DRM is only putting off the inevitable
on
Buzzword du Jour: DRM
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· Score: 5, Insightful
It's really pretty simple. The media companies are and always have been in the business of distribution. Distribution used to be hard and they earned their keep. Now distribution is easy (as any teenager with a internet connection will tell you) and there is little reason for creators and consumers to pay media companies a huge chunk of profit for a service that is essentially free today. DRM is the media/software corporations' attempt to make distribution difficult once again. Let's not be suckers and buy into it.
'Technophobe' implies an irrational fear. But if somebody is catching viruses they are almost certainly using windows. The fear of windows technology is quite rational. I'm afraid of it. If you and your computer are trafficking in MyDoom virus, the appropriate term for you is probably techno-schlemiel, techno-sucker, techno-gomeral, techno-dupe, but not technophobe.
I think a lot of people would rather pay $50 more. That doesn't hurt apple at all--in fact, I imagine it is part of the plan. Consider that you are looking at players in the range of $250 and considering the rio, iRiver, ipod mini or one of the many others. Then you have an epiphany and realize the $50 more gets you a 15MB ipod and you go for it. What apple has just done is convinced you not only to buy from it rather than it's competition, but to buy it's more expensive model. Apple changes the environment from 'which brand should I buy' to 'which apple product should I buy'. I think it is very smart. Those extra $50 start adding up pretty quickly even if the minis aren't selling particularly well and the competition--well they've got trouble.
It looks like consumers have spoken and film is finally going to go the way of the dinosaur."
Consumers may have spoken, but what they said was that they prefer to buy their film cameras from Nikon, Canon, Pentax, Minolta, Konica, Bronica, Hasseblad, Mamiya, Toyo, Linhoff, leica, Contax, Horseman, Sinar, Rollei, even Fuji....in fact anybody so long as they aren't called Kodak.
This reminds me of a passage from Jorge Luis Borges'
Library of Babel. In fact a lot reminds me of that story these days.
Five hundred years ago, the chief of an upper hexagon (2) came upon a book as confusing as the others, but which had nearly two pages of homogeneous lines. He showed his find to a wandering decoder who told him the lines were written in Portuguese; others said they were Yiddish. Within a century, the language was established: a Samoyedic Lithuanian dialect of Guarani, with classical Arabian inflections. The content was also deciphered: some notions of combinative analysis, illustrated with examples of variations with unlimited repetition.
Consider this:Silicon Crackers Tackle Casinos or Revenge On the One-Armed Bandit The fact is, in nevada there is a cottage criminal industry which revolves around ripping off slot machines. These are just individuals. Imagine if they were an organization with the resources of a modern political party trying to game the system. Now imagine if the people making the slot machines were contributing to and had a vested interest in that organization.
We have heard a lot of stories about people, states, and countries moving away from Microsoft. Is this a trend? If you are a manager of a fund heavily invested in MS, or an individual investor, when does this news begin to worry you. In the long run does MS really have a chance when competing against free, well written, well understood software?
Well, being the astute student of English that I am, I looked up 'wafe' in the Oxford English Dictionary. They have it listed as an obsolete variations of Waive, a verb which means "To move to and fro or from side to side." Although it seems pretty unlikely that spending my time digging around in the OED is going o get me wafed (assuming it takes the regular past tense (the ladies love it when you talk about linguistics (almost as much as (riduclously) nested quotes))) anytime soon I though you might be interested. For what it's worth, the most recent example the OED has listed for 'waive' as a verb is from 1570.
Although I can't explain it in detail, I can give you some problems that the folks in Washington haven't solved.
So you want to tax internet transactions and allow states to do the same? Which state gets the revenue, the state of the receiver or sender? It the transaction is routed through a node in Colorado, does Colorado get a cut? If you are taxing the sender and they operate in a high-tax state, what happens if they move their server to a low tax state?
Why isn't this an incentive to move MORE technology jobs overseas? After all if internet activity is being taxed in the US, put your servers in Burma and hire a Burmese staff to administer them....viola!
