But privacy advocates say the lack of legal clarity about who can gain access to location information poses a serious risk.
Unfortunately technologies get deployed LONG before appropriate legislation get enacted. Governments are often like Dionsaurs living in the age of Mammals (ie they're just not built to react quickly to change).
"We are moving into a world where your location is going to be known at all times by some electronic device," said Larry Smarr, director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. "It's inevitable. So we should be talking about its consequences before it's too late."
Unfortunately, most people subscribe to the DKDC model of living. (Don't know, don't care) And it's often left to a vocal (and knowledgable) minority who end up being painted as "the lunatic fringe" by the mass media.
Advocates of location-aware technology insist that its safety benefits -- like locating a 911 caller or a stolen car -- outweigh the privacy issues.
The technology itself is not the issue (the technology is NEVER the issue), the issue is who has access and under what conditions. They're completely missing the point - why can we not have a situation where the privacy and the technology play together nicely in the sandpit?
What guarantees and proof does JimBob SixPack have that this information/service will only be used by police/the government "as needed to apprehend criminals" as opposed to "we felt like snooping on YOU today"?
Last time I looked, even the RIAA could not just pull up your records (from an ISP) without going through appropriate legal motions.
It's my bet there's no existing legislation which covers (eg restricts) government (eg spooks) / police access to this GPS-from-your-cellphone information without (a) your knowledge (b) a judges knowledge and approval in the specific instance of apprehending a supposedly innocent-until-proven-guilty citizen.
"I'm sorry sir, your rights have been revoked - didnt you read the shrink-wrap license/EULA that came with your cell service?"
Unfortunately, in showing your surprise, you're also showing just how naive you have been to date.
These are all aspects of "what the market will bear" which has been standard business practice since something like the 80s (or is that 70s?)
There is zero concept of "fair market value" in the business world today, only "how hard can we screw our customers before they're no longer customers of ours?".
Ask any economist, this is "the standard business model" today.
Aside from all the (endless, redundant) DRM IS BAD commentary, I still find that these companies are fundamentally missing the point.
I would not mind (so much) them wanting to enforce their rights to sell music, to earn money from it, and to stamp out piracy. Except that each and every deployment of Rights Management/Copyright Enforcement has always put me in a position where I (ie The Customer) would be purchasing a lesser product for as much if not more money.
For Example:
A new Australian service where you purchase licenses to tracks for (essentially) $2 Australian
A whole album of tracks would cost more than the CD
AND if you want physical copy, you provide the CDR yourself
Only it's WMA (ie lossy encoding)
And it's 128Kbps (ie not lossless and/or very-high-quality encoding of the original CD bitstream)
CopyProtection systems on CDs
which refuse to play on some CD players
or which flat-out BREAK other CD players
which take up data space ie you're getting less music
iTunes and its ILK, which only work on [insert-one-specific-media-player-here]
I already have XYZ hardware, now I have to buy NEW hardware to listen to music
What's stopping them next year producing new and incompatible formats, requiring not just higher license fees but MORE HARDWARE
A Smart Consumer wants value for money. In an existing market (ie music), a new product needs to give the customer more value (for some definition of 'value') in order to succeed.
So far your (ahem) "solutions" give me
less music
playable in less devices
with lower quality
and less convenience
at the same or higher (total) cost to me
After all this you're surprised to find that Smart Consumers aren't interested in DRM'd music?????
320Kbps audio stream (eg high-quality MP3 encoded audio).
60*60*24=86400 seconds in a day.
Amounts to something like 2.7Gigabytes.
Assume you're listening to that no more than 8 hours/day.
2.7*8/24=0.9 ; so call it "a gigabyte".
Any/Every day.
So an individual could (in theory), without significant effort, suck down 1GB of legitimate/legal traffic a day. ie 30GB/month.
That does mean 8 hours on the internet (even after school/college/work) every day - but these are SLASHDOT readers, after all
And, of course, that doesn't include anything else consuming bits (reading slashdot, trolling for pr0n, email and attachments, playing games, movie trailer downloads, machinima, mirroring OpenSource, downloading ISOs, WindowsUpdates, AntiVirus Updates).
