Actually, my picking one example goes to the heart of the fallacy of simply using a big number to "prove" that there has to be something in there. It's wrong because, as my example shows, Gutenberg includes things people would never read. So you need to come up with an actual number of titles broken down by category. Until then, saying something like the original poster did is just ludicrous.
You do know how text is submitted to PG, don't you? It passes through the Distributed Proofreaders project, where at least 3 people have read the document prior to it being included in PG.
This would seem to imply that at least 3 people would read each thing that shows up there. Maybe not for entertainment, but there is such a thing as reference text. Personally, I didn't realize that genome information was in there due to PGs size... I might want to reference that text some day.
For comparison, my local library has 4 different books on how to use Microsoft Word 95 more efficently, and a few books introducing their readership to the concepts of 'mouse' and 'icon'. While your argument has some merit, libraries talk about the size of their collections all the time. While the original poster's comment might be a bit of a straw man, it definitely isn't ludicrous.
However, PG also has "bookshelves." Check out the Science Fiction Bookshelf for a listing of only SciFi entries available. There's a surprisingly large amount of good stuff hidden in there. PG also has pretty much anything you'd find in a Norton or Oxford English Lit anthology. I'd say that's pretty impressive.
You seem to be confusing the Internet with the hardware used to transmit packets between locations. The Internet is a concept, not a thing; AT&T owns some of the "thing"s required to make the concept a reality.
In other words, IP packets on a fiber-optic line ARE millions of little trucks and need a transport layer to get anywhere.
Well, Mountie Bob he chased me, he was always at my throat
He'd follow on the shoreline 'cause he didn't own a boat
But the cutbacks were a-comin' and the Mountie lost his job
So now he's sailing with me and we call him Salty Bob
A swingin' sword, a skull-and-bones, and pleasant company
I never pay my income tax and screw the GST (Screw it!)
Prince Albert down to Saskatoon, the terror of the sea
If you wanna reach the co-op, boy, you gotta get by me! (Arr!)
The problem here is that companies like AT&T own the lines, which means they are EVERYONE'S ISP at one point or another.
This is similar to a road system: say that AT&T owns a ferry system to get people quickly from point A to point B.
They also happen to own a few hundred yards of the roadway that is the alternate route. Only Comcast busses are allowed on that road, as they own most of it and won't let anyone else drive on it. However, AT&T has set up a toll booth on the bit of road they own, and they charge the same amount to cross their patch of road that they charge for the ferry service, hoping that this will encourage passengers to take their ferry instead of the Comcast bus.
See the problem? In this instance, AT&T is Comcast's ISP for a short distance.
Now let's introduce the Vonage tour system. They want to route passengers from A to B through the AT&T/Comcast morass. They consider that they should have higher priority than John Q Individual trying to get on a bus/ferry to make the trip, so they rent entire ferries from AT&T and busses from Comcast, degrading the service of the average individual. Eventually, AT&T notices that Vonage is making a handsome profit in its business, and decides to get in on the deal.
What do they do? They could provide a competing service, but this smells of anticompetitive monopolistic actions. However, all they really have to do is raise the toll on the Comcast road. Comcast will then charge Vonage more for their bus rentals, and Vonage will be more likely to rent ferries. This will allow AT&T to raise ferry rates in order to supply customers with more ferries. Meanwhile, they can also raise the rates they charge Vonage for ferry rentals, and add in a "group plan" for individuals that is better than individual tickets, but not as good as the Vonage rate.
Sounds good, right? Only problem is, they've still blocked off traffic on the Comcast road, and have priced Vonage out of the market, without any direct competition to either service.
All the end user sees is degrading service and higher rates; their transport providers all say "well, there's nothing we can do about it -- the problem is with the people providing us access." Those people just shrug and say "we can't do anything about it; it costs money to maintain this stuff, and as you can see, the demand is outstripping our ability to supply dependable routes to all transport providers. We're doing what we can. Oh, and here's our bundled service; you can buy a pass from us that lets you use both our ferries and our roads for a reduced bundled rate!" Meanwhile, Comcast has to cut rates to survive, resulting in potholes in their roads, slowing traffic even further.
I know, there's a lot wrong with this metaphor, but with the state that switched packet data transfer is in today, it's not an easy solution no matter what you try to do.
