It would mean no more MPAA, and no more Matrix. No more RIAA, and no more "getting discovered." No more $800 Photoshop, and no more app developer market. No more IP lawyers, and no more living off of your art. What if you could press a button and choose one or the other?
You are blurring the lines a little here. Sure, the MPAA, RIAA and many high dollar entertainment values would dissappear. That does not mean that there would be no more Photoshop and no more app developer market. Software products can generate revenue from support and timely updates. Look at Red Hat or IBM. Their revenue stream is primarily support and consulting. Photoshop may not be $800 each, and sales may be lower, but Adobe can definitely leverage their product and still make money for it. Likewise, there will always be businesses that want custom apps developed. The market may decline, mostly because we won't have to redesign the wheel all the time, but there will still be a market. Musicians will still get paid for live shows, artists will still be needed to provide original content, writers will write online books and such.
Ultimately we don't NEED to sell the infinitely reproducible product and make a profit. Sell the peripheral items. Sell the connected products that are not infinitely reproducible. While the MP3 can be copied forever, you can only go to one live show. Not selling IP actually empowers the artist. It hurts the big business that has been riding on the backs of the creative individuals for years. Sure, there will be a few budding musicians that don't get the big record deal and authors that don't sign the book deal, but ultimately it will work out.
One additional point for your argument. MP3 is a lossy format, converting vast libraries of music to another format is going to result in poorer quality music. Most of us with a large number of MP3s aren't going to want to change for a long time.
By your same reasoning wouldn't we have evolved similarly if we were scavengers. Most of the scavengers I can think of have claws to rip open abandoned carcasses.
Ecological environmentalism seeks to prevent any human-made effects in ecological systems -- preventing any human-made changes to pristine ecologies and removing the effects of humans from sullied ecologies.
Yours is a very simplistic - ideal definition. I have seen, met, read about every type of ecological environmentalist possible. Many of them may want to prevent human-made changes and remove the effects of humans, but many others support things like putting out forest fires or stopping erosion. Some are against man-made projects and others support the man-made projects for the new environments that are created. I think that's the biggest reason they never really get anything done. No one can agree on exactly what should be done.
The true parallel that could be considered "cultural environmentalism" might include splitting or censoring the internet to prevent the flow of "deleterious" culture from one country to another.
Wouldn't it also be a parallel if the "environmentalists" decided that the Internet was an environment unto itself and should be kept in a pristine, wild state - untouched by the evils of governments, regulations, laws and politics?
Depends on your use. I only use my mp3 player at the gym. I don't want to jack with playlists or skip through a bunch of songs. I want to listen to the songs I've loaded on random and be able to skip to the next one if I'm not in the mood for the current one. It's not like I'm going to put my whole music collection on a 512Mb or 1GB mp3 player. For me a shuffle would be perfect, although the size is still a little smaller than I would like.
So, when MySpace (or any other company or organization) appoints a Czar to make everyone safer, take it with a grain of salt.
Exactly. NewsCorp and Rupert Murdoch are not stupid. They bought MySpace to make money and that money comes from the 13 and 14 year old kids. They aren't going to do anything that will make it difficult for those kids to access the site.
No kidding, I don't see them going after wal-mart who provides around 1% of China's GDP. I haven't seen congressional hearings asking if wal-mart is ashamed they are taking advantage of those low wage workers.
That's a great story. I've had similar experiences here with qwest. I finally gave up and went with comcast. I think the telecoms here in the US really missed the boat on DSL. I live in a city of 85,000 and it's only been in the last couple of years that qwest has even made DSL available to most of the city. Meanwhile everyone went with a cable modem...
You have to remember that that which inconviences us is their opportunity.
Or their downfall, something about giving them enough rope... If the RIAA tries to pull a stunt like you just outlined they will be out of business in a year. Nobody will buy their new CD player, they'll just spend the $300 on an iPod and buy all the music from iTunes, or $100 and $13/month on satellite radio. There's choices now and they can't dictate what people can and cannot do. They monopolized the music industry for years - now the musicians don't need them and the consumers don't need them so they're screwed. If they are smart they can probably salvage a lesser roll in the entertainment industry, but if they try to force something on the public it will fail in a big way.
