Apple has noted that people who want to distribute apps to a small group are directed as to how to go about it.
What's being done here is that Apple is stating they will not aid in the proliferation of a competitive piece of software by marketing, promoting and distributing it through THEIR store... which is not the only possible channel of distribution, strictly speaking, but certainly the most convenient.
Do we talk, however, about the flipside of this? Where is the integrity in a developer knowingly creating an application to do something a product already does? You mean to tell me that in the marketplace of ideas that developers are so bereft of creativity that they cannot think of something unique?
I know that even Apple doesn't originate ideas... but it's a bit different when you go buy a company making something you think you can integrate better versus simply writing an app that does roughly what another one does and then pissing and moaning that the distributor refuses to help you cannibalize their own apps.
Are we complaining that Bose stores refuse to sell anything but Bose, or that Dell stores refuse to sell computers other than Dells, or that Ford opts not to distribute Daewoo parts at its stores?
Apple will scare talented developers? If they were truly talented would they have attempted less than surreptitiously to ask a distributor to promote a competing product rather than writing any number of applications that haven't been thought of yet?
Incorrect. If you purchased $670 worth of AAPL at its closing price on Jan 1, 1981, you would today have 1512 shares (three 2:1 splits) and at a price of $180 (which it hit yesterday) you would have $272,160... a 40,520% return.
Had you purchased $670 worth of Dell at close on January 1, 1990, at 6 cents a share, you would have 11,166 shares. Since they had one 3:2 split and six 2:1 splits since then, you would today have 1,071,936 shares, or a market value of $26,798,400.
Of course there is equal likelihood that none of you would have held either of these investments that long since the pressure to avoid Ben Graham's long term value investing principles was already huge in the 1980s, and even more so in today's age of mobile trading platforms for the millions of ADHD fools who are quickly and repeatedly deprived of their money.
Also, in 1981 Apple was still hugely popular. In 1990, Dell was a rinkydink outfit whose market value would have made them unattractive to most investors who tend to buy already overvalued stocks rather than seeking out undervalued stocks and hanging on to them for long periods of time (e.g. 20 years). The greater likelihood is that none of us would have thought of purchasing Dell in 1990, but many of us might have considered an investment in Apple in 1981.
Dell stayed at under a dollar a share for seven years... even those few who might have thought to purchase it might very well have gotten impatient and sold it.
Apple would have hit some speedbumps and people would have sold LONG before anyone even conceived it possible for Apple to make a comeback... Michael Dell himself proposed in 1997 that were he to run the company, he would liquidate Apple's assets.
MC Hawking files a lawsuit for character infringement.
Interesting but inaccurate.
on
Apple After Jobs
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· Score: 2, Informative
Apple's stock price cannot be attributed primarily or solely to Steve Jobs' health. While it may have been on factor, the stock price was already declining due to several factors:
Apple's stock performance is one of the most speculatively-influenced. Rumors of a new product send the stock skyward and, consequently, the release of said product tends to signal that the opportunity has been capitalized by speculators and a sell-off tends to follow. This happens also in the lead-up and aftermath of each WWDC and MacWorld, as well as earnings statements.
Both an earnings statement and iPhone 3G release preceded the current sell-off.
Additionally, current market conditions are sending most common stock issues downward on bad earnings news and renewed fears of the credit crisis.
While I am suggesting that Steve Jobs' health is not the driving factor, especially since these other news items have been far more exposed than concerns over his health, I am not suggesting that Apple's stock has "nowhere to go but up". I want to lay that out there to avoid exclamations of "fanboy"... in the days prior to the iPhone 3G release, I sold half my shares and advised other investors to do the same.
Apple's common stock is currently priced at ten times its book value per share... that is, total assets minus liabilities and intangibles. From a Graham-centric point of view, Apple is considerably overvalued and has a great deal of downside risk.
The question of Apple's future performance as a corporation is not reinforced by how good or bad its heavily speculated (read: overpriced) stock does... as the company does not generate new equity for operations by the trading of already issued shares on the secondary markets (e.g. NASDAQ).
But, I suspect, that since most with an interest in Apple's pipeline and financial success invariably seems to ask how the stock is doing, and so few people follow Graham's value investing philosophy, it goes to reason that what people who post such articles are really saying is "How will Apple's stock do when Steve Jobs is gone?"
These sort of diatribes offer no detailed insight into the actual corporate pipeline, management succession plans, corporate balance sheets (the financial strength upon which a company's future rests), cash flows, etc. and are therefore of little more value than what the gossip column has to say about Miley Cyrus.
Original submitter seemed to suggest Apple was among companies accused of supporting business models that took money away from the industry. Quite the contrary, the manager suggests consulting Apple and the like for their input as to how to make systems in which the artist is fairly compensated.
Of course what is never discussed in the context of these debates is what "fair compensation" is in today's world.
I agree that the recording companies shaft both the consumer and the recording artist, but what is the inevitable end result of having so much access to so many recording artists who can out of their own bedroom gain international notoriety by supplying their music directly on the internet?
Well, the commoditization of music has had many incarnations throughout time... and the model in which artists aspire to be ridiculously wealthy, and only a handful signed to even major labels ever become so, is quite possibly an anachronism.
I think recording artists need to adjust their sights... and get used to the reality, the fact, that the consumer is not willing to pay what they used to for music, and that accessbility and supply play their part in the shift of the equilibrium price per track or album.
That being said, some artists are in greater demand than others... but I'll get back to that in a minute.
If Radiohead's experiment is an example of anything, it's not that the consumers have it entirely wrong. Do I think the consumers are being fair? Hell no. But the data shouldn't be looked at in terms of how many people paid nothing. The data should be looked at in terms of, from the top to the bottom, what was the AVERAGE price paid. This figure will tell you something about at least that band's demand factor... and if they have brains, they'll use that data to figure out a pricing strategy that is appropriate for their material and their demographic targets.
If they're stupid and greedy, they'll blame the consumer, the internet, everything under the sun... without ever thinking that hey, maybe they just aren't that popular.
To provide a counterpoint to U2's manager's argument: People if left to their own devices on Ebay will still pay a quarter of a million dollars for a Patek Philippe wristwatch. But note the difference in terms of scarcity, of quality, and of demand, of that product and its REASONABLY SIMILAR competitors.
So maybe the artist's expectations are flawed. Maybe the industry's demands are flawed. And maybe the consumer is also flawed.
But if you want to make money in this world, there's no getting around the flawed consumer... for whatever reasoning they apply to their purchasing habits, they represent in sum total what cost the market will bear. Clearly that cost is shifting for music as a commodity.
If U2 wants to get paid ridiculous sums of money in this paradigm, they need to be capable of doing the following:
1. Follow market pricing strategies to establish a fair transaction... an honest analysis of where their equilibrium price falls based on hard data.
2. Providing a product that is unmistakably theirs and difficult to reproduce by competitors and pirates. They can't control the pirates, but they can continue finding innovative ways to beat them to the punch... but they need to find the balance between countermeasures and losing sales, rather than going entirely one way or the other. As for being unique, I think they have this locked down but they cannot rest on their laurels before another band out there gives people a reason to fall out of love with U2.
3. Leverage/engage other media into providing a unique experience for their fans that is always one step ahead of the pirates and the competition. This may mean 3D movies, this may mean more live concerts, it may mean releasing in formats that are extremely inconvenient to copy. It may mean a bit of all of these.
Even with all these strategies, bands need to contend with the changing times and get used to the reality of an impendi
I posted this in response to some of the comments on the linked blog:
To Rob Poole and biblethumper, excellent responses.
Also, I would like to add for clarity that "theory" in the scientific context (or any other) does not mean a blind guess, or even an educated guess...
A theory, contrary to its colloquial usage, is defined by Webster's as "The analysis of a set of FACTS in their relation to one another."
Thus, that evolution occurs is a fact. HOW it occurs is what The Theory of Evolution proposes to explain. It explains it so well that it has been used to predict much of the cause-effect relationships that have resulted in most of the medical care you receive today. Were it not for evolutionary biology, very little of today's medical expertise would exist. You cannot peruse any corner of medicine and/or science without running invariably into evolutionary biology, paleobiology, genetics, heredity and all the myriad life sciences that were, of all things, spawned unknowingly by the discovery of a monk (the aforementioned Mendel).
The problem with imagining that Creationism is anything remotely resembling a theory is that it consists of no facts. When questioned as to the facts that support it, a mishmash of suppositions are presented, but no evidence. When asked what Creationism proposes, no cogent explanation is provided. In short, Creationism/Intelligent Design fell apart upon very basic scrutiny in Kitzmiller et. al. v Dover Board of Education, during a cross-examination of ID's biggest "expert", Michael Behe, a molecular biologist from Lehigh University... The court testimony of Behe exposed that Creationism/Intelligent Design consists of no direct evidence, proposes nothing, disproves nothing, and proves nothing.