In this case, they do it so that they can create artificial scarcity, which drives demand for their "new" products.
Eventually, there will be enough media produced that an individual could spend their entire life consuming entertainment they actually enjoy without anything new having to be made. "Out of print" properties prevent this from happening.
Along the same vein, ripping CDs and re-writing them to CD-Rs for use in a CD player is too cumbersome. Nobody will rip CDs.
With the advent of cheap HDs and Hi-Def video, I have a feeling HD-based media devices are going to become more and more prevalent. Nobody wants to mess up their BD video collection -- rip it to your media center, and then it can stream to all the video monitors in your house, and be downsampled for your portable video players.
The entire "Pop in a plastic disc and be entertained" concept is on its way out. Digital video jukeboxes will soon be as commonplace as digital audio jukeboxes. Of course, "soon" is still probably 3-5 years away.
Still, they had to use lots of tricks to cut down the search space; and just stealing schedules of keys was always an important method.
...and with the encryption at hand, the keys must be provided with each disc and player. When you have to provide the keys AND the specs for the encryption are readily available, you're sunk. Even if there's a different keyset for each player and disc run. Especially since if you get a large enough sample of keys, you can just create a key generator, and then you don't even have to decode using a currently used keyset, let alone find a flaw in the encryption algorithm/implementation.
Since some of the brightest mathematicians in the world have been trying to do that for a century or so, it seems unlikely that someone will just stumble across it.
Most solutions are accidentally stumbled upon... the part that takes time is then proving that the theorem is correct.
...you'd think the "7" in the name would have given something away. Then again, FFIII(US) is a stripped down version of FF6, so for the US market, 7 was probably where Square got the balance between graphics, RPG and adventure about right. I still prefer Chrono Trigger (and Secret of Mana for that matter) however.
Here is a Palm T|X running iPhone Imitation launcher. It can also run Picsel Browser, which gives you a great web browser with screen zooming etc. The major Apple-related downside to the thing is that instead of playing iTunes-DRM-encumbered audio, it plays WMA-DRM-encumbered audio. Same goes for video. The only other downsides it has are:
a) nobody's written an SD card driver (yet) that can enable the T|X to use 8/16/32GB SD cards (currently max 4GB storage plus 114MB internal)
b) the screen is the classic single-point sensor type, limiting the UI compared to the iPhone
c) no built-in microphone (one can be added) -- the TX works great as a SIP phone.
Like the iPhone, it suffers from a built-in battery. Some soldering, plastic forming and a third party battery are needed to overcome this. It also has a limiting 20MB for "ram" and "cache".
On the plus side, you can do whatever you want with the device once you've bought it, and lots of people have written software to improve it.
Saying that without Stallman we would not have Free Software is like stating that, without Columbus, we would not have discovered the Americas. It would happen, perhaps later, perhaps in a little bit different way.
Extremely good example. Just like the Chinese, Vikings, Irish, and countless others discovered the Americas before Columbus, there was plenty of Free software before Stallman. Originally, almost all software was Free, because the hardware cost so much.
One solution that goes a long way towards solving the problem is to use the NoScript plugin for Firefox, with the default set to not allow sites to run javascript. Then you have to add sites you trust to your whitelist. If said sites get hacked, you have a problem. If you end up manually submitting data on a "bad" site, you have a problem. It protects against 90% of the cases however, and makes this vulnerability that much less of a juicy target.
Your explanation is missing an important factor, as laid out (believe it or not) by Karl Marx:
Foreign Markets
You see, the US (as an example) economy is based on creating debt and injecting debt-based money into the domestic economy. In order to offset this, the US sells non-tangibles such as entertainment into foreign markets. The only problem with this method is that in order to offset the debt, new markets must continuously be exploited, and the prior markets must hold steady.
This is what makes the GNP so important and, right now, what makes pushing DMCA-like laws onto other nations through the WTO so important to the US. Once all possible markets are saturated, the current fiscal practices will no longer be viable, and will collapse, either through the countries practicing them going bankrupt (see New Zealand for an example that almost left it too late) or by those countries taking natural resources by force from others before the financial collapse begins.
When you install iTunes, it tries to install Quicktime support for all users. It also tries to install an iPod-related driver. Both of these operations should require admin access.
