More of the typical (miserable)/.er reading comprehension.
What "he" (meaning me) said was the analog capture could not be reliably differentiated from the digital source. Since this seems to have flown completely the fuck over your head the first two times I'll explain it in simpler terms:
Image(s)1: still images captured from the analog input (svideo) from a reasonably high end (but old) DVD player.
Image(s)2: stills (same ones) taken from a DVD rip of the movie. Since this will still probably go over your head I'll explain it further: you put the DVD in the computer's DVD drive, and "special software" reads the DVD movie as a file, with which you may then do as you please.
My bet would be he's viewing the Analog outpt through the same POS TV Tuner card
And you lose.
Ever heard of AVS forum? A whole community of high end snobs who were, for quite some time (many still are) basing entire home theaters - tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment and time investment - and using lowly peecees as the central video processor. Peecees with $100 video capture cards. And, your ignorant assertions to the contrary, enjoying very high quality video.
You can spew ignorant bullshit all day if you like, but the fact remains thousands of people know you're dead fucking wrong. Think none of the people who read that also read/.? Well, here's one writing you this very second. With nearly three quarters of a million registered here, I very much doubt I'm alone. If you don't care that you look like a stupendously ignorant "know it all" in front of thousands of strangers, I certainly won't dwell on it any further.
doesn't matter if the source is perfect or not - if the analog capture cannot be differentiated from the >i>digital source then you cannot magically "do better." Not with firewire, not with "lossless" and not with stupid, unfounded assertions in a discussion forum.
I have never had a virus sent to my home machine because I jealously protect my email domain (every individual gets an email address and if it leaks they never hear from me again). Most commercial sites even seem to respect this. But I made a "junk" address for groups.google.com and, although I have only posted through there a couple of times many months ago, the virus found this address. Apparently it is also crawling usenet, or at least the groups served by google.
Five of'em in one day. Of course, the rest will go into the trash automatically, but it was an interesting experience finally catching a taste of the "commoner" internet.
Cheap != low quality. The (now $50) PCI capture card in my system will make caps that are indistinguishable from the DVD source (I've done the comparisons in public forums and there was no definitive consensus which was the digital rip and which was analog). Firewire video capture is great if you're using a camera, but if you're using HDTV or an analog source all it buys you is added complexity and an extra box to find room for.
And if you cannot tell the difference between the video from a $40 PCI capture card and the absolute shit you get from a $100 USB video port, you really, really, need glasses.
Bob Barr is also known as a conservative. mom and Dad brainwashed-by-the-washington-media will give a lot more creedence to a known conservative than if it were Hilary railing against this (although I seriously doubt we would see Hilary railing against this, you get the point).
The creative choice. Because this stuff only works for the corporate oligarchy, you, as a creative person, reject it and distribute your content WITHOUT using it. Instead of being a slave to american corporations your creation now has a worldwide audience.
Something like we (still don't) have now, only more.
You should not even need a firewire or usb card with a moderately modern machine (even my p2/266 vaio has firewire). And yes, many of the most common cards are cheap - no one can complain about a $30 802.11 card.
But try to put a video capture card (aka tv tuner) in your laptop and see how far you get. Or a high end sound card. yeah, you can buy external boxes - so what? especially for a sound card you should not need an external box - the parts just ain't that big. You could cram a reasonably high quality 8 channel sound card into a double height "cradbus" card - except it would likely be five times more expensive than the PCI version simply because the quantities would be so infinitesimally low. And for an HDTV tuner - forget it.
But for people who need that functionality, a "quad height" bay connected to a high speed bus would be all that's needed.
It's encouraging that perhaps the "convergence" may make much of this come to pass. With PCI now serial there's no reason manufacturers couldn't put the connectors on an externally accessible plane and make "cards" into "cartridges." If the bus were uqiquitous then the same HDTV tuner (for example) could work in a TV set or a PC or a laptop or a hard drive recorder. And that would help everyone, both makers and consumers alike.
