So the reason why this is true is that there is an economic imbalance; labor in the United States is valued higher than labor in, say, India. Outsourcing levels the playing field a little, but outsourcing is expensive - the only reason it's worth doing is that imbalance - the overhead cost of outsourcing plus the cost of labor in the outsource location is less than the raw cost of labor in the location from which the outsourcing is occurring. One of the results of heavy outsourcing is that the imbalance levels out.
If you're okay with children starving in China, then it's fine to oppose this leveling. But if you actually want the world to be a better place, outsourcing is a good thing. Leveling the labor playing field is a good thing. Why is it that it's better for someone in the U.S. to prosper than someone in India? Think about it.
Historically what we've seen is that changes like this float all boats. Although I am not fond of him in general, Bush is right in saying that increased prosperity elsewhere creates opportunity here. The suck is that the imbalance will take a while to level out, and while that's happening we will experience some economic woes. But if the value of labor were the same in every country in the world, the result would be global prosperity, not global poverty.
I'll get back to you about whether this is okay with me when my job gets outsourced, but at least in the abstract it seems like a good thing.
Er, Zen Cart is OSCommerce, just with a lot of mods. Warts on warts. Unfortunately, switching to ZenCart won't make your maintenance life any easier, although if it has the features you want, it's not bad. My main complaint about ZenCart is how much useless crap there is in it that hardly anyone will ever use. The ZenCart developers are supposedly working on a rewrite; having learned in the crucible of OSCommerce, perhaps they will in fact produce a nice clean replacement. I'm looking forward to seeing what they've done. 'twould be nice if they rewrite it in some language other than PHP.
Actually, I would say that it's roughly a toss-up whether it's easier to rewrite it or hack it, which is even worse, because every time you sit down to make a change, you have to revisit the question of whether or not you ought to rewrite the damned thing.
It would be really nice to just rewrite the thing in a decent language, with a bit of structure and clarity, and maybe some useful debugging information. But because it basically works, it hasn't happened yet.
When you grow up and get a job in a corporation, get back to us, okay? I've worked for some large corporations in my day, and my experience is that what gets you hired or fired is how good you look, not what you've actually accomplished or failed to accomplish. Neither government nor corporations are inherently good or bad about this. It depends entirely on how good the management is. In the case of government, the management is us. In the case of a corporation, the management is whoever it is. In the former case, we all get a vote; in the latter we don't.
So you tell me, over which do you have more control? And how much do you really think it helps to vote based on some cockamamie ideology rather than actually paying attention to what's going on and voting based on that?
I'm holding off on buying a player since I can already display 1080i on my Mac (of course, I don't actually *get* 1080i because the DVD isn't that high-resolution, but I do get better resolution than my old DVD player outputs). At some point I will probably buy either an HD-DVD or Blu-Ray and play DVDs on it, just because it's easier to control than the Mac. Unless the media prices come down, there's little chance of me actually buying any HD-DVD or Blu-Ray discs.
I really don't care about the DRM on the discs, since I'm not likely to be playing them on my computer, but the price is prohibitive. The whole DRM issue may become more important in the future, but right now I don't have any intention of dropping $2k on a media center PC, and I suspect I'm not alone in that. Who wants to have to run anti-virus software on their DVD player? It's a dumb idea.
People _do_ care about the rootkit thing. Maybe not enough, but they do care. Various states are looking at prosecuting Sony. Congresscritters are making noise. If you want them to care more, pay attention - send them happy mail when they do the right thing, and sad mail when they do the wrong thing. Will it make a difference? You won't know if you don't try.
My main problem with swing is that you have to exhaustively test swing code on every platform and VM where you expect it to run, and you will likely run into weird behaviours. I don't know why this is so, but that's been my experience. I think if you are developing for a single platform it's probably fine, but the mere fact that the APIs are the same on all platforms unfortunately does not mean that it behaves the same, so the whole cross-platform story was a sad joke for me, and I wound up dropping it. I'm now programming with Qt and C++, and happy as a clam.
If I were a game company and I was aware of what was going on there, I'd be pretty leery of taking the suit to trial if I could settle for a mere $300k. The way to fix the patent system is not to individually invalidate bad patents - it is to change the law so that bad patents like this have a harder time getting issued, or maybe so they can't be issued at all. The lawyer route is just too expensive, and the multiplication factor looks like it's in the range of six orders of magnitude - NTP pays $1k for a patent, gets $1b in court. That's not just an uphill battle - that's a battle up an overhang.