CDs would be copy protected and require a CD key to play (a la Windows or PC game keys)
Unfortunately, they don't seem to be aware that the methods you mention are are largely ineffective. It's typically a matter of days from the release of a game before the thing is cracked and downloadable.
would require an internet or modem connection to phone home on each play (like Steam)
Might be a bit hard to play in the car.
What the RIAA wants is for things to go back to the way they used to be. No Internet, no Satellite radio, no iPods, no iTunes. They see their revenue model slowly but surely slipping away and they can't do anything about it, so they flail around and make a lot of noise. This whole article is just posturing. What are they going to do? Start suing people that rip CDs they've purchased? Suing downloaders was bad, going after your customers that actually PAID for the CD - doesn't seem smart to me.
The real answer for all of us here is to not buy or listen to RIAA music. There are thousands, maybe millions of independant artists out there on the web. Go out and support these people. Buy their songs of iTunes, or better yet, buy the CDs directly from their website. Don't know any indie music? Try listening to some podcasts for some ideas. The Association of Music Podcasting has a large list of music podcasts. Personally I think the Eclectic Mix has a good selection of different music and Coverville is a great podcast featuring many indpendent artists.
Eh? That doesn't add up... why should education be any different from any other good? I mean, privatisation hasn't led to a shortage of cars, hamburgers, architects, designers, dentists, guns, airplanes, etc. etc. In fact, education is so important, I expect it'd be a growth industry if privatised & deregulated.
Because education isn't optional. There are people in this country that can't afford cars, guns, dentists or even food at times. It would be nice to expect charities to step up, but I don't know if that's something we can depend on. Personally, I don't want the next generation to be illiterate because we expected the United Way to educate them or because Mom was too tired after working two jobs just to put food on the table to teach them to read. I'm adamently against socialization for most things, but I don't think the future of the country is something we should gamble with casually.
let parents send children to the best schools they can afford, schools of their own choosing (or, alternatively, homeschool).
I agree in theory, but then what happens to schools that can't be profitable and have to close down? What if you can't afford to send your kids to school? What if the only school you can afford offers a poorer education than the current public schools now do? Personally I think it's important for everyone to have some level of education. Unfortunately there are many people in our country that can't or won't spend any more money than required on their children's education. I fear that if education was completely privatized we would have a shortage of educational facilities.
My preference are schools more like the charter schools where the tax dollars still support them, but they have the autonomy that you refer to.
I would run it the same way most caches are run. Only store the most recent pages, release the older stuff. Don't cache pages froma tab that's three hours old and hasn't been used in an hour.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I have no doubt Ellison has nefarious purposes in all of this. Will someone fork these projects and pick up the torch? Will new products be built?
The cache feature is nice, but why distribute it out to every tab? If I have 20 tabs open I'm not going to be constantly clicking the back button on each of them. Why not clear the cache on tabs that haven't been accessed recently and only keep cache on tabs actively being used. Often when I open new tabs I just want to be able to quickly access that page, or use it as a temporary bookmark - not navigate back through the path that got me there.
If the Congress has not issued a Declaration of War, how can the President be exercising "wartime powers?"
That's a great point. There's been a lot of 'wartime' talk lately. If we are at war now, we've been at war pretty much continually since the end of WWII. Korea, Vietnam, the Cold War, Bosnia, Grenada, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Iraq, not to mention the War on Drugs. We have had troops committed somewhere in the world constantly for the better part of the 20th Century. Why is it that only now we have to throw all of our rights out the window, and only now we can exercise "wartime powers"?
Slashdot Mirror
Anybody that ever stayed in a hotel.
It would mean no more MPAA, and no more Matrix. No more RIAA, and no more "getting discovered." No more $800 Photoshop, and no more app developer market. No more IP lawyers, and no more living off of your art. What if you could press a button and choose one or the other?