What drugs are you on? If I have a DNS entry then the machine can be tracked down by that entry. It doesn't matter if the entry is static or dynamic, if http://my.local.machine changes IP every five minutes it can still be cracked just as easily as if it were static.
The vulnerability lies in the "one page, one machine" paradigm. If the net operated more like (get ready for the flames) freenet then nobody (not even the RIAA) could be DDOSd into oblivion. A bittorrent sort of structure would ensure popular documents were always widely available, but the downside (of course) is that less popular content might end up lost. Of course, one can also make the argument nothing would really get lost because some archivists would specialize in retaining this info, just like projects like the wayback machine do with physical sites.
Stupid, stupid, stupid. If these people (or Brad) were thinking at all toward the future they would have made the cards BIGGER not smaller. Make a "double wide, quad height" standard and encourage (through licensing breaks) all laptop makers to incorporate at least one "quad height double wide" slot.
You ALREADY are using the PCI-X interface, so you share that functionality with desktops. So now that laptop makers will have these larger slots they can plan for more comprehensive peripherals - like real tv tuner cards that support HD, higher capacity solid state/MRAM memory cards, etc.
So now you can actually build a complete PC - stuffed with truly useful cards that perform equally well on either platform - and you never have to open the case. We coyld have desktop systems that supports a full battery of "2x4" cards in the back, USB and Firewire and all the rest. And because the cards now can be used on either a desktop or laptop platform, peripheral makers have only ONE standard to support, which makes all their products both cheaper for the end user AND cheaper to produce.
But then what do I know? I don't even spell my name with a "u."
Are you kidding? Germany doesn't cooperate with the UK and US on matters like this?
I had never even heard of JAP until about a month ago. I downloaded it to try it out and when I saw the "anonymous" chain consisted entirely of two servers in GERMANY I knew instantly not to trust it - any more than I would trust any US based "anonymous" provider, or any UK based "anonymous" provider.
There's millions of machines in asia with fast connections that are open to the world. If you want anonymity, learn to use a proxy sniffer and SOCKS chains. Or better still, add your share of bandwidth to freenet.
The site's STILL slashdotted so there'll be no free peecees today. And since when is it really a good thing for public schools to be given tens of Millions of dollars worth of software that really costs MS nothing in the first place? ALL THAT DOES IS GIVE THEM MORE CONTROL OF THE MARKET.
Claiming vouchers and then NOT spending the money on microsoft goodies actually costs MS money AND erodes their hold on the market, which is what this settlement was supposed to do. If you want to help the public schools, donate some equipment. Or donate some time. Doesn't even have to be at the schools, it could be at a community center. All those things would do more good for your community than MS giving away another "free" XP license.
Businesses sure shouldn't be doing any filesharing
Wow, seven new responses and all but one of you seem to refuse to accept any view of the word "file sharing" other than what the **AA has washed into your pointy little heads.
Since when do businesses have no need to share files? If businesses have no need to share files why the fuck are they all using DOCs for text and XLS for spreadsheets? That's the most insanely stupid statement I've seen in this entire thread, and given the level of brainwashing apparent in most of your replies (to quote another of you brainwashed folk) "that's saying a lot."
Every single one of you has unwittingly validated up my argument. "File sharing" has come to mean, in popular vernacular, "downloading movies and music." For most folks who don't understand the workings it doesn't even technically mean sharing because so many of them are unaware the shit they download can be "uploaded" too. So far as they're concerned they're getting free music that they might not find in the local store, or getting anime clips they don't know how to record from tv themselves.
Does anyone here support home users? I mean, besides your siblings and parents? You want to know how many people have asked me why "their internet just gets really slow sometimes" and were oblivious to that kazaa icon in their tool tray? So far as most home users who have never before had broadband before are concerned, "file sharing" is the only reason to step up. If you, a bunch of alleged techno-literates, can't even get past the music industry propoganda when defining file sharing, what the fuck do you think any of that other nonsense means to technically challenged folk?