The problem is that nobody has figured out how to reconcile the provincial nature of local taxation with the nebulous, location-less, nature of the internet. The ban on internet taxes was an acknowledgment of this fact and an attempt to prevent state and local governments from screwing everything up by enacting a menagerie of little taxes. The problems are still unsolved.
So it would seem that tha airport card is difficult to install if you start from the wrong end of the computer. It's like when you try to take the film out of a camera from the lens end...let me tell you, you need to take a lot of shit apart to do that and it's a pain to put back together.
if it means that when I can't figure out how to use a kitchen appliance a little anthropomorphized cartoon refrigerator character pops up, waves at me and tells me what to do.
which systems will save the most money. I find this battle increasingly tiresome. I'm more interested in finding the systems that will put more people to work.
Putting more people to work means paying more people which means lower profits unless those people are able to increase efficiency or sell more product. How can you expect any business to strive to spend more money if there is an alternative? It may work for the government, but if businesses go out to their way to use more workers and pay more people they won't be around very long. There needs to be an economic reason (aka an incentive) for businesses to hire people. They are not going to, and can't, do it out of the kindness of their heart.
RSA and Elliptic Curve wouldn't stand a chance against this unbreakable encryption."
And crackers don't really stand a chance against the algorithms we have now. Although I'm happy to see them inventing cool stuff and cryptography os definitely neat, will this makes us more secure? Sure computers keep getting better and you need to stay ahead of the curve if you are someone like the NSA, but are people the loosing the security game because their 128 bit RSA keys keep getting cracked ? No. They are insecure because they have nanotube-size brains and use their birthday for their password or they leave a laptop with the vice president's agenda at a convenience store.
An essay is a creative thing. The idea is the point. The grammar is there to support the ideas and is secondary to them. The grammar should also be flexible. One of the things that we love about great essayists is that they pushed the envelope of grammar to suit their ideas. Maybe this is a fine tool to help teachers who are pressed for time ever increasing class size and ever decreasing budget but you can not rightly say you have graded a student's essay or that you have really helped him/her learn to write.
Here is an interesting test of the software: Feed it an essay by R.W. Emerson, Annie Dillard, Virginia Woolf, Francis Bacon, or Montaigne and a couple of essays by students with good grammar and spelling and see how it grades them. My guess is that it can't tell them apart. In fact I would hazard a guess that it would take some points away from Mrs. Woolf for run-ons. The essay is a great educational tool for critical thinking, if we standardize grading of it, the essay looses its meaning. If this can't tell the difference between Emerson and little Bobby is it of any value?
Section 2: Findings spells out their beef with p2p software and it seems to be the same beef people have with that pesky first amendment.
Peer-to-peer file trading software has been very widely distributed. The most popular of these programs has been downloaded over 200 million times, and at any one time, there are over 3 million people using it.
Strange that they want to outlaw something that a substantial percentage of the public find useful enough to download. The people behind the bill obviously carry some heavy political currency.
(2) Peer-to-peer systems are emerging as a conduit for the distribution of pornographic images and videos, including child pornography. Child pornography is easily found and downloaded using peer-to-peer systems.
Emerging as a CONDUIT?!? Sense when do we go after the conduit. Speech is a conduit for unsavory ideas as are the radio, magazines, books, our minds. Shall we outlaw those too?
If the RIAA is behind this it is really the hight of hypocrisy. This is an organization that is happy to dress up a teenage Brittany Spears in next to nothing and pay here to wiggle around in front of a bunch of horny boys, but threaten their profits and suddenly they are the keepers of the moral flame. What a crazy world.
On the surface it does make some sense. You work hard to come up with something and somebody just walk in takes it and starts to sell it themselves.
But take a look at copyright. The idea behind copyright is that creative work is good for our culture. Ideally it would be free to anyone, but then there would be no incentive to create. Maybe artists would create anyway but rather than risk a bunch of starving painters and writers perhaps we can find a balance between what is good for society (free unencumbered access of work of cultural importance and the ability to make derivative work) and what is good for the artist. Copyright does this by giving the artist a limited amount of time to control the work. Culture doesn't suffer too much because the term is (or used to be ) limited and the artist can have a stab at making a living. It's a balance.
