There's another reason too. States taxing people in other states will tend to tax the bejeezus out of them because they can't vote. Thus, Alaska might place a huge sales tax on oranges but none on salmon or snowballs. New York a few years back got into similar trouble trying to tax people who live in New Jersey who had family members who worked in NYC. This is a very bad thing! Give politicians the ability to tax people who can't vote them out and soon they'll be slaves. Didn't some country once go to war over an issue like that?;-)
--Brian
Go have a look on eBay (especially if your laptop is old). They have a huge selection of old and busted laptops there ready for scavenging for parts and at amazingly reasonable prices too.
I have not given up hope that some of those folks will catch on to the idea that PVRs are no more an enemy of cable TV than the VCR was the enemy of the movie studios back in the late 1970's when they were fighting them just like the RIAA and the MPAA are now.
HOWEVER...much of the technology I have seen out there (not so much including TiVo although they have their problems too) is horrible. I( bought a Dish TV PVR built into mysatellite box a year or so ago and it sucks big time. The sales lady said it was a "TiVo" but it's some thing they cobbled together. It looks like it was designed bu marketing dweebs looking for "check boxes" on some featrure comparison and not by anyone who ever designed a piece of software (or used a PVR) before. Worse, since it's built into my satellite box I can't just throw the thing away. Instread, I bought a TiVo and put it on top of the thing and aside from having to override the nasty Dish PVR, things are good. Between the lame implementations and the crippling of functionality because of paranoid fears of piracy and loss of control the content producers and distributors are really missing the boat.
It's called "politics". Consider who the powerful people inside the RIAA are and who the powerful people inside individual record companies are. 100% of them are people whose departmental or corporate incomes derive from current lines of business...selling CDs, selling tapes, making music videos, licensing lunchboxes, and so on. Who in those companies or in the RIAA generally makes their living by selling online music? Nobody that's who. There's no constituency for those would would benefit and almost everybody is threatened within their companies by the advent of digital music distribution. Even if there were loads of money to be made that way (and I think there is), it is seen by those guys as "competition" with whatever it is that they are doing today. Add that to the general corporate attitude toward change of ANY kind and you get the kind of lunacy we see at the RIAA.
It's just like the resistance that IBM had to the IBM PC way back in the old days. The Selectric typewriter divsion HATED the PC because it threatened their precious typewriter business. We are seeing the same thing here.
I wouldn't be worried at all if I were a cable TV company. All that TiVos, home networks, and portable players do is let you watch your cable TV in more and better ways.That means more hours of TV delivered per household per day, more ad impressions per day, and more value for the feed. How could that be bad?
Because people could copy/pirate the feed? No. If somoene wants to seriously pirate a movie they can go down to the store, buy a DVD and they are home free. If they want to pirate a TV signal they can just pump it into an A/D converter and out it goes. All these stupid restrictions and DRM garbage do is keep regular folks from doing useful and legitimate things with their feeds, and it makes me pretty mad!
Because TV programmers like to control when people watch what? I know that the programmers love the idea of controlling what times people see programs, but it's not their call. I want to see thigns when I want to see them. It's not their call and it shouldn't be. They are making content, not running my life...are they?
If I were working for Comcast I would be giving away a TiVo with home networking to every customer right out of the box, and banish all DRM. A high value product like that means higher revenues. It just means looking at the market a little differently.
We would still be using ancient 110 baud teletype machines.
face it, the UN is a bunch of clueless politicians who weren't elected by anyone and who presume to speak for the rest of us and who presume to tells us all what we can and can't do without our consent.
Tell me again what makes you think that they know anything about the Internet or would have any more insight as to how it ought to be administered than the lowliest newbie? Remember, they are supposed to be experts in international relations and look how bad they screwed that up!
--Brian
The main reason that companies don't have good mechanisms for handling the disposal of source code after death is that the legal environment that rules such things was created long before the advent of software and the assumption is that all of the assets of the company have a fixed value which will be liquidated and distributed to stockholders when the company dies. Source code by contrast can be distributed to many people as easily as one, and it has no value at all unless there's someone (or many people) to bring it to life. That doesn't fit the model of real estate, buildings, machine tools, warehoused product, and office furniture.