It should be noted, however, that contrary to Rob Poole's post that the Theory of Evolution doesn't have "just as much" evidence as Newtonian and Einsteinian Theories of Gravity. The Theory of Evolution, in fact, has many times the evidence behind it. Over 150 years of findings published in thousands upon thousands of peer-reviewed scientific articles.
It is useful to note that Mendel, who did not understand yet the mechanism of heredity but observed its occurrence, was vindicated three centuries later by James Watson and F.H.C. Crick's discovery of the double-helical structure of DNA, the mechanism of heredity (not unlike how Arno Penzias and Bob Wilson discovered in 1960 the Cosmic Microwave Background that Dirac predicted some 40 years earlier). It is also useful to note that modern genetic research on homeobox genes, the "master control switches" of huge sets of genes, are vindicating key aspects of Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge's Punctuated Equilibrium -- namely the abrupt and drastic periods of divergence interrupting long periods of data-backed, not gap-backed, stasis.
How does the Bible explain the interchangeablity of the Pax-6 homolog between Drosophila melanogaster and Homo sapiens sapiens? Why did the Bible not predict the structure of DNA? If two humans can do it, surely god could have proffered an explanation of his own invention.
There has not been in the history of modern science (circa the advent of chemistry and physics) a more demonstrable theory with more evidence to support it. If you refute evolution, you might as well walk off a cliff and hope for the best.
I agree with those who say that faith and science are not entirely incompatible. But whereas science does not attempt to do anything but find facts, religiion does not do anything but pursue meaning... and poorly at that. So in a way they ARE incompatible. But where science is the best system for testing hypotheses and deriving what is fact, as the scientific process is more successful than any system before it for doing so, religion is no better than a great philosophical treatise or a poignant fiction in giving human beings a sense of self-worth and meaning to find their place. The difference is that, Siskel and Ebert's cutthroat debates aside, usually
No need to completely flip out or resort to ad hominem attacks...
I'm not sure you understood the gist of my argument. "Piracy" or whatever you want to call it is, as I stated, not nearly the problem the record companies want us all to believe it is. The real problem is obsolescence of their internet distro model. You can waste time playing semantic origami with the definition of "distribution" too if you like but I don't think it'll get you any closer to winning an argument.
The problem with your argument about copying increasing overall wealth is twofold:
"Copying is legitimate natural economic behavior which reduces scarcity and creates wealth in absolutely every single instance."
Decreasing scarcity never increases wealth. It instead dilutes value. Stock splits are an excellent example. If supply increases and demand remains constant, the equilibrium price decreases. For all your posturing about Economics, this is the most fundamental principle of basic introductory economics and it should be understood backward and forward by someone who inferred that he is an Economics graduate.
But in order for the equilibrium price (the price the market is willing to PAY) to go up, both supply AND demand have to increase. The problem with the "copyright infringement increases demand" argument is this... It simply doesn't. Show me one set of figures and the source that demonstrate that this actually happens consistently.
The other problem with your argument is that concepts such as transportation, shelter, food, music in and of itself, etc. are so generic that they are outside the scope of copyright. That is, these concepts themselves cannot be copyrighted. This entirely undermines your argument. What also undermines your argument is that copyright exists not just in the sound recording (a phonorecord) but in the lyrics and music itself which are extremely unique.
The idea is that the distribution and profitability of a work as unique as a specific kind of song or arrangement of notes should be the author's prerogative to license as THEY see fit. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, in your counterargument that doesn't reek of arguing from personal incredulity or self-serving convenience.
Your copyright infringement does not profit me, as a consumer, at all. If you believe otherwise, please show mathematically how it does.
That being said, you seem to think that I'm defending the music industry when in fact I'm doing exactly the opposite. I'm suggesting ways they can be beaten at their own game... because frankly, they lack the vision to create truly scarce, truly valuable, truly creative catalogs of music. It's not in their nature to understand how to do so... and that isn't profitable or enjoyable for the artist or the consumer as much as the increase in diversity of the artist pool would be if we stopped pissing and moaning about why you can't download the latest Blink 182 album off a BitTorrent legally and instead paid any sum of money to support an independently recorded artist who adds to the diversity of the music "gene pool".
I am not taking RIAA's side in this... but I'm not buying your unfounded line of reasoning either.
Well, it would have been nice had you mentioned all that in your original reply. You know, a better rebuttal than "it's a blog! it's bad!" Wouldn't think THAT would hold up anywhere, even in the court of public opinion. But it's a blog, so it's not like anyone has to use facts to rebut it. At least, not until they're called on it and have to rebut the law review article as well as the short blog post about it.
Ah see now you're changing gears (presumably to escape the humiliation of having jumped to the wrong conclusion about me, but that's ok... it happens)... while that's fine I'd first like you to at least concede that I do, in fact, know and understand copyright law very well.
That said, I guess the problem is that we disagree about appropriate limits of copyright. I, for one, don't have a problem with watching a football game (or whatever) at the office, even if our screen is bigger than that allowed by 17 USC 1, 110, (5)(B).
I don't particularly care for appeals to emotion. They aren't the way to win me over. What I think you're trying to do here even if you don't realize it is this: You're trying to establish how moral you are by taking the side of the "little guy" who just wants to watch his football game in peace (albeit on his employer's time and expense)...
There's no issue of morality at stake here though. This is a simple matter... like a contractual agreement. The football game is a work of copyright. The broadcast stations pay for the rights to broadcast it. The employer that exceeds Section 110's limits in fact is rebroadcasting the program beyond the scope of Fair Use. Simple as that. I am not convinced that you have an argument simply because you're trying, mistakenly, to justify your own sense of convenience by appealing to my vanity in the hopes that I might see this as an opportunity to show how magnanimous I am by taking the side of the "common man"... a sense of vanity I don't possess. Believe me, I possess other kinds of vanity... just not that one.
Also, I don't like that the law allows people to go after such trivialities. You say that they won't because there's no financial incentive, but are you really going to tell me that the RIAA litigation is anything but a money sink? How can you be so sure that people won't abuse these laws? Now, you can tell me that many of these things are legally frivolous, but have you actually SEEN the lawsuits actually going on today?
I'm not averse to this line of discussion but let it be noted that my detailed response was only attempting to clarify my position against the application/interpretation of copyright law in Tehranian's "John" allegory. I would be perfectly comfortable taking on Tehranian in a courtroom on those indefensible claims of his, and I believe that anyone who has a computer allowing them to violate copyright law is perfectly capable of reading and understanding what they can and cannot do. Note that I do not use P2P networks and then later feign ignorance about copyright law. The Cornell Law database is freely accessible to anyone who wants to know the contents of 17 USC or any other Title of the entire US Code.
Anyway, back to your questions...
Can you tell me with a straight face that people aren't pushing the bounds just a little?
After three years of 150-300 DMCA notices per week, I can tell you that the bounds are being pushed more than you know. Fortunately, most of these requests never turn into real litigation because when it comes down to it their positions are utterly indefensible. It just takes a little while and some case law for that to come to light... and now it is beginning to. Recent decisions have underscored the failure of RIAA/MPAA to meet the essential burden of proof in a court of law to demonstrate infringement of 17 USC 12 and/or 17 USC 5, 512.
But it helps to have a better understanding of what's actually going on...
As a matter of fact I did. I'm not writing a thesis nor am I participating in a debate with the blog author or Mr. Tehranian... the burden of proof is on the blog author or Tehranian to make a compelling argument, and it's just not there. But for sake of argument, see my response to the anonymous guy below. I broke it down.
Firstly, I believe I had already thoroughly established my understanding of the domain of intellectual property since my paper titled "Technology and the Music Industry: Music Distribution via the Internet" was written in 1996 at the University of Minnesota. Secondly, contrary to your opinion, I can read. In fact, much of my research in that paper was based on a 600-page dissection of intellectual property practices of RIAA and the music industry, including the entire text of Title 17, Chapter 1, of US code, which I've read backwards and forwards. This book, titled "This Business of Music" was published by two experienced IP attorneys, Sidney Shemel and M. William Krasilovksy... one of whom served as General Counsel for intellectual property at Warner Bros. Records.
Secondly, I am a registered copyright owner. I have published a screenplay that was registered both with the Writers Guild of America (west) and the Library of Congress, US Copyright Office, under Registration Number PAu002532809 on October 25, 2000. In fact, I filed a cease & desist notification against a company that was erroneously reproducing portions of my work on an adult oriented search engine. It took less than thirty minutes for the website administrator to comply with my request for removal of the material.
