OK, I posted this a week or so ago, but this story is just too relevant not to re-post it. This is one of my favorite topics, and I really think what I've got in mind here is the way to go with all this...
The corporations are going to realize, either through enlightenment or exasperation, that a certain amount of pirating is going to happen no matter what, and all their lawsuits and dumbass anti-theft schemes just annoy and alienate a sizeable segment of their customers. And then they're going to realize that it's not really a bad deal for them... people are still going to buy real product, and bootleg MP3s can be great exposure. They'll have to grow up and take the bad with the good. Makes me want to waggle a finger at them and remind them that life isn't fair, then give them a little pat on the head and tell them to run along... the little tyrannical ballbusting corporate stinkers. They're so cute at this age, aren't they?
Now, of course, when 2.2 terabyte credit-card-size storage cards become widely available, and your common Swatch holds 400 gigs, then all bets are off. But there's enough time between now and then to implement the only system that can save the corporations' sorry asses, as far as I can figure...
You already pay $40/month for, let's face it, lousy fucking cable TV service that's unreliable and offers you no choice whatsoever. What a joke. But most of us keep paying it. Personally, I don't, but if I could pay $10/month and only get Fox (for The Simpsons and Futurama), Discovery, History, Bravo, AMC, Comedy and the Learning Channel, I'd be a happy bastard. But I'm not going to pay another $30/month for a whole pile of pathetic sports, news, almost impossibly stupid MTV shows and something called the WB Network which I'm under doctor's orders not to ever even look at. Oh... but sorry, got off on a tangent there - that's GooseKirk Rant #47. Back to...
Check this out: If I could pay, for example, $60/month for full-on media services... if I could watch any TV show anytime I want, any movie anytime I want, and listen to any music anytime I want, I would never download another illicit MP3 as long as I live. Make this media service available via DSL, cable and broadband roaming wireless, and bam, you've just effectively - not completely, but effectively - wiped out piracy.
YOU TAKE AWAY THE INCENTIVE. Why would I bother owning any physical media whatsoever? Why would I waste my time copying multiple gigs of MP3s and DVDs from my friends? I'm going to want this service no matter what -- it's cable TV, the video store and the music store all at the touch of a button, with all the new stuff available to me the second it's released and all the old stuff available any time I want. Every episode of Futurama, every song by Charles Mingus, every John Cusack movie all professionally encoded and cataloged and awaiting my command. No more schlepping around crates of CDs, no more messed up tapes and discs from the video store, no more late fees, no more unavailable titles, no more accidentally trashing or burning or theft of entire collections, no more missing a favorite show... I've seen the future, brothers and sisters, and it is cool. And add a Transmeta receiver with broadband wandering wireless service, and I'm good for home, the office, the car, jogging, whatever. And, oh yeah, make it a service that runs on top of my current internet provider, please.
The business side of a project like this... I dunno. I'm sure it could be worked out. Out of a $60/month fee, say $10 goes to overhead for whoever runs the service, and $50 gets divided up among all the artists who created content on some sort of a per-watch/listen scale. I realize this raises more questions than it answers, but I'm sure the particulars could be hammered out. Hey, I'm the visionary, I leave the accounting to the eggheads, alright?
OK, there's some privacy issues here, too, I know, I know. The Corporation is going to know everything I watch and listen to. Well, I'm of the camp that the US Gov't needs to pull its head out of its ass and enact some EU-style laws, and pronto. Sorry to my libertarian pals, but I think it's abundantly clear by now that the private sector is not going to play nice on its own, and a little governmental smacking around is occasionally in order. Microsoft. But that's neither here nor there. Personally, I got no beef with marketers knowing that I like good things and hate bad stupid things, and to please stop trying to sell me the bad stupid things and I don't care if Oliver Stone did make the football movie, I'm still not going to watch it, and I'm not going to watch his "WWF Smackdown" movie in 2012, either, so if I have to watch that idiotic commercial one more time...
So what would this system actually be like?
1. It has to be bilateral open-access. Anyone who pays their monthly fee can access anything, and anyone who publishes can get a piece of the action.
2. It's gotta be flat-rate. Micropayments might make more sense, but IMHO consumers just won't go for it. Flat-rate rules.
3. Royalties have to paid out in an equitable manner that's highly resistant to abuse (ah-ha! that makes it really tricky, eh?).
So let's give this a shot:
I think ye olde public/private key encryption is called for. Let's call our secure audio/video streaming format "MP5", and say that it's open-source. Anyone can use FreeMP5 to freely encode their A/V stream and post it on their website or FTP or MP5 server.
But when I encode my MP5, if I want to make money off it, I register it with a public database with my public key... and there's probably a nominal fee for this, like a buck a song or ten cents per minute of video. I don't know who manages these databases, but it should work something like how the domain name servers work now (only... a little smoother, hopefully).
The software I use to play back the MP5 stream unlocks the stream with my private key and hits a counter on the server for it. After some consideration, I think the creators should be paid per second a slice of the flat-rate pie. So if I pay $50/month for media service and I listen to and watch nothing but Peter Gabriel for a whole month straight, Pete gets all $50, but if I watch a straight day of CNN in there, then Pete gets like $48 and CNN gets $2. And if I listen to one Puff Daddy song in there (what are the odds), the Puffster gets like.4 cents. And I bet he hates being called Puffster. (No, I didn't work out the math - it's just relative, for illustration purposes)
I guess in this system, our media service provider would be the maintainer of the database. This could be separate from both our ISP and the provider of the DSL/cable/wireless connection. I still don't fully comprehend how the whole domain name debacle is working, but again, that seems to be the sort of model I'd be after, where if one service refused to log my MP5 song called "Tits.com" because they thought it was offensive, I could just find someone else who'd do it and the experience for both the artist and consumer would be seamless because they'd interoperate like DNS. Does that make any sense?
Of course all this will require some heavy duty infrastructure... but what the hell, in another ten years we'll have it anyway... gotta use it for something!
>where does the small, innovative content producer fit into the scheme?
I've been thinking about that one, and I'd even go further than what you suggest and say that a corporate hegemony over such a system would be flat-out unacceptable. It wouldn't be much different than what we live with now, OK, but still - I get warm fuzzies thinking about the boundless opportunities before us for subverting our corporate oppressors. No, really. I do. I'm that kinda guy.
