A few facts, and you can make your own decision on whether they're relevant.
Sony is a member of the MPAA.
Sony Playstation discs are printed on plain cd's. They can thus be read by cd-roms, and copied by cdrs.
Sony, Inc. hates the makers of bleem! and various mod chips, which allow in various ways people to avoid buying Playstation consoles and games from Sony.
Sony is about to release the Playstation 2, possibly the most anticipated console gaming system ever.
At present, it's not like the record companies are in the red. With 'artists' like Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys breaking album sales records held previously by the likes of Led Zeppelin (I'm talking about TOTAL album sales, not the sales of one particular album), more cd's are being bought now than ever before, thanks to MTV and a booming economy that gives lots of people the wherewithal to buy cd's. What the RIAA wants is not to eliminate the piracy of today.
They want to prevent the piracy of tomorrow. In terms of legality, when I download 700 mp3's from Napster, it's no more illegal than when I burn a copy of my friend's cd. Both cases are a consensual, free-as-in-beer reproduction of copyrighted material. But imagine in 10 or 20 years, if/when every household has the bandwidth of a current college dorm. Suddenly applications like Napster cut a lot more profits.
The moral of this story may turn out to be, that the internet (I feel like Katz here) by making information easier to give away is making it harder to sell; and if I want to sell any, I have to make it hard to give away. Hence SDMI.
So I can't play it with an 'old' CD player. What does that mean? One without a special chip which decodes the copy protection? What sort of cd player do I need to play it?
Combine this question with the fact that they don't even say on the cd that it's so protected, and you're going to get a LOT of people who will return these cd's. Will BMG tell them, "you have to go buy a new cd player if you want to buy our album?" Nope. So they just reduced their market to people who have 'newer' cd players -- and so far we don't even know what exactly that means.
Obviously BMG won't release a 'non-protected' version of the album, that would defeat the purpose of the protection in the first place. It looks as if they've just reduced the sales of their albums, far more than piracy ever will. Either this will pass, or it will take a long time to take over the entire industry(such as the en masse switch from vinyl/cassette to compact disc). By that time, someone will crack it. He'll get thrown in jail, but he'll crack it.
So if state university students in Arizona can't get an uncensored internet from the school, can they pay to install a cable modem? Can they trade porn between their own computers? But the internet filtering is an issue of the government controlling services that it provides (assuming the students don't pay for the bandwidth), which I don't have a political problem with (though I am for damn sure not recommending anyone to go to college in Arizona). But telling people that they can't go into dorms of the opposite sex...that's archaic. Sure it was like that in the fifties, but this isn't the fifties. If you ask me, this senator just wants to decrease enrollment in Arizona universities.
I saw an interesting editorial in my local paper just the other day on the Simpsons. It calls it "possibly the greatest program in American television history."
Of course, by Ars' logic, which was that Half-Life was released so late in '98 that its main impact came in '99, it really didn't deserve the awards in '98...but years are an illusion, and the fact that Half-Life is a great game is not.
PR Spin, and a possible scenario.
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I found it on iwon.com, so I'm sure it's all kinds of other places too, much of it was said on Good Morning America. (actual url).
The gist of it is that Time Warner Online wants to get more and poorer people on the net (i.e. reduce the cost). In light of bravehamster's comment, that AOLTW is a vertical monopoly, meaning it doesn't force anyone to go through it but can provide its service at low cost, this is interesting.
Imagine a Time/AOL ISP that is extremely cheap, say, under $10 for unlimited modem access. Except it's only unlimited in terms of time, because you are forced to use the AOL Browser, which limits what sites you can go to. TWAOL can say, "If you want porn sites, romz or warez sites, or the like, then just pay more for another ISP." They can call it something catchy, like "Unlimited Winternet access," and justify the content controls to parental porn paranoia. Suddenly, what Time Warner's customers get so see is not the free and anarchist Internet that we enjoy, but the parts of the Internet that Time Warner wants its customers to see.
Which is what most people want. They just want to see the sports scores, trade some stocks, and check their email. So competing ISP's, which aren't vertical monopolies, have trouble staying in business. Suddenly, this vertical monoppoly starts expanding sideways.
Unrelated note, or perhaps not: Remember now that this conglomerate now owns Netscape. Go Mozilla!
U.S. patent duration has been changed from 17 years after issue to 20 years after filing. Sound harmless? Hardly. Significant patents take from six to 10 years--or more--to issue. The major revenue from a killer technology (like CD-ROM, VCR or Windows) comes a decade or more after first product introduction. Therefore, this one change cuts your patent protection by 10 to 50 percent, and it won't be easy to undo.