Thirdly, I worked with Qwest Communications Internet Security Enforcement Group for three years and processed hundreds of DMCA investigations per week submitted by RIAA, MPAA, BSA, IDSA, and other criminal investigations involving local, state and federal law enforcement agencies. I have, in the course of that work, been closely involved with our own attorneys and General Counsel.
That being said, upon another examination of Mr. Tehranian's paper I count only two instances of egregious claims of copyright infringement that do not pass the litmus test for Section 107 applicability. These are:
1. The violation of Hanna Barbera's copyright in the likeness of Captain Caveman.
2. The public performance of Mildred S. and Patty Hill's "Happy Birthday", Copyright Warner-Chappell Publishing.
Neither of these examples are likely to be pursued with civil or criminal action as the expenditure to do so far exceeds the potential reward... but I find it interesting that you didn't point out these two and only examples of infringement or the fact that Hanna Barbera is no longer the copyright owner of record since its dissolution and reformation as Cartoon Network.
The rest of the examples given, notably extrapolated in the footnotes (pp. 543-547) are in fact erroneously cited as copyright violations. Footnote 33 is a great example. Works published by the United States government are de facto public domain. The reasoning given in footnote 33 is erroneous because even a cursory examination will show that the litigation was not against individuals for having infringed the copyright. This is not a defensible position. If I were to make photocopies by myself for nonprofit, informational purposes, and then share them with colleagues in a meeting or via the internet, this would constitute fair use. What was of issue in these examples of case law was the fact that Kinkos and other companies were attempting to make a margin of profit on the reproduction of these works for individuals who had requested copies. I was at University of Minnesota at the time. The University Bookstores were affected by these cases. The result was that they could not charge a service fee over and above the basic per page copy fee, as had previously been the practice. Thus, their remedy was simply to avoid making copies on behalf of individuals... but individuals could still go to self-service copiers and use them, and this still constitutes fair use.
The fact of the matter is that both the blog article AND the research paper a
The blog entry's reference, an article by Professor of Law Dr. Tehranian in Utah, makes another interesting error... aside from the corruption of "Fair Use".
He states that RIAA lobbied successfully to have sound recordings considered "works for hire" since the 1999 amendment to Title 17. But the contracts themselves have been pretty unambiguous since at least the 2nd Edition of Shemel and Krasilovsky's <i>This Business of Music</i>. Most recording contracts expressly stipulate in writing that the works made are considered works for hire, and that is supported by fixing the lyrics and music in tangible form through a publisher, and that the phonorecord rights tend to be works made for hire, the consideration for which is the recording advance (read: LOAN) paid to the artist to cover recording costs.
The last known example I can think of in which a band assumed the rights of its recordings made for a recording company was in the case of Led Zeppelin whose publisher reverted the copyrights to Led Zeppelin after 26 years. These were not only works before the Copyright Act of 1976, but also the provisions with their publisher were inked in contract. Otherwwise, generally, all works recorded for a recording company are stipulated in contract as works for hire.
Aside from the fact that the barrage of ads on that site nearly melted my laptop, a few observations:
The article starts off with a disclaimer in the first page. When an opinion piece has to state, "this doesn't represent an endorsement from FiringSquad, but rather our research," the opposite is generally true.
He decides the lack of 1080p content is a myth. His argument? You can convert 1080i back to 1080p. While this is fundamentally true, so is the statement that there's little 1080p content available. Converting it doesn't mean that the content was natively available in 1080p. I know, seems trivial... but this is a precursor to an argumentation style he uses that gets tiresome and downright disingenuous as the article goes on.
He has a table of data for maximum viewing distances to appreciate the full benefit of 1080p quality. He doesn't bother to cite any sources or what methodology was used to arrive at the data... but nevermind, it does get worse.
He's right about LCoS being superior, but for the wrong reason. It isn't the control circuit but rather the fact that there's a liquid crystal display element for each pixel and, in principle, support for resolutions well above 1920 x 1080. Also the fact that baseline LCD displays and DLP do not display a red, green and blue pixel simultaneously for each pixel of resolution on the final image.
Then he uses THX and SMPTE theatrical standards and applies them to a home auditorium, to support his argument that the opposite is true? What ever gave him the idea that these standards were ever applicable to small home auditoriums in the first place? Theatrical exhibition is a different deal entirely, whether digital or optical... but I'm guessing that the THX/SMPTE specs he's quoting were for 35mm which has much higher effective resolution than 2k/4k digital theatrical projection systems.
He confuses the term motion blur with the issue of print clarity. Motion blur is a side effect of optics whereby an object in motion is blurred by way of the aperture and shutter timing of the exposure. This is actually a good thing because in a motion picture format, i.e. a series of still images, it assists the brain in perceiving fluid motion from a series of still images. Motion blur is NOT correlated with effective clarity but exposure length. Therefore it's ridiculous to say that 35mm is equivalent to 720p. In fact, 35mm, depending on the film stock used and the style of cinematography (e.g. sharp, grainy, diffuse glow, etc.) used, motion picture can render images whose digital equivalent would extend up to 6000 pixels of horizontal resolution... three times that of HD 1080p.
While it's true that theatrical Dolby Digital is 320 Kbps and DVD Dolby Digital is typically 448 Kbps, he makes no mention of additional parameters in Dolby Digital home encoding (e.g. dialogue normalization, Dynamic Range Compression, etc.), he doesn't discuss theatrical DTS (an ADPCM-style format with a 1.5Mbps bitstream), nor does he observe that Dolby Digital at 448-640 Kbps is acoustically transparent relative to an uncompressed source. He also confuses the term "lossless" with "uncompressed"... Lossless refers to compression formats, but "high resolution audio" like that on a DVD-Audio recording is typically 20 or 24-bit Linear PCM, which is an uncompressed format. Calling it lossless is superfluous.
He doesn't mention that in addition to the majority of sound being in the front channels, 5.1 is actually 5.1, whereas 7.1 is not. At best, 7.1 is actually 6.1 with the two rear surround channels paired in mono as in DTS-ES. At least, 7.1 is actually Dolby Digital 5.1 discrete with the two paired rear surround channels still mono, but also stereo matrixed into the left and right surround channels the same way that Dolby Surround analog carries the rear surround stereo matrixed into the front left and right channels.
I mostly ignored his commments on power filtering and cables because that subject has been beaten to death already. H
It would appear that I misread the intent of your post. We're basically on the same side of the argument... you make good points but I was a bit confused as I gained the impression somewhere along the way that you were arguing that cables do make a difference, e.g. that Randi deliberately chose a higher quality cable to show they don't make a difference whereas had he used a crappier cable one could see the difference. See what I mean? Just slightly confusing but... ah, all in good sport.
Agreed, it basically comes down to gauge and length... assuming there are no serious material defects in the annealed copper that might result in premature corrosion.
I just wanted to point out to Slashdotters that the lesson here isn't that cables don't make any difference to sound systems. There's a reason Randi choose the already high-end Monster cable as the reference point for this comparison rather than the cheapest piece of crap cabling anyone could find anywhere.
In fact, I have a rather sad story about that exact same bias. My father was generally very conservative in his spending, but around 1963, he decided to splurge and buy a receiver and two stereo speakers from Acoustic Research. (yes, their well-known AR-3's.) Anyone buying Acoustic Research back in '63 was someone who'd done their homework and cared about sound, these were very well-regarded and expensive speakers.
My Dad was in vision research and taught introductory classes in sensory perception for experimental psychology majors, so he knew a thing or two about acoustics and what matters, and he designed and soldered up his own circuits for his experimental apparatus, so he knew a thing or two about electronics, too.
When he went to the store to buy the AR system, they tried to sell him very expensive cables, and he laughed and said it was a huge waste of money, and proceeded to go home and hook the system up with 24 AWG telephone cable, because the wires "don't make any difference." So he just used whatever was cheap that he already had around.
Anyone who knows much about stereos and electronics is probably already groaning at reading that. Good stereos push a high amperage current, and a 24 AWG wire is going to create a high resistance to that current, which is going to change the impedance the receiver is going to see trying to drive the speakers it was built specifically to be matched with. I don't know how to describe the specifics of the nasty effects on the signal that the speakers receive versus what was intended, but the effect on sound quality was tremendous. The system never sounded very good at all.
By the 90's that system was sitting in the basement, and my brother ended up taking the speakers and hooking them up to an inexpensive Sony receiver, and I ended up taking the receiver and hooking it up to some Linaum speakers. My dad ended up hearing the speakers and commenting on how amazing the improvement in receivers has been that those old speakers could sound so good when they never sounded anywhere near that good before. Then separately he heard my speakers being driven off the old receiver, and commented how amazing advances in speakers were, that they could sound so good being driven off that old tube receiver that never sounded any good...