Now look at this case. The availability of data--court records for instance--is of fundamental importance to a free society. Striking a balance between the public and the collators of this information will be much trickier. It is much more critical than a novel or play and it diminishes in value to the public over time. While a Melville novel still holds cultural value, court records from Melville's time won't help us police our judicial system. Once someone has control over public information, they can charge what they like for it, withhold it, and prevent others from publishing it. That is a recipe for abuse and for very expensive information.
Also consider where the data comes from. A quote from the Yahoo article:
Backers of the measure say it would allow database providers to protect themselves against those who simply cut and paste their databases and resell them, or make them available for free online.
So they don't want somebody cutting a pasting. Where exactly did the providers get the information in the first place? They cut and paste it from somewhere else. And that is the point...they didn't create the information. It does not belong to them. It is public. And by giving them license to control it and prevent others from using it we lose something very valuable, of critical interest to everyone and give it to a handful so they may profit. It just isn't worth it.
I don't know about you people, but I have lost all faith in the folks in Washington. They seem to be very good at a lot of things but are not especially good at writing legislation. So what do they do? They ask corporations what they would like and if they would be willing to help draft the language. It's outrageous.
Copyright law is designed to protect CREATIVE work. Data is not creative work and no matter how hard it may be to compile said data, it should not result in you owning the data to the exclusion of everyone else. There is no way anyone in Washington will be able to write this bill in such a way that it doesn't screw everybody except for the lawyers duking out infringement cases based on it.
With the internet data has become so easy to find and compile that just about anyone can do it. A lot of people have figured out that this spells trouble for their business plan that was invented in the fifties and are now trying to make a land grab of sorts to protect their bottom line.
Sharp business is cheating and not getting caught.
No. Sharp business is 'cheating' while following the letter of the law. What he is describing is 'Sharp Criminal Conduct' which some business people and many politicians engage in. When the politicians engage in 'Sharp Criminal Conduct' they make it easier for those engaging in 'sharp business' to do really foul things without actually breaking any laws. It's a subtle, but important difference and worth remembering next time you vote.
What if Gibbon had WHAT?
on
Bay of Souls
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· Score: 5, Funny
For some reason when I read the first sentence I imagined it to read:
"Imagine if Edward Gibbon wrote a James Bond adventure..."
700 Pages of this:
Notwithstanding this menace, a sense of mutual advantage soon renewed the alliance of the Turks and 007: but the pride of the great sexual tigress survived his resentment; and when he announced an important conquest to his friend the emperor M, he styled himself the master of the seven races, and the lord of the seven climates of the world.
The suits that run the labels and the RIAA are not ever going to change. They are too steeped in their business culture. History is full of examples of people clinging to outdated business models struggling to succeed while the rest of the world just moves on.
Sooner or later the artists will figure out that the world is changing and begin to find creative ways to distribute their material that does not involve poor contracts, giving away their money, signing away their creativity or suing people.
I suppose we would be all set if she could tie in:
how the weight of a teaspoon of white-dwarf material compares.
how many trips to the moon and around the earth something would take
How many bowls of Total you would need to eat to equal the nutritional value of one cloud.
But really, from my vantage point on a hot humid evening, listening to the air conditioner's constant drip of water pulled from seemingly dry air, it is no surprise that the atmosphere holds a lot of water. If you consider that clouds form when the air is fully saturated with water it makes a lot of sense that a large thing like a cloud would have a large amount of water in it.
I wonder why the inaccuracy of this system wasn't well known before it was put up in a public place. Did it perform much better under the controlled environment of the lab? The article states that it works well in a one-to-one test, but they knew that this isn't how how it would be used in this case. It seems likely that if this failed so miserably in real life it couldn't have been that great when they were developing it. Does this speak of a certain desperation on the part of law enforcement to 'do something' or at least to appear to be doing something. Or maybe a hopefullness on the part of the company developing it that they might just get lucky. In fact, if they were payed by the government to deploy this test even though it seems likely they knew it would fail, maybe they did get lucky. Who payed for all this anyway?
