Obviously the 1 to 1 correspondence between downloading and lost sales isn't useful...
Actually, I'd like to see the correspondence between downloading and gained sales, and more importantly, gained revenue.
Gained sales of dropping stupid DRM schemes would come through increased word-of-mouth advertising and a much better relationship between movie/music labels and their consumers, as well as a lot more avenues for the media to be used for personal purposes. (E.g. watching a movie on tv, burning a copy to take in the car with you on vacation, etc.)
Here's the kind of thing I'm imagining. Let's say you buy a copy of Shrek 3 on DVD and pay, say $20 for it. $3 could be called the media cost, and $17 could be the licensing cost of having the movie. With the DVD, you get a code you can use to register the fact that you own the rights to watch Shrek 3. Now let's say that you really want a copy of it for your iPod. You get on the web site, pay an incremental $2 fee (you don't need to pay the other $17, you already have!), and you have the movie on your iPod. You want an HD-DVD version? Pay an incremental $5 fee for the media, and there you go. There's a Platinum Extended Edition released a year later? Add another $5 for the content, plus $3 for the new media cost, and you don't have to buy a movie you already own again. Maybe even have a $50 or so "master" version that guarantees you the movie in all formats and with extended material going forward.
Also, there would be a TON of gained revenue from not having to spend any more ridiculous amounts of money on complicated DRM schemes that, in the end, have proven perpetually useless.
Would there still be piracy? You bet, and probably a lot of it. But I look at it this way. The media industries can either lose a billion dollars a year to piracy and make, I dunno $50 billion in revenue, or they can lose five billion dollars a year to piracy and make $100 billion in revenue. So far, they've been pretty stupid in choosing the former. It's just a matter of time (and a matter of the MPAA and RIAA suffering a complete overhaul) before they figure out that the latter is better for us and better for them and that there is a ton of money to be made.
Besides, people still like their plastic discs. People still like to own things, physical things. Lots of reasons why it will still be useful -- less dependent on a particular device that could fail, easier to bring something to a friend's, easier to browse through while someone else is watching TV.
I'm sorry, I disagree. With music, Apple's iTunes service is now the third largest retailer of music in the country, with no disc or booklet or anything that comes with your downloads. (Okay, a very few downloads have downloadable booklets, but those are few and far between.) I see very little difference between movies and music in this respect.
In the end, I see this thing going the way of the Xbox Live download service, where you can rent a movie and watch it and never does a disc grace your system, and/or iTunes, where you can buy television shows and movies and own them.
And I'm not following your "less dependent on a device" argument. With physical media, you're not only dependent on the device, you're dependent on the media not to get messed up, scratched, or otherwise destroyed. Seems to me that it would be a lot easier and more reliable for a central server somewhere to keep track of what you own so that if your player, whatever that ends up being, blows up, you can simply download or stream it again.
What is not mentioned is that the Founders of the DVD forum pretty much all back Blu Ray with the exception of toshiba and JVC.
Exaggerate much?
The movie studio's on the fence claim has no merit
Which explains why I see such a vast selection of the latest and greatest titles, even though the formats have been out for a year now, right? Oh... Wait... No, I remember now, I hardly see anything at all on the shelves, and what I do see is the craptastic dregs of the studios!
you are deluded if you believe that DL's will replace a storage medium.
Man, I wish Slashdot would create some sort of "wanna bet?" system, cause that's a wager I'd like to place. I think you're deluded if you don't think that network delivery will replace discs. Hell, have you checked the news lately? It's already happening, and it's getting bigger and bigger every year.
Ah, but you're probably right. I mean, I'm sure that massive momentum will peter out any day now. I mean, look at what's happened with music. Don't be fooled; just because iTunes is now the third largest music retailer, it's plain that people value physical media such as CDs more than the content. I'm sure it's just a fluke and they'll go out of business any day now, and that it's not analogous to DVDs vs. digital downloads at all...
