In one server room environment I worked in, two of the admins were bikers, two were gun nuts that routinely packed heat in the office, and it was in a state where taking the law into your own hands against a trespasser or burglar is accepted.
Your repo men would have been turned into a bloody pulp, and then begging for their lives:-)
"Many restraunts do that. You work, you get $2.25/hr (or whatever the boss is nice enough to pay you). So in most places, the staff are very dependant on your tips."
I've never been able to resolve this for one second with the notion of a Federal Minimum Wage. Period. It's been explained to me, and I understand the economics, but I can't deal with it. Either there is a Federal Minimum Wage or there isn't.
Because restaurant people don't have to be paid the same minimum as any other labor, I am forced to conclude that "there isn't".
"He walked right into a highly securre area and went, in full KGB uniform"
Sounds like he could have ended up in the military equivalent of a Schwartz.
Instead of the organization considering their security issues, they could have done a court martial on your friend:-)
Re:According to Jerry Pournelle...
on
New Heinlein Novel
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Ah, another example of a situation that cuts to the quick of the copyright issue.
Just because an author "wished" a work would still be under his control after his death, does not mean he should really have a right to such and expectation.
An author is not living up to his end of the bargain, the bargain with the people that allowed writing to have possibilities of making an income for the author in the first place, and he is in fact violating the whole spirit of copyright when he tries to control his work in perpetuity.
If a creative work has value to society, it's up to society, not the artist, whether to destroy or preserve that work.
"How long have people been complaining that CD prices are too high?"
Some of them may complain, but enough of them are paying the retail price that from the producer's point of view, they are justifying the demand curve.
They way to complain that a product is overpriced is to not buy it. If you complain that it's overpriced, but you buy it anyway, that's saying to them "this product is priced at the correct point for me to purchase it."
When exactly do you think people have actually said to the industry leaders, "this product is overpriced?"
It's finally happening now, I guess. But *just* now. Not 15 years ago.
"That's like shopping at Best Buy because you don't like your local organic grocery store's underhanded business tactics."
A *little* bit, but the entertainment industry is controlled by a few big holding companies. On the other hand, Best Buy is actually connected to them, where your local organic grocery store is either privately owned, or is a coop, but it's not run like media!
"Five years later, the prices didn't go down and my 200+ CD collection was stolen from my ghetto appartment. I was literally in tears."
I sympathize. I had a collection of comic books that went back as far as 1971. Had pretty much every issue of every Marvel title from 74-79, including a lot of specials and stuff that never reached the newsstand. Long story short, I had to entertain myself at my dad's office every day after school -- he was in publishing, so I gogot comic books and porn:-)
Anyway, that awesome collection was destroyed in a fire in 1981, together with a couple thousand phono records, mostly early 70's rock, plus a good selection of classicle discs.
Well, that cured me of collecting comics and records, but I didn't learn anything. I bought tons and tons of CD's. Guess what happened in 1996? Fire. Burned up my whole CD collection together with pretty much everything else I owned.
I don't think there's anything that could make me "collect" the "next thing" no matter how good the media is, and no matter how interested I am in the content.
"Almost no one buys music blanks any more (unless they happen to own a Philips recorder)"
Strange to think of this as "back in the day" already, but even on Philips audio recorders we only needed *one* music CD.
You got ready to record your track. You put the music blank in, and armed for record. Then, you pried (!) the drawer open slightly, pulled out the audio disc, and put in a regular CDRW.
"It was only wealthier people who could afford $500 CD players who were willing to pay 2X the money for higher quality audio."
If you say so, sure. But there were enough of those "wealthier" people that the industry could ignore the rest. Again, a consumer demand curve doesn't change just because YOU can't afford to play.
I was pretty poor in those days, but I had a $2000 stereo. So did a lot of people... Now, I'm on a different spot on the curve, considering that I was a serious musician, and a record collector. But I was no "audiophile". And I sure as hell wasn't "wealthier."
You say "prices need to drop", and they would drop along with the demand curve. I'm sure the actuaries and directors realize that P2P filesharing isn't really the biggest factor in the sales equation, that's just a face they put on it for the public. People who make these decisions are much more firmly grounded in reality than we give them credit for.
You think only geeks on slashdot realize the drop in CD sales is more complex than "piracy bad"?
I'll go you one better: Mail Fraud is serious, but it's only the vehicle for the real crime.
Racketeering. Go ahead and put the board of directors in FPMITA Prison. 25-50 years without parole would send a message. Those who cooperate get 5 years, suspended, change their names and move to Arizona, where they aren't allowed to run a company.