Try selling any of this shit to someone who doesn't work in the tech sector. Try selling that "broken protocols" argument to someone who's never even heard of usenet before.
You are all giving examples of people who already have had broadband and telling us why they like it and would keep it. and most of your examples would be utter gibberish to people who don't work on computers already (ie people who already know why they want broadband). You're not going to build a market selling to people who already know they want your product, kids.
Except the "online all the time" part and I addressed that quit well in my first post. You are already showing signs of brainwashing. Go to the nearest windows desktop, right click on any folder, and select "properties." See that tab? The one labeled sharing?
Kazaa and other p2p apps are just a convenient, braindead way for mom and dad user to "share stuff" online. Yeah, some of them are too daft to even realize those "shared files" they download are visible to everyone online, but for every one of those braindead souls there's another who actually uses a p2p app to share stuff legally.
It takes a certain amount of know-how to get a "real" server running on a machine. Takes even more know-how to do that without it being owned by the kid down the street, or even the latest robotic virus. But it doesn't take a genius to install kazaa, drag a few files to the "shared" folder and then point your friends to them. You can even do it with zone alarm running and have some warm fuzzy feelings of safety (however misguided). And yes, I do know folks who use p2p apps in just such a setting.
But for most everything else, no one needs broadband. Especially when it may well cost more than twice as much as dialup access. Many folks who have never had broadband don't realize how handy it is to be able to go to a yahoo map, or google a factoid you can't recall in detail, without having to think about all the crap that goes along with "dialing the internet." They have never had the experience of talking with someone on the phone while they figure something out together. Or even just watched tv and surfed while the kid talks to her friends on the phone.
In fact that is the killer app for broadband, and it's the only way that computers and the net are truly going to become ubiquitous. But you can't sell any of that because the people who use dialup to check their email and surf msnbc have never experienced that, and they cannot relate to it. You might as well be trying to sell them tickets to mars, or lightning in a bottle. They can't get past thinking of "going on the internet" because it's still an alien place to them. They have no sense of ownership of the space in the same sense you and I might think of google as an extension of our own intellect.
So you gotta market what people can understand to get the asses in the seats. And they understand free shit, so you market that. Tell someone who chats with buddies, reads a few emails and surfs ebay an hour a night that they can get pages to load twice as fast with broadband and most every one will tell you "it's already fast enough." I've had broadband in my home, and regularly use very fast academic connections, but even I would not pay forty or fifty bucks a month in addition to a phone bill just to be able to see the pages of slashdot render faster. For most of that stuff dialup is plenty adequate, and with a dedicated phone/fax line the time constraint ("gotta get offline before someome tries to call") goes away as well.
The only reason left is file sharing. Not sharing web pages, not running a fucking web server in your living room - to get broadband sold to 99% of the people who don't have it and have never used it, the only "killer app" available to market right now is music and movie trading.
And SBC wants to be able to talk about it. I think it's fucking absurd that we should be eleventh on the list and be tethered to a phone system (and soon an HDTV system) that is completely unique in the world. It's technological isolationism, and it's biting us in the ass. Laws like this one just add weight to that burden.
If you don't do a lot of file sharing why do you need broadband? To have the convenience of never having to tie up the phone line? Forget it - I can wire this entire rural village with "broadband." We don't get any other form of broadband out here but if no one changed their online habits I could funnel every one of those wireless users through a 128K ISDN line and no one would complain.
File sharing is the only reason to have broadband. Well, actually, buying movie downloads would be a great application, but Hollywood refuses to go there. And legally downloading music would be another great app, but thanks to our antiquated legal system kept fat by dollars from hundreds of lobbyists, we won't have that, either. the thing is...
"Download all the music you like. And all the music you sort of, kind of, maybe even a little bit like. Go MP3 crazy. Try new music. Build a song library. Whatever."