I don't know where you heard this, but HD-DVD has many more backers than "only" Toshiba and Microsoft. Here is a short list. Also, keep in mind that HD-DVD is the format supported by the DVD Forum, aka the DVD consortium, the builders and maintainers of the original DVD format, which means that every company that backs DVDs is indirectly backing HD-DVD, whether they want to or not.
And while it's true that a common misconception is that Sony "owns" Blu-ray, it's also true that Sony is THE major backer and has the most at stake in Blu-ray winning the format war. The movie studios are still on the fence. Even the studios that released Blu-ray versions of movies have only released minor movies and old movies, and could switch at the drop of a hat at any time. Ditto Blockbuster video. If Blu-ray suddenly and dramatically lost the format war to HD-DVD, they wouldn't be impacted very much. (They've planned it that way, incidentally.) However, Sony sold its soul in including the Blu-ray drive in its PS3, and if the format fails, they'll be FUBAR.
Of course, I personally don't think that Blu-ray or HD-DVD will win the format war. The next major format is not media at all; it's network delivery of content. Ten years from now, the concept of having to put a disc into a drive to watch a movie will seem quaint.
Someone should sue Comcast for false advertising. I constantly hear commercials on the radio about how much faster their Internet connections are than DSL's, about how "the other guys" sell you slow connections and make you pay extra for higher speed connections, and all sorts of other crap.
Of course, they don't bother telling you that if you get Comcast, you might not even be able to use your connection, or that they're going to play mommy and tell you what you can and can't do, and punish you for doing things they don't like.
If they're going to do this kind of shit, the FCC and/or the FTC needs to make them disclose it in their commercials. It's a substantial factor in the decision whether or not someone might want to subscribe. And I'd love to see what happens to their subscription numbers when they have to say something like, "We will restrict or forbid some popular services you might want to use on the Internet. Oh, and we require you to use the browser that we prefer, even if you have a Mac and don't have access to it. And last, but not least, if you actually use the Internet, we'll cut you off entirely."
Re:Liberal tinfoil fiesta
on
Fox Hacks Fark
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· Score: 1
Whereas you, I suppose, are the picture of objectivity?
If you find the articles and/or conversations here, you always have the option of, you know, not reading them.
He's obviously missing the point. Among all of the software that does nothing, his is clearly the best.
Seriously, is this any surprise? Every time I go looking for some generic piece of software (as opposed to some specific software I already know and trust), I usually have to sift through a bunch of crap links to sites that exists for no other purpose than to collect ad revenue.
It's not just software, though. Good review sites are really hard to find. A while back, I was looking for a decent web host that would provide inexpensive VPS hosting. I ran across a lot of "review" sites where, surprise surprise, the winner of the review was owned by the same people who posted the review. The really scummy thing was that I would see three or four different review sites, and three or four hosting providers would be at the top of those reviews, and it turned out that all three or four hosting providers--and "review" sites--were all owned by one big company using a bunch of different names.
The lesson to be learned here is that you should never believe anything you read on the Internet that you don't know to already be true or that you get from a source that has proven its trustworthiness repeatedly. Assume that everyone out there is a scum-sucking bottom-feeder who wants to rip you off. I have a short list of around 15 or 20 sites that I know are dependable to be relatively honest, and I consider pretty much everything else junk. (And I often even look at my top 15 or 20 with a skeptical eye, especially when it comes to user-submitted reviews and such.)
I posted a comment at news.com with basically the same idea.
If the bits and bytes can be adjusted in an undetectable manner to put a watermark on, say, an audio or video file, why can't someone just come along after and adjust the bits and bytes again in some random manner to effectively erase the watermark? I mean, if they can't read the bits and bytes that they put on the media because they've been altered, they wouldn't be able to track it, and the watermark would pretty effectively be broken.
It just seems to me that although having a bit-for-bit identical copy of the original would be nice, they've already altered it so that we can't get that. Altering it a bit more (no pun intended) wouldn't really be harmful, and it would still meet the end goal of distributing the media untraceably.