So I don't have the Ultimate Solution for this yet. I know what the properties of such a system are:
1. It has to be bilateral open-access. Anyone who pays their monthly fee can access anything, and anyone who publishes can get a piece of the action.
2. It's gotta be flat-rate. Micropayments might make more sense, but IMHO consumers just won't go for it. Flat-rate rules.
3. Royalties have to paid out in an equitable manner that's highly resistant to abuse (ah-ha! that makes it really tricky, eh?).
So let's give this a shot:
I think ye olde public/private key encryption is called for. Let's call our secure audio/video streaming format "MP5", and say that it's open-source. Anyone can use FreeMP5 to freely encode their A/V stream and post it on their website or FTP or MP5 server.
But when I encode my MP5, if I want to make money off it, I register it with a public database with my public key... and there's probably a nominal fee for this, like a buck a song or ten cents per minute of video. I don't know who manages these databases, but it should work something like how the domain name servers work now (only... a little smoother, hopefully).
The software I use to playback the MP5 stream sends a private key to this database, unlocks the stream and hits a counter for it. After some consideration, I think the creators should be paid per second a slice of the flat-rate pie. So if I pay $50/month for media service and I listen to and watch nothing but Peter Gabriel for a whole month straight, Pete gets all $50, but if I watch a straight day of CNN in there, then Pete gets like $48 and CNN gets $2. And if I listen to one Puff Daddy song in there (what are the odds), the Puffster gets like.4 cents. And I bet he hates being called Puffster. (No, I didn't work out the math - it's just relative, for illustration purposes)
I guess in this system, our media service provider would be the maintainer of the database. This could be separate from both our ISP and the provider of the DSL/cable/wireless connection. I still don't fully comprehend how the whole domain name debacle is working, but again, that seems to be the sort of model I'd be after, where if one service refused to log my MP5 song called "Tits.com" because they thought it was offensive, I could just find someone else who'd do it and the experience for both the artist and consumer would be seamless because they'd interoperate like DNS. Does that make any sense?
Of course all this will require some heavy duty infrastructure... but what the hell, in another ten years we'll have it anyway... gotta use it for something!
The corporations are going to realize, either through enlightenment or exasperation, that a certain amount of pirating is going to happen no matter what, and all their lawsuits and dumbass anti-theft schemes just annoy and alienate a sizeable segment of their customers. And then they're going to realize that it's not really a bad deal for them... people are still going to buy real product, and bootleg MP3s can be great exposure. They'll have to grow up and take the bad with the good. Makes me want to waggle a finger at them and remind them that life isn't fair, then give them a little pat on the head and tell them to run along... the little tyrannical ballbusting corporate stinkers. They're so cute at this age, aren't they?
Now, of course, when 2.2 terabyte credit-card-size storage cards become widely available, and your common Swatch holds 400 gigs, then all bets are off. But there's enough time between now and then to implement the only system that can save the corporations' sorry asses, as far as I can figure...
You already pay $40/month for, let's face it, lousy fucking cable TV service that's unreliable and offers you no choice whatsoever. What a joke. But most of us keep paying it. Personally, I don't, but if I could pay $10/month and only get Fox (for The Simpsons and Futurama), Discovery, History, Bravo, AMC, Comedy and the Learning Channel, I'd be a happy bastard. But I'm not going to pay another $30/month for a whole pile of pathetic sports, news, almost impossibly stupid MTV shows and something called the WB Network which I'm under doctor's orders not to ever even look at. Oh... but sorry, got off on a tangent there - that's GooseKirk Rant #47. Back to...
Check this out: If I could pay, for example, $60/month for full-on media services... if I could watch any TV show anytime I want, any movie anytime I want, and listen to any music anytime I want, I would never download another illicit MP3 as long as I live. Make this media service available via DSL, cable and broadband roaming wireless, and bam, you've just effectively - not completely, but effectively - wiped out piracy.
YOU TAKE AWAY THE INCENTIVE. Why would I bother owning any physical media whatsoever? Why would I waste my time copying multiple gigs of MP3s and DVDs from my friends? I'm going to want this service no matter what -- it's cable TV, the video store and the music store all at the touch of a button, with all the new stuff available to me the second it's released and all the old stuff available any time I want. Every episode of Futurama, every song by Charles Mingus, every John Cusack movie all professionally encoded and cataloged and awaiting my command. No more schlepping around crates of CDs, no more messed up tapes and discs from the video store, no more late fees, no more unavailable titles, no more accidentally trashing or burning or theft of entire collections, no more missing a favorite show... I've seen the future, brothers and sisters, and it is cool. And add a Transmeta receiver with broadband wandering wireless service, and I'm good for home, the office, the car, jogging, whatever. And, oh yeah, make it a service that runs on top of my current internet provider, please.
The business side of a project like this... I dunno. I'm sure it could be worked out. Out of a $60/month fee, say $10 goes to overhead for whoever runs the service, and $50 gets divided up among all the artists who created content on some sort of a per-watch/listen scale. I realize this raises more questions than it answers, but I'm sure the particulars could be hammered out. Hey, I'm the visionary, I leave the accounting to the eggheads, alright?
OK, there's some privacy issues here, too, I know, I know. The Corporation is going to know everything I watch and listen to. Well, I'm of the camp that the US Gov't needs to pull its head out of its ass and enact some EU-style laws, and pronto. Sorry to my libertarian pals, but I think it's abundantly clear by now that the private sector is not going to play nice on its own, and a little governmental smacking around is occasionally in order. Microsoft. But that's neither here nor there. Personally, I got no beef with marketers knowing that I like good things and hate bad stupid things, and to please stop trying to sell me the bad stupid things and I don't care if Oliver Stone did make the football movie, I'm still not going to watch it, and I'm not going to watch his "WWF Smackdown" movie in 2012, either, so if I have to watch that idiotic commercial one more time...
Well, anyway, am I talking the crazy talk here or what, folks?
The corporations are going to realize, either through enlightenment or exasperation, that a certain amount of pirating is going to happen no matter what, and all their lawsuits and dumbass anti-theft schemes just annoy and alienate a sizeable segment of their customers. And then they're going to realize that it's not really a bad deal for them... people are still going to buy real product, and bootleg MP3s can be great exposure. They'll have to grow up and take the bad with the good. Makes me want to waggle a finger at them and remind them that life isn't fair, then give them a little pat on the head and tell them to run along... the little tyrannical ballbusting corporate stinkers. They're so cute at this age, aren't they?