So, in summary 30GB/month is actually not
such a ridiculously unreasonable/unbelievable amount of data that "anyone using that much MUST be breaking some law, somewhere - so lets shut him/her/it down".
Lemme see, I know (for example) people with about 2600ish tracks, for a total of ~15GB. That means that 100 thousand tracks, at a reasonable quality (certainly not the highest) would fit on 600GB.
A WD 250GB SATA drive is ~$225US (checked it on pricewatch.com) , so a terabyte would cost under $1000.
Seems to me that they're not exactly expending anything like a serious amount of time, effort, thought or money on this.
Nice try, except you're forgetting one small thing:
Anywhere you pay for bits consumed (eg ISP with a 'cap' and per-bit charges after) means that You're getting screwed twiceand NO LUBE.
Anyhow, right now I purchase a permanent license (well, as long as the physical medium lasts) when I buy a CD. Now account for that across the life of the medium. You'd need to make it something like $1/month for unlimited music downloads, at full-CD quality (eg lossless encoding), and no restrictions on what physical medium I can transfer it to for playback, for it to be equivalent value.
Remember, you're currently selling me X of value, so don't go thinking you can screw me for X-Y at the same price.
And any suggestion that includes Sure, but you need XYZ new media player for SECURE playback is ONLY valid if it includes which we'll give you for free (or almost) as a crossgrade from your existing.
I've already bought one expensive MP3 player, why do I want to pay you hand-over-fist for poor quality (bitrate wise) music, which I then need to buy new expensive hardware for.
This is a Commercial Transaction People! If you want more money from me, then you need to give me more value.
Fucking me with a piece of barbed wire, and then promising to stop if I pay you LotsOfCash is Just Not Acceptable.
And one more thing that people forget when it comes to Digital Content Downloads. DRM is all nice and good, except that there's no 'standards' involved. At any point in time they could change their content formats and revoke your licenses (of course, they'd stop billing you), and suddenly ALL your music is no longer valid. You'd need to buy new hardware, and pay LARGER license fees, to continue hearing music. What will you do? Stop listening to music altogether, forever? or pay their new higher fees?
You missed the third, and unfortunately, inevitable option
(c) All of the above
After all, you're getting taxed on your media, but it's still illegal to pirate music. These corporations clearly want to have their cake and eat it too.
What on earth gave you the impression that they have committed to these levies instead of DRM, stronger laws, and SWAT team style enforcement? (ie instead of "as well as" which they've clearly shown themselves to be shooting for in the long run)
"We pay for increased insurance rates when other people have more accidents."
Translation: we the customers of insurnce companies pay extra on our insurance due to other insurance customers having accidents.
Lemme say it again just to be clear.
This new levy is MORE like charging me extra on dancing lessons because people have accidents in their cars.
I'm buying a data storage device and you're gonna TAX me because someone's pirating music - how exactly is that "passing increased costs onto your (ie existing, current) customers" like the example you quoted?
Many years ago there was a common (as in well known) saying "Money talks, bullshit walks".
These days, it's the money running the government.
Did you read the legal arguments given by the Microsoft Defence when discussing penalties?
For the love of PROFIT, NO! That would cost us money.
In the end, that's all the government cared/s about.
If the company you're running makes enough money (enough meaning "enough that you can afford to contribute significantly to campaign funds") then you can effectively ignore the laws and screw the people and other businesses.
We saw it with Microsoft and their rampant abuse of the software industry, and now we're seeing it with the RIAA and MPAA.
Talk to your Grandparents, they remember prohibition. Once was a time, the US fought hard against organized crime, now it's embraced with open arms.
I believe than in Australia Telstra urged the government to defind broadband as "128Kbps and up" so that they (Telstra) could then claim that (whatever the exact statistic is) the vast majority of Australians have access to internet at broadband speeds.
Something to do with Telstra being legally required to provide said "broadband" coverage, by a certain date, or be subject to fines/limitations on expansion into other markets/or something.