Personally, I thinhk that the idea of looking up the lawyer who handled the dissolution of the corporation and finding out who might have any rights to the property is a good idea. If you document a reasonable search and you still can't find anyone who might have rights to the stuff you might declare it to be abandoned property and take control on the basis of property rules like the folks who salvage sunken ships do. I imagine a lawyer would be able to help you out there.
--Brian
The problem is worse than that. There are frequently cases where the information required to come up with a proper translation is simply not present in the source text. For example, in English (unless you are south of the Mason-Dixon) there's no plural second-person pronoun, but in many other languages there are such words, so when the source text says "You should vote for the Republicans." there's no way to tell whether "you" refers to one person or many. Likewise, in some languages there is social relationship content in the way words are used. You might use different words for the same thing based on whether you are talking to a dog, a child, a pretty girl, a co-worker, a boss or an emperor. If there's no indication in the source text then you aren't going to be able to tell which word to use.
The only way those kinds of problems is to incent a HAL 9000ish AI that actually understands what language means at an abstract level and can reason out what is happening. That of course would have to include a vast amount of contextual information and so far nobody has been able to build anything even remotely like that.
I have nothing against machine translation, but like every other technology it has its limits.
--Brian
In case anyone wants to build their own PAR, there's a company I visited a while back with all the guts you need to build a variety of audio storage, time shifting, etc. devices: http://www.portalplayer.com/
Enjoy!
Whether it's good or bad, it's DUMB. Any scheme that allows music to be broadcast on the radio, distributed into millions of computers, and sold on millions of CDs with the idea that not a single copy will ever get out of the control of the record companies is just plain stupid. Any scheme that relies on 100% protection in order to work is doomed to failure.
Better yet, any scheme in which the music industry refuses to sell their music on reasonable terms is going to generate piract like...well, like Napster/LimeWire/Kazaa, etc.
> The US is and claims to be a global leader. It
> should set the standard on the environment. The
> fact that it doesn't live up to that is
> puzzling.
But the US *IS* leading. It just isn't leading in the direction that eco-freaks insist is always right...which is of course the direction that allows eco-freaks to tell everyone else in the world what to do, waht not to do, and how to do it.
Not so surprisingly, the exact same people who are "experts" on climatology telling us that they should be allowed to rule the world and crush the American economy in order to save the world from warm weather and the same people who a decade or two ago were "experts" on economics who told us that they have to be allowed to rule the world and crush the American economy in order to save the world from poverty. When confronted by facts that deny their premise such people either ignore the facts or come up with some new lame argument to justify their megalomania.
I have no doubt that you want to be led by someone. I have no doubt that you want them to lead you to some socialist or eco-utopia where you will be told what to do by a dictator. Just don't be surprised when the United States lead the world in a very different direction.
I can know what is good for them because they are human beings and human beings don't deserve to be ruled by murderous dictators. What makes you think that you know that they should be happy with their lot with Saddam?
I hear from anti-war types all the time claiming to "support the troops" while they oppose the war. The idea of deciding not to go to war may or may not make sense before the shooting starts, but once you cross the boundary the best way to get the most troops killed is for the war to be fought in a half-committed manner which gives the enemy encouragement to hold on and holds our guys back from winning. Promoting a policy which results in the most of our troops killed is not what I call "supporting" them.
Winning a war can be a good thing. Refraining from getting into a war can be a good thing too. Taking on all of the hazards of a war (the bad relations, the diplomatic costs, the deaths of people all around, and of course risk of the unknown) and insisting on not getting any of the benefits of victory (like liberating Iraq, removing a terrorist haven, cleaning up the WMDs, etc.) is far worse than any of the other ways of going about things.