If I'm interpreting this correctly, it means that (According to Trudel) the patents now don't take effect until after they are appoved by the bureaucracy, which takes years. So will I be able to open an e-commerce site with "one-click shopping" in the next year or so, and not get sued into the grave? I think not.
I've seen unmoderated Slashdot posts with more logical coherence than what I'm getting out of this guy. I'm surprised the whole page isn't between blink tags.
I used to have you figured out, Katz. I thought that you would take an issue, come up with a radical opinion about it, and then put it up on slashdot so that 400 posters would take their more moderate opinions and debate about them, in between all the "Katz sucks!" But then I see this:
Dr. Venter has only to log onto the discussion that will follow this column to get a realistic dose of just how likely it is that a rational, coherent public discussion of scientists-playing-God" will take place.
Well we all know what/.ers think of Katz, now we know what he thinks of us. If we're all such idiots, why don't we just get back to our stuffed penguins and forget about it? But seriously, since apparently Katz isn't doing this to get us to debate, he must believe the stuff he sticks on this page.
His points, especially in this article, tend to be either obvious (there are ethical questions in genetic engineering, geeks get beat up in high school) or absurd (a Hollywood movie will actually happen, The Man is out to turn geeks into trendies). I'm really getting kind of tired of it.
It's not that philosophical rather than technical discussion has no place on Slashdot, quite the contrary. I think we should turn this sort of thing into an Ask Slashdot kind of deal, where someone writes a short little piece about the debate and maybe the news that spawned it, and then the rest of us see if we can get some karma. As it is, these ethical debates turn into "Is Katz Nutz?"
I'm a little late to the discussion, but hopefully a few people will get to this...
People don't seem to generally object to the removal of cancer-causing genes, down-syndrome-causing genes and the like. Another such gene which will probably be removed from many children is the autism gene, autism being a complex and poorly-understood form of mental retardation.
I have been called "gifted and talented" by various adults throughout my childhood, and I have an autistic brother. I am not alone -- many such people have autism in their families, and many people who are extremely proficient at mathematics or programming are considered to be mildly autistic. I think that was an old Slashdot article, actually...
Do we really want to start screwing around with this? No thanks Mister Genetic Engineer, I'll pass on the test tube kid.
Imagine Scientology as a business like any other. They offer a service, of the spiritual variety, and charge a fee for it. In Scientology's case, it is a very large fee, and they go out of their way to make sure you pay it before you get a whiff of "service". They also have to first convince you to have demand for this service; Christians call it evangelism. The Church of Scientology not only harasses and silences anyone who criticizes their dogma, but also anyone who publishes it. In doing so, they want to force people to only be able to seek Scientologist salvation (or whatever they call it) through paying the Church of Scientology huge sums of money, time and labor.
In other words, the shutdown of these sites is an attempt by the CoS to preserve its monopoly power.
Compare this to another much-maligned religion, Christianity. The Catholic Church through the Dark Ages controlled all the Bibles, and were the only people who could translate the Latin text into the languages actually spoken at the time. As a result, the people were essentially held to the Catholic church, which had the clout to essentially control Europe for centuries -- until the Bible was translated. When private citizens were finally able to sit down and read the Bible, they began to have issues with Catholic dogma, and people like Martin Luther started popping up. Now, there are more denominations than can be named, and due to this competition you can acquire the Christian spiritual service for a very reasonable price.
As long as the CoS can say, "The only way to be a Scientologist is to pay us lots of money," and as long as people want to be Scientologists, this monopoly will stand. In this light, the harassment by any means necessary of critics and "translators" by the CoS makes a lot of sense.
Katz adds a lot to this site. If his opinions seem nutty, and extreme, that's because for the most part they are. But look at the comments! Every Katz posting that has popped up in the last several months has had hundreds of comments in the first day up! Even if a third of the comments are "Jon Katz sucks, and here's why he's dead wrong." He promotes discussion, he stimulates critical thought.
Look at most political discussion today. Two major parties, arguing endlessly on the same issues. Abortion, gun control. People seem to think that politics is two-sided, that you're either right or left wing. It's not. The reason people at large don't realize it is because there aren't enough "nuts" like Katz, who transcend the wing system with "radical" opinions.
