pixmaps to add more decorative borders for the term rects, terms in different colors for different tasks (or with the color dynamically changing to convey information like 'you haven't worked on me in days'). You could have dozens of projects scattered all over your virtual desktop- not icons, but the actual projects, right there ready to be pulled closer and immediately worked on.
I guess it's strange for a Mac dude to be wanting such a full-on CLI environment, but it's not that strange really. Being a longtime Mac dude causes you to look at stuff like Eazel more sceptically. It's like 'been there done that', and now that I do know what I'm doing, what would be the most efficient, streamlined way to do that?
Maybe I can make a demo of it on MacOS, seeing as I know I can make the requisite fonts. I might not be able to make actual terms but it should be possible to code up 'sticky notes' that at least _look_ the way they should :)
As far as just plain solving problems, I can't beat REALbasic. I've done things like write 'AIFF unclippers' in a couple of hours, just puzzling out the format and writing an app to turn all the 'clip' values into 'clip-1' values to make a file safe for digital glass mastering. There is a lot of stuff that can be very easily built on a RB foundation.
However! There is no way to translate this ease and ability to do RAD work to deeper levels of programming. I can tell you that it sure doesn't translate to C programming, or Codewarrior, or GCC: the most basic concepts might be the same, there might even be parallels to things like pointer math ('memoryblocks') but the whole approach to RB is not the approach to more low-level languages such as were used to make RB itself, to make its nice sophisticated bugfree 'objects'. It's possible this is just a matter of degree, but the more you program in RB (or Visual Basic, or some such veryhighlevel language- possibly even MSVS depending on just how drag and drop it really is) the less capable you are of popping the hood and building your own engines, something that is almost obligatory with lowlevel languages.
I concede that most people cannot deal on this low level, but I'm also saying that these very easy candy languages _make_ people unable to deal on the low level. It's almost like a judgement call, a decision you have to make- do you go for getting lots of tasks done, or do you learn to actually program? Using the highlevel stuff can be great if you frequently run into a problem that must have a programming solution and cannot find or buy one, but the problems had better be 'amateur' problems. No matter how exciting your vision you're not going to program Quake in RB- in fact if you're very highlevel you might be entirely unable to cope with the Quake source even if you licensed it. Yet if you go totally lowlevel you might not see the actual problems because you're totally caught up in implementation. It's quite a puzzle.
We do need high level languages. I'm just concerned that this is not only indoctrinating people with particular habits and expectations (i.e. MS for everything), it is also taking a toll of people who might otherwise be able to do creative and productive work at the low levels- which are never going to go away. There is always going to be need for them, and I'd just as soon not have all the people in the world who can hack low level code paid to sit on their hands at Redmond- or debug VB :P
For instance, television is one-to-many information distribution. Benefit: a lot of people didn't have such good access to information before TV came along. Downside: those people have no way of putting information back into the system, it's one-way only. Message: the role of the public is to consume only, on every level.
Now, let's look at the Internet. Benefit: a lot of people now have two-way communication, even to the point that they can get 'slashdotted', their ideas given massive media exposure in various ways. Downside: this communication can be and is being spied on, recorded, censored, controlled and manipulated by powerful entities both in government and private industry. It is becoming very natural to be spied on, controlled, manipulated by outside forces with no accountability. This is taken as natural and desirable by most.
Half a point to anyone who can spot _that_ message (as spelled out in classic literature). Hint: the concept of government we're accustomed to is being steadily replaced by this new concept, illustrating a significant shift in the world's power balance.
Does this mean that no matter what language you use, you now have to use a Microsoft compiler? Or does it mean that no matter what language you use they are dependent upon MS for the spec to be 'compatible' with .NET- which is being specified in rather _general_ terms that aren't useful to a person writing a compiler for another programming language?
How, exactly?
You see, this is the whole, central absurdity of .NET- at some point you have to stop crying out "Cross language object reuse is easily done!" and actually IMPLEMENT it. It's all very well saying that, but what evidence is there that this makes any sort of sense in the real world?
Here, I'll answer you with an equal counter-argument: In CORBA, cross-language objects give you freshly baked chocolate chip cookies unlike in selfish, mean old .NET, which cries like a little baby when it can't get people's undivided attention.
How is your nonsensical, hypothetical claim any different from my nonsensical, hypothetical claim? Are you claiming freshly baked chocolate chip cookies don't exist? *g*
It _would_ be very appropriate for a first class (for some values of appropriate) because there is NO actual content or technical information involved. .NET is nothing but an idea, and the idea is "If everyone uses Microsoft products for everything, you can use any language you could possibly want, solve any problem ever, and be part of the rest of the world all of which is using Microsoft products for everything you could possibly imagine".
This is a very primitive concept, thus it makes perfect sense for a 'first class in CS'. It's kind of like, 'these are the axioms, now read on'. The fact that it makes no sense and belongs to religion more than computer science is not likely to upset many universities at this point o_O
If Microsoft really are going this direction they are in a hell of a lot of trouble. It's like implementation (always hard for them) proved so frustrating that they're abandoning it entirely and going with nothing _but_ 'mindshare'. I will be interested to see how far they get. It'll make a good litmus test for who can think and who just recites propaganda, since there are NO ideas in .NET, apparently.
Just because noncommercial copying could be as free as air does not mean commercial entities get the rights to do anything they want. It sounds like a lot of people are thinking in terms of vastly expanded fair use. There's still a place for copyright- to maintain artistic control over derivative works- but I don't think it means what you think it means. In particular, I think the common assumption, copyright == right to money, is astonishing and absurd. Copyright == your name engraved on the IP. Earning money off that is _your_ problem, and is much less likely if the copying is completely ubitiquous and costless. The problem becomes how to make money on having a reputation, which copyright will still protect.