I can point you to a half dozen russian sites where, for $20 a month, you can get on legal on-demand MP3 downloads of just about any popular artist. That includes lots of Russian artists you've prbably never heard of, but it also includes Britney and Madonna and Christina and all the rest. These sites are operated completely legally, paying royalties to the russian licensing agency (ROMS) responsible for copyrighted "multimedia" works. So, technically, the above statement is 100% true and can be done legally and in a very cost effective fashion (how about a dime a song for 256kbps?).
But you're not likely to hear about this from Hollywood. Doesn't anyone wonder why Hollywood isn't throwing giant canninption fits over these sites offering legal downloads (for years now) to anyone with a Franklin in their Paypal account?
Hollywood isn't going to mention these legal services because they would risk further losing control of the market. Imagine if word got around that you could go online and pick any CD you want, select the level of quality you want, and download it from a completely legal website!
It's the elephant in the room. The record industry zoots don't want to talk about it, the lobbyists and lawyers don't want to talk about it, and the only way they know to keep the discussion stifled is to throw around the red paint of piracy. You think the record industry wants this case to actually go to court? And have their entire case mooted when allthis becomes a matter of public record?
You need to stop citing outdated periodicals and look at who's doing whom in the industry. Is hilary Rosen's successor a democrat? How about the Utah representative who seems to spearhead half the new Hollywood-centric protectionist legislation? Including openly advocating a system that would physically disable the computers of people who participate in file sharing?
Neither party gives a shit about anyone's rights or liberties. All that varies ar their motives. And if you believe anything else given the heaps of evidence, you truly are a moron.
Grasping any opportunity at all (never mind if the measure will be effective, or even if it is practical) just to squeeze some more tax dollars out of their constituents.
According to Sixty Minutes, about a decade ago JC was making a minimum of $35,000 a night playing shows. These were not huge shows, either - cretainly not stadium shows. He played 200 nights a year and made about 5 Million dollars - enough to pay a pretty hefty crew and live a nice life (when he wasn't on the road, I suppose).
Funny, I don't remember any talk at all about how much he paid to ticketmaster, or to the RIAA, or to anyone else besides his employees. And certainly he would not be able to play "guaranteed" $35,000 shows if he were not a famous country music star, and that fame was brought him by the old system.
But so what? Many stars are now leaving the old system. They sign with a record company, get as much fame as possible, then dump the old regime to try things on their own. The evolution is happening already. The last thing we need is legislated subsidies to carry an antiquated media system that refuses to evolve with the market.
As Johnny Cash said in that interview: "Give people something they really want to see and they'll save their money for it." This attitude carried him through decades of fame and generations of fans; We'd all be better off not to forget the wisdom of the legend.
You blew any chances at all o9f having a compelling post with that last moronic line. You think "republicans" aren't going to help protect all those businessmen in Hollywood? You think Republicans care any more about your privacy than the Democrats who followed Shrub over the hill like a buncha lemmings?
The proof: Microsoft was offering to GIVE TCI/AT&T <Pinky to lip>Five Billion Dollars!</pinky>. At $400 a box that would have, at the time, "upgraded" their entire 12.5 Million subscribers to a webTV based box.
It would also have put them in bed with Microsoft, and exposed all those cable boxes to the bazillions of (circa 1998) windows security vulnerabilities.
You can laugh about "security through obscurity" all you like, but this is obviously the game Hollywood (er, I mean the cable companies) are banking on. It's the way they played it before and all signs are they are counting on the courts and their IP-restrictive laws to protect them again.
Time Warner's worse nightmare is for those 12.5 Million subscribers to have cheap chinese video recorders that would instantly obsolete most of their planned "video on demand" services.
If it were about "not being a store" then all they would have to do is hop in bed with Mild Bill. He's a willing partner and as soon as those cable boxes are running windows the hardware becomes a commodity - but it's a commodity that has to compete on store shelves, which means feature creep that the zoots don't necessarily endorse. They saw what happened when cheap PCs could grok Redbooks CDs and DVDs and they ain't about to take that risk again. That would mean even more court battles, perhaps even some fines for their new "partner" but it won't matter in the end because MS has all the money. And a few million cable subscribers with commoditized, cable optimized tivos that cannot be zombified at the push of a button in Burbank is the kind of scenario that gives Jack and his crew night tremors... especially when their new "partner" could buy and sell the entire fucking city and cast his own "Oscar party."