A few years ago microsoft beleived the web was just a game and they were not really interested in it. Then it occured to them that it wasn't going away and there was big money to be made so they jumped into the arena with Explorer, started bullying everyone around, and gave us the tag. I wonder how long it will be before they decide that open source software, and linux in particular, aren't going away and decide they need to be player to stay on top of things. Suddenly we have a microsoft linux distributions that is terrible, breaks a bunch of standards, but is well marketed.
Slashdot Mirror
It's really pretty simple. The media companies are and always have been in the business of distribution. Distribution used to be hard and they earned their keep. Now distribution is easy (as any teenager with a internet connection will tell you) and there is little reason for creators and consumers to pay media companies a huge chunk of profit for a service that is essentially free today. DRM is the media/software corporations' attempt to make distribution difficult once again. Let's not be suckers and buy into it.
Well, if we look at ants, bees and termites, we can safely draw the conclusion that brain size and social complexity are inversely proportional.
'Technophobe' implies an irrational fear. But if somebody is catching viruses they are almost certainly using windows. The fear of windows technology is quite rational. I'm afraid of it. If you and your computer are trafficking in MyDoom virus, the appropriate term for you is probably techno-schlemiel, techno-sucker, techno-gomeral, techno-dupe, but not technophobe.
I think a lot of people would rather pay $50 more. That doesn't hurt apple at all--in fact, I imagine it is part of the plan. Consider that you are looking at players in the range of $250 and considering the rio, iRiver, ipod mini or one of the many others. Then you have an epiphany and realize the $50 more gets you a 15MB ipod and you go for it. What apple has just done is convinced you not only to buy from it rather than it's competition, but to buy it's more expensive model. Apple changes the environment from 'which brand should I buy' to 'which apple product should I buy'. I think it is very smart. Those extra $50 start adding up pretty quickly even if the minis aren't selling particularly well and the competition--well they've got trouble.
I've almost got a winner but what I really need to know, is how many syllables are there in: $_=~/[a-z]['")]*[.!?]+['")]*\s/g)
Consumers may have spoken, but what they said was that they prefer to buy their film cameras from Nikon, Canon, Pentax, Minolta, Konica, Bronica, Hasseblad, Mamiya, Toyo, Linhoff, leica, Contax, Horseman, Sinar, Rollei, even Fuji....in fact anybody so long as they aren't called Kodak.
Consider this:Silicon Crackers Tackle Casinos or Revenge On the One-Armed Bandit The fact is, in nevada there is a cottage criminal industry which revolves around ripping off slot machines. These are just individuals. Imagine if they were an organization with the resources of a modern political party trying to game the system. Now imagine if the people making the slot machines were contributing to and had a vested interest in that organization.
We have heard a lot of stories about people, states, and countries moving away from Microsoft. Is this a trend? If you are a manager of a fund heavily invested in MS, or an individual investor, when does this news begin to worry you. In the long run does MS really have a chance when competing against free, well written, well understood software?
Well, being the astute student of English that I am, I looked up 'wafe' in the Oxford English Dictionary. They have it listed as an obsolete variations of Waive, a verb which means "To move to and fro or from side to side." Although it seems pretty unlikely that spending my time digging around in the OED is going o get me wafed (assuming it takes the regular past tense (the ladies love it when you talk about linguistics (almost as much as (riduclously) nested quotes))) anytime soon I though you might be interested. For what it's worth, the most recent example the OED has listed for 'waive' as a verb is from 1570.
Although I can't explain it in detail, I can give you some problems that the folks in Washington haven't solved.
So you want to tax internet transactions and allow states to do the same? Which state gets the revenue, the state of the receiver or sender? It the transaction is routed through a node in Colorado, does Colorado get a cut? If you are taxing the sender and they operate in a high-tax state, what happens if they move their server to a low tax state?