Now, of course, when 2.2 terabyte credit-card-size storage cards become widely available, and your common Swatch holds 400 gigs, then all bets are off. But there's enough time between now and then to implement the only system that can save the corporations' sorry asses, as far as I can figure...
You already pay $40/month for, let's face it, lousy fucking cable TV service that's unreliable and offers you no choice whatsoever. What a joke. But most of us keep paying it. Personally, I don't, but if I could pay $10/month and only get Fox (for The Simpsons and Futurama), Discovery, History, Bravo, AMC, Comedy and the Learning Channel, I'd be a happy bastard. But I'm not going to pay another $30/month for a whole pile of pathetic sports, news, almost impossibly stupid MTV shows and something called the WB Network which I'm under doctor's orders not to ever even look at. Oh... but sorry, got off on a tangent there - that's GooseKirk Rant #47. Back to...
Check this out: If I could pay, for example, $60/month for full-on media services... if I could watch any TV show anytime I want, any movie anytime I want, and listen to any music anytime I want, I would never download another illicit MP3 as long as I live. Make this media service available via DSL, cable and broadband roaming wireless, and bam, you've just effectively - not completely, but effectively - wiped out piracy.
YOU TAKE AWAY THE INCENTIVE. Why would I bother owning any physical media whatsoever? Why would I waste my time copying multiple gigs of MP3s and DVDs from my friends? I'm going to want this service no matter what -- it's cable TV, the video store and the music store all at the touch of a button, with all the new stuff available to me the second it's released and all the old stuff available any time I want. Every episode of Futurama, every song by Charles Mingus, every John Cusack movie all professionally encoded and cataloged and awaiting my command. No more schlepping around crates of CDs, no more messed up tapes and discs from the video store, no more late fees, no more unavailable titles, no more accidentally trashing or burning or theft of entire collections, no more missing a favorite show... I've seen the future, brothers and sisters, and it is cool. And add a Transmeta receiver with broadband wandering wireless service, and I'm good for home, the office, the car, jogging, whatever. And, oh yeah, make it a service that runs on top of my current internet provider, please.
The business side of a project like this... I dunno. I'm sure it could be worked out. Out of a $60/month fee, say $10 goes to overhead for whoever runs the service, and $50 gets divided up among all the artists who created content on some sort of a per-watch/listen scale. I realize this raises more questions than it answers, but I'm sure the particulars could be hammered out. Hey, I'm the visionary, I leave the accounting to the eggheads, alright?
OK, there's some privacy issues here, too, I know, I know. The Corporation is going to know everything I watch and listen to. Well, I'm of the camp that the US Gov't needs to pull its head out of its ass and enact some EU-style laws, and pronto. Sorry to my libertarian pals, but I think it's abundantly clear by now that the private sector is not going to play nice on its own, and a little governmental smacking around is occasionally in order. Microsoft. But that's neither here nor there. Personally, I got no beef with marketers knowing that I like good things and hate bad stupid things, and to please stop trying to sell me the bad stupid things and I don't care if Oliver Stone did make the football movie, I'm still not going to watch it, and I'm not going to watch his WWF Smackdown movie in 2012, either, so if I have to watch that idiotic commercial one more time...
Well, anyway, am I talking the crazy talk here or what, folks?
There a few good points here... it is true that strong trade ties between nations helps maintain the peace. I'm all in favor of that. But...
"The alternative is to leave the most powerfull nations, such as the US and power blocks such as the EU, to carve up the global economy behind closed doors."
The alternative?? Come again? I'm sorry, I thought that was pretty much exactly what's going on.
And this:
"Which do you prefer, the WTO or the Cold War?"
is just a non-sequiter.
I don't have any trouble with globalization per se. It's globalization at the expense of the environment, human rights, small businessmen, the working class, and the rights of people to govern themselves (instead of being dictated to from multinational corporate boardrooms). The WTO has so far been mostly working to allow the rich and powerful to become moreso while blatantly disregarding some very critical issues. The goal of the protests is to force these issues to the table... which, it should be noted, is not quite the same thing as starting up the Cold War again.
I think it might be smarter to slowly infiltrate all the hardware over a period of time and stockpile it until you're ready to jump off, rather than trying the airport thing. I don't know how one would go about smuggling an entire light armored division or two, though... them customs boys seem to take their jobs pretty seriously.
Or hey, how about *assembling* a couple of light armored divisions. Armor up a bunch of regular civilian vehicles and jury-rig everything, and use civilian small arms. Sure, it wouldn't be great, but it would only have to get you past the guards at the military bases where you could, I imagine, hook yourself up with the real thing. This way, the only thing you have to import is several thousand totally unarmed Chinese soldiers disguised as civilians. Y'know, just one big happy tour group on their way to Mount Rushmore... *whistling casually*...
I think that's somewhat more within the realm of possibility, anyway. I have no clue what sort of security stateside military bases regularly employ, but you're probably right that without any advance warning it'd just be total chaos. Of course, even if you could pull it off, you'd never be able to get your stolen hardware mobilized enough to leave the base in time before all kinds of hellfire rained down on you. Even if you could, you'd still lack the enormous support capabilities you'd need to stay operational.
But let's say, for the sake of cinematic thrills, that you could... where would you go with it and why? It's a %100 guaranteed suicide mission... what could you possibly do in time that'd be worth it?
Y'know, I SWEAR we're halfway to the plot of the next James Bond movie here...
I'm a little skeptical about the viability of the airport sneak-attack plan. First of all, a mass influx of heavy transport planes coming into these airports from China in such close order would, I'm sure, raise a few eyebrows at SAC. If you could stream them in from various places around the globe you might have a better chance of slipping by unnoticed, but then you've got an even bigger counter-intelligence problem with trying to keep it all secret. And if word got out, the Air Force would swat those planes out of the sky without even breaking a sweat, and then you're left with nothing but a whole lot of explaining to do.