But you're right, another option would be to have two (three? four?) accounts get multiple copies of the same file and do a bit-by-bit comparison, either averaging the differences or picking from one of the two copies at random. If you have multiple copies, you might even be able to derive a highly probable copy of the original.
They say that they're going to track your every move, and your response is, "Well, at least I don't live in that other place where they track my every move..."?
Maybe in England they're saying, at least I don't have to check the undercarriage of my car for GPS devices planted by the police without a warrant. (Of course, that's old news, so we've probably all forgotten about it by now.)
Besides, even if things are much worse in England (they're not), is that supposed to be some kind of justification for the gross invasion of privacy taking place? If our government starts deciding to randomly kill a bunch of its citizens just to demonstrate its power, would that be okay because there are other governments out there that randomly kill more of its citizens? Would you still say, "At least I don't live in that other country..." instead of actually feeling a bit of outrage?
No wonder this country is going to hell. With rationalization like that, our government will be able to get away with pretty anything it wants to.
Aw, come on, do you have a dog? If so, what did you name him (or her)? "Dog?"
I feel sorry for your kids.
"Hi there, little girl, what's your name?"
"Daughter."
If you owned an automobile company, we'd be driving Cars that come in imaginative models like the Red Car and the Gray Car.
Point is, hardly anything is simply given a descriptive name of what it is. It's boooring. These days in the age of "Cingular" and "Accenture", it's the rare exception that they are. Good or bad, it's the way it is.
For a small business? Probably simple file synchronization. Right-click on a network drive and pick "Make Available Offline." You'll still have to train people to store their shtuff on the network, but at least that way they'll have access to it even if they're not on the network.
Of course, you might run into some issues with files being locked and such, but you're probably going to have that anyway unless you go with either a big expensive solution or you just get people to use SQL server databases instead.
However, just because it needs to be said...
Ideally these databases would be stored on the SQL servers and the other files stored on the file server, but this is not happening.
The first time that someone loses a million dollars' worth of data or one of your consultant's laptops (with customer data) gets stolen, it will start happening. I don't have much sympathy for this kind of thing. I mean, it's kind of like saying, "Ideally, the money in the bank should be behind the counters with the tellers instead of just laying around in the lobby, but this is not happening." Make it happen. If you can't, at least make your management aware of the risks they're facing so that when something horrible happens, you've got a nice paper trail showing that you're not the scapegoat they're looking for.
If you were a big company, you could probably buy something expensive to mitigate the risk, but it still wouldn't be a good idea. At my big company, we use Connected DataProtector, and I hate it. Once a day, it runs a backup of my laptop and everything on my machine comes to a grinding halt for five to ten minutes. Oh, and it doesn't back up files in use (you know, like MSDE files under development), so a lot of stuff doesn't get backed up anyway.
Who's buying the stock and why are they buying it?
If something's cheap enough, there will always be someone willing to buy it.
If it gets low enough, someone could snag it if for no other reason than to liquidate its assets. All of those desks, computer monitors, and coffee machines have got to be worth something.
Do we? I mean really? You're honestly willing to let go of the notion that there is a god when formulating what is true?
That's the big difference I see between proponents of Intelligent Design and Evolutionists. If you ask an Evolutionist, "What would convince you that the Theory of Evolution is wrong," they'd probably balk, but if you persist long enough, most would agree that there are some things that would do it. Discovery that an alien species interceded in the development of our planet is a great Star Trekish one. Direct observation and thorough (and repeatable) testing and analysis of a supernatural event would probably make some big headway. Discovery of scientific evidence that makes the theory impossible or highly improbable in its current form would be pretty significant. And so on, and so on; the point is that there are things that would change our minds. Even the scientifically sacred theory of gravity has been turned on its head by Einstein, and is even now being poked at by quantum physicists and researchers of string theory.
