In addition to the price, there's also the size difference. The iPod is 4.1 inches long, which is over twice as big as this drive. The whole point about this story is the (physical) size of the drive.
People said the same sort of thing 150 or so years ago during the Industrial Revolution. But even though machines and steam power did take the place of a lot of manual labour, people just found new work, in the industries created by the very technologies that took away their previous jobs. The future isn't as grim as you make it out to be.
That's not the point. The fact is, a serious crime has been committed, and those responsible have got off with a slap on the wrist. If I committed that sort of fraud, even of several orders of magnitude smaller than this, I'd be locked away.
$10 million of fraud doesn't just happen on it's own. Somebody is responsible - maybe the guy in charge of the project, maybe one of his subordinates, or maybe it was a direct order from the CEO. The job of law enforcement should be to find that somebody and punish him, not just to fine the company he works for.
It *is* wrong, however, to force a company to abide by certain terms in regards to totally legal activities.
I agree with the point you were making, but this line is pure nonsense. Forcing people (or companies) not to do certain activities that were formerly totally legal is the whole point of making laws. When laws against (say) monopolistic practices were proposed, they were also restricting totally legal activities.
And from the looks of things, they're also legislating against technology people already use. What about the Spam filters? Bayesian filtering is based on a very similar principle of scanning for key words and phrases, and if they block Gmail from recording the results it could stop them from flagging the results as Spam until you actually open the e-mail.
Having said that, it's likely that they have specified "for the purposes of advertising" in wording of the law - but the privacy concerns are exactly the same.
You say that this "highlights how out of date the worldwide music industry is", but the problem is that there is no worldwide music industry. Different companies own the rights in different countries, so Napster, iTunes et al have to negotiate with the owners of the music in each company seperately. You can't pay the RIAA for European distribution rights, because they don't have them.
The end effect of this is that the record companies in (say) the UK will want Napster to charge close to the existing UK prices for music. And because UK music prices are about 50% higher than in the US, that's what Napster have to charge. They don't have much choice on the issue; >80% of their revenue goes direct to the record companies.
To quote from their site, "A reusable helium balloon will lift our spacecraft, "Wild Fire" to an altitude of 80,000 feet. This is where Wild Fire's rocket engines will fire and propel the crew to the 100 km altitude goal -- space."
I have over 30 GB (!) of mp3's in my shared folder, and run 30+ radio webcast stations, with solely music not represented by the RIAA
This excuse keeps coming up, and it's starting to get on my nerves. Just because the record company who's stuff you're copying isn't part of the RIAA, it doesn't make it legal for you to distribute their material. Sure, they might not be sending rabid lawyers after you, but most record companies (even non-RIAA ones) don't take too kindly to you freely giving out the material they sell.
What you're recommending is the same "security through obscurity" that the open source community is completely against in software design. Just as open source software lets people find the bugs and fix them, a timeline like this would let us see where the potential issues are (assuming that there are any) and resolve them.
It seems to have worked with software, so let's give it a try with IP.
If the prices are the same as other OD2 services, most albums are discounted to GBP 7.99 if you buy the whole thing. Personally I still don't think that that is worth the disadvantage of having DRM'd tracks and no physical media, but it's not as bad as you say.
Registered charities don't have to pay VAT (sales tax). Presumably tax will be factored into this service, as most of the money goes to the record companies, but Oxfam will be able to get a VAT return from the Government on their share.
If a bug that serious has been known since February, it was totally irresponsible to go ahead with the release. It isn't just some nuisance you can work around - people have lost a lot of data from this.
Sure, people might already own the music, but that's not what they're paying for. They're paying for the music to be instantly transferred to their phone in a usable format.
People that want to save money have already got the option of using the 'record' function on their phones to pick up a clip of the song and then set it as a ringtone. Ringtone downloads aren't aimed at those people. They're aimed at kids who want to quickly change their ringtone as a fashion item, possibly while at school or out with friends. If you have to go home to your computer, it's just not as cool anymore.
The biggest limitation I can think of is the speed. I can't imagine that Win98 being run on an emulator could be anywhere near fast enough to play games, DirectX or otherwise.