You are blurring the lines a little here. Sure, the MPAA, RIAA and many high dollar entertainment values would dissappear. That does not mean that there would be no more Photoshop and no more app developer market. Software products can generate revenue from support and timely updates. Look at Red Hat or IBM. Their revenue stream is primarily support and consulting. Photoshop may not be $800 each, and sales may be lower, but Adobe can definitely leverage their product and still make money for it. Likewise, there will always be businesses that want custom apps developed. The market may decline, mostly because we won't have to redesign the wheel all the time, but there will still be a market. Musicians will still get paid for live shows, artists will still be needed to provide original content, writers will write online books and such.
Ultimately we don't NEED to sell the infinitely reproducible product and make a profit. Sell the peripheral items. Sell the connected products that are not infinitely reproducible. While the MP3 can be copied forever, you can only go to one live show. Not selling IP actually empowers the artist. It hurts the big business that has been riding on the backs of the creative individuals for years. Sure, there will be a few budding musicians that don't get the big record deal and authors that don't sign the book deal, but ultimately it will work out.
One additional point for your argument. MP3 is a lossy format, converting vast libraries of music to another format is going to result in poorer quality music. Most of us with a large number of MP3s aren't going to want to change for a long time.
Wish I had mod points. That's the funniest post I've seen in a while. You should sell that to SNL.
two forms of projected power to use against predators - ballistic weapons, and dogs.
Woo Hoo! I'm going to go home and tell my dogs they are responsible for civilization. They will be SO excited.
By your same reasoning wouldn't we have evolved similarly if we were scavengers. Most of the scavengers I can think of have claws to rip open abandoned carcasses.
Ecological environmentalism seeks to prevent any human-made effects in ecological systems -- preventing any human-made changes to pristine ecologies and removing the effects of humans from sullied ecologies.
Yours is a very simplistic - ideal definition. I have seen, met, read about every type of ecological environmentalist possible. Many of them may want to prevent human-made changes and remove the effects of humans, but many others support things like putting out forest fires or stopping erosion. Some are against man-made projects and others support the man-made projects for the new environments that are created. I think that's the biggest reason they never really get anything done. No one can agree on exactly what should be done.
The true parallel that could be considered "cultural environmentalism" might include splitting or censoring the internet to prevent the flow of "deleterious" culture from one country to another.
Wouldn't it also be a parallel if the "environmentalists" decided that the Internet was an environment unto itself and should be kept in a pristine, wild state - untouched by the evils of governments, regulations, laws and politics?
Depends on your use. I only use my mp3 player at the gym. I don't want to jack with playlists or skip through a bunch of songs. I want to listen to the songs I've loaded on random and be able to skip to the next one if I'm not in the mood for the current one. It's not like I'm going to put my whole music collection on a 512Mb or 1GB mp3 player. For me a shuffle would be perfect, although the size is still a little smaller than I would like.
If the government can't tax it, they will outlaw it...
If they can't collect the tax, how is outlawing it going to have any impact?
So, when MySpace (or any other company or organization) appoints a Czar to make everyone safer, take it with a grain of salt.
Exactly. NewsCorp and Rupert Murdoch are not stupid. They bought MySpace to make money and that money comes from the 13 and 14 year old kids. They aren't going to do anything that will make it difficult for those kids to access the site.
No kidding, I don't see them going after wal-mart who provides around 1% of China's GDP. I haven't seen congressional hearings asking if wal-mart is ashamed they are taking advantage of those low wage workers.
That's a great story. I've had similar experiences here with qwest. I finally gave up and went with comcast. I think the telecoms here in the US really missed the boat on DSL. I live in a city of 85,000 and it's only been in the last couple of years that qwest has even made DSL available to most of the city. Meanwhile everyone went with a cable modem...
You have to remember that that which inconviences us is their opportunity.
Or their downfall, something about giving them enough rope... If the RIAA tries to pull a stunt like you just outlined they will be out of business in a year. Nobody will buy their new CD player, they'll just spend the $300 on an iPod and buy all the music from iTunes, or $100 and $13/month on satellite radio. There's choices now and they can't dictate what people can and cannot do. They monopolized the music industry for years - now the musicians don't need them and the consumers don't need them so they're screwed. If they are smart they can probably salvage a lesser roll in the entertainment industry, but if they try to force something on the public it will fail in a big way.