Of course, really the whole thing came down to the fact that my Dad spent more than he has ever spent on a car on that stereo system, the reduced the sound quality to about that of a $20 clock radio by refusing to spend an extra $10 on cables. No, he didn't need gold Monster cables (not that they existed back then anyway), and it's quite possibly true that it would have been impossible to tell the difference between the expensive cables the guy at the store was selling and NM 14-2 household electrical cable from the local hardware store. But running telephone wire for speaker cables destroyed the sound quality. There is a difference in cables, if you don't know what you're doing, don't assume any old wire will be as good as any other. The basic point that I think loony millionaire audiophiles and conservative skeptical engineers can all agree on is that having a large enough gauge cable to easily handle the current is the most important aspect of the system's cables.
Several flaws with your argument.
1. Anecdote/testimony is the worst form of evidence... especially when the anecdote lacks any concrete, objective analysis. Basically you presented paragraph upon paragraph that made a nice story but contained zero objective and quantifiable analysis.
2. Speaker wire carries a powered signal. It carries voltage oscillations to a speaker which converts those voltage oscillations int
For clarification, where I said "In the case of UTP, crosstalk is beneficial" I am referring to crosstalk between the two leads, not between the DSL circuit and another circuit. 3 to 5 Adjacent T1's in the F1 underground cable are sufficient to cause severe attenuation in a DSL circuit.
Unshielded Twisted Pair is not the same as Z-balanced cabling. UTP contains two conductors to form an electrical circuit. Balanced cabling does not form a circuit and is not analogous to UTP except in the sense that both transmit voltage oscillations that are converted into sound.
However, the PRIMARY advantage of balanced audio cabling is this... There's a hot lead and a cold lead. The hot lead carries the audio signal. The cold lead carries a copy of the audio signal, but phase shifted 180 degrees. That is to say the two signals, if combined in this way, would cancel each other out.
RF/EMI disturbance introduces noise into the signal along the line. In an unbalanced cable this noise travels all the way to the other end. However, in a balanced cable system what happens is that the noise is picked up by both the hot and cold leads. At this point the noise is in phase while the original signal is out of phase. Then, at the other end the cold lead's signal is flipped back in phase with the hot lead. Now the signal is in phase and the noise is out of phase! Voila... efficient noise cancellation.
Also I should note that POTS is assisted by coils that act as signal repeaters to amplify transmissions over long distances, but these repeater coils must be removed on lines supporting DSL as they interfere with the much higher bandwidth DSL signal. Consequently, DSL signals become severely attenuated at distances approaching 18,000 feet. In the case of Rate Adaptive DSL, the most common DSL around today, this translates into reduced bandwidth because the number of frequency-spread channels across which downstream traffic is transmitted start dropping out. This has nothing to do with the cable being balanced or not... because technically it's not a balanced cable, and it can't be because balanced cabling involves a phase shift where the two separate leads should not succumb to RF crosstalk. In the case of UTP, crosstalk is beneficial because the twists in the unshielded pair actually serve to increase the signal power (measurable in decibel-milliwatts, or dBm) and consequently improve SNR over rated distances. The higher the category rating of the UTP, the more twists per meter, and the higher the bandwidth capacity.
Also, it should be noted that structured cabling systems like SYSTIMAX are an implementation of UTP where not one pair but all four pairs are used simultaneously for transmit/receive, thus increasing the available bandwidth (e.g. CAT 5 UTP single pair would support up to 155Mbps whereas CAT 5 SYSTIMAX supported up to 655Mbps over rated distances).
Not to be a picker of nits... but the Bentley's insurance isn't necessarily more expensive.
Contrary to popular belief, insurance rates are determined by the frequency/cost of medical claims far more than the cost of auto body repair work... because medical claims are, by comparison, astronomical.
Case in point: I paid slightly less insurance on a Mercedes Benz than I am paying on my VW... the Benz performs better in 40mph frontal offset crash tests with little or no intrusion into the cabin. The Benzes are tanks... I've seen footage of two 100mph crashes on the Autobahn where the occupants of the vehicle got up and walked away.
I don't know the case with the Bentley specfically, but it is very possible that the insurance rates could be less given the number of safety features typical of luxury vehicles.
This "study" was conducted by the same Forrester Research that said the iPod Photo would go nowhere, the same Forrester Research which claimed iTunes sales were "collapsing" then had to scramble to do damage control when their estimates were based on a very misleading data source.
Part of their problem is they can't seem to see five minutes into the future at the larger strategy Apple is deploying with devices such as AppleTV. What the MIT computer science-educated, but consumer technology-ignorant analysts at Forrester seem to want is for Apple to:
a) Follow the same abysmal (read: atrociously unsexy) corporate branding strategy as everyone else... i.e. iPods should be APPLE IPODS (imagine a big flashing neon sign). b) Focus more energy on getting consumers to accept the 1970's definition of computing (which, incidentally, is paramount to Forrester's bread and butter).
What Apple does that seems to have Forrester analysts' panties in a bunch is they focus on understanding how consumers interact with technology, and then define solutions that fit that usage. Consequently, Apple does not fit Forrester's mold. They deploy a device like AppleTV and all Forrester can see is Apple trying to compete with cable/dish. They cannot see the larger multimedia strategy at play here, of which AppleTV is only a "feeler" product. Even if AppleTV fails, its lessons are going to be harvested by Apple product people to shape the next generation. Since Steve Jobs' return, Apple seldom experiences a tragic loss in the market because they take whatever they learned and shape future products with the improvements that were needed. If AppleTV succeeds, we'll see an extrapolation of more of its features. If it doesn't, we'll see devices based off AppleTV that possess what it is that AppleTV lacks.
This difference in focal length of Apple's vision, and Forrester's vision, is also what sets Apple apart from all its competitors. They're just as myopic as Forrester... which works out perfectly since there's money to be made by restating the patently obvious. It's certainly a lot easier than having vision.
You say: An album worth of tracks on iTunes cost more than a full price new release. I say: Buy the album at the album price, not the tracks individually. Whether there are one track or twenty five on it, it will cost you less than the CD.
You say: iTunes will not let you mix and match an album worth of tracks for the price of an album. I say: No one else will. Not Amazon. Not Best Buy. Nobody.
Oh, and by the way... if you already bought a couple tracks of an album and want to complete the album, iTunes will let you grab the rest of the album for the album price less the money you already paid toward the tracks you already have... even THOUGH as a portion of a full album the per track price is less than 99 cents, they're still letting you apply what you have paid thus far to an album price, rather than a prorated per-track album completion price. The same model will likely apply when the per track price is $1.30 and the album prices are still $9.99 even for the higher fidelity (as Apple has stated they plan to do).
Care to identify a single music retailer other than Apple who will do this?
The problem in your assumptions is that you think that the entire price of a product is associated only with the tangible materials that went into it. As if there are no other people to be paid other than those who work at the manufacturing plant, and as if there's no inherent market value to the INTANGIBLE content... (i.e. lyrics, music) in a musical work, and as if there are no costs to maintaining data centers with global load balancing that can serve millions of customers worldwide without crashing to a grinding halt.
Also, you're saying it starts to look worse and worse for individual singles. Do you remember when a single cost $1.49 to $3.49 just to buy it on a crappy analog cassette? I sure as hell do... and then you could only buy the singles that the studio released AS singles. You had no option of buying almost any track off an album, much less digital. It has only gotten better.
There is also a premium associated with the convenience of the iTunes model. Amazon will charge you shipping unless you want to wait an indefinite period for their SuperSaver shipping by which time you could have downloaded many times that amount of content from iTunes. Your time is worth money... how much? That's open to debate depending on the individual but I would imagine it's no fun to wait days on end just to get that one song you wanted... and when you do, Amazon won't let you have just that one song. It's got to be the entire album... one song you want, and a bunch you might not.
There is no direct analogy between what Amazon offers in terms of product and service, versus what Apple offers. And you are overlooking a very important competitive edge here because the ability to mix and match whatever tracks you want at a fair market price is one of the key attributes that makes iTunes so much more convenient and consequently hugely popular and still increasing in popularity.
The Apple business model can command a premium for the non-DRM tracks because of the limited alternatives to having their a-la carte purchasing options and the convenience of their user interface, search capabilities and purchasing system.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you seriously trying to say that a developer should never develop an application that does something another application already does?
No.
Apple has noted that people who want to distribute apps to a small group are directed as to how to go about it.