The whole point of establishing standard defaults is to get rid of the "EULA for every sale" problem. When you buy an apple or a book we don't have to read and agree to the whole UCC in order to buy the thing. One the other hand, if someone were to sell apples (or books) under some other set of contractual rules (like "You have to eat it on the premises." or "You have to keep the contents secret.") that's perfectly fine too. The question is what the right defaults ought to be, departures from which would require EULAs and so on. Right now the RIAA and friends don't want this market to develop so they are insisting on unreasonable rules in order to prevent the market from developing at all.
You can't have a deal with people who are uninterested in dealing, so that means that the only way to get the stuff is piracy. The alternative to piracy is not DRM, it is selling the stuff on reasonable terms and DRM is completely unreasonable. It doesn't make the media valuable enough to buy and doesn't protect the IP owners either.
We learned this 20 years ago in the software industry when we realized that copy protection schemes were stupid and we got rid of them.
You are right that we rarely see a moral justification for intellectual property laws, and that has always been of great concern to me. Lack of a moral framework in which such laws can be understood means that we are just haggling over the mechanisms of the law rather than what the law should be. I think that the reason for this is that usually it has been lawyers driving the discussion and they are generally concerned with what they can get away with under the law rather than what the law ought to be.
Be that as it may, the moral underpinnings of intellectual property rights are the same as those of other property rights (which alas, too many lawyers and others have abandoned any moral justification for), namely that people have a right to control themselves and the fruits of their labor, just as John Locke outlined in his books 300 years ago. As I see it, anyone who does any kind of work, whether it is making shoes or writing songs has a right to set the terms on which he exchanges his goods for whatever kind of compensation the recipients choose to exchange. that said, there is great advantage in establishing standard kinds of agreements which are well understood and easy to agree to and enforce, and as I see it, this ought to be the grounds of the debate on how intellectual materials are exchanged. Should the default be "distribute anything for free no matter what"? Should it be "Never use it in any way that the producers (or their agents) approve ahead of time."? Both of those are clearly wrong choices as defaults. I think that the traditional copyright defaults were pretty good (requiring payment for copyrighted works at market prices and fair use of the works once you own them). The problem is that the media monopolies don't like the idea of market competition so they don't offer their stuff for sale in the first place. They'd make a lot more money if they actually started selling their wares on the open market than they do now as they cower before the notion that they might have to compete on the open market.
Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that nothing substantial changed for a thousand years, and the Church had everyone convinced that the the end of the world was right around the corner. Under such a an environment it should come as no surprise that the future was uniformly considered either with dread or ignored. Maybe that was it.;-)
I imagine you'll feel an urgent need to take steps when ARIN announces that anybody who doesn't support v6 won't get any more v4 IP addresses, and an even more urgent need when they start taking away address blocks from those who aren't taking steps to support v6. Just a thought.
Interestingly enough this analysis left out what I think is the most important factor in determining what will happen in this arena and that is whether there's a non-pirate alternative to the "darknet". The lack of a legal large volume, reasonably priced, non-crippled service that sells a gigantic library of stuff drives people to illegal sharing services (which offers all of that except the legal part). So much an issue that I think that this pressure toward piracy generated by lack of legal alternatives is even stronger than the fact that the file sharing systems are free!
I know that I would buy media online if the idiots who owned it would just bother to take my money. The problem here is not so much taht people pirate media, it's that the media companies don't provide any reasonable alternative. (Aside from "Wait for ten years until we get our act together and until then shut the hell up you whining customers!" that is.)
A. Will never actually substantially stop piracy because you can always violate the protection.
B. It is a nightmare for honest folks who do pay, which makes DRMed products inferior to non-DRMed ones.
We all went through this back in the early 1980's with software. If you recall, back then there were copy protection schemes all over the place and in the end it became obvious that A&B above were both true. The solution to this (which I don't hear often enough!) is for the media companies to start actually selling content in a usable format unencumbered by stupid DRM schemes and that will do two things:
1. Start making them some money so they will not see the digital media world as an entire threatening thing, but a profit center instead.
2. It will devastate piracy operations by removing substantial numbers of people (particularly the ones who would otherwise not mind paying for media) from pirate systems. Right now there's no alternative to piracy, so people become pirates.