But ask a proponent of Intelligent Design what evidence could possibly convince them that their belief is wrong--what new discovery could put the nail in the coffin once and for all and convince them that the Theory of Evolution is most likely correct and cause them to forsake Intelligent Design as we forsook the notion that the earth was flat centuries ago--and you will get the exact same answer around 99% of the time: There is none. (That question is especially fun to ask of Creationists. Nothing illustrates why they have no business interfering with teaching kids science more.) Every Intelligent Design proponent I've ever met has insisted that every shred of evidence that we have that points to evolution being a completely natural process without an Initiator is either not true, politically (in a religious context) motivated, or not good enough to displace the words of a 2,000-year-old book and what their parents taught them as a child. In other words, they flat-out refuse to poke at it because to an Intelligent Design proponent, the theory really is sacred and therefore irreproachable.
And for the record, Christians are after the Truth as well, and we're glad you capitalized it.
I wouldn't take that as a compliment. I capitalized it because the Truth that most Christians seek is just that--a proper noun that designates a specific idea that may or may not be shared by others, and that may or may not, in fact, be true. I did it to differentiate it from the "truth" (uncapitalized), which is a plain ol' noun that does means that which is true. Rarely they may coincide, most of the time they bear no relevance to each other, and sometimes they directly conflict. The question is, which are you going to believe when they do conflict? The Truth, or the truth?
I'm not jealous. Unlike the U.S., which I honestly believe is no longer capable of carrying out a project like this (hell, we can barely keep our 26-year-old space shuttle program afloat), I hope China has a real shot at making headway in the exploration of space.
Just because we can't do it doesn't mean that I hope it won't be done. If they can make progress where we can't, all the better!
One of the biggest misnomers is that intelligent design even precludes evolution... it doesn't. It simply ascribes a source.
Yes, it kind of does. Evolution ascribes the source for changes in species over time to a natural process, the hallmark of science. Intelligent Design ascribes it to a Master Planner, the hallmark of religion. The two are directly at odds with each other.
Think of it this way. What will humans evolve into in a million years? An Intelligent Design advocate will tell you "that which the Creator intends us to as part of his Plan." An evolutionist will tell you "that which natural selection determines is the best course for our species to survive and thrive."
That's not just a philosophical difference. There are more practical ramifications. The evolutionist will go about studying how the laws of nature operate to try to have better insight into the process. Thanks to evolutionists, we've made tremendous strides in fields such as genetics, pathology, and many others. The reactions of Intelligent Design vary wildly. Some do nothing at all, content that they know The Answer. Some deliberately belittle and obstruct academic research because it treads upon the Works of (their particular) God. Some manage to come to grips with it and still function, albeit it impaired by the confines of what they're willing to accept that might go against their religious beliefs.
No matter how they react, though, the fact that they're not willing to forsake supernatural explanations for natural phenomena will always be a handicap in the rigorous study of science. Some manage to do great work in spite of it. Most...not so great.
One more thing. When you're studying science, you must be willing to let go of your preconceptions and keep an open mind about results that you didn't expect, results that counter what everyone thought they knew for a long time. It's happened many times in the past that a scientist turned a field upside-down. Think of what Copernicus did to the Ptolemaic system, Einstein did to Newtonian physics, Michelson and Morley did to the luminiferous aether, and so on. Believe me, most scientists have considered the question, "What if there is an Intelligent Designer?" If we discovered that, for example, an alien species visited Earth a million years ago and seeded the planet to become what it is, scientists would be beside themselves with excitement and all over studying it.
However, I hardly ever see an Intelligent Design advocate even consider the possibility that there is no Creator and ask themselves in an unbiased fashion, "which explanation is more likely given what we know?" On the few occasions I have seen an Intelligent Design advocate address science, it's only to ridicule non-Intelligent Design position. The end goal of the study of science is not supposed to validate religion, it's to find the truth. The end goal of Intelligent Design is to make what we find fit neatly within the confines of their Truth, whatever the advocate deems that to be for his or her religion, and ridicule or completely disregard all other evidence. It's not compelling, and it's not science.
"There are two issues people need to come to grips with," BitTorrent CEO Ashwin Narvin told Slyck.com. "The genie is back in the bottle, and the cat is back in the bag."