And if you do pull off the transport itself, securing the airports might be pretty tricky. In urban areas, police SWAT teams with helicopters and night-vision scopes would respond relatively quickly; sure, they may not be able to go toe-to-toe with your infiltration force, but they'd likely throw some wrenches in the works. And what are you gonna do when John McClane shows up? (i.e., http://us.imdb.com/Title?0099423)
I'm not buying the private airstrip thing, either. A private airstrip big enough to land a 747 is going to get noticed by the county planners. And then when a whole bunch of huge transports inbound from China start landing at an unknown or even known civilian airfield in rural Bassackwards, Idaho, well, someone's going to be curious about that, and that someone will have guns. Big guns.
You're talking about a pretty significant amount of material to move via air, and I don't think you could move enough to assault military bases, for example. You'd have to contend with, in most places, fairly congested civilian roads, and I think people would tend to notice a large, foreign invasion force cruising down I-75. If you used US military hardware that'd probably help, but odds are pretty strong that by the time you got to the gates of the nearest airbase, they'd be expecting you. A couple hours warning may not be enough for the US troops to gas up the big guns, but on the other hand, you wouldn't have any, either. And let's say you did take over a small base here or there - what've you got? You'd just be sitting there waiting for other US troops to get mobilized to come overrun you.
You could make a rush to take over a few port facilities, where you immediately start offloading your thousands of pieces of heavy equipment from your fleet of transports, but then, why bother with the airport business at all? Wouldn't take much to commandeer a port. You have your transport pull up to the dock one night and have a couple dozen guys with pistols round up the rent-a-cops, and there you go. As long as you're offloading a bunch of armor and anti-air assets, you're good to go.
Of course, you'd have to have a whole hell of a lot of transports pulling up in very short order to pull it off, and then you're back to the problem of moving a huge invasion force across the ocean without anyone in the free world noticing. Even if you could somehow neutralize or avoid the entire US Seventh Fleet, you wouldn't make it within a couple hundred miles of shore before the Air Force starts raining stand-off missiles on your fleet. The sheer amount of firepower the US military could bring to bear on a naval fleet approaching its coastlines is enough to make my head spin. No way is it doable. And even if it were, you'd crawl up the beach only to be greeted by a sea of ground forces stretching from horizon to horizon, and they've been following your fleet's progress on CNN and are quite anxious to make your acquaintance.
Maybe a case could be made for a sneak amphibious assault across the Bering into Alaska, but then again, I imagine the US military has considered that too, and there are probably some significant defenses in that area that we civilians aren't even privy to. Even if there aren't, it's a long drive from Alaska to the lower 48, and AFAIK there's only one sizeable road you can take and I bet there a bunch of A-10 pilots who are already pretty familiar with it.
And anyway, lastly, the real question is - why would China ever WANT to invade? Even if it was possible, what could they theoretically gain from it? Offhand, it seems like a losing proposition any way you look at it... to put it delicately, occupying a nation as large and rambunctious as the US would be problematic. And where's the profit in it?
No, no, my friends... a much better idea would be an invasion of Baja California. Now there's a prime piece of real estate just itching to be annexed by somebody! If you or someone you know is a major global power looking for an extracurricular military excursion, then have I got a plan for you! Except you, France... I've got a reputation to uphold, y'know.
All of you that are interested in this story should seek out a documentary called "Pripyat". It played here in Olympia, WA, as part of our local film society's annual film festival (yay!) this year and it is an AMAZING sight...
Chernobyl is surrounded by The Zone, a 20km (IIRC) area that is cordoned off. There is an entire city that sits abandoned within the zone(there's a special issue of Scientific American on the stands now, an issue on gigantic engineering projects, that includes a double-page photograph overlooking this city). Armed guards control access to the zone, which is supposed to have been completely evacuated, but of course there are still people living there.
The filmmakers of Pripyat didn't do much editorializing - they pretty much just set up the camera and let it roll. Their subjects include an elderly couple who live a primitive lifestyle within the zone, a worker who travels to the zone every day for her job testing for radiation, and best of all: the Chernobyl plant safety manager! It even includes a bit of a tour of the plant! The safety officer goes on quite a bit about the heavy responsibility he bears, and then shows the camera crew how wonderful their lunches are and how they're free of charge, and then laments that he only wishes he got PAID for his job... yup, after many months on the job, this guy, the frickin' plant safety officer, still hadn't ever been paid. Talk about pushing a willie button... that oughta be enough to give anyone the heebie jeebies. That and the fact that all the controls and electronics looked vintage 1952, and the rest of the building appeared to be a little shaky in the maintenance department.
Anyway, if you have a cool video store in your neighborhood, it'd be worth your while to ask them to get it in for you when it becomes available. HIGHLY recommended!
All the discussion about the effect on society and what it all means is a quaint exercise. But if a parent is so sure that they are incapable of providing for a handicapped child that they are willing to kill it rather than try... do you really want to force that parent to keep that kid based on some nebulous sociological theory? I've got a sociological theory for you -- it's better to have fewer screwed-up families in the world than more. A flippant attitude to a serious subject with deep ramifications, perhaps, but it works for me.
I've only done this with Windows, but here's my setup...
First, naturally, you need a big fat hard drive. SCSI's better, of course, but I have gotten good rips with IDE.
A SoundBlaster Live! with the S/PDIF inputs has worked just fine for me. Some people will say it's no good for professional-quality stuff, but I have no complaints. Besides, a lot of those "professional" cards seem to have other nasty quirks and issues surrounding them. I'd have to hear a side-by-side comparison before I'd be convinced to shell out the extra bucks and deal with the potential extra headaches for one of those cards. My Live! has always done everything I've asked of it without a glitch.
For the recording and mastering, SoundForge with CD Architect has worked like a charm for me. I record a huge.wav file using SoundForge, then assign track numbers and burn straight from CD Architect. Again, I've never had a glitch with this software combined with either a Yamaha 4216 or a Plextor 8/20. CD Architect is a terrific little program - simple, relatively intuitive, and it'll do practically anything you can think of.
CD Architect: http://www.sonicfoundry.com/Products/ShowProduct.a sp?PID=13
My musician friend and I have burned dozens of live shows from DAT using this setup and we've been very pleased with the results.
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Off topic: Man, I fly Northwest probably 40 to 60 times a year. Is there a worse airline?
Yeah, IMHO... after I fly Delta or America West, I get on a Northwest flight just to cheer myself up.