Of course they could then go after the big time piracy outfits and be attacking the actual pirates rather than otherwise honest folks who just want to get the goodies but are not allowed to do it legally.
The only question is how long it will take the media companies to figure out A&B above. The software industry figured it out in a couple of years. Let's hope it doesn't take them a couple of decades.
Help the US economy compared to what? Either the services are worth paying for or they aren't. If they aren't then it's a waste of money for the government to pay for them. If not then the government isn't required.
The TVA is actually a good example of why having the government build loads of expensive infrastructure that was unjustified by any rational economic benefit. Politicians love to buy votes with public funds, and that's the real justification for the TVA.
It's easy to look back and say "Look at all of those businesses and homes that wouldn't otherwise be here except for subsidies. What's harder to see is all of the economic growth that was stunted through taxation and regulation and never developed at all. Of course those effects are diffused all over the country, and consist of non-existent things which would have otherwise existed, but that doesn't mean that the effects are unreal or that the TVA generated a net economic benefit.
If politicians actually wanted to generate economic development then they would show that they are serious and spend their OWN money and learn something about business rather than just patting themselves on the back for spending public funds for "development".
The next step of course will be for Microsoft to close the PC as well. Have you not spelled the Palladium coffee? You won't be able to compute or communicate without permission from Redmond. Nice huh?
It's not "the rich" who rule, it's the lawyers and political slimeballs (oops, I should optimize out those repeating expressions). Rich folks get screwed just as badly as anyone else when the government grabs unconstitutional powers as it has been doing for the past 50 years.
Slashdot Mirror
There's another reason too. States taxing people in other states will tend to tax the bejeezus out of them because they can't vote. Thus, Alaska might place a huge sales tax on oranges but none on salmon or snowballs. New York a few years back got into similar trouble trying to tax people who live in New Jersey who had family members who worked in NYC. This is a very bad thing! Give politicians the ability to tax people who can't vote them out and soon they'll be slaves. Didn't some country once go to war over an issue like that? ;-)
--Brian
--Brian
HOWEVER...much of the technology I have seen out there (not so much including TiVo although they have their problems too) is horrible. I( bought a Dish TV PVR built into mysatellite box a year or so ago and it sucks big time. The sales lady said it was a "TiVo" but it's some thing they cobbled together. It looks like it was designed bu marketing dweebs looking for "check boxes" on some featrure comparison and not by anyone who ever designed a piece of software (or used a PVR) before. Worse, since it's built into my satellite box I can't just throw the thing away. Instread, I bought a TiVo and put it on top of the thing and aside from having to override the nasty Dish PVR, things are good. Between the lame implementations and the crippling of functionality because of paranoid fears of piracy and loss of control the content producers and distributors are really missing the boat.
--Brian
It's just like the resistance that IBM had to the IBM PC way back in the old days. The Selectric typewriter divsion HATED the PC because it threatened their precious typewriter business. We are seeing the same thing here.
--Brian
Because people could copy/pirate the feed? No. If somoene wants to seriously pirate a movie they can go down to the store, buy a DVD and they are home free. If they want to pirate a TV signal they can just pump it into an A/D converter and out it goes. All these stupid restrictions and DRM garbage do is keep regular folks from doing useful and legitimate things with their feeds, and it makes me pretty mad!
Because TV programmers like to control when people watch what? I know that the programmers love the idea of controlling what times people see programs, but it's not their call. I want to see thigns when I want to see them. It's not their call and it shouldn't be. They are making content, not running my life...are they?
If I were working for Comcast I would be giving away a TiVo with home networking to every customer right out of the box, and banish all DRM. A high value product like that means higher revenues. It just means looking at the market a little differently.
Change is good! Embrace it, don't fear it!