And don't say "buy a distro" because I've not seen these as being much better. I've tried both Lindows and Lycorice - and with XP being only about $50 more with a new machine, they still suck.
i think his point is that nothing works as easily in linux as it does in windows.
Not entirely, although that's still true (see my other comments about setting file shares). But it's also that linux (yes, ALL the distros I have seen) doesn't jabber certain filetypes because of some IP issue or another, and it's not exactly intuitive on how to fix this. Granted WAY too few people know about the "solution" I use in win2k - install ffdshow and 99.9% of files play perfectly using only an open solution - but at least these install easily with the default interface. I can rebuild a win2k bbox from scratch in a few minutes and trust just about anyone else to do it after being shown once, but if I were to setup a linux box for someone and it ever had to be reconfigured, it would be me having to do it.
Job security? Maybe. Except the whole idea is to not have that "job." Any idiot can install XP on a box and get it working on the net. Any idot can get a redhat box working on the net, too. But there's a world of difference between what one can do with those two boxes in their baseline configs.
Mom doesn't need to be able to run nmap and nessus, mom wants to watch the baby's videos and listen to clint black. Mom wants to chat with her friends on msn and aol and check her hotmail account. And mom doesn't want to have to call the "computer guy" every time she wants to try a new game, buys a new digital camera, or tries to share files with the PC in her daughter's room.
Slashdot Mirror
What "he" (meaning me) said was the analog capture could not be reliably differentiated from the digital source. Since this seems to have flown completely the fuck over your head the first two times I'll explain it in simpler terms:
Image(s)1: still images captured from the analog input (svideo) from a reasonably high end (but old) DVD player.
Image(s)2: stills (same ones) taken from a DVD rip of the movie. Since this will still probably go over your head I'll explain it further: you put the DVD in the computer's DVD drive, and "special software" reads the DVD movie as a file, with which you may then do as you please.
My bet would be he's viewing the Analog outpt through the same POS TV Tuner card
And you lose.
Ever heard of AVS forum? A whole community of high end snobs who were, for quite some time (many still are) basing entire home theaters - tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment and time investment - and using lowly peecees as the central video processor. Peecees with $100 video capture cards. And, your ignorant assertions to the contrary, enjoying very high quality video.
You can spew ignorant bullshit all day if you like, but the fact remains thousands of people know you're dead fucking wrong. Think none of the people who read that also read /.? Well, here's one writing you this very second. With nearly three quarters of a million registered here, I very much doubt I'm alone. If you don't care that you look like a stupendously ignorant "know it all" in front of thousands of strangers, I certainly won't dwell on it any further.
doesn't matter if the source is perfect or not - if the analog capture cannot be differentiated from the >i>digital source then you cannot magically "do better." Not with firewire, not with "lossless" and not with stupid, unfounded assertions in a discussion forum.
Five of'em in one day. Of course, the rest will go into the trash automatically, but it was an interesting experience finally catching a taste of the "commoner" internet.
And if you cannot tell the difference between the video from a $40 PCI capture card and the absolute shit you get from a $100 USB video port, you really, really, need glasses.
Bob Barr is also known as a conservative. mom and Dad brainwashed-by-the-washington-media will give a lot more creedence to a known conservative than if it were Hilary railing against this (although I seriously doubt we would see Hilary railing against this, you get the point).
Something like we (still don't) have now, only more.
The cool new movies do not just come from Hollywood. Nor even from Sony.
But try to put a video capture card (aka tv tuner) in your laptop and see how far you get. Or a high end sound card. yeah, you can buy external boxes - so what? especially for a sound card you should not need an external box - the parts just ain't that big. You could cram a reasonably high quality 8 channel sound card into a double height "cradbus" card - except it would likely be five times more expensive than the PCI version simply because the quantities would be so infinitesimally low. And for an HDTV tuner - forget it.