Off-Off-topic: is there a worse airplane than anything built by Airbus?
OK, I posted this a week or so ago, but this story is just too relevant not to re-post it. This is one of my favorite topics, and I really think what I've got in mind here is the way to go with all this...
.4 cents. And I bet he hates being called Puffster. (No, I didn't work out the math - it's just relative, for illustration purposes)
The corporations are going to realize, either through enlightenment or exasperation, that a certain amount of pirating is going to happen no matter what, and all their lawsuits and dumbass anti-theft schemes just annoy and alienate a sizeable segment of their customers. And then they're going to realize that it's not really a bad deal for them... people are still going to buy real product, and bootleg MP3s can be great exposure. They'll have to grow up and take the bad with the good. Makes me want to waggle a finger at them and remind them that life isn't fair, then give them a little pat on the head and tell them to run along... the little tyrannical ballbusting corporate stinkers. They're so cute at this age, aren't they?
Now, of course, when 2.2 terabyte credit-card-size storage cards become widely available, and your common Swatch holds 400 gigs, then all bets are off. But there's enough time between now and then to implement the only system that can save the corporations' sorry asses, as far as I can figure...
You already pay $40/month for, let's face it, lousy fucking cable TV service that's unreliable and offers you no choice whatsoever. What a joke. But most of us keep paying it. Personally, I don't, but if I could pay $10/month and only get Fox (for The Simpsons and Futurama), Discovery, History, Bravo, AMC, Comedy and the Learning Channel, I'd be a happy bastard. But I'm not going to pay another $30/month for a whole pile of pathetic sports, news, almost impossibly stupid MTV shows and something called the WB Network which I'm under doctor's orders not to ever even look at. Oh... but sorry, got off on a tangent there - that's GooseKirk Rant #47. Back to...
Check this out: If I could pay, for example, $60/month for full-on media services... if I could watch any TV show anytime I want, any movie anytime I want, and listen to any music anytime I want, I would never download another illicit MP3 as long as I live. Make this media service available via DSL, cable and broadband roaming wireless, and bam, you've just effectively - not completely, but effectively - wiped out piracy.
YOU TAKE AWAY THE INCENTIVE. Why would I bother owning any physical media whatsoever? Why would I waste my time copying multiple gigs of MP3s and DVDs from my friends? I'm going to want this service no matter what -- it's cable TV, the video store and the music store all at the touch of a button, with all the new stuff available to me the second it's released and all the old stuff available any time I want. Every episode of Futurama, every song by Charles Mingus, every John Cusack movie all professionally encoded and cataloged and awaiting my command. No more schlepping around crates of CDs, no more messed up tapes and discs from the video store, no more late fees, no more unavailable titles, no more accidentally trashing or burning or theft of entire collections, no more missing a favorite show... I've seen the future, brothers and sisters, and it is cool. And add a Transmeta receiver with broadband wandering wireless service, and I'm good for home, the office, the car, jogging, whatever. And, oh yeah, make it a service that runs on top of my current internet provider, please.
The business side of a project like this... I dunno. I'm sure it could be worked out. Out of a $60/month fee, say $10 goes to overhead for whoever runs the service, and $50 gets divided up among all the artists who created content on some sort of a per-watch/listen scale. I realize this raises more questions than it answers, but I'm sure the particulars could be hammered out. Hey, I'm the visionary, I leave the accounting to the eggheads, alright?
OK, there's some privacy issues here, too, I know, I know. The Corporation is going to know everything I watch and listen to. Well, I'm of the camp that the US Gov't needs to pull its head out of its ass and enact some EU-style laws, and pronto. Sorry to my libertarian pals, but I think it's abundantly clear by now that the private sector is not going to play nice on its own, and a little governmental smacking around is occasionally in order. Microsoft. But that's neither here nor there. Personally, I got no beef with marketers knowing that I like good things and hate bad stupid things, and to please stop trying to sell me the bad stupid things and I don't care if Oliver Stone did make the football movie, I'm still not going to watch it, and I'm not going to watch his "WWF Smackdown" movie in 2012, either, so if I have to watch that idiotic commercial one more time...
So what would this system actually be like?
1. It has to be bilateral open-access. Anyone who pays their monthly fee can access anything, and anyone who publishes can get a piece of the action.
2. It's gotta be flat-rate. Micropayments might make more sense, but IMHO consumers just won't go for it. Flat-rate rules.
3. Royalties have to paid out in an equitable manner that's highly resistant to abuse (ah-ha! that makes it really tricky, eh?).
So let's give this a shot:
I think ye olde public/private key encryption is called for. Let's call our secure audio/video streaming format "MP5", and say that it's open-source. Anyone can use FreeMP5 to freely encode their A/V stream and post it on their website or FTP or MP5 server.
But when I encode my MP5, if I want to make money off it, I register it with a public database with my public key... and there's probably a nominal fee for this, like a buck a song or ten cents per minute of video. I don't know who manages these databases, but it should work something like how the domain name servers work now (only... a little smoother, hopefully).
The software I use to play back the MP5 stream unlocks the stream with my private key and hits a counter on the server for it. After some consideration, I think the creators should be paid per second a slice of the flat-rate pie. So if I pay $50/month for media service and I listen to and watch nothing but Peter Gabriel for a whole month straight, Pete gets all $50, but if I watch a straight day of CNN in there, then Pete gets like $48 and CNN gets $2. And if I listen to one Puff Daddy song in there (what are the odds), the Puffster gets like
I guess in this system, our media service provider would be the maintainer of the database. This could be separate from both our ISP and the provider of the DSL/cable/wireless connection. I still don't fully comprehend how the whole domain name debacle is working, but again, that seems to be the sort of model I'd be after, where if one service refused to log my MP5 song called "Tits.com" because they thought it was offensive, I could just find someone else who'd do it and the experience for both the artist and consumer would be seamless because they'd interoperate like DNS. Does that make any sense?
Of course all this will require some heavy duty infrastructure... but what the hell, in another ten years we'll have it anyway... gotta use it for something!
Comments appreciated...
>where does the small, innovative content producer fit into the scheme?
.4 cents. And I bet he hates being called Puffster. (No, I didn't work out the math - it's just relative, for illustration purposes)
I've been thinking about that one, and I'd even go further than what you suggest and say that a corporate hegemony over such a system would be flat-out unacceptable. It wouldn't be much different than what we live with now, OK, but still - I get warm fuzzies thinking about the boundless opportunities before us for subverting our corporate oppressors. No, really. I do. I'm that kinda guy.