What's being done here is that Apple is stating they will not aid in the proliferation of a competitive piece of software by marketing, promoting and distributing it through THEIR store... which is not the only possible channel of distribution, strictly speaking, but certainly the most convenient.
Do we talk, however, about the flipside of this? Where is the integrity in a developer knowingly creating an application to do something a product already does? You mean to tell me that in the marketplace of ideas that developers are so bereft of creativity that they cannot think of something unique?
I know that even Apple doesn't originate ideas... but it's a bit different when you go buy a company making something you think you can integrate better versus simply writing an app that does roughly what another one does and then pissing and moaning that the distributor refuses to help you cannibalize their own apps.
Are we complaining that Bose stores refuse to sell anything but Bose, or that Dell stores refuse to sell computers other than Dells, or that Ford opts not to distribute Daewoo parts at its stores?
Apple will scare talented developers? If they were truly talented would they have attempted less than surreptitiously to ask a distributor to promote a competing product rather than writing any number of applications that haven't been thought of yet?
Incorrect. If you purchased $670 worth of AAPL at its closing price on Jan 1, 1981, you would today have 1512 shares (three 2:1 splits) and at a price of $180 (which it hit yesterday) you would have $272,160... a 40,520% return.
Had you purchased $670 worth of Dell at close on January 1, 1990, at 6 cents a share, you would have 11,166 shares. Since they had one 3:2 split and six 2:1 splits since then, you would today have 1,071,936 shares, or a market value of $26,798,400.
Of course there is equal likelihood that none of you would have held either of these investments that long since the pressure to avoid Ben Graham's long term value investing principles was already huge in the 1980s, and even more so in today's age of mobile trading platforms for the millions of ADHD fools who are quickly and repeatedly deprived of their money.
Also, in 1981 Apple was still hugely popular. In 1990, Dell was a rinkydink outfit whose market value would have made them unattractive to most investors who tend to buy already overvalued stocks rather than seeking out undervalued stocks and hanging on to them for long periods of time (e.g. 20 years). The greater likelihood is that none of us would have thought of purchasing Dell in 1990, but many of us might have considered an investment in Apple in 1981.
Dell stayed at under a dollar a share for seven years... even those few who might have thought to purchase it might very well have gotten impatient and sold it.
Apple would have hit some speedbumps and people would have sold LONG before anyone even conceived it possible for Apple to make a comeback... Michael Dell himself proposed in 1997 that were he to run the company, he would liquidate Apple's assets.
Go figure.
MC Hawking files a lawsuit for character infringement.
Apple's stock price cannot be attributed primarily or solely to Steve Jobs' health. While it may have been on factor, the stock price was already declining due to several factors:
Apple's stock performance is one of the most speculatively-influenced. Rumors of a new product send the stock skyward and, consequently, the release of said product tends to signal that the opportunity has been capitalized by speculators and a sell-off tends to follow. This happens also in the lead-up and aftermath of each WWDC and MacWorld, as well as earnings statements.
Both an earnings statement and iPhone 3G release preceded the current sell-off.
Additionally, current market conditions are sending most common stock issues downward on bad earnings news and renewed fears of the credit crisis.
While I am suggesting that Steve Jobs' health is not the driving factor, especially since these other news items have been far more exposed than concerns over his health, I am not suggesting that Apple's stock has "nowhere to go but up". I want to lay that out there to avoid exclamations of "fanboy"... in the days prior to the iPhone 3G release, I sold half my shares and advised other investors to do the same.
Apple's common stock is currently priced at ten times its book value per share... that is, total assets minus liabilities and intangibles. From a Graham-centric point of view, Apple is considerably overvalued and has a great deal of downside risk.
The question of Apple's future performance as a corporation is not reinforced by how good or bad its heavily speculated (read: overpriced) stock does... as the company does not generate new equity for operations by the trading of already issued shares on the secondary markets (e.g. NASDAQ).
But, I suspect, that since most with an interest in Apple's pipeline and financial success invariably seems to ask how the stock is doing, and so few people follow Graham's value investing philosophy, it goes to reason that what people who post such articles are really saying is "How will Apple's stock do when Steve Jobs is gone?"
These sort of diatribes offer no detailed insight into the actual corporate pipeline, management succession plans, corporate balance sheets (the financial strength upon which a company's future rests), cash flows, etc. and are therefore of little more value than what the gossip column has to say about Miley Cyrus.
Tell that Bob Woodruff.
Original submitter seemed to suggest Apple was among companies accused of supporting business models that took money away from the industry. Quite the contrary, the manager suggests consulting Apple and the like for their input as to how to make systems in which the artist is fairly compensated.
Of course what is never discussed in the context of these debates is what "fair compensation" is in today's world.
I agree that the recording companies shaft both the consumer and the recording artist, but what is the inevitable end result of having so much access to so many recording artists who can out of their own bedroom gain international notoriety by supplying their music directly on the internet?
Well, the commoditization of music has had many incarnations throughout time... and the model in which artists aspire to be ridiculously wealthy, and only a handful signed to even major labels ever become so, is quite possibly an anachronism.
I think recording artists need to adjust their sights... and get used to the reality, the fact, that the consumer is not willing to pay what they used to for music, and that accessbility and supply play their part in the shift of the equilibrium price per track or album.
That being said, some artists are in greater demand than others... but I'll get back to that in a minute.
If Radiohead's experiment is an example of anything, it's not that the consumers have it entirely wrong. Do I think the consumers are being fair? Hell no. But the data shouldn't be looked at in terms of how many people paid nothing. The data should be looked at in terms of, from the top to the bottom, what was the AVERAGE price paid. This figure will tell you something about at least that band's demand factor... and if they have brains, they'll use that data to figure out a pricing strategy that is appropriate for their material and their demographic targets.
If they're stupid and greedy, they'll blame the consumer, the internet, everything under the sun... without ever thinking that hey, maybe they just aren't that popular.
To provide a counterpoint to U2's manager's argument: People if left to their own devices on Ebay will still pay a quarter of a million dollars for a Patek Philippe wristwatch. But note the difference in terms of scarcity, of quality, and of demand, of that product and its REASONABLY SIMILAR competitors.
So maybe the artist's expectations are flawed. Maybe the industry's demands are flawed. And maybe the consumer is also flawed.
But if you want to make money in this world, there's no getting around the flawed consumer... for whatever reasoning they apply to their purchasing habits, they represent in sum total what cost the market will bear. Clearly that cost is shifting for music as a commodity.
If U2 wants to get paid ridiculous sums of money in this paradigm, they need to be capable of doing the following:
1. Follow market pricing strategies to establish a fair transaction... an honest analysis of where their equilibrium price falls based on hard data.
2. Providing a product that is unmistakably theirs and difficult to reproduce by competitors and pirates. They can't control the pirates, but they can continue finding innovative ways to beat them to the punch... but they need to find the balance between countermeasures and losing sales, rather than going entirely one way or the other. As for being unique, I think they have this locked down but they cannot rest on their laurels before another band out there gives people a reason to fall out of love with U2.
3. Leverage/engage other media into providing a unique experience for their fans that is always one step ahead of the pirates and the competition. This may mean 3D movies, this may mean more live concerts, it may mean releasing in formats that are extremely inconvenient to copy. It may mean a bit of all of these.
Even with all these strategies, bands need to contend with the changing times and get used to the reality of an impendi
One of the best posts I think I've read in a long time on Slashdot. Eloquent, humorous, and a total smackdown, all in one.
I posted this in response to some of the comments on the linked blog:
To Rob Poole and biblethumper, excellent responses.
Also, I would like to add for clarity that "theory" in the scientific context (or any other) does not mean a blind guess, or even an educated guess...
A theory, contrary to its colloquial usage, is defined by Webster's as "The analysis of a set of FACTS in their relation to one another."
Thus, that evolution occurs is a fact. HOW it occurs is what The Theory of Evolution proposes to explain. It explains it so well that it has been used to predict much of the cause-effect relationships that have resulted in most of the medical care you receive today. Were it not for evolutionary biology, very little of today's medical expertise would exist. You cannot peruse any corner of medicine and/or science without running invariably into evolutionary biology, paleobiology, genetics, heredity and all the myriad life sciences that were, of all things, spawned unknowingly by the discovery of a monk (the aforementioned Mendel).
The problem with imagining that Creationism is anything remotely resembling a theory is that it consists of no facts. When questioned as to the facts that support it, a mishmash of suppositions are presented, but no evidence. When asked what Creationism proposes, no cogent explanation is provided. In short, Creationism/Intelligent Design fell apart upon very basic scrutiny in Kitzmiller et. al. v Dover Board of Education, during a cross-examination of ID's biggest "expert", Michael Behe, a molecular biologist from Lehigh University... The court testimony of Behe exposed that Creationism/Intelligent Design consists of no direct evidence, proposes nothing, disproves nothing, and proves nothing.
