I think in this context we are comparing those who DL music off of P2P sites, or even more specifically, those who distribute music on P2P sites with those who make money off of distributing music illegally.
There's almost no question that the for-profit kind is costing the record industry more than the teenager sharing a couple hundred MP3s on KaZaA without even thinking about it.
Yet the RIAA is pursuing the larger number of people causing the smaller amount of "damage".
Exactly, the RIAA is going to take this data and use it as PROOF that their legal assautls are working and that P2P piracy is 100% of the reason that sales took a dive to begin with.
I remember a few years ago when the labels were bitching about declining sales and Napster, someone did a study and determined that if even the most ridiculously high estimates of P2P usage were true and counting that every downloaded song as a lost CD sale that P2P only accounted for like 20% of the drop in CD sales since the 90s economy bubble.
In reality it was the economy that caused sales to drop, after all buying CDs is just about the most optional thing and the first thing to go when the.com that was overpaying you ran out of funding.
Now the economy is on the upswing, and surprisingly people are spending more on leisure items like music.
I could be wrong (I'm not an iTunes user) but it is my understanding that when you "buy" a track or album from the iTunes Music Store that it comes down in some format that includes DRM. And that DRM restricts how often you can copy the file or burn it to CD.
I'm alomost certian it won't let you rip an iTMS purchased track directly to MP3, you would need to burn it to CD then rip to MP3, where the extra conversion would no doubt result in loss of quality.
Now I have no doubt that if you are dealing with non iTMS files, such as a WMA, AAC or whatever that you can easily rip 8 ways from Sunday, since there is no DRM on those files to begin with.
No doubt there is DRM, if there wasn't TiVo would get sued by the MPAA & TV networks in a heartbeat.
TiVo as a company itself doesn't care, in fact I'm sure they would prefer to open the box cause it would drive additional sales up but they saw what happened to ReplayTV when they offered these kinds of featues. They literally got sued out of business (without even going to trial IIRC).
As a TiVo subscriber I'm definitely willing to have them hold back a bit on features if it enables them to stay in business and continue to provide me their service. Most of the missing stuff could be easily done with hacks if I were so inclined anyways.
Re:no tivotogo for direct tv subscribers
on
TiVo to Go Released
·
· Score: 1
This is the price you pay. With a DirecTiVo you get dualtuners and record the digital stream right off the satellite but there are features that DirecTV won't allow TiVo to enable because they are scared of the content providers (TiVo is as well but isn't as dependent on the networks (like Viacom) as DirecTV is)
Expect it to get worse (the feature gap) once DirecTV releases their own DVR, when Newscorps UK satellite provider released a DVR they gradually scaled back TiVo support to the point where integrated TiVo units were almost obsolete.
IMO people who are tech savvy who would be more inclined towards a PC based system (as opposed to an appliance like TiVo) will be non-plussed by the infelxibility and restrictions in MPC.
The "sweet spot" that MS is targetting, that I'm not sure exists as a viable market is the consumer that wants to run their media on their single PC. Figure the odds that the person ready to control their entertainment with a PC has only one PC.
I wonder if that was referring to server boxes or total processors?
I also wonder if they were going with first tier server vendors (i.e. Dell, HP, Sun, etc.) or if any old white box with a "Server" label was counted?
Like I said I'm really happy for the progress AMD has made. Competition can only be good for the market in general. I just think they aren't as "dominant" as they would like us to believe.
As much as I'm rooting for AMD to give Intel a run for it's money I'd still probably shy from it for my critical servers, primarily due to the relibility issues of their earlier PII & PIII clone processors in desktops (primarily low end "consumer grade" PCs sold in places like Circuit City or Sears). Inteligently I know these new chips are completely/u different animals but I guess you get burned once (or a handful in my case) and you don't forget:-)
"AMD has declared dominance in the gaming and server microprocessor market in 2004:
I've yet to see an AMD equipped server. If even 5% of all servers are equipped with AMD processors I'll be amazed.
This reminds me of when the CEO of Pepsi released a book deatailing how Pepsi "Won the cola wars".