No surprises here, just Yet Another Big Business redefining reality so that they can wipe their hands of their legally bound responsibilities and rape their customers for further profits.
Either the poster is dumber-than-a-brick or has less than zero understanding of RF engineering.
"7Mhz is for Amateur radio frequencies."
So? The slashdot-summary-article very very very very clearly states 7MHz-wide broadcast TV allocations in the 45MHz band.
ie Frequency ~ 45MHz
Bandwidth (ie width of the band of frequencies) +/- 3.5
Where oh where does it say "frequency of 7MHz"?
Anyway, this is talking about in Australia. What on earth or any other planet in the known universe does that have to do with FCC allcoation of frequency use in the US of A?
"you ping the hanoi machine with the number of disks encoded in the type of service field, and you get response packets whose sequence numbers represent the disk moves need to solve the puzzle"
ping HanoiServer -tos=128
Send one packet, get a hundred thousand (I'm sure I lost count somewhere) in return?
Slashdot Mirror
But privacy advocates say the lack of legal clarity about who can gain access to location information poses a serious risk.
Unfortunately technologies get deployed LONG before appropriate legislation get enacted. Governments are often like Dionsaurs living in the age of Mammals (ie they're just not built to react quickly to change).
"We are moving into a world where your location is going to be known at all times by some electronic device," said Larry Smarr, director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. "It's inevitable. So we should be talking about its consequences before it's too late."
Unfortunately, most people subscribe to the DKDC model of living. (Don't know, don't care) And it's often left to a vocal (and knowledgable) minority who end up being painted as "the lunatic fringe" by the mass media.
Advocates of location-aware technology insist that its safety benefits -- like locating a 911 caller or a stolen car -- outweigh the privacy issues.
The technology itself is not the issue (the technology is NEVER the issue), the issue is who has access and under what conditions. They're completely missing the point - why can we not have a situation where the privacy and the technology play together nicely in the sandpit?
What guarantees and proof does JimBob SixPack have that this information/service will only be used by police/the government "as needed to apprehend criminals" as opposed to "we felt like snooping on YOU today"?
Last time I looked, even the RIAA could not just pull up your records (from an ISP) without going through appropriate legal motions.
It's my bet there's no existing legislation which covers (eg restricts) government (eg spooks) / police access to this GPS-from-your-cellphone information without (a) your knowledge (b) a judges knowledge and approval in the specific instance of apprehending a supposedly innocent-until-proven-guilty citizen.
"I'm sorry sir, your rights have been revoked - didnt you read the shrink-wrap license/EULA that came with your cell service?"
Free as long as you ignore the bit-consumption cap from my ISP, after which I have to pay extra.
Like I said earlier, this is Yet Another Way to Get Screwed by Big Business.
Unfortunately, in showing your surprise, you're also showing just how naive you have been to date.
These are all aspects of "what the market will bear" which has been standard business practice since something like the 80s (or is that 70s?)
There is zero concept of "fair market value" in the business world today, only "how hard can we screw our customers before they're no longer customers of ours?".
Ask any economist, this is "the standard business model" today.
Aside from all the (endless, redundant) DRM IS BAD commentary, I still find that these companies are fundamentally missing the point.
I would not mind (so much) them wanting to enforce their rights to sell music, to earn money from it, and to stamp out piracy. Except that each and every deployment of Rights Management/Copyright Enforcement has always put me in a position where I (ie The Customer) would be purchasing a lesser product for as much if not more money.