The irony here is that high school civics teachers are going to eat this up. If the law is written as described, a lot of them are going to see it as a challenge, and wind up teaching really good classes on the basis for copyright law. And we're going to wind up with a generation of kids coming up who actually know what copyright law is all about - where it applies, where it doesn't, and what the real ethical implications are.
Yes, there will be some line-toeing teachers who teach the MPAA party line. Fortunately, kids can smell bullshit a mile away, so if they have a teacher like this, they will quickly realize that they are in the presence of a tool. And they're going to do the opposite of what said tool advises. The ones who buy what the tool was teaching probably would have bought what the MPAA says in its ads anyway, so it's no loss.
Now if we can only make teaching about patents compulsory in public schools...
The argument needs a bit of clarification, but it's not invalid. It does matter how things look. It also matters that they work, and that they be easy to use. You can just get things to work, but if they aren't easy to use, nobody will use them, so it doesn't matter if they work. Part of making a visual interface usable is figuring out how to naturally draw the eye where it needs to go - how to provide visual cues that help you to do the right thing without having to internalize a complicated model of how the program works. It's also possible, however, to just add glitz without adding usability, and that's where the bad reputation visual design gets comes from. Attractive visual design without usability gives you an app that's all dressed up with no place to go.
More likely they're both infected with the _same_ disease - the one that makes you think that behaving in a partisan manner is how you make the world a better place.
I used to work for a company that got bled by the infamous Cadtrak. I think we had to pay something like $20k to make them go away. That was a lot of money for us - not enough to bankrupt the company, but enough to pay my salary for half a year at the time. The idea that a "company" is a thing that can be sucked dry, and that there is no moral or ethical problem with doing so, is wrong - real people are affected by these kinds of activities, and real suffering occurs as a result of these petty acts of extortion.
The difference between a patent troll and someone like BMI is that in the case of BMI, what they hold has actual value - someone worked, and created a thing of beauty, and is trying to get paid for it, using a flawed tool, BMI, to obtain that compensation. In the case of a patent troll company, there is no thing of beauty that was created. RIM, whatever missteps they may have made in the litigation process, actually created something and made it work. NTP, as far as I can tell, patented an obvious idea and then tried to get rich off of it, without ever creating anything of value.
So although I personally do not like the way BMI and ASCAP do business, they are much less pernicious than a company that patent things they never actually made, and then tries to extort money from a company that actually did make something of value.
If you want a real picture of a patent troll, compare it to someone who, during the gold rush, would lurk in the background waiting for someone to make a strike, and then stake a claim on the place where the strike happened, or would bushwack the person who held the claim, bury them in an unmarked grave, and then sell the claim to a third party who would actually do the work of taking the gold out of the ground. Sure, the amount they'd charge for the claim might be comparitively nominal, but it wasn't their property in the first place.
Anyway, the Slate article is quite a good article. Should be recommended reading for people who have interest in this field.
Man, you really read a lot into so few lines. Are you arguing with me, or the cop who pulled you over for speeding? Remind me to tell you sometime about the time I spent twenty minutes reading some cop the riot act for pulling me over for not riding my bicycle in the gutter, while his partner watched and tried not to laugh at the both of us.
You know, if there was a system in place where artists could release their stuff, and there was some way to tick a counter every time one of their songs was played to the end, and then there was a way to apportion the incoming revenue stream based on the relative ratios on the counters, then you're right - I'd be happy with that. But in practice, what actually happens is that companies like ASCAP just go around collecting statistical data, with no real concern for methodology, which means that the big hits get paid for somewhat in excess of what they earned, and anybody whose music is in the long tail gets zilch. So yeah, in principle you're right, but in practice your analogy doesn't hold.
A good test of the system would be if the money we spent on the levy were completely recompensed by the system. But that seems unlikely.
We do use laptops for recording - Powerbooks, to be precise. They work pretty nicely, but only if someone has one, and they're pretty expensive. As I said in another comment, intel laptops don't have line in, so you can't record off a sound board. And their microphone preamps tend to introduce a lot of noise because the power supply is noisy and the preamp isn't well isolated from the noise. The advent of VOIP apps like Skype seems to have driven the standards up a bit, but the lack of support for line in is a real problem.