So I don't have the Ultimate Solution for this yet. I know what the properties of such a system are:
1. It has to be bilateral open-access. Anyone who pays their monthly fee can access anything, and anyone who publishes can get a piece of the action.
2. It's gotta be flat-rate. Micropayments might make more sense, but IMHO consumers just won't go for it. Flat-rate rules.
3. Royalties have to paid out in an equitable manner that's highly resistant to abuse (ah-ha! that makes it really tricky, eh?).
So let's give this a shot:
I think ye olde public/private key encryption is called for. Let's call our secure audio/video streaming format "MP5", and say that it's open-source. Anyone can use FreeMP5 to freely encode their A/V stream and post it on their website or FTP or MP5 server.
But when I encode my MP5, if I want to make money off it, I register it with a public database with my public key... and there's probably a nominal fee for this, like a buck a song or ten cents per minute of video. I don't know who manages these databases, but it should work something like how the domain name servers work now (only... a little smoother, hopefully).
The software I use to playback the MP5 stream sends a private key to this database, unlocks the stream and hits a counter for it. After some consideration, I think the creators should be paid per second a slice of the flat-rate pie. So if I pay $50/month for media service and I listen to and watch nothing but Peter Gabriel for a whole month straight, Pete gets all $50, but if I watch a straight day of CNN in there, then Pete gets like $48 and CNN gets $2. And if I listen to one Puff Daddy song in there (what are the odds), the Puffster gets like
I guess in this system, our media service provider would be the maintainer of the database. This could be separate from both our ISP and the provider of the DSL/cable/wireless connection. I still don't fully comprehend how the whole domain name debacle is working, but again, that seems to be the sort of model I'd be after, where if one service refused to log my MP5 song called "Tits.com" because they thought it was offensive, I could just find someone else who'd do it and the experience for both the artist and consumer would be seamless because they'd interoperate like DNS. Does that make any sense?
Of course all this will require some heavy duty infrastructure... but what the hell, in another ten years we'll have it anyway... gotta use it for something!
Comments appreciated...
-----
GooseKirk
Here's what I think about all this...
The corporations are going to realize, either through enlightenment or exasperation, that a certain amount of pirating is going to happen no matter what, and all their lawsuits and dumbass anti-theft schemes just annoy and alienate a sizeable segment of their customers. And then they're going to realize that it's not really a bad deal for them... people are still going to buy real product, and bootleg MP3s can be great exposure. They'll have to grow up and take the bad with the good. Makes me want to waggle a finger at them and remind them that life isn't fair, then give them a little pat on the head and tell them to run along... the little tyrannical ballbusting corporate stinkers. They're so cute at this age, aren't they?
Now, of course, when 2.2 terabyte credit-card-size storage cards become widely available, and your common Swatch holds 400 gigs, then all bets are off. But there's enough time between now and then to implement the only system that can save the corporations' sorry asses, as far as I can figure...
You already pay $40/month for, let's face it, lousy fucking cable TV service that's unreliable and offers you no choice whatsoever. What a joke. But most of us keep paying it. Personally, I don't, but if I could pay $10/month and only get Fox (for The Simpsons and Futurama), Discovery, History, Bravo, AMC, Comedy and the Learning Channel, I'd be a happy bastard. But I'm not going to pay another $30/month for a whole pile of pathetic sports, news, almost impossibly stupid MTV shows and something called the WB Network which I'm under doctor's orders not to ever even look at. Oh... but sorry, got off on a tangent there - that's GooseKirk Rant #47. Back to...
Check this out: If I could pay, for example, $60/month for full-on media services... if I could watch any TV show anytime I want, any movie anytime I want, and listen to any music anytime I want, I would never download another illicit MP3 as long as I live. Make this media service available via DSL, cable and broadband roaming wireless, and bam, you've just effectively - not completely, but effectively - wiped out piracy.
YOU TAKE AWAY THE INCENTIVE. Why would I bother owning any physical media whatsoever? Why would I waste my time copying multiple gigs of MP3s and DVDs from my friends? I'm going to want this service no matter what -- it's cable TV, the video store and the music store all at the touch of a button, with all the new stuff available to me the second it's released and all the old stuff available any time I want. Every episode of Futurama, every song by Charles Mingus, every John Cusack movie all professionally encoded and cataloged and awaiting my command. No more schlepping around crates of CDs, no more messed up tapes and discs from the video store, no more late fees, no more unavailable titles, no more accidentally trashing or burning or theft of entire collections, no more missing a favorite show... I've seen the future, brothers and sisters, and it is cool. And add a Transmeta receiver with broadband wandering wireless service, and I'm good for home, the office, the car, jogging, whatever. And, oh yeah, make it a service that runs on top of my current internet provider, please.
The business side of a project like this... I dunno. I'm sure it could be worked out. Out of a $60/month fee, say $10 goes to overhead for whoever runs the service, and $50 gets divided up among all the artists who created content on some sort of a per-watch/listen scale. I realize this raises more questions than it answers, but I'm sure the particulars could be hammered out. Hey, I'm the visionary, I leave the accounting to the eggheads, alright?
OK, there's some privacy issues here, too, I know, I know. The Corporation is going to know everything I watch and listen to. Well, I'm of the camp that the US Gov't needs to pull its head out of its ass and enact some EU-style laws, and pronto. Sorry to my libertarian pals, but I think it's abundantly clear by now that the private sector is not going to play nice on its own, and a little governmental smacking around is occasionally in order. Microsoft. But that's neither here nor there. Personally, I got no beef with marketers knowing that I like good things and hate bad stupid things, and to please stop trying to sell me the bad stupid things and I don't care if Oliver Stone did make the football movie, I'm still not going to watch it, and I'm not going to watch his "WWF Smackdown" movie in 2012, either, so if I have to watch that idiotic commercial one more time...
Well, anyway, am I talking the crazy talk here or what, folks?