I'm sorry if your still #2 in sales you didn't "win" and if you have only begun to break into the marked you certianly aren't "Dominance"
For one, I think that AMD is doing great things with their new stuff (been syaing for years they need to do more than just clone Intel CPUs) and that Intel would be wise in paying attention to what AMD is doing but declaring dominance, at least in the server market is kind of like Ralph Nader declaring victory in October.
You can connect ANY IMAP4 (or even POP3) E-Mail client to an Exchange server all day long and it will have identical funcionality to that same IMAP4 client connecting to any other IMAP4 server.
The limitation is in the IMAP4 protocol itself. There are a lot of features you give up when you switch to IMAP using Outlook that you never had with any other IMAP client.
I used to run a network where we had Exchange, Netscape Mail server and Groupwise, and I had a mix of Outlook, Netscape Communicator and Groupwise clients. All three clients could connect to all three servers without issue. We ran this way because we were a systems integration shop and had customers that ran all three. It all worked seamlessly where any user could talk to any other and people could (and did) switch servers whenever they wanted.
Scarily enough, Exchange is probably the best messaging platform out there for servicing multiple client OSs and applications.
I've been saying for years that a neural interface will be practical, even commonplace in our lifetime. The phrase "keyboard? how quaint!" won't be a line from a movie to our kids.
Look to Science Fiction, will we "jack in" and physically plug in to a computer/network (with our interface installed during childhood) or will computers be able to interface with a more indirect connection?
During all these discussions, you've never made it to http://blackboxvoting.org/ [blackboxvoting.org]? I consider machines that let real votes disappear to be pretty insecure.
OK I just spent a good deal of time reading that site and even reading about the chimpanzee and the GEMS software and the elections officials in Riverside country I'll still stick by my original statement:
I have yet to see any evidence from any of the critics showing that even voting machines with no paper trail are any less secure than paper ballots in real world scenarios.
Notice the bolded parts. Even if someone were to "melt down an entire election" (and get themselves thrown into a federal pound me in the ass prison) using back doors and 6 lines of VB script there's still the memory in the voting machines to go back to.
Are these systems perfect? Heck no. Are they more flawed than paper ballots? Not by a longshot IMO.
FTR you can mod this down as flamebait if you want but as I was reading that site the whole notion of tinfoil hats kept coming to mind.
This makes the IMO unreasonable assumption that a single individual writes code for the machines without any checks or oversight by at least one other person, and that the malicious coder is willing to become a fugitive or go to jail when (not if) the easter egg is discovered.
The same type of scenario applied to paper ballots would have one person drive the ballots from the polling place with no escort or other checks where they could easily drop one of the boxes in a dumpster on the way if they know the precinct doesn't favor their candidate/party.
Make no mistake, I'm in no way suggesting that electronic voting should be free from scrutiny and believe that every effort should be made to ensure the integrity of the votes but if we wait until all the bugs are worked out of the system before we start using it we will never find out what the bugs are in order to fix them.
It seems to me that electronic voting not only holds the promise of reducing election fraud (or error) to a tiny fraction of what we have seen in the past but doing so while making voting more convenient and accessible for the voting public.
I'm personally distrustful of paper records as they rely on humans to read and interpet them so I'd prefer something like a smart card ballot record, one for each voter, that the machine spits out after you vote. These could be used for recounts or other audits. You could easily verify the integrity of the smart card data with a separate device or program inside the machine, designed by a different group/company that read the card and compared it to what the voting machine held in memory.
I have yet to see any evidence from any of the critics showing that even voting machines with no paper trail are any less secure than paper ballots in real world scenarios.
Even if the worst FUD claims of the anti electronic voting crowd are true electronic voting is no more vulnerable to tampering than paper ballot voting. Where ballots can (and are) lost (or "lost") and there are dozens of opportunities for workers to mess with or change things.
I've voted touchscreen twice and it was great, I got to vote in advance of election day (when it was convenient for me). Though there was a LOT of pressing "next page" for the CA Recall election to sort through the >100 candidates.:)
Like any new system it will no doubt have it's own issues that will need to be worked out. That's the price for progress.
What I'm waiting for is the opportunity to vote online.
A few years ago I was rebuilding my (Windows) PC and was particularly annoyed at Microsoft for one reason or another so I installed StarOffice instead of MS Office.