That looks good in the shopping basket, but unfortunately doesn't work very well. The box I described in the previous post _was_ an M-Audio box, and I lost valuable data because the driver was flaky. And this was with the stock drivers, on Windows - I wasn't doing anything funny.
In general, ALSA drivers are good, but only for non-obscure equipment. The M-Audio gear is sufficiently obscure that I'd have to have a lot of miles on it in testing before I'd trust it live. Pretty much the difference between a pro setup and a cheap setup is that the pro setup works reliably. You pay the extra money not so much for better quality hardware as that the manufacture is going to be in deep doo-doo if somebody loses a recording session on the pro gear they bought for a couple of thousand bucks, but if you lose data on the cheap stuff, the manufacturer pretty much doesn't care.
Ironically, what I'm using right now is a Shuttle box, and it pretty much does the job with the baseboard audio - I don't need an M-audio card, because the motherboard comes with a line in. The software is all command-line, which means that only I can operate it, but that's fixable - as I said earlier, I'll probably wrap some Qt4 widgets around DarkIce and do some trivial mods to support storing uncompressed audio rather than MP3. It's a work in progress.
$1k for a reliable recorder is a little spendy, but that's about what you have to pay. I'd really like something the size of a Nokia 770 with a line in and a real spinning disk drive - that would address my need precisely, because it runs Linux, so I can slap a custom recording program on it and go. Unfortunately the real Nokia 770 doesn't have a line in, and doesn't really support spinning media, so I'd have to get an iMic or something, and it'd take me a long time to be able to trust the driver on that.
Also, you're right that I'm asking for the world. What's wrong with that? Seems like the world is eminently buildable - there are devices that are very, very close to what I want on the market already. Sadly, there are none that do exactly what I want.
We tried the iRiver for a while, but that was a huge disappointment - despite being a great hardware platform for recording, the UI is geared primarily for playback (one wonders how many people buy an iRiver when they could have an iPod for less money if all the want is playback), and, unbelievably, the iRiver maxes out at an hour and nine minutes of recording if you record into a WAV file at 44KHz+mono (less if you go stereo), and so what we found was that we kept getting half a class, because the person operating the iRiver had no real way of noticing that it had stopped recording. You could set up a discipline (e.g., set a timer for an hour, start a new session then) but it's not practical unless you have professionals doing the recording, and we don't.
The lesson here for me is that it pretty much has to run Linux or I don't want to be bothered with it. So no more iRivers. No windows boxes. No Macs (mac sound drivers tend to fluctuate in quality from release to release, unfortunately, and coding for Cocoa and Apple's sound system is deeply painful). I'm confident that within a year or so there will be something on the market that fits the bill, but I can still whine about it in the meantime!;')
While you may be right in the example you give, in point of fact given the choice between two lawyers of equal ability, I'd prefer to hire the one that actually believes in what they're doing.
If you reread what I wrote, you might see that you are actually replying to the opposite of the point I was making - the point I was making is that if you have already paid for the data that you are copying, you still have to pay the levy. It was not that if you pay the levy you still have to buy the data.
What are you talking about? You can make perfectly good copies or master audio-CDs on any PC. Perhaps you don't know how to use your gear properly??? Have you tried to RTFM???
Again, reading comprehension is your friend. I am not making copies of CDs here - I am recording analog sound onto a digital medium. One of the types of media we used to use was the audio minidisc, because you have this nice little compact device that makes a high-quality digital recording, and that's easy enough to use that nearly anyone can operate it.
The problem with this is that you can't get the bits back off of the device very easily. You'd think that since it's basically a disk drive, you could just read the data off the disk as fast as the disk would go, but in fact you can't get a minidisc drive that works that way. And none of the portable minidisc recorders have digital output - only digital input. So you can't make a digital-to-digital copy with one of them. You have to buy a separate device.
And when you get that device, the only way to get the digital data off of it cleanly is to *play* it in realtime into another digitizing system, which is unbelievably time consuming when you have a stack of minidiscs to transfer.
And why did Sony design the system this way? Because they were afraid you'd make copies of the preprinted minidisc media that they sold. And how many copies of such media did they sell? Roughly zero. But thank heaven, at least none of it was pirated, so that makes it all worthwhile.