Darl actually getting to become somebody's bitch, because he "knew or should have known" that the claims he made were false.
Sorry to be hateful, but I really think we should call a spade a spade. I don't think "Mail Fraud" goes nearly far enough. These people need to go from CEO to eating from a dumpster, and they need to know it was their own actions that caused their downfall. Then, after their miserable lives are finished, we can start assigning various circles of hell.
"We" are too busy chasing after other ambitions, to perform our civic duties. "We" don't vote, "We" eschew real political discourse, "We" don't plug into a political party and STAY plugged in, and "We" don't develop relationships with our representatives. "We" don't run for office ourselves; instead "We" delegate the job to professional politicians.
I really can't bring myself to blame "The Corporations" for that. "We" are to blame.
That's your opinion, which I share of course, but consider this:
They proved they could get the price point for CD's when they first came out, $15-20 in '82 that I can remember, before that there were too few titles on CD that I cared about, and I was still collecting vinyl in those days.
So it turned out the market could bear the price.
So you and I realize the price is exorbitant, but, the price was not out of line with the demand curve.
The consumer (the millions who aren't you and me... actually, just you, as I've bought hundreds of the damned things), disagrees, on the whole.
The consumer pays the price. So if you look at the equation from a suit's point of view -- the price is spot on...
"Certainly I am not the only person in the world who thinks this way."
You aren't! And, choreographers, drama coaches, gym teachers, gaffers, lighting technicians, and costumers don't appreciate the musicians getting the credit for all their work either!
I'd also like to mention that 16 bits @ 44.1 captures audio, but the compromise is just shy of "quite well". It's a pity, because it doesn't take *much* more to get to a good threshold. Unfortunately, the next level is severe overkill; 24bits/96khz has so much headroom, so good that it doesn't get adopted! (People stick with the compromise, because the next level isn't worth the expense!) Oh well, tiny gripe; it only really matters in production situations, not consuming/listening.
If you've ever dealt with aliasing, resampling aberration, or artifacts from shifting a high frequency sample down (suddenly those meaningless harmonics above 15k *matter*!), you know where I'm coming from -- and you use 96khz to record your tracks:-)
"Now I'm down to 850 CDs that can actually be sold, and I'm out $2700."
Don't take this the wrong way, but the reward was the opportunity to make music and have a chance that it would be listened to. Some people seem to have this opportunity handed to them, along with a mansion and a jag:-) Others have to pay and suffer, and still might not actually get the chance to get their music out there. Then when you do play, it's for people who don't really know the difference between one noise bouncing off their ears or another.
Then you get guys like me who hold down jobs specifically in order to support the costs of making music. As you know, $5-10K is just the start for a home studio, and even then you're probably still mixing on a Mackie, and you haven't built the room that's quiet enough for -108db:-) Checking out your band though, I don't guess you need quite the same studio as someone doing classical woodwinds and piano:-):-)
If you want more on your end of the bargain, consider the frequent words of an opera history professor that I knew back in the day:
"There are tenors with a high C sweeping the street in New York."
I can tell you put a lot of work into your band, and your website is great.
I understand your point of view fully, and I'm not really trying to make a counterpoint or anything... Just that I hope you'll consider the value of being able to say "we have this CD and that, we played 20 nights in August, got this film gig coming up, all 19 new songs ready to go, yadda yadda"... that's actually worth a lot more than the cash losses you're complaining about on your cd production.
One vinyl gig I was involved with in 85, spent nearly 3 grand just on *photography*...
I just can't equate "costing money to make music" with "getting screwed."
If your music is good enough, different enough, etc., to be worthy of a living wage while you're alive, that's a freakin' miracle, that almost nobody ever gets miracled with.
"The court can TELL you to pay up, but it can't really MAKE you do it."
Actually, they can. They will start by taking your tax refund. Then they will garnish your wages. Then they will seize your assets and sell them at auction, just like they do for tax evaders, corrupt televangelists, and casual marijuana smokers.
After that, they might actually find a way to bring contempt of court charges against you for not paying... which could conceivably give you prison time...
Get back to me when you are required to file a government document online, but it is impossible to use any tool other than a DRM-enabled PDF viewer on a DRM-enabled Microsoft OS.
"1 - The rights-management stuff is off by default, says the article."
At first, of course it is.
After a bit of research shows a sufficient saturation of the new product line, expect a service pack that fixes some horrible vulnerability, to also turn on the DRM feature.
If the document is REALLY important, insist on ink and paper.
The bigger, underlying problem as I see it is this:
People who care about concepts such as "Software Freedom" do not tend to rise to positions of decision making authority in business.