It was pretty functional, ended up using it exclusively for a few months. The mail client sucked and I was ending up using Outlook Express (which also sucks) for E-Mail. The Mail client was dropped when StarOffice more or less became OpenOffice.
I ended up installing Outlook for E-Mail and not long after ran into some problem (which admittedly I can't remember now) that forced me to install MS Office 2000 and I never switched back.
I still use a few spreadsheets that I created in StarOffice, they work fine in MS Office.
IMO OpenOffice is probably fine for most people , it's existance is most definitely a good thing.
They already make standalone DVD burners, though I don't think they are very popular.
The deal with this thing is it can be used standalone, to simply record video onto DVD, or you can plug it into your PC and burn data or whatever.
I'm sure that it will work with Macrovision exactly like it does today if you try to record the output from a DVD player onto a VCR, with the telltale Macrovision picture crapification.
If you can strip out the Macrovision you should be able to use it to make copies. The quality won't be the same as a drue DVD copy as you have to deal with extra D/A A/D conversions but it should be more than adequate for making backup copies for your kids to watch Disney videos 10k times on so they don't scratch up your $18 original.
Before I browsed the site I was thinking it was in the realm of satire and thus free speech, though decidedly unethical at least by my standards.
After looking at the site I have conslcuded it's just a negative attack ad meant to get votes for Floyd, even the "Email Us" link will send a message to floydforcongress@verizon.net. That and the fact that he registered.com,.net and.org tells me he is deliberately trying to restrict the speech of Mr. Van Hollen.
IMO (not being a lawyer) this should not be onsidered free speech and is cyber squatting if it isn't in volation of election law it should be.
One's things for sure, were he my congressman Mr. Van Hollen would definitely get my vote.
Domain law is hopeless anyways, legitimate satire sites like peta.org can be and are acquired by bigger organizations just because the smaller group can't afford to fight it while you have companies like NetIdentity/Mailbank.com who register domain names that match family names then use it to collect money from members of the family who want an @.xxx E-Mail address. The only constant is that the little guy will almost always lose.
The presedential election is a team game. You and the rest of the citizens of your state are a team. In football you don't award seperate points to the individual players, In elections for the president you don't either.
Sorry that analogy doesn't work for me. The election is far more like a football season than a game anyways. And the current system, applied to a game would be something like heeping track of who scored the most points in each quarter and making the game winner the team that "won" the most quarters, regardless of how many total points were scored in the game.
If a congressional district win earned one EC vote that would mean that what's going on now, with the so-called "battleground" states getting 95% of the attention of candidates, with large population center like L.A. getting the other 5% for fund-raising purposes.
Neither candidate will bother with a "safe" state like California or Texas even if it has a huge population.
Factor into it the issue of time zones and the media calling states, even calling the election hours before the polls close on the west coast (never mind Hawaii) which only reinforces the "my vote doesn't count" attitude that too many people have.
If EC votes were distributed more equitably, the candidates would be forced to campaign around the country, the Republican candidate could get votes from New York or Massachusets and the Democrats could get votes from Texas, and third parties, could get votes!
Really the only downside is the break of the stranglehold that the two major parties have on the system.
The way almost all (48 IIRC) states award electors is to give 100% of the states EC votes to the candidate that wins 50%+1 vote of the state.
This is THE biggest problem with the EC system, it's theoretically possible to win the Presidnecy by winning 50%+1 vote in 11 states and getting 0 votes in the other 39.
What should be done is to award electors based on congressional districts, with the overall winner of the state getting the bonus 2 electors. This could be accomplished by changing state laws and without messing with the US Constitution. Of course that is not in the best intreses of either of the two major parties so it likely won't happen in our lifetime.
Slashdot Mirror
Karma whore huh? I think that means my honor is at stake or something.
In any case, that was a while ago but I think the study is http://www.azoz.com/music/features/0008.html and here is a more recent study http://www.nber.org/~confer/2004/URCs04/felix.pdf
I think in this context we are comparing those who DL music off of P2P sites, or even more specifically, those who distribute music on P2P sites with those who make money off of distributing music illegally.
There's almost no question that the for-profit kind is costing the record industry more than the teenager sharing a couple hundred MP3s on KaZaA without even thinking about it.