And this is just one example of a general problem. I tried to switch away from minidiscs to computers, because that would save me the transfer time off the minidisc. But it turns out that most digitizing systems are flaky. They sort of work. If you don't mind spending thousands of dollars, you can get clean audio, but otherwise forget it. One quite expensive but still consumer-grade piece of equipment that I use simply stopped delivering an audio stream halfway through a talk, and I wound up having to get the audio off the video camera, which is a real pain because now you're sucking twelve-and-a-half gigabytes per hour off the camera, in realtime again, just so that you can winnow out and use the audio from that data stream, which amounts to maybe 300k/hour.
The only think that's worked well for me is the line in on a Powerbook or the line in on a Linux box, and indeed that's what I'm now using, but intel laptops don't have line in - they have mic in - so you have to buy a desktop machine to do recording. And unfortunately laptops aren't point-and-shoot the way minidisc recorders are, so you need a geek to operate them, which means that I'm one of maybe four people in the Dharma group that can do it.
And by the way, if it sounds like I'm really upset about this, there's certainly a hint of that, but mostly it's just laughable. My ultimate solution to this fiasco is to just write new software myself, and that's a work in progress. A Qt wrapper around darkice that stores a WAV file to disk instead of an MP3 file (which is what darkice currently does) looms large in my plans for upcoming hacks. My hope is that I really can get it to the point where a non-geek can reliably operate it, but so far the jury's out.
Fortunately we _are_ in the 'states, so we don't have to pay the levy. My point is just that the idea of enacting a similar levy in the U.S. doesn't strike me as an improvement over the current situation - theft is theft whether it's a penny at a time out of everyone's bank account of 100k pennies at a time out of every 100k'th person's bank account. Applying for a refund only works if the amount of money I get back covers the time I spent applying for the refund, which I think is exceedingly unlikely.
No, that's also repugnant. But it's repugnant in a different way - rather than making everybody subsidize your broken revenue model, you concentrate the burden on a smaller number of individuals, thus increasing the individual suffering and allowing most people to think that nothing is wrong. It's a lot like using speeding tickets as a revenue source.
Actually, that's not precisely the system you have. With the system you have, you pay the levy whether you use it or not, and whether you were otherwise entitled to the music or not (e.g., by buying it through iTMS or because you already paid for the CD).
Personally, I find the idea of paying a levy on every piece of media I *could* use to pirate music repugnant. I do sound for a Dharma center where we have a lot of teachings; we record them and give them away for free. Having to pay a levy for an iPod or for CDs or whatever is completely unfair in this case - we aren't getting any of that money back when people copy our audio (nor do we want it - the audio is *supposed* to be free).
Meanwhile, because of all the paranoia from the music industry, it's very difficult to record anything - there are so many attempts to close the analog hole and to avoid perfect copies that, to this day, it is a struggle to get any kind of usable equipment that works for us - e.g., something where you push "record" and you get a clean digital recording. If you have the bucks for really expensive pro gear this isn't out of the question, but all of the sub-$1k equipment is deliberately crippled.
I can't add anything to the basic point you've made here, because it's perfect. However, to go in another direction with this, another thing to consider is that ultimately it's great for Bill Gates if he's generous, and it's great for Steve Jobs if he's generous, and either way it's really none of our business. That is, it's not our job to decide what the right thing is for Steve Jobs to do or Bill Gates to do. It's their job.
If they screw it up, that's too bad, and if we're in a position to give them advice that will help them to do a thing that will produce more happiness for them, that's wonderful, but usually we're not in that position, and if we aren't, then making judgements about it boils down to gossip.
One might make the argument that it's wrong for a person to amass great wealth in the abstract, and that therefore a person who accidentally amasses great wealth should do their best to divest themselves of it in a constructive way. But again, this falls to the person who makes the "mistake" of amassing this great wealth to judge, not to me.
Now if Mr. Jobs or Mr. Gates were to do something illegal to get their money, or something that we think should be illegal, then we could have a debate about whether the legal system had failed, and what to do about it, but again we wouldn't be talking about whether or not Mr. Jobs or Mr. Gates were a good or bad person - we'd be debating matters of public policy, which in itself would require no judgements to be made about the motivations of either party.
Yeah, sure, next thing you're going to tell is is that he's going to be bit on the toe by a cat that's a snake. That's highly unlikely. More likely his organs will be harvested and his assets taken by the state. If he's lucky they'll keep his brain frozen, but that's unlikely - it'll be considered a waste of resources.
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So the reason why this is true is that there is an economic imbalance; labor in the United States is valued higher than labor in, say, India. Outsourcing levels the playing field a little, but outsourcing is expensive - the only reason it's worth doing is that imbalance - the overhead cost of outsourcing plus the cost of labor in the outsource location is less than the raw cost of labor in the location from which the outsourcing is occurring. One of the results of heavy outsourcing is that the imbalance levels out.