-----
GooseKirk
The corporations are going to realize, either through enlightenment or exasperation, that a certain amount of pirating is going to happen no matter what, and all their lawsuits and dumbass anti-theft schemes just annoy and alienate a sizeable segment of their customers. And then they're going to realize that it's not really a bad deal for them... people are still going to buy real product, and bootleg MP3s can be great exposure. They'll have to grow up and take the bad with the good. Makes me want to waggle a finger at them and remind them that life isn't fair, then give them a little pat on the head and tell them to run along... the little tyrannical ballbusting corporate stinkers. They're so cute at this age, aren't they?
Now, of course, when 2.2 terabyte credit-card-size storage cards become widely available, and your common Swatch holds 400 gigs, then all bets are off. But there's enough time between now and then to implement the only system that can save the corporations' sorry asses, as far as I can figure...
You already pay $40/month for, let's face it, lousy fucking cable TV service that's unreliable and offers you no choice whatsoever. What a joke. But most of us keep paying it. Personally, I don't, but if I could pay $10/month and only get Fox (for The Simpsons and Futurama), Discovery, History, Bravo, AMC, Comedy and the Learning Channel, I'd be a happy bastard. But I'm not going to pay another $30/month for a whole pile of pathetic sports, news, almost impossibly stupid MTV shows and something called the WB Network which I'm under doctor's orders not to ever even look at. Oh... but sorry, got off on a tangent there - that's GooseKirk Rant #47. Back to...
Check this out: If I could pay, for example, $60/month for full-on media services... if I could watch any TV show anytime I want, any movie anytime I want, and listen to any music anytime I want, I would never download another illicit MP3 as long as I live. Make this media service available via DSL, cable and broadband roaming wireless, and bam, you've just effectively - not completely, but effectively - wiped out piracy.
YOU TAKE AWAY THE INCENTIVE. Why would I bother owning any physical media whatsoever? Why would I waste my time copying multiple gigs of MP3s and DVDs from my friends? I'm going to want this service no matter what -- it's cable TV, the video store and the music store all at the touch of a button, with all the new stuff available to me the second it's released and all the old stuff available any time I want. Every episode of Futurama, every song by Charles Mingus, every John Cusack movie all professionally encoded and cataloged and awaiting my command. No more schlepping around crates of CDs, no more messed up tapes and discs from the video store, no more late fees, no more unavailable titles, no more accidentally trashing or burning or theft of entire collections, no more missing a favorite show... I've seen the future, brothers and sisters, and it is cool. And add a Transmeta receiver with broadband wandering wireless service, and I'm good for home, the office, the car, jogging, whatever. And, oh yeah, make it a service that runs on top of my current internet provider, please.
The business side of a project like this... I dunno. I'm sure it could be worked out. Out of a $60/month fee, say $10 goes to overhead for whoever runs the service, and $50 gets divided up among all the artists who created content on some sort of a per-watch/listen scale. I realize this raises more questions than it answers, but I'm sure the particulars could be hammered out. Hey, I'm the visionary, I leave the accounting to the eggheads, alright?
OK, there's some privacy issues here, too, I know, I know. The Corporation is going to know everything I watch and listen to. Well, I'm of the camp that the US Gov't needs to pull its head out of its ass and enact some EU-style laws, and pronto. Sorry to my libertarian pals, but I think it's abundantly clear by now that the private sector is not going to play nice on its own, and a little governmental smacking around is occasionally in order. Microsoft. But that's neither here nor there. Personally, I got no beef with marketers knowing that I like good things and hate bad stupid things, and to please stop trying to sell me the bad stupid things and I don't care if Oliver Stone did make the football movie, I'm still not going to watch it, and I'm not going to watch his WWF Smackdown movie in 2012, either, so if I have to watch that idiotic commercial one more time...
Well, anyway, am I talking the crazy talk here or what, folks?
-----
GooseKirk
There a few good points here... it is true that strong trade ties between nations helps maintain the peace. I'm all in favor of that. But...
"The alternative is to leave the most powerfull nations, such as the US and power blocks such as the EU, to carve up the global economy behind closed doors."
The alternative?? Come again? I'm sorry, I thought that was pretty much exactly what's going on.
And this:
"Which do you prefer, the WTO or the Cold War?"
is just a non-sequiter.
I don't have any trouble with globalization per se. It's globalization at the expense of the environment, human rights, small businessmen, the working class, and the rights of people to govern themselves (instead of being dictated to from multinational corporate boardrooms). The WTO has so far been mostly working to allow the rich and powerful to become moreso while blatantly disregarding some very critical issues. The goal of the protests is to force these issues to the table... which, it should be noted, is not quite the same thing as starting up the Cold War again.
I think it might be smarter to slowly infiltrate all the hardware over a period of time and stockpile it until you're ready to jump off, rather than trying the airport thing. I don't know how one would go about smuggling an entire light armored division or two, though... them customs boys seem to take their jobs pretty seriously.
Or hey, how about *assembling* a couple of light armored divisions. Armor up a bunch of regular civilian vehicles and jury-rig everything, and use civilian small arms. Sure, it wouldn't be great, but it would only have to get you past the guards at the military bases where you could, I imagine, hook yourself up with the real thing. This way, the only thing you have to import is several thousand totally unarmed Chinese soldiers disguised as civilians. Y'know, just one big happy tour group on their way to Mount Rushmore... *whistling casually*...
I think that's somewhat more within the realm of possibility, anyway. I have no clue what sort of security stateside military bases regularly employ, but you're probably right that without any advance warning it'd just be total chaos. Of course, even if you could pull it off, you'd never be able to get your stolen hardware mobilized enough to leave the base in time before all kinds of hellfire rained down on you. Even if you could, you'd still lack the enormous support capabilities you'd need to stay operational.
But let's say, for the sake of cinematic thrills, that you could... where would you go with it and why? It's a %100 guaranteed suicide mission... what could you possibly do in time that'd be worth it?
Y'know, I SWEAR we're halfway to the plot of the next James Bond movie here...
Now this is a fun topic of debate!
I'm a little skeptical about the viability of the airport sneak-attack plan. First of all, a mass influx of heavy transport planes coming into these airports from China in such close order would, I'm sure, raise a few eyebrows at SAC. If you could stream them in from various places around the globe you might have a better chance of slipping by unnoticed, but then you've got an even bigger counter-intelligence problem with trying to keep it all secret. And if word got out, the Air Force would swat those planes out of the sky without even breaking a sweat, and then you're left with nothing but a whole lot of explaining to do.