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In addition to the price, there's also the size difference. The iPod is 4.1 inches long, which is over twice as big as this drive. The whole point about this story is the (physical) size of the drive.
People said the same sort of thing 150 or so years ago during the Industrial Revolution. But even though machines and steam power did take the place of a lot of manual labour, people just found new work, in the industries created by the very technologies that took away their previous jobs. The future isn't as grim as you make it out to be.
That's not the point. The fact is, a serious crime has been committed, and those responsible have got off with a slap on the wrist. If I committed that sort of fraud, even of several orders of magnitude smaller than this, I'd be locked away.
$10 million of fraud doesn't just happen on it's own. Somebody is responsible - maybe the guy in charge of the project, maybe one of his subordinates, or maybe it was a direct order from the CEO. The job of law enforcement should be to find that somebody and punish him, not just to fine the company he works for.
It *is* wrong, however, to force a company to abide by certain terms in regards to totally legal activities.
I agree with the point you were making, but this line is pure nonsense. Forcing people (or companies) not to do certain activities that were formerly totally legal is the whole point of making laws. When laws against (say) monopolistic practices were proposed, they were also restricting totally legal activities.
And from the looks of things, they're also legislating against technology people already use. What about the Spam filters? Bayesian filtering is based on a very similar principle of scanning for key words and phrases, and if they block Gmail from recording the results it could stop them from flagging the results as Spam until you actually open the e-mail.
Having said that, it's likely that they have specified "for the purposes of advertising" in wording of the law - but the privacy concerns are exactly the same.
You say that this "highlights how out of date the worldwide music industry is", but the problem is that there is no worldwide music industry. Different companies own the rights in different countries, so Napster, iTunes et al have to negotiate with the owners of the music in each company seperately. You can't pay the RIAA for European distribution rights, because they don't have them.
The end effect of this is that the record companies in (say) the UK will want Napster to charge close to the existing UK prices for music. And because UK music prices are about 50% higher than in the US, that's what Napster have to charge. They don't have much choice on the issue; >80% of their revenue goes direct to the record companies.
One variation possibility they have not covered possibly is the use as a platform for more conventional launches.
You mean, like the The Da Vinci Project's X Prize attempt?
To quote from their site, "A reusable helium balloon will lift our spacecraft, "Wild Fire" to an altitude of 80,000 feet. This is where Wild Fire's rocket engines will fire and propel the crew to the 100 km altitude goal -- space."
I have over 30 GB (!) of mp3's in my shared folder, and run 30+ radio webcast stations, with solely music not represented by the RIAA
This excuse keeps coming up, and it's starting to get on my nerves. Just because the record company who's stuff you're copying isn't part of the RIAA, it doesn't make it legal for you to distribute their material. Sure, they might not be sending rabid lawyers after you, but most record companies (even non-RIAA ones) don't take too kindly to you freely giving out the material they sell.
What you're recommending is the same "security through obscurity" that the open source community is completely against in software design. Just as open source software lets people find the bugs and fix them, a timeline like this would let us see where the potential issues are (assuming that there are any) and resolve them.
It seems to have worked with software, so let's give it a try with IP.
If the prices are the same as other OD2 services, most albums are discounted to GBP 7.99 if you buy the whole thing. Personally I still don't think that that is worth the disadvantage of having DRM'd tracks and no physical media, but it's not as bad as you say.
Registered charities don't have to pay VAT (sales tax). Presumably tax will be factored into this service, as most of the money goes to the record companies, but Oxfam will be able to get a VAT return from the Government on their share.
If a bug that serious has been known since February, it was totally irresponsible to go ahead with the release. It isn't just some nuisance you can work around - people have lost a lot of data from this.
Sure, people might already own the music, but that's not what they're paying for. They're paying for the music to be instantly transferred to their phone in a usable format.
People that want to save money have already got the option of using the 'record' function on their phones to pick up a clip of the song and then set it as a ringtone. Ringtone downloads aren't aimed at those people. They're aimed at kids who want to quickly change their ringtone as a fashion item, possibly while at school or out with friends. If you have to go home to your computer, it's just not as cool anymore.
The biggest limitation I can think of is the speed. I can't imagine that Win98 being run on an emulator could be anywhere near fast enough to play games, DirectX or otherwise.