If they did, then the questions of open source in the enterprise, interoperability, and patent encumbrances, would be answered by boards of directors, and not just discussed on slashdot and other places where there is no effect on the marketplace.
The people who seem to know so much about what's right for technology, sure don't seem to be rising to positions of authority where they could just lay down the law.
Instead, we just make excuses while others who ARE successful at achieving positions of authority make decisions.
"PDF has been around for ten years and grown explosively, but hasn't replaced printed media yet."
It hasn't completely replaced printed media, or replaced it everywhere, but it has replaced printed media to an extent. I routinely receive products with no printed manual, but either a PDF on a CD or else just on a website somewhere.
"Other than virtual console code everything has been 100% stable."
The ability to get a native terminal that's at a high text resolution, is one of the biggest reasons I'm still running Linux.
Having this feature broken is a complete showstopper for me. I'm surprised something of this magnitude can be broken this badly on a build that's supposed to be one of the last steps before release.
My card is a Radeon 8500 LE (a "QL")
What happens is, when I run, say, "fbset 1280x1024-75" (or even -60), I get an 80x25 terminal in the upper left hand corner of my screen. Then any VC I change to has seemingly random effects on both the upper left hand corner and the rest of the screen. Very strange, and definitely broken.
It works perfectly on 2.4.22. I've raised this in a couple other places, and the response is always a mix of complete confusion as to what I'm talking about, and suggestions to "just use XTterms".
To that I say, if something like serial tty support was broken, would you suggest "just use ethernet?" Not helpful at all.
I really hope this gets fixed, even if not many people seem to care about it.
You only have choices regarding your personal use or your own business. What's important here, is that you don't have such choices when the decision is already forced on you. This is a problem, say, in public education, or in government agencies. The choice *should* be given to the citizen and taxpayer.
I really can't abide government agency sites that require IE, Word, or Acrobat. I don't like my tax dollars supporting this.
Slashdot Mirror
Once again, more evidence that people who understand technology tend not to rise to levels of decision making authority.
In one server room environment I worked in, two of the admins were bikers, two were gun nuts that routinely packed heat in the office, and it was in a state where taking the law into your own hands against a trespasser or burglar is accepted.
:-)
Your repo men would have been turned into a bloody pulp, and then begging for their lives
"Many restraunts do that. You work, you get $2.25/hr (or whatever the boss is nice enough to pay you). So in most places, the staff are very dependant on your tips."
I've never been able to resolve this for one second with the notion of a Federal Minimum Wage.
Period. It's been explained to me, and I understand the economics, but I can't deal with it. Either there is a Federal Minimum Wage or there isn't.
Because restaurant people don't have to be paid the same minimum as any other labor, I am forced to conclude that "there isn't".
"He walked right into a highly securre area and went, in full KGB uniform"
:-)
Sounds like he could have ended up in the military equivalent of a Schwartz.
Instead of the organization considering their security issues, they could have done a court martial on your friend
Ah, another example of a situation that cuts to the quick of the copyright issue.
Just because an author "wished" a work would still be under his control after his death, does not mean he should really have a right to such and expectation.
An author is not living up to his end of the bargain, the bargain with the people that allowed writing to have possibilities of making an income for the author in the first place, and he is in fact violating the whole spirit of copyright when he tries to control his work in perpetuity.
If a creative work has value to society, it's up to society, not the artist, whether to destroy or preserve that work.
"With no defending interest, these laws would dry up and go away pretty quick."
If only that were true. But laws have a way of outliving their champions and their relevance.
Look at hemp prohibition, for instance.
"How long have people been complaining that CD prices are too high?"
Some of them may complain, but enough of them are paying the retail price that from the producer's point of view, they are justifying the demand curve.
They way to complain that a product is overpriced is to not buy it. If you complain that it's overpriced, but you buy it anyway, that's saying to them "this product is priced at the correct point for me to purchase it."
When exactly do you think people have actually said to the industry leaders, "this product is overpriced?"
It's finally happening now, I guess. But *just* now. Not 15 years ago.
"That's like shopping at Best Buy because you don't like your local organic grocery store's underhanded business tactics."
A *little* bit, but the entertainment industry is controlled by a few big holding companies. On the other hand, Best Buy is actually connected to them, where your local organic grocery store is either privately owned, or is a coop, but it's not run like media!
>Let's hope so.
I don't know. I'm afraid that as the ship sinks, freedom of expression is going to go down in the vortex along with it.
>Continue the boycott!
Why stop there?
I wish more people would just make their own music. That would lower the floor even below the zero of "boycott."