Actually, I think the conclusions are way off... what this survey shows is that at least 33% of people aged 16 to 24 in the UK have a clue about privacy rights.
Think about it: with today's culture of datamining and identity theft, selling your phone with all its personal data for a mere $1mil is crazy... more than that though, giving away such information in a truthful manner to Joe Surveyor for free is just plain crazy.
I think they need to combine this survey with one of the older ones conducted, and offer a year's supply of chocolate in exchange for the phone instead.
But seriously... there are a LOT of slashdot users. If ALL of them actually left their computers, went to bars and behaved like that, it would make the front page of most newspapers.
However, I'm thinking more along the lines of:
[Geek at computer] --trolling on Slashdot while phone rings--
[Rich Uncle] Hey Duane, I want to give my daughter something special for her birthday, and have heard a lot about these new iPhones that can play movies and music and work as a phone too. Do you have any advice? Oh, and I have some questions for you about getting that internet thing working, so we can all see those pictures you set up for Cousin Millie.
[Geek at computer] No way, the iPod is a tool of the RIAA, DRM is poisoning software freedom and the RIAA are a bunch of terrorists killing innocent GNU Monks. Did you hear that Dimitry Skylarov was arrested for writing code in Russia when he visited America. And in GNU/Kenya blind people have been prevented from backing up their Audio books. Cory Doctorow wrote a great science fiction story about a version of Star Wars where DRM prevented the Bothans from copying the plans for the Death Star, it was called "Many Bothans were KILLED BY THE MAFIAA1!1!". Isn't Bush like Palpatine of even Hitler! I'm going to buy the Venezualan ChavezTunes MP3 player. It has DRM so it only boots Debian Linux, and it knows how to send malformed packets to M Dollar Zunes over Wifi so they crash. The hardware companies said that Free Software wasn't allowed to use Wifi because of security concerns but that's just like Big Alcohol tells people that safe and perfectly natural herbs make you paranoid. That's why I don't drink, I don't want to support those BASTARDS.
[Rich Uncle]...
[Geek at computer] (now maybe he'll stop bothering me...)
[Rich Uncle] (I wonder where I can buy one of those iPhones? He's got a point about Bush though... maybe I'll let him buy the iPhone for me....)
I've actually still got a DJ 850 and an 820cxi in operation, and the cartridges are cheap to refill/replace. That said, they don't get much use, as most print jobs go to the laser printer.
The copyright industry can finance media campaigns etc to impress their lingo upon you and make it mainstream. You cannot. So when you use the term "terrorism" for their tactics you might be qualifying their actions, but mostly you are disqualifying yourself as a serious person. You will be merely a radical that can be ignored. Hell, members of the copyright industry might even quote you just as to show how insane the "opponents of copyrights" have become.
Ever heard of the Internet?
If enough bloggers start calling the RIAA tactics "terrorist tactics," it will become mainstream. If everyone on/. started calling the RIAA a Terrorist Organization whenever the RIAA was brought up in their presence, even THAT would probably push it into mainstream parlance eventually. However, slashdot works by providing a forum where everyone who shares this point of view can rant, so they don't have to rant about it anywhere else.
Hey... here's an idea: every time corporations misuse the word "Pirate", the people can misuse the word "Terrorist".
When everyone's a Pirate, only Pirates will fight the Terrorists:)
I mean hey... Pirates kill people and steal physical objects. Terrorists kill people and create FUD about conducting legitimate activities. Copyright infringers don't kill people, and neither do entertainment conglomerates (well, for the most part in both cases). So, remove the obvious lie, and if copyright infringers are still considered Pirates, then the RIAA should be considered a Terrorist organization.
Slashdot Mirror
This would seem to imply that at least 3 people would read each thing that shows up there. Maybe not for entertainment, but there is such a thing as reference text. Personally, I didn't realize that genome information was in there due to PGs size... I might want to reference that text some day.
For comparison, my local library has 4 different books on how to use Microsoft Word 95 more efficently, and a few books introducing their readership to the concepts of 'mouse' and 'icon'. While your argument has some merit, libraries talk about the size of their collections all the time. While the original poster's comment might be a bit of a straw man, it definitely isn't ludicrous.