Sorry, I just thought that was funny. If you RTFA, though, it sounds like the sky isn't falling just yet. The client, which was closed source before, is still free (as in free beer), and the protocol is available to anyone who asks for it.
I have a theory. Since we have no other explanation for now, it must be a miracle of God.
A few years down the road, once so-called "scientists" do their so-called "research" and determine that there's some perfectly logical explanation for it that fits within the realm of what we know to be true and what can be tested, I'm still going to believe my theory. After all, it's just as valid as all of their "evidence."
I can't wait for one of their crazy theories to be developed and then another so-called "scientist" comes along with more data and tries to refine it to make it more accurate and valid. Obviously, it's just proof that they don't know what they're talking about. Since my theory is 100% right and won't need to be refined or changed over the course of thousands of years, it's obviously the right one.
Don't ask me to provide any evidence. I've been taught that if I question my theory, I'll go to hell. It doesn't matter much, though, because even if you do ask me for evidence, you are obviously going to hell, and you're the kind of person I teach my kids not to associate with. I'll pray for you, but please stop persecuting me as I try to force universities to present my theory as equal to that of those so-called "scientists" once they cobble one together.
(I know, it's flamebait, I admit it. Go ahead and mod it down. I'm just feeling disgusted right now and needed to vent after being on the other end of a depressingly similar conversation.)
Re:Need More Exposure to Ideas and Methods
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The New Yorker On Spam
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· Score: 5, Interesting
So while this article is informational, it does nothing practical for the reader. I realize--and I think a lot of people will agree with me--that the best way to stop spam is to stop clicking on it and show others how to do the same.
This is definitely a start in the right direction, but it's not the whole story. I'm convinced that a massive part of the problem is that there's a widespread belief that spammers make millions of dollars.
No doubt, a very few do. A very few have mansions and island retreats in the Bahamas. But these people are like the Michael Jordans of spammers, the people who have spent an incredible amount of time and effort into honing their spamming skills not just into an art, but a lucrative profession.
The problem is that most spammers aren't the Michael Jordans of spam. They're just people who have heard that spammers make millions of dollars, and they want in on that action. They go out and download the latest scripts and fire off a few million e-mails. No one responds. So they fire off a few million more. After enough times, someone will respond, and they've made $20 bucks. Flush with the thought of new mansions, they fire off millions more. Whoops, that $20 was charged to a stolen card, so they're back to zero.
The point is that the world has changed. Back in the day, there was a lot of money to be made from spam. Now, though, you have a very few scummy individuals who have made massive amounts of money. You have thousands of scummy individuals who think they can do they same thing, but fail miserably. It doesn't matter, though, all you need are the few who do make millions to keep the perception alive that spam = TONS of money, and you'll have people lining up to do it.
What need to happen is that they need to stop focusing so much on the spam "kings" and go after the regular guys who send it out. The people without the million-dollar houses. The people who think that it doesn't hurt anything to fire off a few million e-mails to try to sell some Vigara (yes, I misspelled it deliberately). The press need to cover those stories too. (They really need to cover them more.) People stop seeing Bill the multi-millionaire spam king and start seeing Ted the worthless loser who was so desperate that he thought he could make a million dollars by sending spam.
It's not enough to make spam unprofitable. People have to know it's unprofitable, and that when caught, they'll end up in jail for nothing.
There's a reason why it's extremely unpopular. We need anonymity on the Internet.
Do you really want everything you do on the Internet to be trackable back to you? If they set up some sort of central ID authority, I can't help but think it will be expanded beyond spam service, and frankly, I don't want everything I do to be tracked.
I think that part of the problem is that people do stupid things without any thought of consequence. For example, several years ago, my sister called and asked my e-mail address, and I told her. I was kind of excited, because she hadn't had e-mail before, and apparently she had finally joined the Internet age. I asked her what she was going to send me. She kind of hemmed and hawed around, and finally said that Bill Gates sent out an e-mail saying to forward the message to everyone, and Microsoft would send her $1,000.