For Example:
- A new Australian service where you purchase licenses to tracks for (essentially) $2 Australian
- A whole album of tracks would cost more than the CD
- AND if you want physical copy, you provide the CDR yourself
- Only it's WMA (ie lossy encoding)
- And it's 128Kbps (ie not lossless and/or very-high-quality encoding of the original CD bitstream)
- CopyProtection systems on CDs
- which refuse to play on some CD players
- or which flat-out BREAK other CD players
- which take up data space ie you're getting less music
- iTunes and its ILK, which only work on [insert-one-specific-media-player-here]
- I already have XYZ hardware, now I have to buy NEW hardware to listen to music
- What's stopping them next year producing new and incompatible formats, requiring not just higher license fees but MORE HARDWARE
A Smart Consumer wants value for money. In an existing market (ie music), a new product needs to give the customer more value (for some definition of 'value') in order to succeed.So far your (ahem) "solutions" give me
- less music
- playable in less devices
- with lower quality
- and less convenience
- at the same or higher (total) cost to me
After all this you're surprised to find that Smart Consumers aren't interested in DRM'd music?????60*60*24=86400 seconds in a day.
Amounts to something like 2.7Gigabytes.
Assume you're listening to that no more than 8 hours/day.
2.7*8/24=0.9 ; so call it "a gigabyte".
Any/Every day.
So an individual could (in theory), without significant effort, suck down 1GB of legitimate/legal traffic a day. ie 30GB/month.
- That does mean 8 hours on the internet (even after school/college/work) every day - but these are SLASHDOT readers, after all
- And, of course, that doesn't include anything else consuming bits (reading slashdot, trolling for pr0n, email and attachments, playing games, movie trailer downloads, machinima, mirroring OpenSource, downloading ISOs, WindowsUpdates, AntiVirus Updates).
So, in summary 30GB/month is actually not such a ridiculously unreasonable/unbelievable amount of data that "anyone using that much MUST be breaking some law, somewhere - so lets shut him/her/it down".Considering your attitude, I'm not surprised the RIAA is doing its best to RAPE potential customers.
Not all people who're ripping music are pirates. Some of us are just trying to play music from CDs we've bought on our iPOD.
http://download.nullsoft.com/winamp/client/winamp5 0_full.exe brings up 404.
Looks like someone at Nullsoft saw the HUGE load and pulled the file.
anyone got a Mirror?
Hearts In Atlantis.
Sorry, but it's not so hard a challenge for people with good taste in music.
Lemme see, I know (for example) people with about 2600ish tracks, for a total of ~15GB. That means that 100 thousand tracks, at a reasonable quality (certainly not the highest) would fit on 600GB.
A WD 250GB SATA drive is ~$225US (checked it on pricewatch.com) , so a terabyte would cost under $1000.
Seems to me that they're not exactly expending anything like a serious amount of time, effort, thought or money on this.
Tell me again why I want to pay for this?
Nice try, except you're forgetting one small thing:
Anywhere you pay for bits consumed (eg ISP with a 'cap' and per-bit charges after) means that You're getting screwed twice and NO LUBE.
Anyhow, right now I purchase a permanent license (well, as long as the physical medium lasts) when I buy a CD. Now account for that across the life of the medium. You'd need to make it something like $1/month for unlimited music downloads, at full-CD quality (eg lossless encoding), and no restrictions on what physical medium I can transfer it to for playback, for it to be equivalent value.
Remember, you're currently selling me X of value, so don't go thinking you can screw me for X-Y at the same price.
And any suggestion that includes Sure, but you need XYZ new media player for SECURE playback is ONLY valid if it includes which we'll give you for free (or almost) as a crossgrade from your existing.
I've already bought one expensive MP3 player, why do I want to pay you hand-over-fist for poor quality (bitrate wise) music, which I then need to buy new expensive hardware for.
This is a Commercial Transaction People! If you want more money from me, then you need to give me more value.
Fucking me with a piece of barbed wire, and then promising to stop if I pay you LotsOfCash is Just Not Acceptable.
And one more thing that people forget when it comes to Digital Content Downloads.
DRM is all nice and good, except that there's no 'standards' involved. At any point in time they could change their content formats and revoke your licenses (of course, they'd stop billing you), and suddenly ALL your music is no longer valid. You'd need to buy new hardware, and pay LARGER license fees, to continue hearing music. What will you do? Stop listening to music altogether, forever? or pay their new higher fees?
It's called Bait and Switch .