But for people who need that functionality, a "quad height" bay connected to a high speed bus would be all that's needed.
It's encouraging that perhaps the "convergence" may make much of this come to pass. With PCI now serial there's no reason manufacturers couldn't put the connectors on an externally accessible plane and make "cards" into "cartridges." If the bus were uqiquitous then the same HDTV tuner (for example) could work in a TV set or a PC or a laptop or a hard drive recorder. And that would help everyone, both makers and consumers alike.
The vulnerability lies in the "one page, one machine" paradigm. If the net operated more like (get ready for the flames) freenet then nobody (not even the RIAA) could be DDOSd into oblivion. A bittorrent sort of structure would ensure popular documents were always widely available, but the downside (of course) is that less popular content might end up lost. Of course, one can also make the argument nothing would really get lost because some archivists would specialize in retaining this info, just like projects like the wayback machine do with physical sites.
You ALREADY are using the PCI-X interface, so you share that functionality with desktops. So now that laptop makers will have these larger slots they can plan for more comprehensive peripherals - like real tv tuner cards that support HD, higher capacity solid state/MRAM memory cards, etc.
So now you can actually build a complete PC - stuffed with truly useful cards that perform equally well on either platform - and you never have to open the case. We coyld have desktop systems that supports a full battery of "2x4" cards in the back, USB and Firewire and all the rest. And because the cards now can be used on either a desktop or laptop platform, peripheral makers have only ONE standard to support, which makes all their products both cheaper for the end user AND cheaper to produce.
But then what do I know? I don't even spell my name with a "u."
I had never even heard of JAP until about a month ago. I downloaded it to try it out and when I saw the "anonymous" chain consisted entirely of two servers in GERMANY I knew instantly not to trust it - any more than I would trust any US based "anonymous" provider, or any UK based "anonymous" provider.
There's millions of machines in asia with fast connections that are open to the world. If you want anonymity, learn to use a proxy sniffer and SOCKS chains. Or better still, add your share of bandwidth to freenet.
What's an SMB share? is that like Morpheus?
Claiming vouchers and then NOT spending the money on microsoft goodies actually costs MS money AND erodes their hold on the market, which is what this settlement was supposed to do. If you want to help the public schools, donate some equipment. Or donate some time. Doesn't even have to be at the schools, it could be at a community center. All those things would do more good for your community than MS giving away another "free" XP license.
Wow, seven new responses and all but one of you seem to refuse to accept any view of the word "file sharing" other than what the **AA has washed into your pointy little heads.
Since when do businesses have no need to share files? If businesses have no need to share files why the fuck are they all using DOCs for text and XLS for spreadsheets? That's the most insanely stupid statement I've seen in this entire thread, and given the level of brainwashing apparent in most of your replies (to quote another of you brainwashed folk) "that's saying a lot."
Every single one of you has unwittingly validated up my argument. "File sharing" has come to mean, in popular vernacular, "downloading movies and music." For most folks who don't understand the workings it doesn't even technically mean sharing because so many of them are unaware the shit they download can be "uploaded" too. So far as they're concerned they're getting free music that they might not find in the local store, or getting anime clips they don't know how to record from tv themselves.
Does anyone here support home users? I mean, besides your siblings and parents? You want to know how many people have asked me why "their internet just gets really slow sometimes" and were oblivious to that kazaa icon in their tool tray? So far as most home users who have never before had broadband before are concerned, "file sharing" is the only reason to step up. If you, a bunch of alleged techno-literates, can't even get past the music industry propoganda when defining file sharing, what the fuck do you think any of that other nonsense means to technically challenged folk?
You are all giving examples of people who already have had broadband and telling us why they like it and would keep it. and most of your examples would be utter gibberish to people who don't work on computers already (ie people who already know why they want broadband). You're not going to build a market selling to people who already know they want your product, kids.