True. I do think there is a place for some aspects of copyright law, however. Currently, I can do creative work to get attention for my ability to do that work- something I can charge for (not the IP but the doing of the work). It's easier if I can be certain that the stuff I produce is associated with me. I see the primary purpose of copyright law to make it illegal for someone to impersonate me and claim they did my work...
Maybe he'll settle for 500.001 points of light :)
We need him more than you 'cos we're way more screwed up than you :P doneventhinkaboutit!
The Gore supporters who wanted to play radical and vote Nader out of some sort of 21st-century liberal paternalism can redeem themselves by voting for the guy they apparently wanted in the first place.
Real Nader supporters would still vote Nader. Haven't you even listened to anything the man said? I frankly don't think many Gore people voted Nader, whether they promised to or not. I think they made big promises and just like their candidate Gore, promptly ignored them.
The one good thing I can see coming out of this election is that _both_ parties are blatantly lame-duck parties. There is no consensus, no majority, no mandate. I hope the government stays in deadlock without causing too much damage for the next four years. And if the government refuses to give money to Nader next time around, I will just have to build it into my meager budget, save up, and give him money (and vital time and effort) myself. Screw the government.
Completely eliminate the income for the 'media' that is now equal to the cost of flipping a bunch of bits from 1 to 0, and the current music industry has _no_ model for income, yet a market remains for some kind of product, and that's not going to change- people treat music like it was a _staple_, I've seen people rating it right up there with food and water as necessities for their existence.
That said- as a previous resident of mp3.com's indie artist community I can tell you that ubitiquous music does NOT equal the current industry. It's not that places like mp3.com only have poor music- there's a mix, from the awful to the phenomenal. A lot of the stuff there is quirky but appealing- sort of unprofessional but honest. Some of it is fully 'label quality' in every sense, particularly for genres with poor record label support in the first place.
The problem is sorting through all that, and it's a problem few music listeners want to deal with. As technology advances it'll become easier to do this- but we're still talking about traditional music business models, in a way.
The thing is, musicians are not wholly reliant on IP. The biz is, but for all that IP, typically several to a lot of musicians, engineers, techs got together and produced the music that you listen to. The work they put in, to do that, is what can be charged for- and if the major label biz goes down the tubes and the world is rendered 'musicless', there will be immediate demand for something new. People won't sit around copying old music back and forth on Napster forever- they'll inevitably start to wonder what else is out there. That's the point where a performer- or studio player, or engineer- can start to earn possibly a quite respectable wage for practicing their specialised craft. If you need a guitar solo on a song you can't just hire a guy off the street- you seek out someone with that skill, and it makes a difference who you pick. You'll want someone who's got time to do the work, who you can afford, who can do just the right solo, who can work with your requirements.
It's really not that different from, say, hiring a web design professional. You could fake doing that in Frontpage or Word but it would be _awful_. How many people really need to produce- not read, _produce_- a really professional webpage? And yet the skills are in demand and it's commonly accepted that the most skilled performers get paid handsomely.
Get rid of the existing music industry and you'll see similar conditions in music. Currently things are so distorted by weird expectations and ruthless control of the means of distribution and publicity that there's little correlation between skilled music performers and wealth, but in the computer industry (particularly Web stuff- much of which is effectively public domain and a matter of taste), there is that correlation. Kill the existing industry and leave nothing but rampant 'piracy' in its place and it will quickly become more feasible for skilled musicians to practice their trade and earn money, just like web designers, on the basis of their skill.
Yet, at the same time, look at how many stories people are telling of "Oh, I had a good idea and the college was fighting me for it- so I dropped out and made a company and now I am Cisco" *g*
Okay, so that's exaggerated. But there are two points here:
- As 'brain drain' from universities continue and corporate requirements on universities tighten, universities will be less and less able to provide an education that is worth money in the real world. It'll be like waving an McSE when applying for a serious admin job: the university degree will be evidence that the person isn't good enough to have dropped out and gone commercial.
- By the same token, there's a subtler effect that I think is being largely ignored. 20 years ago it would have seemed radical to drop out of college and start a business- now you have colorful characters like Larry Ellison fulminating and inciting students to do this, AND he is an unbelievably rich man. It's becoming culturally expected for the _really_ sharp individuals to drop out and strike out on their own. This means that for the first time that I'm aware of, there is serious backing for a person's decision to drop out- and a lot of evidence to show doubters. It used to be a stigma. Now, if you're smart and trying to start a business (rather than dropping out due to apathy) your public image can be that of a potential Larry Ellison, and you can quote Ellison and recite lists of billionare dropouts to justify your decision.
- Finally, at the same time as this cultural change, the universities themselves are making it substantially more difficult to justify using them as a step in your personal growth- not only is it very expensive, not only is it increasingly unlikely that you'll get anything resembling an unbiased and truthful education, but if you are trying to get a head start on your career by using your youth and energy to think and learn and invent new things to build your future on, the university will pirate your work out from under you. This forces you to only do useless work at university- in some cases it may force you to stop thinking entirely for fear that the uni will lay claim to what you invented on your own time. So you are paying them to impede your growth, progress and learning.
I dropped out of college myself- over 10 years ago- 'before it was fashionable' you might say, but I could also say 'before it was obligatory'! Honestly, reading this thread and the things people are saying, it's horrifying. I hope people are ready to educate themselves, and willing to put in some effort towards getting a well rounded education as well- because at this point I couldn't recommend higher education for anybody. Yes, it's hurtin' as things stand, funding is desperately bad and dedicated teachers etc. deserve some sympathy- but when you look at these appalling IP costs and risks the whole thing reminds me of the record industry- i.e. "just say YAAAAH! NO WAY!"