We need more nuts, I say. Not just "geeks are oppressed by American society" nuts, but all kinds of nuts. We need all kinds of nuts: anarchists, syndicalists, communists, and anything else you can think of, named or not. Maybe then, people will see more possible solutions to problems than what the Demicans and Republicrats propose. Maybe then, when I tell people I'm a libertarian, they won't confuse "libertarian" with "very liberal" and call me a communist.
What we have here is simply another mouse button. Either you are touching the mouse, or you aren't, so the most you could do is bind one function to "mouse_touchy_touchy". Granted, this mouse button is extremely easy to press, but overall this technology seems sillier than it is nifty.
Something to think about -- and correct me if I'm wrong, guys, but this is the information I have picked up, I believe from a church-sponsored seminar. Classical Satanism came about around the French Revolution. Revolutionaries being what they are, they began questioning everything about European society, including good ol' Jesus and pals. The Satanists were a group that decided that there was a war being fought between God and Satan, and that Satan was eventually going to win. Wanting to be on the winning side, they started doing evil stuff to appease Satan. Normal Christians don't believe in such a war.
This game would thus appear to have a premise that is more Satanic than Christian.
Many kids out there exist who are like the Columbine killers. They play violent video games, they own guns, they are tormented by (and therefore, hate) the more popular kids. I would bet that there are several in every high school. Somehow, they manage not to be mass murderers. You read Jon Katz's series. Were trench-coat wearing Quake players left alone? Even if they had made no threat, not acted out?
So the question is, how will schools use this program? The company says that it is only for use when explicit threats exist, but how many schools have interpreted Marilyn Manson T-shirts as expicit threats?
The ironic thing is, colleges constantly preach the idea that they don't look only at standardized tests, because tests may not accurately judge a student by themselves. So now, while we reject standardized tests for admissions, we adopt them for discipline.
We can talk about this reducing kids' rights, reinforcing the social standards in high school, and all that. But lately, what hasn't?
How many nano-rock stars can you fit on the head of a pin?
Killing an ant with a flamethrower
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In the movie Brazil, people essentially went through hell doing paperwork and dealing with bureaucracy, and the governing agencies told them it was to keep down terrorism. One of the key points of the movie is when a character asks, (to paraphrase) "Do you know any terrorists?"
Here we see the same thing. I only had time to read about the first 10 sections, but it seemed that everyone was proposing that some independent agency or the like do something. The expense of a group of institutions designed to implement and enforce this ratings proposal blows my mind. But companies and politicians will support and pass it, because voters and stockholders are shaking in their boots about terrorism and child pornography.
But I pose the question: how many child pornographers do you know? How many children that you know have built bombs and hurt people from seeing it on the Internet? That your family and friends know? Sure, there are a few. We hear all about them on Dateline. But are there so many that we should spend millions of tax dollars on this proposal? A proposal that has to be described by its proponents as "not censorship?" A proposal that imposes bureaucratic slowdown on the fastest communication method ever invented?
The effect of media violence on our children is no longer open to debate. Has anyone seen any scientific studies linking violence in media with murder? With all that's going on, I think that I would have heard of such a study by now, right? Why haven't I? What I see instead is statements like the above. Political parties and organizations have been shoving the "monkey see monkey do" logic on us for so long, apparently we don't even need to support these bills with evidence. I'm getting very uncomfortable about this. Please, please, someone show me a link to a study about the effects of media violence. The only one I've ever heard of is the one that links country music to increased alcohol consumption.
Slashdot Mirror
Intentional?
Sony is a member of the MPAA.
Sony Playstation discs are printed on plain cd's. They can thus be read by cd-roms, and copied by cdrs.
Sony, Inc. hates the makers of bleem! and various mod chips, which allow in various ways people to avoid buying Playstation consoles and games from Sony.
Sony is about to release the Playstation 2, possibly the most anticipated console gaming system ever.
Sony's Playstation 2 games use DVD media.
There's a lot of things we can draw from this....
They want to prevent the piracy of tomorrow. In terms of legality, when I download 700 mp3's from Napster, it's no more illegal than when I burn a copy of my friend's cd. Both cases are a consensual, free-as-in-beer reproduction of copyrighted material. But imagine in 10 or 20 years, if/when every household has the bandwidth of a current college dorm. Suddenly applications like Napster cut a lot more profits.
The moral of this story may turn out to be, that the internet (I feel like Katz here) by making information easier to give away is making it harder to sell; and if I want to sell any, I have to make it hard to give away. Hence SDMI.
