Gene Simmons doesn't get it. His beloved music industry (the labels) forgot that marketplaces are like living systems, not fossils frozen in amber. Marketplaces ebb and flow, they adapt and evolve because they must to remain responsive the the needs and preferences of those who come to them, or as the case may be, go to those who might want something.
The music industry forgot this essential reality: it is they who needed to adapt to the marketplace, not the marketplace that needed to adapt to them. When they could easily control all aspects of of their product, they could define what the marketplace would be and who could enter to participated in the commerce. The Internet has basically freed the marketplace and allowed it to resume its natural evolution. The music industry's rigid business model has collapsed like a building made of toothpicks because its architects failed to heed reality.
Now they weep and mourn. I hear Mary Hopkins in the background singing their lament, "Those Were the Days." I hear them in their cocktail lounges, perhaps recounting "We'll No More Go A-Roving..." Poor Gene Simmons and his record label mourners, poor corporate lotus eaters forced to see the squalor just beyond the bubble of their dreams. He's like Mistah Kurtz. "He dead. A penny for the old boy."
Rowling has a solid case. Harry Potter and everything about the Harry Potter universe is her property. It's not anyone else's, and they don't have a right to to try to use it to make a buck for themselves and thumb their noses at Rowling. She has spent decades meticulously putting her imaginary world together, and these bloodsuckers come along like disease-bearing mosquitoes. Swat the little bastards. I hope she slaps them so silly they never see straight again.
If the malware is on a sector of the disk normally skipped during ordinary reformatting, then a reformat might not get it.
Also, who says this is the Chinese government trying to collect intel on other governments? It could just be some officials somewhere looking for ways to clean out other people's bank accounts. Or a test run for future acts of IT warfare. What better way to demoralize citizens of your enemy's country than to suck their bank accounts dry? What a burden that would place on your enemy's resources!
My vote goes for the crooks in the cogs of a bureaucracy using a clever way to get rich while using their government agency to mask their nefarious ways.
I agree with everything you say except "cold blooded." That should appropriately be "no nonsense" as in "pragmatic good sense." The secrecy keeps the buzz up, while putting the brakes on negative press from gainsayers that would undermine or kill a product's launch.
You are so biocentric. Who is to say that a rock is not alive, it's just that its metabolic processes are so slow it takes a few hundred thousand years to notice them?
Of course, rock thought processes take even longer. About the time the sun goes nova, the thought may be something along the lines of "W...T...F...?"
I suppose you could hitch an ox to an axeltree, have it walk a circle to turn gears that poer a flywheel that runs a generator. They already do something similar with oxen to power irrigation pumps or millstones.
Well, of course. There won't be any edible garbage left. As the food supply shrinks, the cockroach population will shrink, and if there's anything remarkable about human civilization, it's enormity of its waste dumps.
I suspect that the truly successful spammers are smart enough to hide their identities. Even in a country where laws concerning this abuse of the internet are lax or non-existent, one should be smart enough to know that their anti-social behavior is going to attract unwanted and hateful attention.
Spammers don't deserve death. They deserve a punishment that will strip them of their property and most of their money, put them in jail for running botnets (theft of someone else's online connection fees), and forever bar them from using PCs under pain of further prosecution, and subject them surveillance to make sure they stay compliant with the terms of their convictions.
The next step is to identify everyone within earshot, and hit them with an audience tax. After all, they heard it. Therefore, they must pay. It matters not whether they wanted to hear. They heard. Open that wallet and pay up.
Business is bad for the labels and fee collection agencies. It's getting worse. Things like this will have radio stations losing audience share because radios will be turned off. Music sales will be hurt because fewer people are hearing it, so they don't look for it at the stores.
Business for the labels gets even worse. They are digging their own graves, preparing for the day when they finally succeed in cutting their own throats.
They are succeeding in convincing everyone to turn off the music.
My guess is that the officials in questions were bored and tired of the typical "look like you're doing serious ministry-related work when you can't get away with long tea breaks" mentality. The reprimanding official no doubt saw this as a fine way to shine as a responsible civil servant safe-guarding public funds. So now the reprimanded officials are back to doing other things that make them look like they're officially busy. Maybe they've been sent out into the fields to chase down illegal Chinese Filipino farm workers being paid with Ministry of Agriculture subsidies, or maybe helping farmers figure out a way to get even cheaper legal foreign labor to keep the farms running... God know, most Japanese these days don't want to muck around in the rice paddies.