So this "new service" works out to be about the same cost as a NEW CD, only
This is a "service" in the same sense as what stud horses do to mares when they're in season.
An editor obviously visited the site and saw nothing more than
- Under Construction
- Some Random Plugin required to read the news
SO they terminated your submission with extreme prejudice, as they should have.Zero real content, lots of "aren't I fabulous" posturizing, and please make me famous on slashdot.
Geez! the NERVE of some people.
You missed the third, and unfortunately, inevitable option
(c) All of the above
After all, you're getting taxed on your media, but it's still illegal to pirate music. These corporations clearly want to have their cake and eat it too.
What on earth gave you the impression that they have committed to these levies instead of DRM, stronger laws, and SWAT team style enforcement? (ie instead of "as well as" which they've clearly shown themselves to be shooting for in the long run)
er, don't you mean "the copyright holders are getting compensated"?
Which, if I remember correctly, translates into "the industry takes a major cut of the funds, and passes a few cents back to the original artists".
Or do you actually have documented evidence that these "artists" ever see any of this money?
"We pay for increased insurance rates when other people have more accidents."
Translation: we the customers of insurnce companies pay extra on our insurance due to other insurance customers having accidents.
Lemme say it again just to be clear.
This new levy is MORE like charging me extra on dancing lessons because people have accidents in their cars.
I'm buying a data storage device and you're gonna TAX me because someone's pirating music - how exactly is that "passing increased costs onto your (ie existing, current) customers" like the example you quoted?
Nikon Fe (or Fe2).
Cheap body, cheap lenses, good to learn the basics on.
Many years ago there was a common (as in well known) saying "Money talks, bullshit walks".
These days, it's the money running the government.
Did you read the legal arguments given by the Microsoft Defence when discussing penalties?
For the love of PROFIT, NO! That would cost us money.
In the end, that's all the government cared/s about.
If the company you're running makes enough money (enough meaning "enough that you can afford to contribute significantly to campaign funds") then you can effectively ignore the laws and screw the people and other businesses.
We saw it with Microsoft and their rampant abuse of the software industry, and now we're seeing it with the RIAA and MPAA.
Talk to your Grandparents, they remember prohibition. Once was a time, the US fought hard against organized crime, now it's embraced with open arms.
I believe than in Australia Telstra urged the government to defind broadband as "128Kbps and up" so that they (Telstra) could then claim that (whatever the exact statistic is) the vast majority of Australians have access to internet at broadband speeds.
Something to do with Telstra being legally required to provide said "broadband" coverage, by a certain date, or be subject to fines/limitations on expansion into other markets/or something.
No surprises here, just Yet Another Big Business redefining reality so that they can wipe their hands of their legally bound responsibilities and rape their customers for further profits.
Either the poster is dumber-than-a-brick or has less than zero understanding of RF engineering.
.
"7Mhz is for Amateur radio frequencies."
So? The slashdot-summary-article very very very very clearly states 7MHz-wide broadcast TV allocations in the 45MHz band
ie Frequency ~ 45MHz
Bandwidth (ie width of the band of frequencies) +/- 3.5
Where oh where does it say "frequency of 7MHz"?
Anyway, this is talking about in Australia. What on earth or any other planet in the known universe does that have to do with FCC allcoation of frequency use in the US of A?
er, that would be no.
The channel-width is 7MHz, the frequency is around 45MHz.
Yea Yeah Yeah, I know the TOS field isn't big enough to show 128.
It's a joke, so laugh.
"you ping the hanoi machine with the number of disks encoded in the type of service field, and you get response packets whose sequence numbers represent the disk moves need to solve the puzzle"
ping HanoiServer -tos=128
Send one packet, get a hundred thousand (I'm sure I lost count somewhere) in return?
Am I the only one who read the Headline (this is Slashdot, after all) and wondered why?
If you've identified the losers, why would you then go on to outsource them? Why not just fire them and be done with it?
The Austin Powers association was WAY too easy.
The Austin Powers Association(tm) has always been way too easy. In fact, I believe that's the whole point.
Shagadelic, baby!