Of course, I told her it was a scam, but she still sent it out anyway. Why? Because, as she explained, "It's probably fake, but even if there's a one in a million chance that it's real, it will be worth it, because it doesn't cost anything to send an e-mail."
Needless to say, she never got her $1,000 from Bill Gates, and a few years later, she's not as naive as she used to be. Still, it took a depressingly long time for her to wise up to how the Internet works, and there are masses of naive people like that joining the Internet community every day.
What made it worse, of course, is that she didn't just send the message to me, she CC'ed it to everyone she could get an e-mail address for. So that means that several dozen people now have my e-mail address. Knowing her friends, at least several of them CC'ed it to everyone they could get e-mail addresses for, which means that hundreds of people now have my e-mail address. After just a very few iterations of this, I might as well get on national television and broadcast my e-mail during the Superbowl. No doubt I've gotten at least a few thousand spams from people who stupidly CC their whole address list on stuff.
You do know that the New York Times has more than one reporter, right? And that it's possible for them to write stories on silly little things like this and still cover the Taliban, homeless, floods, and government? Oh, and even give us a nifty new crossword every day?
Each of these robots sets up a robot factory and sends hundreds of copies out. These do the same. In less then million years every star will have an army of robots.
That's all fine and good until some alien civilization builds an army of self-replicating robot cannibals.
On a more serious note, I see a fatal flaw in the "self-replicating robot" theory. I'd bet that it would take a pretty massive investment in money and resources to do this, and the technology to do it is probably at least several centuries away.
But even if it were possible, why would anyone do this? I mean, I could see investing in something like going to the moon or mars, where we would get results within our lifetime. But history--especially recent history--has proven that humans just aren't much up to the task of doing something that will only reap vaguely possible benefits generations down the road.
Something like this could never happen until all wars have been stopped and the entire world is peaceful, hunger has been stamped out, disease has been eliminated, and every person on the planet is brimming over with wealth and joy. Why? Because if there's so much as one hungry person on the planet, there will be a lot people who think that sending out self-replicating robots that we'll never hear from again to be a colossal waste of money that could be spent on better things.
It's the same reason why we'll never build generation ships. Very, very few people are going to agree that it's a good thing to build a massive (and very expensive) spaceship to carry a bunch of people off into space never to be seen or heard from again in their lifetimes unless, of course, they're one of the people who get to go.
Maybe, but I kind of doubt it. I was a NT server support person for a couple of years, then a systems admin (and a damned good one, if I do say so myself) for almost a decade. I've fought my fair share of battles, and my background is precisely why I know how to get around most of the shit they keep trying to push down to my workstation.
Some higher up executive, though, decided to bring it up... (blah blah blah)
Did you try to fight it? Did you tell your manager, "This is a bad idea, and here's why..."? Like I've said, I've fought my fair share of battles. I haven't won them all. I had to delete Solitaire and Minesweeper at a smaller company I worked at because, as my boss said, "I hate those stupid timewasters." However, when he had a meeting to tell us that he read that you could lock down the desktop background image, I explained to him why that was a bad idea, and actually won that battle.
At my last job before the one I have now, I was the manager of server operations. I hate to say it, but my boss was a complete idiot who didn't know a thing about managing an IT department. It was ridiculous, and on more than one occasion, I found myself in the CFO's office (his boss) explaining why what my boss had told him was a load of hooey. I ended up quitting because I literally was afraid that I would be prosecuted at some point for something my boss would make me do and pinned on me as a scapegoat, and a few months later, he was finally fired because he screwed up a license scheme and it cost the company over $100 thousand (a LOT of money for that company). While I was there, I actually deliberately disobeyed him on many occasions when he asked me to do things that were illegal and/or unethical.
But the desktop goobers where I am now? They don't just implement management's decisions. Believe me, I've talked to them on many occasions, and they actually defend what they've done. I know for a fact that they are the ones who are instigating a lot of this crap, because in my company, it's how you get ahead; you lead a project that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and put together reports about how well it went. What? There isn't a project involving spending hundreds of thousands of dollars? Then you make one up.