--Brian
We would still be using ancient 110 baud teletype machines. face it, the UN is a bunch of clueless politicians who weren't elected by anyone and who presume to speak for the rest of us and who presume to tells us all what we can and can't do without our consent. Tell me again what makes you think that they know anything about the Internet or would have any more insight as to how it ought to be administered than the lowliest newbie? Remember, they are supposed to be experts in international relations and look how bad they screwed that up! --Brian
The main reason that companies don't have good mechanisms for handling the disposal of source code after death is that the legal environment that rules such things was created long before the advent of software and the assumption is that all of the assets of the company have a fixed value which will be liquidated and distributed to stockholders when the company dies. Source code by contrast can be distributed to many people as easily as one, and it has no value at all unless there's someone (or many people) to bring it to life. That doesn't fit the model of real estate, buildings, machine tools, warehoused product, and office furniture. Personally, I thinhk that the idea of looking up the lawyer who handled the dissolution of the corporation and finding out who might have any rights to the property is a good idea. If you document a reasonable search and you still can't find anyone who might have rights to the stuff you might declare it to be abandoned property and take control on the basis of property rules like the folks who salvage sunken ships do. I imagine a lawyer would be able to help you out there. --Brian
The problem is worse than that. There are frequently cases where the information required to come up with a proper translation is simply not present in the source text. For example, in English (unless you are south of the Mason-Dixon) there's no plural second-person pronoun, but in many other languages there are such words, so when the source text says "You should vote for the Republicans." there's no way to tell whether "you" refers to one person or many. Likewise, in some languages there is social relationship content in the way words are used. You might use different words for the same thing based on whether you are talking to a dog, a child, a pretty girl, a co-worker, a boss or an emperor. If there's no indication in the source text then you aren't going to be able to tell which word to use. The only way those kinds of problems is to incent a HAL 9000ish AI that actually understands what language means at an abstract level and can reason out what is happening. That of course would have to include a vast amount of contextual information and so far nobody has been able to build anything even remotely like that. I have nothing against machine translation, but like every other technology it has its limits. --Brian
In case anyone wants to build their own PAR, there's a company I visited a while back with all the guts you need to build a variety of audio storage, time shifting, etc. devices: http://www.portalplayer.com/ Enjoy!
Better yet, any scheme in which the music industry refuses to sell their music on reasonable terms is going to generate piract like...well, like Napster/LimeWire/Kazaa, etc.
> should set the standard on the environment. The
> fact that it doesn't live up to that is
> puzzling.
But the US *IS* leading. It just isn't leading in the direction that eco-freaks insist is always right...which is of course the direction that allows eco-freaks to tell everyone else in the world what to do, waht not to do, and how to do it.
Not so surprisingly, the exact same people who are "experts" on climatology telling us that they should be allowed to rule the world and crush the American economy in order to save the world from warm weather and the same people who a decade or two ago were "experts" on economics who told us that they have to be allowed to rule the world and crush the American economy in order to save the world from poverty. When confronted by facts that deny their premise such people either ignore the facts or come up with some new lame argument to justify their megalomania.
I have no doubt that you want to be led by someone. I have no doubt that you want them to lead you to some socialist or eco-utopia where you will be told what to do by a dictator. Just don't be surprised when the United States lead the world in a very different direction.
--Brian
Now could we PLEASE get back on topic?
Winning a war can be a good thing. Refraining from getting into a war can be a good thing too. Taking on all of the hazards of a war (the bad relations, the diplomatic costs, the deaths of people all around, and of course risk of the unknown) and insisting on not getting any of the benefits of victory (like liberating Iraq, removing a terrorist haven, cleaning up the WMDs, etc.) is far worse than any of the other ways of going about things.
You can't have a deal with people who are uninterested in dealing, so that means that the only way to get the stuff is piracy. The alternative to piracy is not DRM, it is selling the stuff on reasonable terms and DRM is completely unreasonable. It doesn't make the media valuable enough to buy and doesn't protect the IP owners either.
We learned this 20 years ago in the software industry when we realized that copy protection schemes were stupid and we got rid of them.