If you're okay with children starving in China, then it's fine to oppose this leveling. But if you actually want the world to be a better place, outsourcing is a good thing. Leveling the labor playing field is a good thing. Why is it that it's better for someone in the U.S. to prosper than someone in India? Think about it.
Historically what we've seen is that changes like this float all boats. Although I am not fond of him in general, Bush is right in saying that increased prosperity elsewhere creates opportunity here. The suck is that the imbalance will take a while to level out, and while that's happening we will experience some economic woes. But if the value of labor were the same in every country in the world, the result would be global prosperity, not global poverty.
I'll get back to you about whether this is okay with me when my job gets outsourced, but at least in the abstract it seems like a good thing.
Er, Zen Cart is OSCommerce, just with a lot of mods. Warts on warts. Unfortunately, switching to ZenCart won't make your maintenance life any easier, although if it has the features you want, it's not bad. My main complaint about ZenCart is how much useless crap there is in it that hardly anyone will ever use. The ZenCart developers are supposedly working on a rewrite; having learned in the crucible of OSCommerce, perhaps they will in fact produce a nice clean replacement. I'm looking forward to seeing what they've done. 'twould be nice if they rewrite it in some language other than PHP.
Actually, I would say that it's roughly a toss-up whether it's easier to rewrite it or hack it, which is even worse, because every time you sit down to make a change, you have to revisit the question of whether or not you ought to rewrite the damned thing.
It would be really nice to just rewrite the thing in a decent language, with a bit of structure and clarity, and maybe some useful debugging information. But because it basically works, it hasn't happened yet.
When you grow up and get a job in a corporation, get back to us, okay? I've worked for some large corporations in my day, and my experience is that what gets you hired or fired is how good you look, not what you've actually accomplished or failed to accomplish. Neither government nor corporations are inherently good or bad about this. It depends entirely on how good the management is. In the case of government, the management is us. In the case of a corporation, the management is whoever it is. In the former case, we all get a vote; in the latter we don't.
So you tell me, over which do you have more control? And how much do you really think it helps to vote based on some cockamamie ideology rather than actually paying attention to what's going on and voting based on that?
Not that I am bitter or anything. No sirree!
I'm holding off on buying a player since I can already display 1080i on my Mac (of course, I don't actually *get* 1080i because the DVD isn't that high-resolution, but I do get better resolution than my old DVD player outputs). At some point I will probably buy either an HD-DVD or Blu-Ray and play DVDs on it, just because it's easier to control than the Mac. Unless the media prices come down, there's little chance of me actually buying any HD-DVD or Blu-Ray discs.
I really don't care about the DRM on the discs, since I'm not likely to be playing them on my computer, but the price is prohibitive. The whole DRM issue may become more important in the future, but right now I don't have any intention of dropping $2k on a media center PC, and I suspect I'm not alone in that. Who wants to have to run anti-virus software on their DVD player? It's a dumb idea.
People _do_ care about the rootkit thing. Maybe not enough, but they do care. Various states are looking at prosecuting Sony. Congresscritters are making noise. If you want them to care more, pay attention - send them happy mail when they do the right thing, and sad mail when they do the wrong thing. Will it make a difference? You won't know if you don't try.
My main problem with swing is that you have to exhaustively test swing code on every platform and VM where you expect it to run, and you will likely run into weird behaviours. I don't know why this is so, but that's been my experience. I think if you are developing for a single platform it's probably fine, but the mere fact that the APIs are the same on all platforms unfortunately does not mean that it behaves the same, so the whole cross-platform story was a sad joke for me, and I wound up dropping it. I'm now programming with Qt and C++, and happy as a clam.
If I were a game company and I was aware of what was going on there, I'd be pretty leery of taking the suit to trial if I could settle for a mere $300k. The way to fix the patent system is not to individually invalidate bad patents - it is to change the law so that bad patents like this have a harder time getting issued, or maybe so they can't be issued at all. The lawyer route is just too expensive, and the multiplication factor looks like it's in the range of six orders of magnitude - NTP pays $1k for a patent, gets $1b in court. That's not just an uphill battle - that's a battle up an overhang.
Are you kidding? It's really hard to find intelligent people to run businesses these days. No joke!