Frank Herbert was vague on this point, as are most science fiction conceptualists. They come up with the broader sweeps of ideas and leave the technical details to nerds and geeks like those who hang out on/. Often they link one concept with another:
Reader Geek: Cool. A stillsuit! How do you keep the wearer from dying of heat exhaustion? Sci-Fi Writer: A really neat fabric that allows heat to radiate away, but not moisture. Reader Geek: Way cool! What's that made of? Sci-Fi Writer: It's classified until the 98th century AB, which doesn't begin until around the 40th century AD.
You pick up an advertising "newspaper" wherever they put them for people to pick them up. They're free. They exist for the advertising. You flip through it. You toss it in the trash. You don't buy a thing that was advertised. Have you cheated the publisher by ignoring the ads? No. The publisher gave the paper away and the advertisers hoped you might see their ads and remember them, but if you didn't, that's fine.
Web pages are the same. The site owners put their pages up in the hope that people will use them and generate ad revenue for them, but that's as far as it goes. The owners have no right to force you to look at the adds, nor do the advertisers.
I buy plenty of music online, much of it downloaded and some of it physical CDs of albums I know are through-and-through good music. I have the feeling that many downloaders via P2P won't buy anyway. Is there an effect on sales? No doubt. Some studies I've read tend to indicate that piracy actually drives sales. Downloading reflects market trends, making it easier to target certain types of music or bands to specific areas where sales go up because of the availability of product.
Of course, the legitimate paid download market has taken off. Consumers are no longer enslaved to buying entire CDs that may contain one or two decent racks that are padded with 10 tracks of fluff. As the iTune Music Store and other paid-for download stores have flourished, the physical CD market has crashed. Too many record labels don't seem to be getting the message from consumers: offer better quality of content throughout. Instead, they blame the downloaders for their grief at the record stores.
The Japanese telecommunications industry has been unhappy with the internet since it had to open it to general public access in 1995 or face serious economic reprisals from its trading partners. Prior to 1995, NTT was busy trying to construct a monopoly that would lock international ISPs out of Japan and allow the Japanese Telcom giant (still a de facto monopoly) to charge enormous user fees. Creating an alternative that they completely own would allow the government and NTT to once again assert control over the system and claim the monetary riches they feel they lost when they had to throw open the internet to genuine domestic competition from local and international providers.
So. A university president who is a public employee is going to force other public employees to donate time paid for by tax payers to enhance the profile of a private for-profit company that the university president has a board-of-directors interest (or former interest) in. Aside from the glaring conflict of interest, does anyone see a short tenure as university president in the cards for that over-educated idiot? Does anyone see lawsuits and possible criminal charges concerning misappropriation of State funds? Maybe the university president is spending too much time over at the bar enjoying happy hour.
Jhannet has no TV at home? They aren't showing trailers for Transformers on TV? She has not internet? If she does, they don't know you can access trailers?
I think Elton isn't getting out enough into the new bands circuit. People who love to make music love to make it with other people who also love to make it. Hasn't changed a bit, as far as I can see. My two sons are really keen on computers and programming as tools for making music, but when it comes time to play, they get their guitars and drums and congas and tablas and gamalans and their laptops, and get together in a room with their friends who also bring similar equipment, and they jam together, and create tunes and light shows. I think it's fantastic.
Making music, they say, isn't worth it if you can't share the making with others. The point is to have some fun at it, right? And it's a lot more fun to have fun with others who are having fun with you, than it is trying to have fun all by yourself, isn't it? I don't think the web has corroded this one bit. I do think--I have seen--that the internet has given a lot of musicians chances at inexpensive wide exposure that they would otherwise never have been able to get 15 years ago.
Re:Geeks do- everyone else doesn't.
on
The DRM Scorecard
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· Score: 1
DRM for Apple iTMS files is usually easy to crack on a Mac, by anyone. All they usually have to do is know how to burn their DRM'd tunes to audio CD or a CD disk image. Converting the DRM'd AAC or MP3 files to WAV or AIFF strips the DRM. Reimport them as MP3 or AAC, and they're DRM-free.
I think the music executives know DRM and other copy protection can be cracked, but they add it for legal reasons to protect themselves from artists and investors. By adding it, they can say they're doing their best to protect the interests of artists and investors. Otherwise, they might find themselves being sued by some artists and investors for negligence. It also establishes for the courts that they are doing their best to protect their copyright interests.
Switching to Mac OS X, that is. The investment required to switch to OS X would entail all new hardware, which is surely more costly that switching to Vista running on existing hardware. Linux might be an option, since it will run on existing PC hardware, but again, the investment in installed, Windows-tailored software must still make Linux the more expensive enterprise alternative. Enterprises will just wait, sticking with XP for as long as they can get support for it. This may slow down the spread of Vista among Windows users and will probably effect Microsoft's quarterly earnings, but it won't spell the end of Vista or the survival of XP. It won't be a boon for Linux or Apple.