"Five years later, the prices didn't go down and my 200+ CD collection was stolen from my ghetto appartment. I was literally in tears."
:-)
I sympathize. I had a collection of comic books that went back as far as 1971. Had pretty much every issue of every Marvel title from 74-79, including a lot of specials and stuff that never reached the newsstand. Long story short, I had to entertain myself at my dad's office every day after school -- he was in publishing, so I gogot comic books and porn
Anyway, that awesome collection was destroyed in a fire in 1981, together with a couple thousand phono records, mostly early 70's rock, plus a good selection of classicle discs.
Well, that cured me of collecting comics and records, but I didn't learn anything. I bought tons and tons of CD's. Guess what happened in 1996? Fire. Burned up my whole CD collection together with pretty much everything else I owned.
I don't think there's anything that could make me "collect" the "next thing" no matter how good the media is, and no matter how interested I am in the content.
"Almost no one buys music blanks any more (unless they happen to own a Philips recorder)"
Strange to think of this as "back in the day" already, but even on Philips audio recorders we
only needed *one* music CD.
You got ready to record your track. You put the music blank in, and armed for record. Then, you pried (!) the drawer open slightly, pulled out the audio disc, and put in a regular CDRW.
"It was only wealthier people who could afford $500 CD players who were willing to pay 2X the money for higher quality audio."
If you say so, sure. But there were enough of those "wealthier" people that the industry could ignore the rest. Again, a consumer demand curve doesn't change just because YOU can't afford to play.
I was pretty poor in those days, but I had a $2000 stereo. So did a lot of people... Now, I'm on a different spot on the curve, considering that I was a serious musician, and a record collector. But I was no "audiophile". And I sure as hell wasn't "wealthier."
You say "prices need to drop", and they would drop along with the demand curve. I'm sure the actuaries and directors realize that P2P filesharing isn't really the biggest factor in the sales equation, that's just a face they put on it for the public. People who make these decisions are much more firmly grounded in reality than we give them credit for.
You think only geeks on slashdot realize the drop in CD sales is more complex than "piracy bad"?
The SEC won't move toward prosecution until a crime has been committed.
There's poor taste and judgement on SCO's part, but so far all their legal p's and q's are probably order, at least as far as the SEC is concerned.
>MY understanding of fraud.
I'll go you one better: Mail Fraud is serious, but it's only the vehicle for the real crime.
Racketeering. Go ahead and put the board of directors in FPMITA Prison. 25-50 years without parole would send a message. Those who cooperate get 5 years, suspended, change their names and move to Arizona, where they aren't allowed to run a company.
Darl actually getting to become somebody's bitch, because he "knew or should have known" that the claims he made were false.
Sorry to be hateful, but I really think we should call a spade a spade. I don't think "Mail Fraud" goes nearly far enough. These people need to go from CEO to eating from a dumpster, and they need to know it was their own actions that caused their downfall. Then, after their miserable lives are finished, we can start assigning various circles of hell.
>"We the people" no longer run the government
"We" choose not to.
"We" are too busy chasing after other ambitions, to perform our civic duties. "We" don't vote, "We" eschew real political discourse, "We" don't plug into a political party and STAY plugged in, and "We" don't develop relationships with our representatives. "We" don't run for office ourselves; instead "We" delegate the job to professional politicians.
I really can't bring myself to blame "The Corporations" for that. "We" are to blame.
>CDs have been overpriced for years.
That's your opinion, which I share of course, but consider this:
They proved they could get the price point for CD's when they first came out, $15-20 in '82 that I can remember, before that there were too few titles on CD that I cared about, and I was still collecting vinyl in those days.
So it turned out the market could bear the price.
So you and I realize the price is exorbitant, but, the price was not out of line with the demand curve.
The consumer (the millions who aren't you and me... actually, just you, as I've bought hundreds of the damned things), disagrees, on the whole.
The consumer pays the price. So if you look at the equation from a suit's point of view -- the price is spot on...
"Certainly I am not the only person in the world who thinks this way."
:-)
You aren't! And, choreographers, drama coaches, gym teachers, gaffers, lighting technicians, and costumers don't appreciate the musicians getting the credit for all their work either!
I'd also like to mention that 16 bits @ 44.1 captures audio, but the compromise is just shy of "quite well". It's a pity, because it doesn't take *much* more to get to a good threshold. Unfortunately, the next level is severe overkill; 24bits/96khz has so much headroom, so good that it doesn't get adopted! (People stick with the compromise, because the next level isn't worth the expense!) Oh well, tiny gripe; it only really matters in production situations, not consuming/listening.