Yet the RIAA is pursuing the larger number of people causing the smaller amount of "damage".
Exactly, the RIAA is going to take this data and use it as PROOF that their legal assautls are working and that P2P piracy is 100% of the reason that sales took a dive to begin with.
I remember a few years ago when the labels were bitching about declining sales and Napster, someone did a study and determined that if even the most ridiculously high estimates of P2P usage were true and counting that every downloaded song as a lost CD sale that P2P only accounted for like 20% of the drop in CD sales since the 90s economy bubble.
In reality it was the economy that caused sales to drop, after all buying CDs is just about the most optional thing and the first thing to go when the .com that was overpaying you ran out of funding.
Now the economy is on the upswing, and surprisingly people are spending more on leisure items like music.
Laptop or Pizza.
I could be wrong (I'm not an iTunes user) but it is my understanding that when you "buy" a track or album from the iTunes Music Store that it comes down in some format that includes DRM. And that DRM restricts how often you can copy the file or burn it to CD.
I'm alomost certian it won't let you rip an iTMS purchased track directly to MP3, you would need to burn it to CD then rip to MP3, where the extra conversion would no doubt result in loss of quality.
Now I have no doubt that if you are dealing with non iTMS files, such as a WMA, AAC or whatever that you can easily rip 8 ways from Sunday, since there is no DRM on those files to begin with.
No doubt there is DRM, if there wasn't TiVo would get sued by the MPAA & TV networks in a heartbeat.
TiVo as a company itself doesn't care, in fact I'm sure they would prefer to open the box cause it would drive additional sales up but they saw what happened to ReplayTV when they offered these kinds of featues. They literally got sued out of business (without even going to trial IIRC).
As a TiVo subscriber I'm definitely willing to have them hold back a bit on features if it enables them to stay in business and continue to provide me their service. Most of the missing stuff could be easily done with hacks if I were so inclined anyways.
This is the price you pay. With a DirecTiVo you get dualtuners and record the digital stream right off the satellite but there are features that DirecTV won't allow TiVo to enable because they are scared of the content providers (TiVo is as well but isn't as dependent on the networks (like Viacom) as DirecTV is)
Expect it to get worse (the feature gap) once DirecTV releases their own DVR, when Newscorps UK satellite provider released a DVR they gradually scaled back TiVo support to the point where integrated TiVo units were almost obsolete.
IMO people who are tech savvy who would be more inclined towards a PC based system (as opposed to an appliance like TiVo) will be non-plussed by the infelxibility and restrictions in MPC.
The "sweet spot" that MS is targetting, that I'm not sure exists as a viable market is the consumer that wants to run their media on their single PC. Figure the odds that the person ready to control their entertainment with a PC has only one PC.
Then color me amazed :-)
I wonder if that was referring to server boxes or total processors?
I also wonder if they were going with first tier server vendors (i.e. Dell, HP, Sun, etc.) or if any old white box with a "Server" label was counted?
Like I said I'm really happy for the progress AMD has made. Competition can only be good for the market in general. I just think they aren't as "dominant" as they would like us to believe.
As much as I'm rooting for AMD to give Intel a run for it's money I'd still probably shy from it for my critical servers, primarily due to the relibility issues of their earlier PII & PIII clone processors in desktops (primarily low end "consumer grade" PCs sold in places like Circuit City or Sears). Inteligently I know these new chips are completely/u different animals but I guess you get burned once (or a handful in my case) and you don't forget :-)
"AMD has declared dominance in the gaming and server microprocessor market in 2004: I've yet to see an AMD equipped server. If even 5% of all servers are equipped with AMD processors I'll be amazed. This reminds me of when the CEO of Pepsi released a book deatailing how Pepsi "Won the cola wars". I'm sorry if your still #2 in sales you didn't "win" and if you have only begun to break into the marked you certianly aren't "Dominance" For one, I think that AMD is doing great things with their new stuff (been syaing for years they need to do more than just clone Intel CPUs) and that Intel would be wise in paying attention to what AMD is doing but declaring dominance, at least in the server market is kind of like Ralph Nader declaring victory in October.
You can connect ANY IMAP4 (or even POP3) E-Mail client to an Exchange server all day long and it will have identical funcionality to that same IMAP4 client connecting to any other IMAP4 server.