Why isn't this an incentive to move MORE technology jobs overseas? After all if internet activity is being taxed in the US, put your servers in Burma and hire a Burmese staff to administer them....viola!
The problem is that nobody has figured out how to reconcile the provincial nature of local taxation with the nebulous, location-less, nature of the internet. The ban on internet taxes was an acknowledgment of this fact and an attempt to prevent state and local governments from screwing everything up by enacting a menagerie of little taxes. The problems are still unsolved.
So it would seem that tha airport card is difficult to install if you start from the wrong end of the computer. It's like when you try to take the film out of a camera from the lens end...let me tell you, you need to take a lot of shit apart to do that and it's a pain to put back together.
if it means that when I can't figure out how to use a kitchen appliance a little anthropomorphized cartoon refrigerator character pops up, waves at me and tells me what to do.
Putting more people to work means paying more people which means lower profits unless those people are able to increase efficiency or sell more product. How can you expect any business to strive to spend more money if there is an alternative? It may work for the government, but if businesses go out to their way to use more workers and pay more people they won't be around very long. There needs to be an economic reason (aka an incentive) for businesses to hire people. They are not going to, and can't, do it out of the kindness of their heart.
And crackers don't really stand a chance against the algorithms we have now. Although I'm happy to see them inventing cool stuff and cryptography os definitely neat, will this makes us more secure? Sure computers keep getting better and you need to stay ahead of the curve if you are someone like the NSA, but are people the loosing the security game because their 128 bit RSA keys keep getting cracked ? No. They are insecure because they have nanotube-size brains and use their birthday for their password or they leave a laptop with the vice president's agenda at a convenience store.
An essay is a creative thing. The idea is the point. The grammar is there to support the ideas and is secondary to them. The grammar should also be flexible. One of the things that we love about great essayists is that they pushed the envelope of grammar to suit their ideas. Maybe this is a fine tool to help teachers who are pressed for time ever increasing class size and ever decreasing budget but you can not rightly say you have graded a student's essay or that you have really helped him/her learn to write.
Here is an interesting test of the software: Feed it an essay by R.W. Emerson, Annie Dillard, Virginia Woolf, Francis Bacon, or Montaigne and a couple of essays by students with good grammar and spelling and see how it grades them. My guess is that it can't tell them apart. In fact I would hazard a guess that it would take some points away from Mrs. Woolf for run-ons. The essay is a great educational tool for critical thinking, if we standardize grading of it, the essay looses its meaning. If this can't tell the difference between Emerson and little Bobby is it of any value?
Section 2: Findings spells out their beef with p2p software and it seems to be the same beef people have with that pesky first amendment.
Peer-to-peer file trading software has been very widely distributed. The most popular of these programs has been downloaded over 200 million times, and at any one time, there are over 3 million people using it.
Strange that they want to outlaw something that a substantial percentage of the public find useful enough to download. The people behind the bill obviously carry some heavy political currency.
(2) Peer-to-peer systems are emerging as a conduit for the distribution of pornographic images and videos, including child pornography. Child pornography is easily found and downloaded using peer-to-peer systems.
Emerging as a CONDUIT?!? Sense when do we go after the conduit. Speech is a conduit for unsavory ideas as are the radio, magazines, books, our minds. Shall we outlaw those too?
If the RIAA is behind this it is really the hight of hypocrisy. This is an organization that is happy to dress up a teenage Brittany Spears in next to nothing and pay here to wiggle around in front of a bunch of horny boys, but threaten their profits and suddenly they are the keepers of the moral flame. What a crazy world.
But take a look at copyright. The idea behind copyright is that creative work is good for our culture. Ideally it would be free to anyone, but then there would be no incentive to create. Maybe artists would create anyway but rather than risk a bunch of starving painters and writers perhaps we can find a balance between what is good for society (free unencumbered access of work of cultural importance and the ability to make derivative work) and what is good for the artist. Copyright does this by giving the artist a limited amount of time to control the work. Culture doesn't suffer too much because the term is (or used to be ) limited and the artist can have a stab at making a living. It's a balance.