However, PG also has "bookshelves." Check out the Science Fiction Bookshelf for a listing of only SciFi entries available. There's a surprisingly large amount of good stuff hidden in there. PG also has pretty much anything you'd find in a Norton or Oxford English Lit anthology. I'd say that's pretty impressive.
No, honest! The internet is a public transportation system for little information-carrying vehicles!
In other words, IP packets on a fiber-optic line ARE millions of little trucks and need a transport layer to get anywhere.
This is similar to a road system: say that AT&T owns a ferry system to get people quickly from point A to point B.
They also happen to own a few hundred yards of the roadway that is the alternate route. Only Comcast busses are allowed on that road, as they own most of it and won't let anyone else drive on it. However, AT&T has set up a toll booth on the bit of road they own, and they charge the same amount to cross their patch of road that they charge for the ferry service, hoping that this will encourage passengers to take their ferry instead of the Comcast bus.
See the problem? In this instance, AT&T is Comcast's ISP for a short distance.
Now let's introduce the Vonage tour system. They want to route passengers from A to B through the AT&T/Comcast morass. They consider that they should have higher priority than John Q Individual trying to get on a bus/ferry to make the trip, so they rent entire ferries from AT&T and busses from Comcast, degrading the service of the average individual. Eventually, AT&T notices that Vonage is making a handsome profit in its business, and decides to get in on the deal.
What do they do? They could provide a competing service, but this smells of anticompetitive monopolistic actions. However, all they really have to do is raise the toll on the Comcast road. Comcast will then charge Vonage more for their bus rentals, and Vonage will be more likely to rent ferries. This will allow AT&T to raise ferry rates in order to supply customers with more ferries. Meanwhile, they can also raise the rates they charge Vonage for ferry rentals, and add in a "group plan" for individuals that is better than individual tickets, but not as good as the Vonage rate.
Sounds good, right? Only problem is, they've still blocked off traffic on the Comcast road, and have priced Vonage out of the market, without any direct competition to either service.
All the end user sees is degrading service and higher rates; their transport providers all say "well, there's nothing we can do about it -- the problem is with the people providing us access." Those people just shrug and say "we can't do anything about it; it costs money to maintain this stuff, and as you can see, the demand is outstripping our ability to supply dependable routes to all transport providers. We're doing what we can. Oh, and here's our bundled service; you can buy a pass from us that lets you use both our ferries and our roads for a reduced bundled rate!" Meanwhile, Comcast has to cut rates to survive, resulting in potholes in their roads, slowing traffic even further.
I know, there's a lot wrong with this metaphor, but with the state that switched packet data transfer is in today, it's not an easy solution no matter what you try to do.
...you forgot "and everyone is above average."
Eventually, there will be enough media produced that an individual could spend their entire life consuming entertainment they actually enjoy without anything new having to be made. "Out of print" properties prevent this from happening.
With the advent of cheap HDs and Hi-Def video, I have a feeling HD-based media devices are going to become more and more prevalent. Nobody wants to mess up their BD video collection -- rip it to your media center, and then it can stream to all the video monitors in your house, and be downsampled for your portable video players.
The entire "Pop in a plastic disc and be entertained" concept is on its way out. Digital video jukeboxes will soon be as commonplace as digital audio jukeboxes. Of course, "soon" is still probably 3-5 years away.
Remember: nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.
...you'd think the "7" in the name would have given something away. Then again, FFIII(US) is a stripped down version of FF6, so for the US market, 7 was probably where Square got the balance between graphics, RPG and adventure about right. I still prefer Chrono Trigger (and Secret of Mana for that matter) however.
Er, actually, Freecell probably has them all beat.
a) nobody's written an SD card driver (yet) that can enable the T|X to use 8/16/32GB SD cards (currently max 4GB storage plus 114MB internal)
b) the screen is the classic single-point sensor type, limiting the UI compared to the iPhone
c) no built-in microphone (one can be added) -- the TX works great as a SIP phone.
Like the iPhone, it suffers from a built-in battery. Some soldering, plastic forming and a third party battery are needed to overcome this. It also has a limiting 20MB for "ram" and "cache".
On the plus side, you can do whatever you want with the device once you've bought it, and lots of people have written software to improve it.