Kazaa and other p2p apps are just a convenient, braindead way for mom and dad user to "share stuff" online. Yeah, some of them are too daft to even realize those "shared files" they download are visible to everyone online, but for every one of those braindead souls there's another who actually uses a p2p app to share stuff legally.
It takes a certain amount of know-how to get a "real" server running on a machine. Takes even more know-how to do that without it being owned by the kid down the street, or even the latest robotic virus. But it doesn't take a genius to install kazaa, drag a few files to the "shared" folder and then point your friends to them. You can even do it with zone alarm running and have some warm fuzzy feelings of safety (however misguided). And yes, I do know folks who use p2p apps in just such a setting.
But for most everything else, no one needs broadband. Especially when it may well cost more than twice as much as dialup access. Many folks who have never had broadband don't realize how handy it is to be able to go to a yahoo map, or google a factoid you can't recall in detail, without having to think about all the crap that goes along with "dialing the internet." They have never had the experience of talking with someone on the phone while they figure something out together. Or even just watched tv and surfed while the kid talks to her friends on the phone.
In fact that is the killer app for broadband, and it's the only way that computers and the net are truly going to become ubiquitous. But you can't sell any of that because the people who use dialup to check their email and surf msnbc have never experienced that, and they cannot relate to it. You might as well be trying to sell them tickets to mars, or lightning in a bottle. They can't get past thinking of "going on the internet" because it's still an alien place to them. They have no sense of ownership of the space in the same sense you and I might think of google as an extension of our own intellect.
So you gotta market what people can understand to get the asses in the seats. And they understand free shit, so you market that. Tell someone who chats with buddies, reads a few emails and surfs ebay an hour a night that they can get pages to load twice as fast with broadband and most every one will tell you "it's already fast enough." I've had broadband in my home, and regularly use very fast academic connections, but even I would not pay forty or fifty bucks a month in addition to a phone bill just to be able to see the pages of slashdot render faster. For most of that stuff dialup is plenty adequate, and with a dedicated phone/fax line the time constraint ("gotta get offline before someome tries to call") goes away as well.
The only reason left is file sharing. Not sharing web pages, not running a fucking web server in your living room - to get broadband sold to 99% of the people who don't have it and have never used it, the only "killer app" available to market right now is music and movie trading.
If you don't do a lot of file sharing why do you need broadband? To have the convenience of never having to tie up the phone line? Forget it - I can wire this entire rural village with "broadband." We don't get any other form of broadband out here but if no one changed their online habits I could funnel every one of those wireless users through a 128K ISDN line and no one would complain.
File sharing is the only reason to have broadband. Well, actually, buying movie downloads would be a great application, but Hollywood refuses to go there. And legally downloading music would be another great app, but thanks to our antiquated legal system kept fat by dollars from hundreds of lobbyists, we won't have that, either. the thing is...
"Download all the music you like. And all the music you sort of, kind of, maybe even a little bit like. Go MP3 crazy. Try new music. Build a song library. Whatever."
I can point you to a half dozen russian sites where, for $20 a month, you can get on legal on-demand MP3 downloads of just about any popular artist. That includes lots of Russian artists you've prbably never heard of, but it also includes Britney and Madonna and Christina and all the rest. These sites are operated completely legally, paying royalties to the russian licensing agency (ROMS) responsible for copyrighted "multimedia" works. So, technically, the above statement is 100% true and can be done legally and in a very cost effective fashion (how about a dime a song for 256kbps?).
But you're not likely to hear about this from Hollywood. Doesn't anyone wonder why Hollywood isn't throwing giant canninption fits over these sites offering legal downloads (for years now) to anyone with a Franklin in their Paypal account?
Hollywood isn't going to mention these legal services because they would risk further losing control of the market. Imagine if word got around that you could go online and pick any CD you want, select the level of quality you want, and download it from a completely legal website!