The limitation is in the IMAP4 protocol itself. There are a lot of features you give up when you switch to IMAP using Outlook that you never had with any other IMAP client.
I used to run a network where we had Exchange, Netscape Mail server and Groupwise, and I had a mix of Outlook, Netscape Communicator and Groupwise clients. All three clients could connect to all three servers without issue. We ran this way because we were a systems integration shop and had customers that ran all three. It all worked seamlessly where any user could talk to any other and people could (and did) switch servers whenever they wanted.
Scarily enough, Exchange is probably the best messaging platform out there for servicing multiple client OSs and applications.
There is a master plan for all this and I've just figured it out.
Instead of submerging spent nuclear fuel rods in huge tanks of water we will use huge tanks of liquid Co2.
The envronmentalists only have to protest in one place. Therefore the drive less, especially in their smoke spewing 62 VW buses.
The net result is less emissions, which is where the REAL benefit comes from with this plan.
No I didn't see it either.
I'm off to weez some juice.
Or was that from Encino Man? (a different movie I didn't see)
I've been saying for years that a neural interface will be practical, even commonplace in our lifetime. The phrase "keyboard? how quaint!" won't be a line from a movie to our kids.
Look to Science Fiction, will we "jack in" and physically plug in to a computer/network (with our interface installed during childhood) or will computers be able to interface with a more indirect connection?
During all these discussions, you've never made it to http://blackboxvoting.org/ [blackboxvoting.org]? I consider machines that let real votes disappear to be pretty insecure.
OK I just spent a good deal of time reading that site and even reading about the chimpanzee and the GEMS software and the elections officials in Riverside country I'll still stick by my original statement:
I have yet to see any evidence from any of the critics showing that even voting machines with no paper trail are any less secure than paper ballots in real world scenarios.
Notice the bolded parts. Even if someone were to "melt down an entire election" (and get themselves thrown into a federal pound me in the ass prison) using back doors and 6 lines of VB script there's still the memory in the voting machines to go back to.
Are these systems perfect? Heck no. Are they more flawed than paper ballots? Not by a longshot IMO.
FTR you can mod this down as flamebait if you want but as I was reading that site the whole notion of tinfoil hats kept coming to mind.
This makes the IMO unreasonable assumption that a single individual writes code for the machines without any checks or oversight by at least one other person, and that the malicious coder is willing to become a fugitive or go to jail when (not if) the easter egg is discovered.
The same type of scenario applied to paper ballots would have one person drive the ballots from the polling place with no escort or other checks where they could easily drop one of the boxes in a dumpster on the way if they know the precinct doesn't favor their candidate/party.
Make no mistake, I'm in no way suggesting that electronic voting should be free from scrutiny and believe that every effort should be made to ensure the integrity of the votes but if we wait until all the bugs are worked out of the system before we start using it we will never find out what the bugs are in order to fix them.
It seems to me that electronic voting not only holds the promise of reducing election fraud (or error) to a tiny fraction of what we have seen in the past but doing so while making voting more convenient and accessible for the voting public.
I'm personally distrustful of paper records as they rely on humans to read and interpet them so I'd prefer something like a smart card ballot record, one for each voter, that the machine spits out after you vote. These could be used for recounts or other audits. You could easily verify the integrity of the smart card data with a separate device or program inside the machine, designed by a different group/company that read the card and compared it to what the voting machine held in memory.
I have yet to see any evidence from any of the critics showing that even voting machines with no paper trail are any less secure than paper ballots in real world scenarios.
Really not meant to be flamebait but:
The horse and buggy were cheap and simple compared to early automobiles.
Pencil, paper & a sliderule were certianly cheap and simple compared to the first computers.
Newer is certianly not always better but it's most definitely not always worse.
Even if the worst FUD claims of the anti electronic voting crowd are true electronic voting is no more vulnerable to tampering than paper ballot voting. Where ballots can (and are) lost (or "lost") and there are dozens of opportunities for workers to mess with or change things.
I've voted touchscreen twice and it was great, I got to vote in advance of election day (when it was convenient for me). Though there was a LOT of pressing "next page" for the CA Recall election to sort through the >100 candidates. :)
Like any new system it will no doubt have it's own issues that will need to be worked out. That's the price for progress.