One solution that goes a long way towards solving the problem is to use the NoScript plugin for Firefox, with the default set to not allow sites to run javascript. Then you have to add sites you trust to your whitelist. If said sites get hacked, you have a problem. If you end up manually submitting data on a "bad" site, you have a problem. It protects against 90% of the cases however, and makes this vulnerability that much less of a juicy target.
Foreign Markets
You see, the US (as an example) economy is based on creating debt and injecting debt-based money into the domestic economy. In order to offset this, the US sells non-tangibles such as entertainment into foreign markets. The only problem with this method is that in order to offset the debt, new markets must continuously be exploited, and the prior markets must hold steady.
This is what makes the GNP so important and, right now, what makes pushing DMCA-like laws onto other nations through the WTO so important to the US. Once all possible markets are saturated, the current fiscal practices will no longer be viable, and will collapse, either through the countries practicing them going bankrupt (see New Zealand for an example that almost left it too late) or by those countries taking natural resources by force from others before the financial collapse begins.
Do you sell bridges too?
When you install iTunes, it tries to install Quicktime support for all users. It also tries to install an iPod-related driver. Both of these operations should require admin access.
Think about it: with today's culture of datamining and identity theft, selling your phone with all its personal data for a mere $1mil is crazy... more than that though, giving away such information in a truthful manner to Joe Surveyor for free is just plain crazy.
I think they need to combine this survey with one of the older ones conducted, and offer a year's supply of chocolate in exchange for the phone instead.
But seriously... there are a LOT of slashdot users. If ALL of them actually left their computers, went to bars and behaved like that, it would make the front page of most newspapers.
However, I'm thinking more along the lines of:
[Geek at computer] --trolling on Slashdot while phone rings--
[Rich Uncle] Hey Duane, I want to give my daughter something special for her birthday, and have heard a lot about these new iPhones that can play movies and music and work as a phone too. Do you have any advice? Oh, and I have some questions for you about getting that internet thing working, so we can all see those pictures you set up for Cousin Millie.
[Geek at computer] No way, the iPod is a tool of the RIAA, DRM is poisoning software freedom and the RIAA are a bunch of terrorists killing innocent GNU Monks. Did you hear that Dimitry Skylarov was arrested for writing code in Russia when he visited America. And in GNU/Kenya blind people have been prevented from backing up their Audio books. Cory Doctorow wrote a great science fiction story about a version of Star Wars where DRM prevented the Bothans from copying the plans for the Death Star, it was called "Many Bothans were KILLED BY THE MAFIAA1!1!". Isn't Bush like Palpatine of even Hitler! I'm going to buy the Venezualan ChavezTunes MP3 player. It has DRM so it only boots Debian Linux, and it knows how to send malformed packets to M Dollar Zunes over Wifi so they crash. The hardware companies said that Free Software wasn't allowed to use Wifi because of security concerns but that's just like Big Alcohol tells people that safe and perfectly natural herbs make you paranoid. That's why I don't drink, I don't want to support those BASTARDS.
[Rich Uncle] ...
[Geek at computer] (now maybe he'll stop bothering me...)
[Rich Uncle] (I wonder where I can buy one of those iPhones? He's got a point about Bush though... maybe I'll let him buy the iPhone for me....)
I've actually still got a DJ 850 and an 820cxi in operation, and the cartridges are cheap to refill/replace. That said, they don't get much use, as most print jobs go to the laser printer.
The key clause in my argument was whenever the RIAA was brought up in their presence. If you leave it on Slashdot, not much will likely happen.
If enough bloggers start calling the RIAA tactics "terrorist tactics," it will become mainstream. If everyone on /. started calling the RIAA a Terrorist Organization whenever the RIAA was brought up in their presence, even THAT would probably push it into mainstream parlance eventually. However, slashdot works by providing a forum where everyone who shares this point of view can rant, so they don't have to rant about it anywhere else.
When everyone's a Pirate, only Pirates will fight the Terrorists :)
I mean hey... Pirates kill people and steal physical objects. Terrorists kill people and create FUD about conducting legitimate activities. Copyright infringers don't kill people, and neither do entertainment conglomerates (well, for the most part in both cases). So, remove the obvious lie, and if copyright infringers are still considered Pirates, then the RIAA should be considered a Terrorist organization.