It should be noted, however, that contrary to Rob Poole's post that the Theory of Evolution doesn't have "just as much" evidence as Newtonian and Einsteinian Theories of Gravity. The Theory of Evolution, in fact, has many times the evidence behind it. Over 150 years of findings published in thousands upon thousands of peer-reviewed scientific articles.
It is useful to note that Mendel, who did not understand yet the mechanism of heredity but observed its occurrence, was vindicated three centuries later by James Watson and F.H.C. Crick's discovery of the double-helical structure of DNA, the mechanism of heredity (not unlike how Arno Penzias and Bob Wilson discovered in 1960 the Cosmic Microwave Background that Dirac predicted some 40 years earlier). It is also useful to note that modern genetic research on homeobox genes, the "master control switches" of huge sets of genes, are vindicating key aspects of Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge's Punctuated Equilibrium -- namely the abrupt and drastic periods of divergence interrupting long periods of data-backed, not gap-backed, stasis.
How does the Bible explain the interchangeablity of the Pax-6 homolog between Drosophila melanogaster and Homo sapiens sapiens? Why did the Bible not predict the structure of DNA? If two humans can do it, surely god could have proffered an explanation of his own invention.
There has not been in the history of modern science (circa the advent of chemistry and physics) a more demonstrable theory with more evidence to support it. If you refute evolution, you might as well walk off a cliff and hope for the best.
I agree with those who say that faith and science are not entirely incompatible. But whereas science does not attempt to do anything but find facts, religiion does not do anything but pursue meaning... and poorly at that. So in a way they ARE incompatible. But where science is the best system for testing hypotheses and deriving what is fact, as the scientific process is more successful than any system before it for doing so, religion is no better than a great philosophical treatise or a poignant fiction in giving human beings a sense of self-worth and meaning to find their place. The difference is that, Siskel and Ebert's cutthroat debates aside, usually
"All right, what would you little maniacs like to do first?"
No need to completely flip out or resort to ad hominem attacks...
I'm not sure you understood the gist of my argument. "Piracy" or whatever you want to call it is, as I stated, not nearly the problem the record companies want us all to believe it is. The real problem is obsolescence of their internet distro model. You can waste time playing semantic origami with the definition of "distribution" too if you like but I don't think it'll get you any closer to winning an argument.
The problem with your argument about copying increasing overall wealth is twofold:
"Copying is legitimate natural economic behavior which reduces scarcity and creates wealth in absolutely every single instance."
Decreasing scarcity never increases wealth. It instead dilutes value. Stock splits are an excellent example. If supply increases and demand remains constant, the equilibrium price decreases. For all your posturing about Economics, this is the most fundamental principle of basic introductory economics and it should be understood backward and forward by someone who inferred that he is an Economics graduate.
But in order for the equilibrium price (the price the market is willing to PAY) to go up, both supply AND demand have to increase. The problem with the "copyright infringement increases demand" argument is this... It simply doesn't. Show me one set of figures and the source that demonstrate that this actually happens consistently.
The other problem with your argument is that concepts such as transportation, shelter, food, music in and of itself, etc. are so generic that they are outside the scope of copyright. That is, these concepts themselves cannot be copyrighted. This entirely undermines your argument. What also undermines your argument is that copyright exists not just in the sound recording (a phonorecord) but in the lyrics and music itself which are extremely unique.
The idea is that the distribution and profitability of a work as unique as a specific kind of song or arrangement of notes should be the author's prerogative to license as THEY see fit. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, in your counterargument that doesn't reek of arguing from personal incredulity or self-serving convenience.
Your copyright infringement does not profit me, as a consumer, at all. If you believe otherwise, please show mathematically how it does.
That being said, you seem to think that I'm defending the music industry when in fact I'm doing exactly the opposite. I'm suggesting ways they can be beaten at their own game... because frankly, they lack the vision to create truly scarce, truly valuable, truly creative catalogs of music. It's not in their nature to understand how to do so... and that isn't profitable or enjoyable for the artist or the consumer as much as the increase in diversity of the artist pool would be if we stopped pissing and moaning about why you can't download the latest Blink 182 album off a BitTorrent legally and instead paid any sum of money to support an independently recorded artist who adds to the diversity of the music "gene pool".
I am not taking RIAA's side in this... but I'm not buying your unfounded line of reasoning either.
Well, it would have been nice had you mentioned all that in your original reply. You know, a better rebuttal than "it's a blog! it's bad!" Wouldn't think THAT would hold up anywhere, even in the court of public opinion. But it's a blog, so it's not like anyone has to use facts to rebut it. At least, not until they're called on it and have to rebut the law review article as well as the short blog post about it.
Ah see now you're changing gears (presumably to escape the humiliation of having jumped to the wrong conclusion about me, but that's ok... it happens)... while that's fine I'd first like you to at least concede that I do, in fact, know and understand copyright law very well.
That said, I guess the problem is that we disagree about appropriate limits of copyright. I, for one, don't have a problem with watching a football game (or whatever) at the office, even if our screen is bigger than that allowed by 17 USC 1, 110, (5)(B).
I don't particularly care for appeals to emotion. They aren't the way to win me over. What I think you're trying to do here even if you don't realize it is this: You're trying to establish how moral you are by taking the side of the "little guy" who just wants to watch his football game in peace (albeit on his employer's time and expense)...
There's no issue of morality at stake here though. This is a simple matter... like a contractual agreement. The football game is a work of copyright. The broadcast stations pay for the rights to broadcast it. The employer that exceeds Section 110's limits in fact is rebroadcasting the program beyond the scope of Fair Use. Simple as that. I am not convinced that you have an argument simply because you're trying, mistakenly, to justify your own sense of convenience by appealing to my vanity in the hopes that I might see this as an opportunity to show how magnanimous I am by taking the side of the "common man"... a sense of vanity I don't possess. Believe me, I possess other kinds of vanity... just not that one.
Also, I don't like that the law allows people to go after such trivialities. You say that they won't because there's no financial incentive, but are you really going to tell me that the RIAA litigation is anything but a money sink? How can you be so sure that people won't abuse these laws? Now, you can tell me that many of these things are legally frivolous, but have you actually SEEN the lawsuits actually going on today?
I'm not averse to this line of discussion but let it be noted that my detailed response was only attempting to clarify my position against the application/interpretation of copyright law in Tehranian's "John" allegory. I would be perfectly comfortable taking on Tehranian in a courtroom on those indefensible claims of his, and I believe that anyone who has a computer allowing them to violate copyright law is perfectly capable of reading and understanding what they can and cannot do. Note that I do not use P2P networks and then later feign ignorance about copyright law. The Cornell Law database is freely accessible to anyone who wants to know the contents of 17 USC or any other Title of the entire US Code.
Anyway, back to your questions...
Can you tell me with a straight face that people aren't pushing the bounds just a little?
After three years of 150-300 DMCA notices per week, I can tell you that the bounds are being pushed more than you know. Fortunately, most of these requests never turn into real litigation because when it comes down to it their positions are utterly indefensible. It just takes a little while and some case law for that to come to light... and now it is beginning to. Recent decisions have underscored the failure of RIAA/MPAA to meet the essential burden of proof in a court of law to demonstrate infringement of 17 USC 12 and/or 17 USC 5, 512.
But it helps to have a better understanding of what's actually going on...
In my 1996 paper I pointed out a couple of k
As a matter of fact I did. I'm not writing a thesis nor am I participating in a debate with the blog author or Mr. Tehranian... the burden of proof is on the blog author or Tehranian to make a compelling argument, and it's just not there. But for sake of argument, see my response to the anonymous guy below. I broke it down.
A few things in response...
Firstly, I believe I had already thoroughly established my understanding of the domain of intellectual property since my paper titled "Technology and the Music Industry: Music Distribution via the Internet" was written in 1996 at the University of Minnesota. Secondly, contrary to your opinion, I can read. In fact, much of my research in that paper was based on a 600-page dissection of intellectual property practices of RIAA and the music industry, including the entire text of Title 17, Chapter 1, of US code, which I've read backwards and forwards. This book, titled "This Business of Music" was published by two experienced IP attorneys, Sidney Shemel and M. William Krasilovksy... one of whom served as General Counsel for intellectual property at Warner Bros. Records.
Secondly, I am a registered copyright owner. I have published a screenplay that was registered both with the Writers Guild of America (west) and the Library of Congress, US Copyright Office, under Registration Number PAu002532809 on October 25, 2000. In fact, I filed a cease & desist notification against a company that was erroneously reproducing portions of my work on an adult oriented search engine. It took less than thirty minutes for the website administrator to comply with my request for removal of the material.