Maybe it might make MS a little more attentive to what its customers are telling it, instead of it telling its customers what they need and are going to get whether they like it or not. Now that would be a boon...
Oh. They'll run off batteries. I wonder what the power requirements will be, how many shots per charge, and recharge time?
Actually, this could be a boon for developing better batteries, the kind that can be used for electric cars. And, lest we forget, practical hydrogen fuel cells that can keep those batteries charged if not produce enough power to eliminate the need for batteries in the first place.
The possibilities for spin-off tech may be more interesting than the laser cannons or rail guns.
I guess we should all be shocked into dumping our Macs! Good heavens. Most of the world uses non-Apple PCs, Windows runs on them, most come pre-installed with Windows, and Microsoft has pulled XP off the market. Vista's the only thing going, unless you want to switch to Linux, and people heavily invested in Windows software won't see Linux as a practical alternative. Apple sure isn't going to license OS X. I guess it was a slow news day for whoever thought the the creeping increase in Vista sales was newsworthy. What is newsworthy is how slowly and reluctantly Vista is spreading. If XP were still being offered for sale, Vista sales would likely be stagnant. Yawn.
As much as it sucks, Comcast isn't the only one. I don't think it's so much that they hate their customers as it is that either they don't want more customers, or are to addle pated to realize they chopping out a huge market sector.
And does this company have security software they want to sell to OSX users? Pardon my skepticism, but for every announcement like this that I read, it seems that someone is riding the coattails with a security solution for the worm or virus or trojan just "discovered".
After looking at all of this stuff, it seems that Justin is using his YouTube videos and "free" lessons as inducements (advertising) to buy his products--instructional DVDs and face-to-face lessons. Since recognizable songs by others are being used for advertising to earn him money, Justin should pay a fee for the songs or stop using the copyrighted songs in his videos and substitute his own original work.
As far as I can see, the RIAA has nothing to do with this, but I have to admit, it makes a much more sensational headline.
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Gene Simmons doesn't get it. His beloved music industry (the labels) forgot that marketplaces are like living systems, not fossils frozen in amber. Marketplaces ebb and flow, they adapt and evolve because they must to remain responsive the the needs and preferences of those who come to them, or as the case may be, go to those who might want something.
The music industry forgot this essential reality: it is they who needed to adapt to the marketplace, not the marketplace that needed to adapt to them. When they could easily control all aspects of of their product, they could define what the marketplace would be and who could enter to participated in the commerce. The Internet has basically freed the marketplace and allowed it to resume its natural evolution. The music industry's rigid business model has collapsed like a building made of toothpicks because its architects failed to heed reality.
Now they weep and mourn. I hear Mary Hopkins in the background singing their lament, "Those Were the Days." I hear them in their cocktail lounges, perhaps recounting "We'll No More Go A-Roving..." Poor Gene Simmons and his record label mourners, poor corporate lotus eaters forced to see the squalor just beyond the bubble of their dreams. He's like Mistah Kurtz. "He dead. A penny for the old boy."
Rowling has a solid case. Harry Potter and everything about the Harry Potter universe is her property. It's not anyone else's, and they don't have a right to to try to use it to make a buck for themselves and thumb their noses at Rowling. She has spent decades meticulously putting her imaginary world together, and these bloodsuckers come along like disease-bearing mosquitoes. Swat the little bastards. I hope she slaps them so silly they never see straight again.
If the malware is on a sector of the disk normally skipped during ordinary reformatting, then a reformat might not get it.
Also, who says this is the Chinese government trying to collect intel on other governments? It could just be some officials somewhere looking for ways to clean out other people's bank accounts. Or a test run for future acts of IT warfare. What better way to demoralize citizens of your enemy's country than to suck their bank accounts dry? What a burden that would place on your enemy's resources!
My vote goes for the crooks in the cogs of a bureaucracy using a clever way to get rich while using their government agency to mask their nefarious ways.
I agree with everything you say except "cold blooded." That should appropriately be "no nonsense" as in "pragmatic good sense." The secrecy keeps the buzz up, while putting the brakes on negative press from gainsayers that would undermine or kill a product's launch.
You are so biocentric. Who is to say that a rock is not alive, it's just that its metabolic processes are so slow it takes a few hundred thousand years to notice them?