And if you do pull off the transport itself, securing the airports might be pretty tricky. In urban areas, police SWAT teams with helicopters and night-vision scopes would respond relatively quickly; sure, they may not be able to go toe-to-toe with your infiltration force, but they'd likely throw some wrenches in the works. And what are you gonna do when John McClane shows up? (i.e., http://us.imdb.com/Title?0099423)
I'm not buying the private airstrip thing, either. A private airstrip big enough to land a 747 is going to get noticed by the county planners. And then when a whole bunch of huge transports inbound from China start landing at an unknown or even known civilian airfield in rural Bassackwards, Idaho, well, someone's going to be curious about that, and that someone will have guns. Big guns.
You're talking about a pretty significant amount of material to move via air, and I don't think you could move enough to assault military bases, for example. You'd have to contend with, in most places, fairly congested civilian roads, and I think people would tend to notice a large, foreign invasion force cruising down I-75. If you used US military hardware that'd probably help, but odds are pretty strong that by the time you got to the gates of the nearest airbase, they'd be expecting you. A couple hours warning may not be enough for the US troops to gas up the big guns, but on the other hand, you wouldn't have any, either. And let's say you did take over a small base here or there - what've you got? You'd just be sitting there waiting for other US troops to get mobilized to come overrun you.
You could make a rush to take over a few port facilities, where you immediately start offloading your thousands of pieces of heavy equipment from your fleet of transports, but then, why bother with the airport business at all? Wouldn't take much to commandeer a port. You have your transport pull up to the dock one night and have a couple dozen guys with pistols round up the rent-a-cops, and there you go. As long as you're offloading a bunch of armor and anti-air assets, you're good to go.
Of course, you'd have to have a whole hell of a lot of transports pulling up in very short order to pull it off, and then you're back to the problem of moving a huge invasion force across the ocean without anyone in the free world noticing. Even if you could somehow neutralize or avoid the entire US Seventh Fleet, you wouldn't make it within a couple hundred miles of shore before the Air Force starts raining stand-off missiles on your fleet. The sheer amount of firepower the US military could bring to bear on a naval fleet approaching its coastlines is enough to make my head spin. No way is it doable. And even if it were, you'd crawl up the beach only to be greeted by a sea of ground forces stretching from horizon to horizon, and they've been following your fleet's progress on CNN and are quite anxious to make your acquaintance.
Maybe a case could be made for a sneak amphibious assault across the Bering into Alaska, but then again, I imagine the US military has considered that too, and there are probably some significant defenses in that area that we civilians aren't even privy to. Even if there aren't, it's a long drive from Alaska to the lower 48, and AFAIK there's only one sizeable road you can take and I bet there a bunch of A-10 pilots who are already pretty familiar with it.
And anyway, lastly, the real question is - why would China ever WANT to invade? Even if it was possible, what could they theoretically gain from it? Offhand, it seems like a losing proposition any way you look at it... to put it delicately, occupying a nation as large and rambunctious as the US would be problematic. And where's the profit in it?
No, no, my friends... a much better idea would be an invasion of Baja California. Now there's a prime piece of real estate just itching to be annexed by somebody! If you or someone you know is a major global power looking for an extracurricular military excursion, then have I got a plan for you! Except you, France... I've got a reputation to uphold, y'know.
All of you that are interested in this story should seek out a documentary called "Pripyat". It played here in Olympia, WA, as part of our local film society's annual film festival (yay!) this year and it is an AMAZING sight...
Chernobyl is surrounded by The Zone, a 20km (IIRC) area that is cordoned off. There is an entire city that sits abandoned within the zone(there's a special issue of Scientific American on the stands now, an issue on gigantic engineering projects, that includes a double-page photograph overlooking this city). Armed guards control access to the zone, which is supposed to have been completely evacuated, but of course there are still people living there.
The filmmakers of Pripyat didn't do much editorializing - they pretty much just set up the camera and let it roll. Their subjects include an elderly couple who live a primitive lifestyle within the zone, a worker who travels to the zone every day for her job testing for radiation, and best of all: the Chernobyl plant safety manager! It even includes a bit of a tour of the plant! The safety officer goes on quite a bit about the heavy responsibility he bears, and then shows the camera crew how wonderful their lunches are and how they're free of charge, and then laments that he only wishes he got PAID for his job... yup, after many months on the job, this guy, the frickin' plant safety officer, still hadn't ever been paid. Talk about pushing a willie button... that oughta be enough to give anyone the heebie jeebies. That and the fact that all the controls and electronics looked vintage 1952, and the rest of the building appeared to be a little shaky in the maintenance department.
Anyway, if you have a cool video store in your neighborhood, it'd be worth your while to ask them to get it in for you when it becomes available. HIGHLY recommended!
All the discussion about the effect on society and what it all means is a quaint exercise. But if a parent is so sure that they are incapable of providing for a handicapped child that they are willing to kill it rather than try... do you really want to force that parent to keep that kid based on some nebulous sociological theory? I've got a sociological theory for you -- it's better to have fewer screwed-up families in the world than more. A flippant attitude to a serious subject with deep ramifications, perhaps, but it works for me.
I've only done this with Windows, but here's my setup...
.wav file using SoundForge, then assign track numbers and burn straight from CD Architect. Again, I've never had a glitch with this software combined with either a Yamaha 4216 or a Plextor 8/20. CD Architect is a terrific little program - simple, relatively intuitive, and it'll do practically anything you can think of.
a sp?PID=13
First, naturally, you need a big fat hard drive. SCSI's better, of course, but I have gotten good rips with IDE.
A SoundBlaster Live! with the S/PDIF inputs has worked just fine for me. Some people will say it's no good for professional-quality stuff, but I have no complaints. Besides, a lot of those "professional" cards seem to have other nasty quirks and issues surrounding them. I'd have to hear a side-by-side comparison before I'd be convinced to shell out the extra bucks and deal with the potential extra headaches for one of those cards. My Live! has always done everything I've asked of it without a glitch.
For the recording and mastering, SoundForge with CD Architect has worked like a charm for me. I record a huge
CD Architect: http://www.sonicfoundry.com/Products/ShowProduct.
My musician friend and I have burned dozens of live shows from DAT using this setup and we've been very pleased with the results.