Combine this question with the fact that they don't even say on the cd that it's so protected, and you're going to get a LOT of people who will return these cd's. Will BMG tell them, "you have to go buy a new cd player if you want to buy our album?" Nope. So they just reduced their market to people who have 'newer' cd players -- and so far we don't even know what exactly that means.
Obviously BMG won't release a 'non-protected' version of the album, that would defeat the purpose of the protection in the first place. It looks as if they've just reduced the sales of their albums, far more than piracy ever will. Either this will pass, or it will take a long time to take over the entire industry(such as the en masse switch from vinyl/cassette to compact disc). By that time, someone will crack it. He'll get thrown in jail, but he'll crack it.
So if state university students in Arizona can't get an uncensored internet from the school, can they pay to install a cable modem? Can they trade porn between their own computers? But the internet filtering is an issue of the government controlling services that it provides (assuming the students don't pay for the bandwidth), which I don't have a political problem with (though I am for damn sure not recommending anyone to go to college in Arizona). But telling people that they can't go into dorms of the opposite sex...that's archaic. Sure it was like that in the fifties, but this isn't the fifties. If you ask me, this senator just wants to decrease enrollment in Arizona universities.
Here's the link.
Of course, by Ars' logic, which was that Half-Life was released so late in '98 that its main impact came in '99, it really didn't deserve the awards in '98...but years are an illusion, and the fact that Half-Life is a great game is not.
The gist of it is that Time Warner Online wants to get more and poorer people on the net (i.e. reduce the cost). In light of bravehamster's comment, that AOLTW is a vertical monopoly, meaning it doesn't force anyone to go through it but can provide its service at low cost, this is interesting.
Imagine a Time/AOL ISP that is extremely cheap, say, under $10 for unlimited modem access. Except it's only unlimited in terms of time, because you are forced to use the AOL Browser, which limits what sites you can go to. TWAOL can say, "If you want porn sites, romz or warez sites, or the like, then just pay more for another ISP." They can call it something catchy, like "Unlimited Winternet access," and justify the content controls to parental porn paranoia. Suddenly, what Time Warner's customers get so see is not the free and anarchist Internet that we enjoy, but the parts of the Internet that Time Warner wants its customers to see.
Which is what most people want. They just want to see the sports scores, trade some stocks, and check their email. So competing ISP's, which aren't vertical monopolies, have trouble staying in business. Suddenly, this vertical monoppoly starts expanding sideways.
Unrelated note, or perhaps not: Remember now that this conglomerate now owns Netscape. Go Mozilla!
U.S. patent duration has been changed from 17 years after issue to 20 years after filing. Sound harmless? Hardly. Significant patents take from six to 10 years--or more--to issue. The major revenue from a killer technology (like CD-ROM, VCR or Windows) comes a decade or more after first product introduction. Therefore, this one change cuts your patent protection by 10 to 50 percent, and it won't be easy to undo.
If I'm interpreting this correctly, it means that (According to Trudel) the patents now don't take effect until after they are appoved by the bureaucracy, which takes years. So will I be able to open an e-commerce site with "one-click shopping" in the next year or so, and not get sued into the grave? I think not.
I've seen unmoderated Slashdot posts with more logical coherence than what I'm getting out of this guy. I'm surprised the whole page isn't between blink tags.
Dr. Venter has only to log onto the discussion that will follow this column to get a realistic dose of just how likely it is that a rational, coherent public discussion of scientists-playing-God" will take place.
Well we all know what /.ers think of Katz, now we know what he thinks of us. If we're all such idiots, why don't we just get back to our stuffed penguins and forget about it? But seriously, since apparently Katz isn't doing this to get us to debate, he must believe the stuff he sticks on this page.
His points, especially in this article, tend to be either obvious (there are ethical questions in genetic engineering, geeks get beat up in high school) or absurd (a Hollywood movie will actually happen, The Man is out to turn geeks into trendies). I'm really getting kind of tired of it.
It's not that philosophical rather than technical discussion has no place on Slashdot, quite the contrary. I think we should turn this sort of thing into an Ask Slashdot kind of deal, where someone writes a short little piece about the debate and maybe the news that spawned it, and then the rest of us see if we can get some karma. As it is, these ethical debates turn into "Is Katz Nutz?"
People don't seem to generally object to the removal of cancer-causing genes, down-syndrome-causing genes and the like. Another such gene which will probably be removed from many children is the autism gene, autism being a complex and poorly-understood form of mental retardation.