The irony here is that high school civics teachers are going to eat this up. If the law is written as described, a lot of them are going to see it as a challenge, and wind up teaching really good classes on the basis for copyright law. And we're going to wind up with a generation of kids coming up who actually know what copyright law is all about - where it applies, where it doesn't, and what the real ethical implications are.
Yes, there will be some line-toeing teachers who teach the MPAA party line. Fortunately, kids can smell bullshit a mile away, so if they have a teacher like this, they will quickly realize that they are in the presence of a tool. And they're going to do the opposite of what said tool advises. The ones who buy what the tool was teaching probably would have bought what the MPAA says in its ads anyway, so it's no loss.
Now if we can only make teaching about patents compulsory in public schools...
The argument needs a bit of clarification, but it's not invalid. It does matter how things look. It also matters that they work, and that they be easy to use. You can just get things to work, but if they aren't easy to use, nobody will use them, so it doesn't matter if they work. Part of making a visual interface usable is figuring out how to naturally draw the eye where it needs to go - how to provide visual cues that help you to do the right thing without having to internalize a complicated model of how the program works. It's also possible, however, to just add glitz without adding usability, and that's where the bad reputation visual design gets comes from. Attractive visual design without usability gives you an app that's all dressed up with no place to go.
More likely they're both infected with the _same_ disease - the one that makes you think that behaving in a partisan manner is how you make the world a better place.
I think that if the only way to get gold is to kill people, maybe we should try to get by without it.
I used to work for a company that got bled by the infamous Cadtrak. I think we had to pay something like $20k to make them go away. That was a lot of money for us - not enough to bankrupt the company, but enough to pay my salary for half a year at the time. The idea that a "company" is a thing that can be sucked dry, and that there is no moral or ethical problem with doing so, is wrong - real people are affected by these kinds of activities, and real suffering occurs as a result of these petty acts of extortion.
The difference between a patent troll and someone like BMI is that in the case of BMI, what they hold has actual value - someone worked, and created a thing of beauty, and is trying to get paid for it, using a flawed tool, BMI, to obtain that compensation. In the case of a patent troll company, there is no thing of beauty that was created. RIM, whatever missteps they may have made in the litigation process, actually created something and made it work. NTP, as far as I can tell, patented an obvious idea and then tried to get rich off of it, without ever creating anything of value.
So although I personally do not like the way BMI and ASCAP do business, they are much less pernicious than a company that patent things they never actually made, and then tries to extort money from a company that actually did make something of value.
If you want a real picture of a patent troll, compare it to someone who, during the gold rush, would lurk in the background waiting for someone to make a strike, and then stake a claim on the place where the strike happened, or would bushwack the person who held the claim, bury them in an unmarked grave, and then sell the claim to a third party who would actually do the work of taking the gold out of the ground. Sure, the amount they'd charge for the claim might be comparitively nominal, but it wasn't their property in the first place.
Anyway, the Slate article is quite a good article. Should be recommended reading for people who have interest in this field.
..whether the patents were good? They patented email in a mobile device. How good does that get?
Man, you really read a lot into so few lines. Are you arguing with me, or the cop who pulled you over for speeding? Remind me to tell you sometime about the time I spent twenty minutes reading some cop the riot act for pulling me over for not riding my bicycle in the gutter, while his partner watched and tried not to laugh at the both of us.
You know, if there was a system in place where artists could release their stuff, and there was some way to tick a counter every time one of their songs was played to the end, and then there was a way to apportion the incoming revenue stream based on the relative ratios on the counters, then you're right - I'd be happy with that. But in practice, what actually happens is that companies like ASCAP just go around collecting statistical data, with no real concern for methodology, which means that the big hits get paid for somewhat in excess of what they earned, and anybody whose music is in the long tail gets zilch. So yeah, in principle you're right, but in practice your analogy doesn't hold.
A good test of the system would be if the money we spent on the levy were completely recompensed by the system. But that seems unlikely.
We do use laptops for recording - Powerbooks, to be precise. They work pretty nicely, but only if someone has one, and they're pretty expensive. As I said in another comment, intel laptops don't have line in, so you can't record off a sound board. And their microphone preamps tend to introduce a lot of noise because the power supply is noisy and the preamp isn't well isolated from the noise. The advent of VOIP apps like Skype seems to have driven the standards up a bit, but the lack of support for line in is a real problem.