Thirdly, I worked with Qwest Communications Internet Security Enforcement Group for three years and processed hundreds of DMCA investigations per week submitted by RIAA, MPAA, BSA, IDSA, and other criminal investigations involving local, state and federal law enforcement agencies. I have, in the course of that work, been closely involved with our own attorneys and General Counsel.
That being said, upon another examination of Mr. Tehranian's paper I count only two instances of egregious claims of copyright infringement that do not pass the litmus test for Section 107 applicability. These are:
1. The violation of Hanna Barbera's copyright in the likeness of Captain Caveman.
2. The public performance of Mildred S. and Patty Hill's "Happy Birthday", Copyright Warner-Chappell Publishing.
Neither of these examples are likely to be pursued with civil or criminal action as the expenditure to do so far exceeds the potential reward... but I find it interesting that you didn't point out these two and only examples of infringement or the fact that Hanna Barbera is no longer the copyright owner of record since its dissolution and reformation as Cartoon Network.
The rest of the examples given, notably extrapolated in the footnotes (pp. 543-547) are in fact erroneously cited as copyright violations. Footnote 33 is a great example. Works published by the United States government are de facto public domain. The reasoning given in footnote 33 is erroneous because even a cursory examination will show that the litigation was not against individuals for having infringed the copyright. This is not a defensible position. If I were to make photocopies by myself for nonprofit, informational purposes, and then share them with colleagues in a meeting or via the internet, this would constitute fair use. What was of issue in these examples of case law was the fact that Kinkos and other companies were attempting to make a margin of profit on the reproduction of these works for individuals who had requested copies. I was at University of Minnesota at the time. The University Bookstores were affected by these cases. The result was that they could not charge a service fee over and above the basic per page copy fee, as had previously been the practice. Thus, their remedy was simply to avoid making copies on behalf of individuals... but individuals could still go to self-service copiers and use them, and this still constitutes fair use.
The fact of the matter is that both the blog article AND the research paper a
... for fleas!
The blog entry's reference, an article by Professor of Law Dr. Tehranian in Utah, makes another interesting error... aside from the corruption of "Fair Use".
He states that RIAA lobbied successfully to have sound recordings considered "works for hire" since the 1999 amendment to Title 17. But the contracts themselves have been pretty unambiguous since at least the 2nd Edition of Shemel and Krasilovsky's <i>This Business of Music</i>. Most recording contracts expressly stipulate in writing that the works made are considered works for hire, and that is supported by fixing the lyrics and music in tangible form through a publisher, and that the phonorecord rights tend to be works made for hire, the consideration for which is the recording advance (read: LOAN) paid to the artist to cover recording costs.
The last known example I can think of in which a band assumed the rights of its recordings made for a recording company was in the case of Led Zeppelin whose publisher reverted the copyrights to Led Zeppelin after 26 years. These were not only works before the Copyright Act of 1976, but also the provisions with their publisher were inked in contract. Otherwwise, generally, all works recorded for a recording company are stipulated in contract as works for hire.
This is why I do not read blogs... because they are rife with poorly researched theses such as this.
The entire argument made in the excerpt is predicated upon completely ignoring 17 USC 1, Section 107, "Fair Use". Period.
TFA is not newsworthy material.
Aside from the fact that the barrage of ads on that site nearly melted my laptop, a few observations:
The article starts off with a disclaimer in the first page. When an opinion piece has to state, "this doesn't represent an endorsement from FiringSquad, but rather our research," the opposite is generally true.
He decides the lack of 1080p content is a myth. His argument? You can convert 1080i back to 1080p. While this is fundamentally true, so is the statement that there's little 1080p content available. Converting it doesn't mean that the content was natively available in 1080p. I know, seems trivial... but this is a precursor to an argumentation style he uses that gets tiresome and downright disingenuous as the article goes on.
He has a table of data for maximum viewing distances to appreciate the full benefit of 1080p quality. He doesn't bother to cite any sources or what methodology was used to arrive at the data... but nevermind, it does get worse.
He's right about LCoS being superior, but for the wrong reason. It isn't the control circuit but rather the fact that there's a liquid crystal display element for each pixel and, in principle, support for resolutions well above 1920 x 1080. Also the fact that baseline LCD displays and DLP do not display a red, green and blue pixel simultaneously for each pixel of resolution on the final image.
Then he uses THX and SMPTE theatrical standards and applies them to a home auditorium, to support his argument that the opposite is true? What ever gave him the idea that these standards were ever applicable to small home auditoriums in the first place? Theatrical exhibition is a different deal entirely, whether digital or optical... but I'm guessing that the THX/SMPTE specs he's quoting were for 35mm which has much higher effective resolution than 2k/4k digital theatrical projection systems.
He confuses the term motion blur with the issue of print clarity. Motion blur is a side effect of optics whereby an object in motion is blurred by way of the aperture and shutter timing of the exposure. This is actually a good thing because in a motion picture format, i.e. a series of still images, it assists the brain in perceiving fluid motion from a series of still images. Motion blur is NOT correlated with effective clarity but exposure length. Therefore it's ridiculous to say that 35mm is equivalent to 720p. In fact, 35mm, depending on the film stock used and the style of cinematography (e.g. sharp, grainy, diffuse glow, etc.) used, motion picture can render images whose digital equivalent would extend up to 6000 pixels of horizontal resolution... three times that of HD 1080p.
While it's true that theatrical Dolby Digital is 320 Kbps and DVD Dolby Digital is typically 448 Kbps, he makes no mention of additional parameters in Dolby Digital home encoding (e.g. dialogue normalization, Dynamic Range Compression, etc.), he doesn't discuss theatrical DTS (an ADPCM-style format with a 1.5Mbps bitstream), nor does he observe that Dolby Digital at 448-640 Kbps is acoustically transparent relative to an uncompressed source. He also confuses the term "lossless" with "uncompressed"... Lossless refers to compression formats, but "high resolution audio" like that on a DVD-Audio recording is typically 20 or 24-bit Linear PCM, which is an uncompressed format. Calling it lossless is superfluous.
He doesn't mention that in addition to the majority of sound being in the front channels, 5.1 is actually 5.1, whereas 7.1 is not. At best, 7.1 is actually 6.1 with the two rear surround channels paired in mono as in DTS-ES. At least, 7.1 is actually Dolby Digital 5.1 discrete with the two paired rear surround channels still mono, but also stereo matrixed into the left and right surround channels the same way that Dolby Surround analog carries the rear surround stereo matrixed into the front left and right channels.
I mostly ignored his commments on power filtering and cables because that subject has been beaten to death already. H
It would appear that I misread the intent of your post. We're basically on the same side of the argument... you make good points but I was a bit confused as I gained the impression somewhere along the way that you were arguing that cables do make a difference, e.g. that Randi deliberately chose a higher quality cable to show they don't make a difference whereas had he used a crappier cable one could see the difference. See what I mean? Just slightly confusing but... ah, all in good sport.
Agreed, it basically comes down to gauge and length... assuming there are no serious material defects in the annealed copper that might result in premature corrosion.
I just wanted to point out to Slashdotters that the lesson here isn't that cables don't make any difference to sound systems. There's a reason Randi choose the already high-end Monster cable as the reference point for this comparison rather than the cheapest piece of crap cabling anyone could find anywhere.
In fact, I have a rather sad story about that exact same bias. My father was generally very conservative in his spending, but around 1963, he decided to splurge and buy a receiver and two stereo speakers from Acoustic Research. (yes, their well-known AR-3's.) Anyone buying Acoustic Research back in '63 was someone who'd done their homework and cared about sound, these were very well-regarded and expensive speakers.
My Dad was in vision research and taught introductory classes in sensory perception for experimental psychology majors, so he knew a thing or two about acoustics and what matters, and he designed and soldered up his own circuits for his experimental apparatus, so he knew a thing or two about electronics, too.
When he went to the store to buy the AR system, they tried to sell him very expensive cables, and he laughed and said it was a huge waste of money, and proceeded to go home and hook the system up with 24 AWG telephone cable, because the wires "don't make any difference." So he just used whatever was cheap that he already had around.
Anyone who knows much about stereos and electronics is probably already groaning at reading that. Good stereos push a high amperage current, and a 24 AWG wire is going to create a high resistance to that current, which is going to change the impedance the receiver is going to see trying to drive the speakers it was built specifically to be matched with. I don't know how to describe the specifics of the nasty effects on the signal that the speakers receive versus what was intended, but the effect on sound quality was tremendous. The system never sounded very good at all.