What I'm waiting for is the opportunity to vote online.
A few years ago I was rebuilding my (Windows) PC and was particularly annoyed at Microsoft for one reason or another so I installed StarOffice instead of MS Office.
It was pretty functional, ended up using it exclusively for a few months. The mail client sucked and I was ending up using Outlook Express (which also sucks) for E-Mail. The Mail client was dropped when StarOffice more or less became OpenOffice.
I ended up installing Outlook for E-Mail and not long after ran into some problem (which admittedly I can't remember now) that forced me to install MS Office 2000 and I never switched back.
I still use a few spreadsheets that I created in StarOffice, they work fine in MS Office.
IMO OpenOffice is probably fine for most people , it's existance is most definitely a good thing.
The voters can kiss his shiny metal ass, he definitely should have made it in.
Is HAL even a robot? I though he/it was a computer.
I'll be pissed of Tweakie (TWKE-4) makes it in before Bender.
They already make standalone DVD burners, though I don't think they are very popular.
The deal with this thing is it can be used standalone, to simply record video onto DVD, or you can plug it into your PC and burn data or whatever.
I'm sure that it will work with Macrovision exactly like it does today if you try to record the output from a DVD player onto a VCR, with the telltale Macrovision picture crapification.
If you can strip out the Macrovision you should be able to use it to make copies. The quality won't be the same as a drue DVD copy as you have to deal with extra D/A A/D conversions but it should be more than adequate for making backup copies for your kids to watch Disney videos 10k times on so they don't scratch up your $18 original.
Pretty unsurprising results really. I'd say it's as accurate as a short test can be.
Thanks for linking that.
Before I browsed the site I was thinking it was in the realm of satire and thus free speech, though decidedly unethical at least by my standards.
After looking at the site I have conslcuded it's just a negative attack ad meant to get votes for Floyd, even the "Email Us" link will send a message to floydforcongress@verizon.net. That and the fact that he registered .com, .net and .org tells me he is deliberately trying to restrict the speech of Mr. Van Hollen.
IMO (not being a lawyer) this should not be onsidered free speech and is cyber squatting if it isn't in volation of election law it should be.
One's things for sure, were he my congressman Mr. Van Hollen would definitely get my vote.
Domain law is hopeless anyways, legitimate satire sites like peta.org can be and are acquired by bigger organizations just because the smaller group can't afford to fight it while you have companies like NetIdentity/Mailbank.com who register domain names that match family names then use it to collect money from members of the family who want an @.xxx E-Mail address. The only constant is that the little guy will almost always lose.
The presedential election is a team game. You and the rest of the citizens of your state are a team. In football you don't award seperate points to the individual players, In elections for the president you don't either. Sorry that analogy doesn't work for me. The election is far more like a football season than a game anyways. And the current system, applied to a game would be something like heeping track of who scored the most points in each quarter and making the game winner the team that "won" the most quarters, regardless of how many total points were scored in the game. If a congressional district win earned one EC vote that would mean that what's going on now, with the so-called "battleground" states getting 95% of the attention of candidates, with large population center like L.A. getting the other 5% for fund-raising purposes. Neither candidate will bother with a "safe" state like California or Texas even if it has a huge population. Factor into it the issue of time zones and the media calling states, even calling the election hours before the polls close on the west coast (never mind Hawaii) which only reinforces the "my vote doesn't count" attitude that too many people have. If EC votes were distributed more equitably, the candidates would be forced to campaign around the country, the Republican candidate could get votes from New York or Massachusets and the Democrats could get votes from Texas, and third parties, could get votes! Really the only downside is the break of the stranglehold that the two major parties have on the system.
The way almost all (48 IIRC) states award electors is to give 100% of the states EC votes to the candidate that wins 50%+1 vote of the state. This is THE biggest problem with the EC system, it's theoretically possible to win the Presidnecy by winning 50%+1 vote in 11 states and getting 0 votes in the other 39. What should be done is to award electors based on congressional districts, with the overall winner of the state getting the bonus 2 electors. This could be accomplished by changing state laws and without messing with the US Constitution. Of course that is not in the best intreses of either of the two major parties so it likely won't happen in our lifetime.