That looks good in the shopping basket, but unfortunately doesn't work very well. The box I described in the previous post _was_ an M-Audio box, and I lost valuable data because the driver was flaky. And this was with the stock drivers, on Windows - I wasn't doing anything funny.
;')
In general, ALSA drivers are good, but only for non-obscure equipment. The M-Audio gear is sufficiently obscure that I'd have to have a lot of miles on it in testing before I'd trust it live. Pretty much the difference between a pro setup and a cheap setup is that the pro setup works reliably. You pay the extra money not so much for better quality hardware as that the manufacture is going to be in deep doo-doo if somebody loses a recording session on the pro gear they bought for a couple of thousand bucks, but if you lose data on the cheap stuff, the manufacturer pretty much doesn't care.
Ironically, what I'm using right now is a Shuttle box, and it pretty much does the job with the baseboard audio - I don't need an M-audio card, because the motherboard comes with a line in. The software is all command-line, which means that only I can operate it, but that's fixable - as I said earlier, I'll probably wrap some Qt4 widgets around DarkIce and do some trivial mods to support storing uncompressed audio rather than MP3. It's a work in progress.
$1k for a reliable recorder is a little spendy, but that's about what you have to pay. I'd really like something the size of a Nokia 770 with a line in and a real spinning disk drive - that would address my need precisely, because it runs Linux, so I can slap a custom recording program on it and go. Unfortunately the real Nokia 770 doesn't have a line in, and doesn't really support spinning media, so I'd have to get an iMic or something, and it'd take me a long time to be able to trust the driver on that.
Also, you're right that I'm asking for the world. What's wrong with that? Seems like the world is eminently buildable - there are devices that are very, very close to what I want on the market already. Sadly, there are none that do exactly what I want.
We tried the iRiver for a while, but that was a huge disappointment - despite being a great hardware platform for recording, the UI is geared primarily for playback (one wonders how many people buy an iRiver when they could have an iPod for less money if all the want is playback), and, unbelievably, the iRiver maxes out at an hour and nine minutes of recording if you record into a WAV file at 44KHz+mono (less if you go stereo), and so what we found was that we kept getting half a class, because the person operating the iRiver had no real way of noticing that it had stopped recording. You could set up a discipline (e.g., set a timer for an hour, start a new session then) but it's not practical unless you have professionals doing the recording, and we don't.
The lesson here for me is that it pretty much has to run Linux or I don't want to be bothered with it. So no more iRivers. No windows boxes. No Macs (mac sound drivers tend to fluctuate in quality from release to release, unfortunately, and coding for Cocoa and Apple's sound system is deeply painful). I'm confident that within a year or so there will be something on the market that fits the bill, but I can still whine about it in the meantime!
While you may be right in the example you give, in point of fact given the choice between two lawyers of equal ability, I'd prefer to hire the one that actually believes in what they're doing.
Ooh, "industry shill?" Where'd that come from?
If you reread what I wrote, you might see that you are actually replying to the opposite of the point I was making - the point I was making is that if you have already paid for the data that you are copying, you still have to pay the levy. It was not that if you pay the levy you still have to buy the data.
What are you talking about? You can make perfectly good copies or master audio-CDs on any PC. Perhaps you don't know how to use your gear properly??? Have you tried to RTFM???
Again, reading comprehension is your friend. I am not making copies of CDs here - I am recording analog sound onto a digital medium. One of the types of media we used to use was the audio minidisc, because you have this nice little compact device that makes a high-quality digital recording, and that's easy enough to use that nearly anyone can operate it.
The problem with this is that you can't get the bits back off of the device very easily. You'd think that since it's basically a disk drive, you could just read the data off the disk as fast as the disk would go, but in fact you can't get a minidisc drive that works that way. And none of the portable minidisc recorders have digital output - only digital input. So you can't make a digital-to-digital copy with one of them. You have to buy a separate device.
And when you get that device, the only way to get the digital data off of it cleanly is to *play* it in realtime into another digitizing system, which is unbelievably time consuming when you have a stack of minidiscs to transfer.
And why did Sony design the system this way? Because they were afraid you'd make copies of the preprinted minidisc media that they sold. And how many copies of such media did they sell? Roughly zero. But thank heaven, at least none of it was pirated, so that makes it all worthwhile.