Of course, rock thought processes take even longer. About the time the sun goes nova, the thought may be something along the lines of "W...T...F...?"
Sizzle.
It must be oxen, not cows.
I suppose you could hitch an ox to an axeltree, have it walk a circle to turn gears that poer a flywheel that runs a generator. They already do something similar with oxen to power irrigation pumps or millstones.
Well, of course. There won't be any edible garbage left. As the food supply shrinks, the cockroach population will shrink, and if there's anything remarkable about human civilization, it's enormity of its waste dumps.
I suspect that the truly successful spammers are smart enough to hide their identities. Even in a country where laws concerning this abuse of the internet are lax or non-existent, one should be smart enough to know that their anti-social behavior is going to attract unwanted and hateful attention.
Spammers don't deserve death. They deserve a punishment that will strip them of their property and most of their money, put them in jail for running botnets (theft of someone else's online connection fees), and forever bar them from using PCs under pain of further prosecution, and subject them surveillance to make sure they stay compliant with the terms of their convictions.
Loss of wealth and property is torture enough.
The next step is to identify everyone within earshot, and hit them with an audience tax. After all, they heard it. Therefore, they must pay. It matters not whether they wanted to hear. They heard. Open that wallet and pay up.
Business is bad for the labels and fee collection agencies. It's getting worse. Things like this will have radio stations losing audience share because radios will be turned off. Music sales will be hurt because fewer people are hearing it, so they don't look for it at the stores.
Business for the labels gets even worse. They are digging their own graves, preparing for the day when they finally succeed in cutting their own throats.
They are succeeding in convincing everyone to turn off the music.
My guess is that the officials in questions were bored and tired of the typical "look like you're doing serious ministry-related work when you can't get away with long tea breaks" mentality. The reprimanding official no doubt saw this as a fine way to shine as a responsible civil servant safe-guarding public funds. So now the reprimanded officials are back to doing other things that make them look like they're officially busy. Maybe they've been sent out into the fields to chase down illegal Chinese Filipino farm workers being paid with Ministry of Agriculture subsidies, or maybe helping farmers figure out a way to get even cheaper legal foreign labor to keep the farms running... God know, most Japanese these days don't want to muck around in the rice paddies.
Frank Herbert was vague on this point, as are most science fiction conceptualists. They come up with the broader sweeps of ideas and leave the technical details to nerds and geeks like those who hang out on /. Often they link one concept with another:
Reader Geek: Cool. A stillsuit! How do you keep the wearer from dying of heat exhaustion?
Sci-Fi Writer: A really neat fabric that allows heat to radiate away, but not moisture.
Reader Geek: Way cool! What's that made of?
Sci-Fi Writer: It's classified until the 98th century AB, which doesn't begin until around the 40th century AD.
Hahahahahahahaha! With Vista languishing anyway, this should really help MS move the product! In the meantime, it will move users to new OSes.
You pick up an advertising "newspaper" wherever they put them for people to pick them up. They're free. They exist for the advertising. You flip through it. You toss it in the trash. You don't buy a thing that was advertised. Have you cheated the publisher by ignoring the ads? No. The publisher gave the paper away and the advertisers hoped you might see their ads and remember them, but if you didn't, that's fine. Web pages are the same. The site owners put their pages up in the hope that people will use them and generate ad revenue for them, but that's as far as it goes. The owners have no right to force you to look at the adds, nor do the advertisers.
I buy plenty of music online, much of it downloaded and some of it physical CDs of albums I know are through-and-through good music. I have the feeling that many downloaders via P2P won't buy anyway. Is there an effect on sales? No doubt. Some studies I've read tend to indicate that piracy actually drives sales. Downloading reflects market trends, making it easier to target certain types of music or bands to specific areas where sales go up because of the availability of product.
Of course, the legitimate paid download market has taken off. Consumers are no longer enslaved to buying entire CDs that may contain one or two decent racks that are padded with 10 tracks of fluff. As the iTune Music Store and other paid-for download stores have flourished, the physical CD market has crashed. Too many record labels don't seem to be getting the message from consumers: offer better quality of content throughout. Instead, they blame the downloaders for their grief at the record stores.
The Japanese telecommunications industry has been unhappy with the internet since it had to open it to general public access in 1995 or face serious economic reprisals from its trading partners. Prior to 1995, NTT was busy trying to construct a monopoly that would lock international ISPs out of Japan and allow the Japanese Telcom giant (still a de facto monopoly) to charge enormous user fees. Creating an alternative that they completely own would allow the government and NTT to once again assert control over the system and claim the monetary riches they feel they lost when they had to throw open the internet to genuine domestic competition from local and international providers.