If you've ever dealt with aliasing, resampling aberration, or artifacts from shifting a high frequency sample down (suddenly those meaningless harmonics above 15k *matter*!), you know where I'm coming from -- and you use 96khz to record your tracks
"Now I'm down to 850 CDs that can actually be sold, and I'm out $2700."
:-) Others have to pay and suffer, and still might not actually get the chance to get their music out there. Then when you do play, it's for people who don't really know the difference between one noise bouncing off their ears or another.
:-) Checking out your band though, I don't guess you need quite the same studio as someone doing classical woodwinds and piano :-) :-)
Don't take this the wrong way, but the reward was the opportunity to make music and have a chance that it would be listened to. Some people seem to have this opportunity handed to them, along with a mansion and a jag
Then you get guys like me who hold down jobs specifically in order to support the costs of making music. As you know, $5-10K is just the start for a home studio, and even then you're probably still mixing on a Mackie, and you haven't built the room that's quiet enough for
-108db
If you want more on your end of the bargain, consider the frequent words of an opera history professor that I knew back in the day:
"There are tenors with a high C sweeping the street in New York."
I can tell you put a lot of work into your band, and your website is great.
I understand your point of view fully, and I'm not really trying to make a counterpoint or anything... Just that I hope you'll consider the value of being able to say "we have this CD and that, we played 20 nights in August, got this film gig coming up, all 19 new songs ready to go, yadda yadda"... that's actually worth a lot more than the cash losses you're complaining about on your cd production.
One vinyl gig I was involved with in 85, spent nearly 3 grand just on *photography*...
I just can't equate "costing money to make music" with "getting screwed."
If your music is good enough, different enough, etc., to be worthy of a living wage while you're alive, that's a freakin' miracle, that almost nobody ever gets miracled with.
"The court can TELL you to pay up, but it can't really MAKE you do it."
Actually, they can. They will start by taking your tax refund. Then they will garnish your wages. Then they will seize your assets and sell them at auction, just like they do for tax evaders, corrupt televangelists, and casual marijuana smokers.
After that, they might actually find a way to bring contempt of court charges against you for not paying... which could conceivably give you prison time...
Yeah, yeah, software manuals.
Get back to me when you are required to file a government document online, but it is impossible to use any tool other than a DRM-enabled PDF viewer on a DRM-enabled Microsoft OS.
I'm afraid that's not far ahead.
"1 - The rights-management stuff is off by default, says the article."
At first, of course it is.
After a bit of research shows a sufficient saturation of the new product line, expect a service pack that fixes some horrible vulnerability, to also turn on the DRM feature.
If the document is REALLY important, insist on ink and paper.
The bigger, underlying problem as I see it is this:
People who care about concepts such as "Software Freedom" do not tend to rise to positions of decision making authority in business.
If they did, then the questions of open source in the enterprise, interoperability, and patent encumbrances, would be answered by boards of directors, and not just discussed on slashdot and other places where there is no effect on the marketplace.
The people who seem to know so much about what's right for technology, sure don't seem to be rising to positions of authority where they could just lay down the law.
Instead, we just make excuses while others who ARE successful at achieving positions of authority make decisions.
"PDF has been around for ten years and grown explosively, but hasn't replaced printed media yet."
It hasn't completely replaced printed media, or replaced it everywhere, but it has replaced printed media to an extent. I routinely receive products with no printed manual, but either a PDF on a CD or else just on a website somewhere.
"Other than virtual console code everything has been 100% stable."
The ability to get a native terminal that's at a high text resolution, is one of the biggest reasons I'm still running Linux.
Having this feature broken is a complete showstopper for me. I'm surprised something of this magnitude can be broken this badly on a build that's supposed to be one of the last steps before release.
My card is a Radeon 8500 LE (a "QL")
What happens is, when I run, say, "fbset 1280x1024-75" (or even -60), I get an 80x25 terminal in the upper left hand corner of my screen. Then any VC I change to has seemingly random effects on both the upper left hand corner and the rest of the screen. Very strange, and definitely broken.
It works perfectly on 2.4.22. I've raised this in a couple other places, and the response is always a mix of complete confusion as to what I'm talking about, and suggestions to "just use XTterms".
To that I say, if something like serial tty support was broken, would you suggest "just use ethernet?" Not helpful at all.
I really hope this gets fixed, even if not many people seem to care about it.
You only have choices regarding your personal use or your own business. What's important here, is that you don't have such choices when the decision is already forced on you. This is a problem, say, in public education, or in government agencies.
The choice *should* be given to the citizen and taxpayer.
I really can't abide government agency sites that require IE, Word, or Acrobat. I don't like my tax dollars supporting this.