And this is just one example of a general problem. I tried to switch away from minidiscs to computers, because that would save me the transfer time off the minidisc. But it turns out that most digitizing systems are flaky. They sort of work. If you don't mind spending thousands of dollars, you can get clean audio, but otherwise forget it. One quite expensive but still consumer-grade piece of equipment that I use simply stopped delivering an audio stream halfway through a talk, and I wound up having to get the audio off the video camera, which is a real pain because now you're sucking twelve-and-a-half gigabytes per hour off the camera, in realtime again, just so that you can winnow out and use the audio from that data stream, which amounts to maybe 300k/hour.
The only think that's worked well for me is the line in on a Powerbook or the line in on a Linux box, and indeed that's what I'm now using, but intel laptops don't have line in - they have mic in - so you have to buy a desktop machine to do recording. And unfortunately laptops aren't point-and-shoot the way minidisc recorders are, so you need a geek to operate them, which means that I'm one of maybe four people in the Dharma group that can do it.
And by the way, if it sounds like I'm really upset about this, there's certainly a hint of that, but mostly it's just laughable. My ultimate solution to this fiasco is to just write new software myself, and that's a work in progress. A Qt wrapper around darkice that stores a WAV file to disk instead of an MP3 file (which is what darkice currently does) looms large in my plans for upcoming hacks. My hope is that I really can get it to the point where a non-geek can reliably operate it, but so far the jury's out.
Fortunately we _are_ in the 'states, so we don't have to pay the levy. My point is just that the idea of enacting a similar levy in the U.S. doesn't strike me as an improvement over the current situation - theft is theft whether it's a penny at a time out of everyone's bank account of 100k pennies at a time out of every 100k'th person's bank account. Applying for a refund only works if the amount of money I get back covers the time I spent applying for the refund, which I think is exceedingly unlikely.
No, that's also repugnant. But it's repugnant in a different way - rather than making everybody subsidize your broken revenue model, you concentrate the burden on a smaller number of individuals, thus increasing the individual suffering and allowing most people to think that nothing is wrong. It's a lot like using speeding tickets as a revenue source.
Actually, that's not precisely the system you have. With the system you have, you pay the levy whether you use it or not, and whether you were otherwise entitled to the music or not (e.g., by buying it through iTMS or because you already paid for the CD).
Personally, I find the idea of paying a levy on every piece of media I *could* use to pirate music repugnant. I do sound for a Dharma center where we have a lot of teachings; we record them and give them away for free. Having to pay a levy for an iPod or for CDs or whatever is completely unfair in this case - we aren't getting any of that money back when people copy our audio (nor do we want it - the audio is *supposed* to be free).
Meanwhile, because of all the paranoia from the music industry, it's very difficult to record anything - there are so many attempts to close the analog hole and to avoid perfect copies that, to this day, it is a struggle to get any kind of usable equipment that works for us - e.g., something where you push "record" and you get a clean digital recording. If you have the bucks for really expensive pro gear this isn't out of the question, but all of the sub-$1k equipment is deliberately crippled.
I can't add anything to the basic point you've made here, because it's perfect. However, to go in another direction with this, another thing to consider is that ultimately it's great for Bill Gates if he's generous, and it's great for Steve Jobs if he's generous, and either way it's really none of our business. That is, it's not our job to decide what the right thing is for Steve Jobs to do or Bill Gates to do. It's their job.
If they screw it up, that's too bad, and if we're in a position to give them advice that will help them to do a thing that will produce more happiness for them, that's wonderful, but usually we're not in that position, and if we aren't, then making judgements about it boils down to gossip.
One might make the argument that it's wrong for a person to amass great wealth in the abstract, and that therefore a person who accidentally amasses great wealth should do their best to divest themselves of it in a constructive way. But again, this falls to the person who makes the "mistake" of amassing this great wealth to judge, not to me.
Now if Mr. Jobs or Mr. Gates were to do something illegal to get their money, or something that we think should be illegal, then we could have a debate about whether the legal system had failed, and what to do about it, but again we wouldn't be talking about whether or not Mr. Jobs or Mr. Gates were a good or bad person - we'd be debating matters of public policy, which in itself would require no judgements to be made about the motivations of either party.
Well, sure, but there are plenty of lichens up in the Cairngorms that they can use in that eventuality.
Yeah, sure, next thing you're going to tell is is that he's going to be bit on the toe by a cat that's a snake. That's highly unlikely. More likely his organs will be harvested and his assets taken by the state. If he's lucky they'll keep his brain frozen, but that's unlikely - it'll be considered a waste of resources.