By the 90's that system was sitting in the basement, and my brother ended up taking the speakers and hooking them up to an inexpensive Sony receiver, and I ended up taking the receiver and hooking it up to some Linaum speakers. My dad ended up hearing the speakers and commenting on how amazing the improvement in receivers has been that those old speakers could sound so good when they never sounded anywhere near that good before. Then separately he heard my speakers being driven off the old receiver, and commented how amazing advances in speakers were, that they could sound so good being driven off that old tube receiver that never sounded any good...
Of course, really the whole thing came down to the fact that my Dad spent more than he has ever spent on a car on that stereo system, the reduced the sound quality to about that of a $20 clock radio by refusing to spend an extra $10 on cables. No, he didn't need gold Monster cables (not that they existed back then anyway), and it's quite possibly true that it would have been impossible to tell the difference between the expensive cables the guy at the store was selling and NM 14-2 household electrical cable from the local hardware store. But running telephone wire for speaker cables destroyed the sound quality. There is a difference in cables, if you don't know what you're doing, don't assume any old wire will be as good as any other. The basic point that I think loony millionaire audiophiles and conservative skeptical engineers can all agree on is that having a large enough gauge cable to easily handle the current is the most important aspect of the system's cables.
Several flaws with your argument.
1. Anecdote/testimony is the worst form of evidence... especially when the anecdote lacks any concrete, objective analysis. Basically you presented paragraph upon paragraph that made a nice story but contained zero objective and quantifiable analysis.
2. Speaker wire carries a powered signal. It carries voltage oscillations to a speaker which converts those voltage oscillations int
For clarification, where I said "In the case of UTP, crosstalk is beneficial" I am referring to crosstalk between the two leads, not between the DSL circuit and another circuit. 3 to 5 Adjacent T1's in the F1 underground cable are sufficient to cause severe attenuation in a DSL circuit.
Unshielded Twisted Pair is not the same as Z-balanced cabling. UTP contains two conductors to form an electrical circuit. Balanced cabling does not form a circuit and is not analogous to UTP except in the sense that both transmit voltage oscillations that are converted into sound.
However, the PRIMARY advantage of balanced audio cabling is this... There's a hot lead and a cold lead. The hot lead carries the audio signal. The cold lead carries a copy of the audio signal, but phase shifted 180 degrees. That is to say the two signals, if combined in this way, would cancel each other out.
RF/EMI disturbance introduces noise into the signal along the line. In an unbalanced cable this noise travels all the way to the other end. However, in a balanced cable system what happens is that the noise is picked up by both the hot and cold leads. At this point the noise is in phase while the original signal is out of phase. Then, at the other end the cold lead's signal is flipped back in phase with the hot lead. Now the signal is in phase and the noise is out of phase! Voila... efficient noise cancellation.
Also I should note that POTS is assisted by coils that act as signal repeaters to amplify transmissions over long distances, but these repeater coils must be removed on lines supporting DSL as they interfere with the much higher bandwidth DSL signal. Consequently, DSL signals become severely attenuated at distances approaching 18,000 feet. In the case of Rate Adaptive DSL, the most common DSL around today, this translates into reduced bandwidth because the number of frequency-spread channels across which downstream traffic is transmitted start dropping out. This has nothing to do with the cable being balanced or not... because technically it's not a balanced cable, and it can't be because balanced cabling involves a phase shift where the two separate leads should not succumb to RF crosstalk. In the case of UTP, crosstalk is beneficial because the twists in the unshielded pair actually serve to increase the signal power (measurable in decibel-milliwatts, or dBm) and consequently improve SNR over rated distances. The higher the category rating of the UTP, the more twists per meter, and the higher the bandwidth capacity.
Also, it should be noted that structured cabling systems like SYSTIMAX are an implementation of UTP where not one pair but all four pairs are used simultaneously for transmit/receive, thus increasing the available bandwidth (e.g. CAT 5 UTP single pair would support up to 155Mbps whereas CAT 5 SYSTIMAX supported up to 655Mbps over rated distances).
Not to be a picker of nits... but the Bentley's insurance isn't necessarily more expensive.
Contrary to popular belief, insurance rates are determined by the frequency/cost of medical claims far more than the cost of auto body repair work... because medical claims are, by comparison, astronomical.
Case in point: I paid slightly less insurance on a Mercedes Benz than I am paying on my VW... the Benz performs better in 40mph frontal offset crash tests with little or no intrusion into the cabin. The Benzes are tanks... I've seen footage of two 100mph crashes on the Autobahn where the occupants of the vehicle got up and walked away.
I don't know the case with the Bentley specfically, but it is very possible that the insurance rates could be less given the number of safety features typical of luxury vehicles.
This "study" was conducted by the same Forrester Research that said the iPod Photo would go nowhere, the same Forrester Research which claimed iTunes sales were "collapsing" then had to scramble to do damage control when their estimates were based on a very misleading data source.
Part of their problem is they can't seem to see five minutes into the future at the larger strategy Apple is deploying with devices such as AppleTV. What the MIT computer science-educated, but consumer technology-ignorant analysts at Forrester seem to want is for Apple to:
a) Follow the same abysmal (read: atrociously unsexy) corporate branding strategy as everyone else... i.e. iPods should be APPLE IPODS (imagine a big flashing neon sign).
b) Focus more energy on getting consumers to accept the 1970's definition of computing (which, incidentally, is paramount to Forrester's bread and butter).
What Apple does that seems to have Forrester analysts' panties in a bunch is they focus on understanding how consumers interact with technology, and then define solutions that fit that usage. Consequently, Apple does not fit Forrester's mold. They deploy a device like AppleTV and all Forrester can see is Apple trying to compete with cable/dish. They cannot see the larger multimedia strategy at play here, of which AppleTV is only a "feeler" product. Even if AppleTV fails, its lessons are going to be harvested by Apple product people to shape the next generation. Since Steve Jobs' return, Apple seldom experiences a tragic loss in the market because they take whatever they learned and shape future products with the improvements that were needed. If AppleTV succeeds, we'll see an extrapolation of more of its features. If it doesn't, we'll see devices based off AppleTV that possess what it is that AppleTV lacks.
This difference in focal length of Apple's vision, and Forrester's vision, is also what sets Apple apart from all its competitors. They're just as myopic as Forrester... which works out perfectly since there's money to be made by restating the patently obvious. It's certainly a lot easier than having vision.
You say: An album worth of tracks on iTunes cost more than a full price new release.
I say: Buy the album at the album price, not the tracks individually. Whether there are one track or twenty five on it, it will cost you less than the CD.
You say: iTunes will not let you mix and match an album worth of tracks for the price of an album.
I say: No one else will. Not Amazon. Not Best Buy. Nobody.
Oh, and by the way... if you already bought a couple tracks of an album and want to complete the album, iTunes will let you grab the rest of the album for the album price less the money you already paid toward the tracks you already have... even THOUGH as a portion of a full album the per track price is less than 99 cents, they're still letting you apply what you have paid thus far to an album price, rather than a prorated per-track album completion price. The same model will likely apply when the per track price is $1.30 and the album prices are still $9.99 even for the higher fidelity (as Apple has stated they plan to do).
Care to identify a single music retailer other than Apple who will do this?
The problem in your assumptions is that you think that the entire price of a product is associated only with the tangible materials that went into it. As if there are no other people to be paid other than those who work at the manufacturing plant, and as if there's no inherent market value to the INTANGIBLE content... (i.e. lyrics, music) in a musical work, and as if there are no costs to maintaining data centers with global load balancing that can serve millions of customers worldwide without crashing to a grinding halt.
Also, you're saying it starts to look worse and worse for individual singles. Do you remember when a single cost $1.49 to $3.49 just to buy it on a crappy analog cassette? I sure as hell do... and then you could only buy the singles that the studio released AS singles. You had no option of buying almost any track off an album, much less digital. It has only gotten better.
There is also a premium associated with the convenience of the iTunes model. Amazon will charge you shipping unless you want to wait an indefinite period for their SuperSaver shipping by which time you could have downloaded many times that amount of content from iTunes. Your time is worth money... how much? That's open to debate depending on the individual but I would imagine it's no fun to wait days on end just to get that one song you wanted... and when you do, Amazon won't let you have just that one song. It's got to be the entire album... one song you want, and a bunch you might not.
There is no direct analogy between what Amazon offers in terms of product and service, versus what Apple offers. And you are overlooking a very important competitive edge here because the ability to mix and match whatever tracks you want at a fair market price is one of the key attributes that makes iTunes so much more convenient and consequently hugely popular and still increasing in popularity.
The Apple business model can command a premium for the non-DRM tracks because of the limited alternatives to having their a-la carte purchasing options and the convenience of their user interface, search capabilities and purchasing system.