Now look at this case. The availability of data--court records for instance--is of fundamental importance to a free society. Striking a balance between the public and the collators of this information will be much trickier. It is much more critical than a novel or play and it diminishes in value to the public over time. While a Melville novel still holds cultural value, court records from Melville's time won't help us police our judicial system. Once someone has control over public information, they can charge what they like for it, withhold it, and prevent others from publishing it. That is a recipe for abuse and for very expensive information.
Also consider where the data comes from. A quote from the Yahoo article:
Backers of the measure say it would allow database providers to protect themselves against those who simply cut and paste their databases and resell them, or make them available for free online.
So they don't want somebody cutting a pasting. Where exactly did the providers get the information in the first place? They cut and paste it from somewhere else. And that is the point...they didn't create the information. It does not belong to them. It is public. And by giving them license to control it and prevent others from using it we lose something very valuable, of critical interest to everyone and give it to a handful so they may profit. It just isn't worth it.
I don't know about you people, but I have lost all faith in the folks in Washington. They seem to be very good at a lot of things but are not especially good at writing legislation. So what do they do? They ask corporations what they would like and if they would be willing to help draft the language. It's outrageous.
Copyright law is designed to protect CREATIVE work. Data is not creative work and no matter how hard it may be to compile said data, it should not result in you owning the data to the exclusion of everyone else. There is no way anyone in Washington will be able to write this bill in such a way that it doesn't screw everybody except for the lawyers duking out infringement cases based on it.
With the internet data has become so easy to find and compile that just about anyone can do it. A lot of people have figured out that this spells trouble for their business plan that was invented in the fifties and are now trying to make a land grab of sorts to protect their bottom line.
No. Sharp business is 'cheating' while following the letter of the law. What he is describing is 'Sharp Criminal Conduct' which some business people and many politicians engage in. When the politicians engage in 'Sharp Criminal Conduct' they make it easier for those engaging in 'sharp business' to do really foul things without actually breaking any laws. It's a subtle, but important difference and worth remembering next time you vote.
"Imagine if Edward Gibbon wrote a James Bond adventure..."
700 Pages of this:
Notwithstanding this menace, a sense of mutual advantage soon renewed the alliance of the Turks and 007: but the pride of the great sexual tigress survived his resentment; and when he announced an important conquest to his friend the emperor M, he styled himself the master of the seven races, and the lord of the seven climates of the world.
The suits that run the labels and the RIAA are not ever going to change. They are too steeped in their business culture. History is full of examples of people clinging to outdated business models struggling to succeed while the rest of the world just moves on.
Sooner or later the artists will figure out that the world is changing and begin to find creative ways to distribute their material that does not involve poor contracts, giving away their money, signing away their creativity or suing people.
That day can't come soon enough.
But really, from my vantage point on a hot humid evening, listening to the air conditioner's constant drip of water pulled from seemingly dry air, it is no surprise that the atmosphere holds a lot of water. If you consider that clouds form when the air is fully saturated with water it makes a lot of sense that a large thing like a cloud would have a large amount of water in it.
I wonder why the inaccuracy of this system wasn't well known before it was put up in a public place. Did it perform much better under the controlled environment of the lab? The article states that it works well in a one-to-one test, but they knew that this isn't how how it would be used in this case. It seems likely that if this failed so miserably in real life it couldn't have been that great when they were developing it. Does this speak of a certain desperation on the part of law enforcement to 'do something' or at least to appear to be doing something. Or maybe a hopefullness on the part of the company developing it that they might just get lucky. In fact, if they were payed by the government to deploy this test even though it seems likely they knew it would fail, maybe they did get lucky. Who payed for all this anyway?
A few years ago microsoft beleived the web was just a game and they were not really interested in it. Then it occured to them that it wasn't going away and there was big money to be made so they jumped into the arena with Explorer, started bullying everyone around, and gave us the tag. I wonder how long it will be before they decide that open source software, and linux in particular, aren't going away and decide they need to be player to stay on top of things. Suddenly we have a microsoft linux distributions that is terrible, breaks a bunch of standards, but is well marketed.