Be that as it may, the moral underpinnings of intellectual property rights are the same as those of other property rights (which alas, too many lawyers and others have abandoned any moral justification for), namely that people have a right to control themselves and the fruits of their labor, just as John Locke outlined in his books 300 years ago. As I see it, anyone who does any kind of work, whether it is making shoes or writing songs has a right to set the terms on which he exchanges his goods for whatever kind of compensation the recipients choose to exchange. that said, there is great advantage in establishing standard kinds of agreements which are well understood and easy to agree to and enforce, and as I see it, this ought to be the grounds of the debate on how intellectual materials are exchanged. Should the default be "distribute anything for free no matter what"? Should it be "Never use it in any way that the producers (or their agents) approve ahead of time."? Both of those are clearly wrong choices as defaults. I think that the traditional copyright defaults were pretty good (requiring payment for copyrighted works at market prices and fair use of the works once you own them). The problem is that the media monopolies don't like the idea of market competition so they don't offer their stuff for sale in the first place. They'd make a lot more money if they actually started selling their wares on the open market than they do now as they cower before the notion that they might have to compete on the open market.
Cloning a "pipedream"? What good is cloning? The old-fashioned way is cheaper and a lot more fun.
Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that nothing substantial changed for a thousand years, and the Church had everyone convinced that the the end of the world was right around the corner. Under such a an environment it should come as no surprise that the future was uniformly considered either with dread or ignored. Maybe that was it. ;-)
I imagine you'll feel an urgent need to take steps when ARIN announces that anybody who doesn't support v6 won't get any more v4 IP addresses, and an even more urgent need when they start taking away address blocks from those who aren't taking steps to support v6. Just a thought.
I know that I would buy media online if the idiots who owned it would just bother to take my money. The problem here is not so much taht people pirate media, it's that the media companies don't provide any reasonable alternative. (Aside from "Wait for ten years until we get our act together and until then shut the hell up you whining customers!" that is.)
A. Will never actually substantially stop piracy because you can always violate the protection.
B. It is a nightmare for honest folks who do pay, which makes DRMed products inferior to non-DRMed ones.
We all went through this back in the early 1980's with software. If you recall, back then there were copy protection schemes all over the place and in the end it became obvious that A&B above were both true. The solution to this (which I don't hear often enough!) is for the media companies to start actually selling content in a usable format unencumbered by stupid DRM schemes and that will do two things:
1. Start making them some money so they will not see the digital media world as an entire threatening thing, but a profit center instead.
2. It will devastate piracy operations by removing substantial numbers of people (particularly the ones who would otherwise not mind paying for media) from pirate systems. Right now there's no alternative to piracy, so people become pirates.
Of course they could then go after the big time piracy outfits and be attacking the actual pirates rather than otherwise honest folks who just want to get the goodies but are not allowed to do it legally.
The only question is how long it will take the media companies to figure out A&B above. The software industry figured it out in a couple of years. Let's hope it doesn't take them a couple of decades.
Help the US economy compared to what? Either the services are worth paying for or they aren't. If they aren't then it's a waste of money for the government to pay for them. If not then the government isn't required.
The TVA is actually a good example of why having the government build loads of expensive infrastructure that was unjustified by any rational economic benefit. Politicians love to buy votes with public funds, and that's the real justification for the TVA.
It's easy to look back and say "Look at all of those businesses and homes that wouldn't otherwise be here except for subsidies. What's harder to see is all of the economic growth that was stunted through taxation and regulation and never developed at all. Of course those effects are diffused all over the country, and consist of non-existent things which would have otherwise existed, but that doesn't mean that the effects are unreal or that the TVA generated a net economic benefit.
If politicians actually wanted to generate economic development then they would show that they are serious and spend their OWN money and learn something about business rather than just patting themselves on the back for spending public funds for "development".
The next step of course will be for Microsoft to close the PC as well. Have you not spelled the Palladium coffee? You won't be able to compute or communicate without permission from Redmond. Nice huh?
Become the personal friend of a politician? How could you live with yourself in the morning?
It's not "the rich" who rule, it's the lawyers and political slimeballs (oops, I should optimize out those repeating expressions). Rich folks get screwed just as badly as anyone else when the government grabs unconstitutional powers as it has been doing for the past 50 years.
Yeah, so does anthrax, but that doesn't mean we should sit back and let "them" feed it to us without making a stink.