It's the elephant in the room. The record industry zoots don't want to talk about it, the lobbyists and lawyers don't want to talk about it, and the only way they know to keep the discussion stifled is to throw around the red paint of piracy. You think the record industry wants this case to actually go to court? And have their entire case mooted when all this becomes a matter of public record?
Neither party gives a shit about anyone's rights or liberties. All that varies ar their motives. And if you believe anything else given the heaps of evidence, you truly are a moron.
Grasping any opportunity at all (never mind if the measure will be effective, or even if it is practical) just to squeeze some more tax dollars out of their constituents.
Funny, I don't remember any talk at all about how much he paid to ticketmaster, or to the RIAA, or to anyone else besides his employees. And certainly he would not be able to play "guaranteed" $35,000 shows if he were not a famous country music star, and that fame was brought him by the old system.
But so what? Many stars are now leaving the old system. They sign with a record company, get as much fame as possible, then dump the old regime to try things on their own. The evolution is happening already. The last thing we need is legislated subsidies to carry an antiquated media system that refuses to evolve with the market.
As Johnny Cash said in that interview: "Give people something they really want to see and they'll save their money for it." This attitude carried him through decades of fame and generations of fans; We'd all be better off not to forget the wisdom of the legend.
Moron.
It would also have put them in bed with Microsoft, and exposed all those cable boxes to the bazillions of (circa 1998) windows security vulnerabilities.
You can laugh about "security through obscurity" all you like, but this is obviously the game Hollywood (er, I mean the cable companies) are banking on. It's the way they played it before and all signs are they are counting on the courts and their IP-restrictive laws to protect them again.
Time Warner's worse nightmare is for those 12.5 Million subscribers to have cheap chinese video recorders that would instantly obsolete most of their planned "video on demand" services.
If it were about "not being a store" then all they would have to do is hop in bed with Mild Bill. He's a willing partner and as soon as those cable boxes are running windows the hardware becomes a commodity - but it's a commodity that has to compete on store shelves, which means feature creep that the zoots don't necessarily endorse. They saw what happened when cheap PCs could grok Redbooks CDs and DVDs and they ain't about to take that risk again. That would mean even more court battles, perhaps even some fines for their new "partner" but it won't matter in the end because MS has all the money. And a few million cable subscribers with commoditized, cable optimized tivos that cannot be zombified at the push of a button in Burbank is the kind of scenario that gives Jack and his crew night tremors... especially when their new "partner" could buy and sell the entire fucking city and cast his own "Oscar party."
And don't say "buy a distro" because I've not seen these as being much better. I've tried both Lindows and Lycorice - and with XP being only about $50 more with a new machine, they still suck.
Not entirely, although that's still true (see my other comments about setting file shares). But it's also that linux (yes, ALL the distros I have seen) doesn't jabber certain filetypes because of some IP issue or another, and it's not exactly intuitive on how to fix this. Granted WAY too few people know about the "solution" I use in win2k - install ffdshow and 99.9% of files play perfectly using only an open solution - but at least these install easily with the default interface. I can rebuild a win2k bbox from scratch in a few minutes and trust just about anyone else to do it after being shown once, but if I were to setup a linux box for someone and it ever had to be reconfigured, it would be me having to do it.
Job security? Maybe. Except the whole idea is to not have that "job." Any idiot can install XP on a box and get it working on the net. Any idot can get a redhat box working on the net, too. But there's a world of difference between what one can do with those two boxes in their baseline configs.
Mom doesn't need to be able to run nmap and nessus, mom wants to watch the baby's videos and listen to clint black. Mom wants to chat with her friends on msn and aol and check her hotmail account. And mom doesn't want to have to call the "computer guy" every time she wants to try a new game, buys a new digital camera, or tries to share files with the PC in her daughter's room.
And with windows there are... secure alternatives?
See... this is what I'm saying. Too many people suffer the minutae and don't look at the bg picture.
Why not give me a "sharing" tab in the folder properties dialog and then prompt for a root password when I make changes and click "apply?"
Was that so hard?