CDs would be copy protected and require a CD key to play (a la Windows or PC game keys)
Unfortunately, they don't seem to be aware that the methods you mention are are largely ineffective. It's typically a matter of days from the release of a game before the thing is cracked and downloadable.
would require an internet or modem connection to phone home on each play (like Steam)
Might be a bit hard to play in the car.
What the RIAA wants is for things to go back to the way they used to be. No Internet, no Satellite radio, no iPods, no iTunes. They see their revenue model slowly but surely slipping away and they can't do anything about it, so they flail around and make a lot of noise. This whole article is just posturing. What are they going to do? Start suing people that rip CDs they've purchased? Suing downloaders was bad, going after your customers that actually PAID for the CD - doesn't seem smart to me.
The real answer for all of us here is to not buy or listen to RIAA music. There are thousands, maybe millions of independant artists out there on the web. Go out and support these people. Buy their songs of iTunes, or better yet, buy the CDs directly from their website. Don't know any indie music? Try listening to some podcasts for some ideas. The Association of Music Podcasting has a large list of music podcasts. Personally I think the Eclectic Mix has a good selection of different music and Coverville is a great podcast featuring many indpendent artists.
Eh? That doesn't add up ... why should education be any different from any other good? I mean, privatisation hasn't led to a shortage of cars, hamburgers, architects, designers, dentists, guns, airplanes, etc. etc. In fact, education is so important, I expect it'd be a growth industry if privatised & deregulated.
Because education isn't optional. There are people in this country that can't afford cars, guns, dentists or even food at times. It would be nice to expect charities to step up, but I don't know if that's something we can depend on. Personally, I don't want the next generation to be illiterate because we expected the United Way to educate them or because Mom was too tired after working two jobs just to put food on the table to teach them to read. I'm adamently against socialization for most things, but I don't think the future of the country is something we should gamble with casually.
let parents send children to the best schools they can afford, schools of their own choosing (or, alternatively, homeschool).
I agree in theory, but then what happens to schools that can't be profitable and have to close down? What if you can't afford to send your kids to school? What if the only school you can afford offers a poorer education than the current public schools now do? Personally I think it's important for everyone to have some level of education. Unfortunately there are many people in our country that can't or won't spend any more money than required on their children's education. I fear that if education was completely privatized we would have a shortage of educational facilities.
My preference are schools more like the charter schools where the tax dollars still support them, but they have the autonomy that you refer to.
Maybe not as strange as you think... just more public than normal.
I would run it the same way most caches are run. Only store the most recent pages, release the older stuff. Don't cache pages froma tab that's three hours old and hasn't been used in an hour.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I have no doubt Ellison has nefarious purposes in all of this. Will someone fork these projects and pick up the torch? Will new products be built?
The cache feature is nice, but why distribute it out to every tab? If I have 20 tabs open I'm not going to be constantly clicking the back button on each of them. Why not clear the cache on tabs that haven't been accessed recently and only keep cache on tabs actively being used. Often when I open new tabs I just want to be able to quickly access that page, or use it as a temporary bookmark - not navigate back through the path that got me there.
-1 can mean unlimited.
Similiar sentiments were expressed during the Cold War, and look how that turned out.
Few struggles are actually eternal.
They have two security plans
Kate Moss security - You won't remember where that site is anyway
and the
Tyra Banks security - Look out for the dolphins
Thought it was from potato to corn.
If the Congress has not issued a Declaration of War, how can the President be exercising "wartime powers?"
That's a great point. There's been a lot of 'wartime' talk lately. If we are at war now, we've been at war pretty much continually since the end of WWII. Korea, Vietnam, the Cold War, Bosnia, Grenada, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Iraq, not to mention the War on Drugs. We have had troops committed somewhere in the world constantly for the better part of the 20th Century. Why is it that only now we have to throw all of our rights out the window, and only now we can exercise "wartime powers"?