So. A university president who is a public employee is going to force other public employees to donate time paid for by tax payers to enhance the profile of a private for-profit company that the university president has a board-of-directors interest (or former interest) in. Aside from the glaring conflict of interest, does anyone see a short tenure as university president in the cards for that over-educated idiot? Does anyone see lawsuits and possible criminal charges concerning misappropriation of State funds? Maybe the university president is spending too much time over at the bar enjoying happy hour.
Jhannet has no TV at home? They aren't showing trailers for Transformers on TV? She has not internet? If she does, they don't know you can access trailers?
Her story sounds a little fishy to me.
I think Elton isn't getting out enough into the new bands circuit. People who love to make music love to make it with other people who also love to make it. Hasn't changed a bit, as far as I can see. My two sons are really keen on computers and programming as tools for making music, but when it comes time to play, they get their guitars and drums and congas and tablas and gamalans and their laptops, and get together in a room with their friends who also bring similar equipment, and they jam together, and create tunes and light shows. I think it's fantastic.
Making music, they say, isn't worth it if you can't share the making with others. The point is to have some fun at it, right? And it's a lot more fun to have fun with others who are having fun with you, than it is trying to have fun all by yourself, isn't it? I don't think the web has corroded this one bit. I do think--I have seen--that the internet has given a lot of musicians chances at inexpensive wide exposure that they would otherwise never have been able to get 15 years ago.
DRM for Apple iTMS files is usually easy to crack on a Mac, by anyone. All they usually have to do is know how to burn their DRM'd tunes to audio CD or a CD disk image. Converting the DRM'd AAC or MP3 files to WAV or AIFF strips the DRM. Reimport them as MP3 or AAC, and they're DRM-free.
I think the music executives know DRM and other copy protection can be cracked, but they add it for legal reasons to protect themselves from artists and investors. By adding it, they can say they're doing their best to protect the interests of artists and investors. Otherwise, they might find themselves being sued by some artists and investors for negligence. It also establishes for the courts that they are doing their best to protect their copyright interests.
Switching to Mac OS X, that is. The investment required to switch to OS X would entail all new hardware, which is surely more costly that switching to Vista running on existing hardware. Linux might be an option, since it will run on existing PC hardware, but again, the investment in installed, Windows-tailored software must still make Linux the more expensive enterprise alternative. Enterprises will just wait, sticking with XP for as long as they can get support for it. This may slow down the spread of Vista among Windows users and will probably effect Microsoft's quarterly earnings, but it won't spell the end of Vista or the survival of XP. It won't be a boon for Linux or Apple. Maybe it might make MS a little more attentive to what its customers are telling it, instead of it telling its customers what they need and are going to get whether they like it or not. Now that would be a boon...
Oh. They'll run off batteries. I wonder what the power requirements will be, how many shots per charge, and recharge time?
Actually, this could be a boon for developing better batteries, the kind that can be used for electric cars. And, lest we forget, practical hydrogen fuel cells that can keep those batteries charged if not produce enough power to eliminate the need for batteries in the first place.
The possibilities for spin-off tech may be more interesting than the laser cannons or rail guns.
I guess we should all be shocked into dumping our Macs! Good heavens. Most of the world uses non-Apple PCs, Windows runs on them, most come pre-installed with Windows, and Microsoft has pulled XP off the market. Vista's the only thing going, unless you want to switch to Linux, and people heavily invested in Windows software won't see Linux as a practical alternative. Apple sure isn't going to license OS X. I guess it was a slow news day for whoever thought the the creeping increase in Vista sales was newsworthy. What is newsworthy is how slowly and reluctantly Vista is spreading. If XP were still being offered for sale, Vista sales would likely be stagnant. Yawn.
As much as it sucks, Comcast isn't the only one. I don't think it's so much that they hate their customers as it is that either they don't want more customers, or are to addle pated to realize they chopping out a huge market sector.
That should tell investors something negative.
And does this company have security software they want to sell to OSX users? Pardon my skepticism, but for every announcement like this that I read, it seems that someone is riding the coattails with a security solution for the worm or virus or trojan just "discovered".
After looking at all of this stuff, it seems that Justin is using his YouTube videos and "free" lessons as inducements (advertising) to buy his products--instructional DVDs and face-to-face lessons. Since recognizable songs by others are being used for advertising to earn him money, Justin should pay a fee for the songs or stop using the copyrighted songs in his videos and substitute his own original work.
As far as I can see, the RIAA has nothing to do with this, but I have to admit, it makes a much more sensational headline.