I have been called "gifted and talented" by various adults throughout my childhood, and I have an autistic brother. I am not alone -- many such people have autism in their families, and many people who are extremely proficient at mathematics or programming are considered to be mildly autistic. I think that was an old Slashdot article, actually...
Do we really want to start screwing around with this? No thanks Mister Genetic Engineer, I'll pass on the test tube kid.
Imagine Scientology as a business like any other. They offer a service, of the spiritual variety, and charge a fee for it. In Scientology's case, it is a very large fee, and they go out of their way to make sure you pay it before you get a whiff of "service". They also have to first convince you to have demand for this service; Christians call it evangelism. The Church of Scientology not only harasses and silences anyone who criticizes their dogma, but also anyone who publishes it. In doing so, they want to force people to only be able to seek Scientologist salvation (or whatever they call it) through paying the Church of Scientology huge sums of money, time and labor.
In other words, the shutdown of these sites is an attempt by the CoS to preserve its monopoly power.
Compare this to another much-maligned religion, Christianity. The Catholic Church through the Dark Ages controlled all the Bibles, and were the only people who could translate the Latin text into the languages actually spoken at the time. As a result, the people were essentially held to the Catholic church, which had the clout to essentially control Europe for centuries -- until the Bible was translated. When private citizens were finally able to sit down and read the Bible, they began to have issues with Catholic dogma, and people like Martin Luther started popping up. Now, there are more denominations than can be named, and due to this competition you can acquire the Christian spiritual service for a very reasonable price.
As long as the CoS can say, "The only way to be a Scientologist is to pay us lots of money," and as long as people want to be Scientologists, this monopoly will stand. In this light, the harassment by any means necessary of critics and "translators" by the CoS makes a lot of sense.
Or should I say, cents.
Look at most political discussion today. Two major parties, arguing endlessly on the same issues. Abortion, gun control. People seem to think that politics is two-sided, that you're either right or left wing. It's not. The reason people at large don't realize it is because there aren't enough "nuts" like Katz, who transcend the wing system with "radical" opinions.
We need more nuts, I say. Not just "geeks are oppressed by American society" nuts, but all kinds of nuts. We need all kinds of nuts: anarchists, syndicalists, communists, and anything else you can think of, named or not. Maybe then, people will see more possible solutions to problems than what the Demicans and Republicrats propose. Maybe then, when I tell people I'm a libertarian, they won't confuse "libertarian" with "very liberal" and call me a communist.
What we have here is simply another mouse button. Either you are touching the mouse, or you aren't, so the most you could do is bind one function to "mouse_touchy_touchy". Granted, this mouse button is extremely easy to press, but overall this technology seems sillier than it is nifty.
This game would thus appear to have a premise that is more Satanic than Christian.
So the question is, how will schools use this program? The company says that it is only for use when explicit threats exist, but how many schools have interpreted Marilyn Manson T-shirts as expicit threats?
The ironic thing is, colleges constantly preach the idea that they don't look only at standardized tests, because tests may not accurately judge a student by themselves. So now, while we reject standardized tests for admissions, we adopt them for discipline.
We can talk about this reducing kids' rights, reinforcing the social standards in high school, and all that. But lately, what hasn't?
How many nano-rock stars can you fit on the head of a pin?
Here we see the same thing. I only had time to read about the first 10 sections, but it seemed that everyone was proposing that some independent agency or the like do something. The expense of a group of institutions designed to implement and enforce this ratings proposal blows my mind. But companies and politicians will support and pass it, because voters and stockholders are shaking in their boots about terrorism and child pornography.
But I pose the question: how many child pornographers do you know? How many children that you know have built bombs and hurt people from seeing it on the Internet? That your family and friends know? Sure, there are a few. We hear all about them on Dateline. But are there so many that we should spend millions of tax dollars on this proposal? A proposal that has to be described by its proponents as "not censorship?" A proposal that imposes bureaucratic slowdown on the fastest communication method ever invented?
The tyranny of the majority strikes again.
The effect of media violence on our children is no longer open to debate. Has anyone seen any scientific studies linking violence in media with murder? With all that's going on, I think that I would have heard of such a study by now, right? Why haven't I?
What I see instead is statements like the above. Political parties and organizations have been shoving the "monkey see monkey do" logic on us for so long, apparently we don't even need to support these bills with evidence.
I'm getting very uncomfortable about this. Please, please, someone show me a link to a study about the effects of media violence. The only one I've ever heard of is the one that links country music to increased alcohol consumption.