So yeah, I guess I am one of those users. As a matter of fact, I do know more than most of our IT folks about how these systems work. And if they stand in the way of me doing my job, I'll go around them without an iota of guilt because frankly, what I'm doing is much more important then them locking down my home page and desktop background.
Sorry for the confusion, but my profanity filter was off. (One of my first steps, too.) Theirs was on. Thus, the ensuing hilarity. The person I was talking to thought I was saying something obscene; all I saw was that I told them they could count on me, and they were acting like I had just cussed them out.
Slashdot Mirror
Did anyone notice that in the video, the robotic arm seems to be writing "Help" on the screen, pleading for someone to assist it? It looked so sad...
Actually, I'd like to see the correspondence between downloading and gained sales, and more importantly, gained revenue.
Gained sales of dropping stupid DRM schemes would come through increased word-of-mouth advertising and a much better relationship between movie/music labels and their consumers, as well as a lot more avenues for the media to be used for personal purposes. (E.g. watching a movie on tv, burning a copy to take in the car with you on vacation, etc.)
Here's the kind of thing I'm imagining. Let's say you buy a copy of Shrek 3 on DVD and pay, say $20 for it. $3 could be called the media cost, and $17 could be the licensing cost of having the movie. With the DVD, you get a code you can use to register the fact that you own the rights to watch Shrek 3. Now let's say that you really want a copy of it for your iPod. You get on the web site, pay an incremental $2 fee (you don't need to pay the other $17, you already have!), and you have the movie on your iPod. You want an HD-DVD version? Pay an incremental $5 fee for the media, and there you go. There's a Platinum Extended Edition released a year later? Add another $5 for the content, plus $3 for the new media cost, and you don't have to buy a movie you already own again. Maybe even have a $50 or so "master" version that guarantees you the movie in all formats and with extended material going forward.
Also, there would be a TON of gained revenue from not having to spend any more ridiculous amounts of money on complicated DRM schemes that, in the end, have proven perpetually useless.
Would there still be piracy? You bet, and probably a lot of it. But I look at it this way. The media industries can either lose a billion dollars a year to piracy and make, I dunno $50 billion in revenue, or they can lose five billion dollars a year to piracy and make $100 billion in revenue. So far, they've been pretty stupid in choosing the former. It's just a matter of time (and a matter of the MPAA and RIAA suffering a complete overhaul) before they figure out that the latter is better for us and better for them and that there is a ton of money to be made.
I'm sorry, I disagree. With music, Apple's iTunes service is now the third largest retailer of music in the country, with no disc or booklet or anything that comes with your downloads. (Okay, a very few downloads have downloadable booklets, but those are few and far between.) I see very little difference between movies and music in this respect.
In the end, I see this thing going the way of the Xbox Live download service, where you can rent a movie and watch it and never does a disc grace your system, and/or iTunes, where you can buy television shows and movies and own them.
And I'm not following your "less dependent on a device" argument. With physical media, you're not only dependent on the device, you're dependent on the media not to get messed up, scratched, or otherwise destroyed. Seems to me that it would be a lot easier and more reliable for a central server somewhere to keep track of what you own so that if your player, whatever that ends up being, blows up, you can simply download or stream it again.
Hahahahaha... You're so funny...
Exaggerate much?
Which explains why I see such a vast selection of the latest and greatest titles, even though the formats have been out for a year now, right? Oh... Wait... No, I remember now, I hardly see anything at all on the shelves, and what I do see is the craptastic dregs of the studios!
Man, I wish Slashdot would create some sort of "wanna bet?" system, cause that's a wager I'd like to place. I think you're deluded if you don't think that network delivery will replace discs. Hell, have you checked the news lately? It's already happening, and it's getting bigger and bigger every year.
Ah, but you're probably right. I mean, I'm sure that massive momentum will peter out any day now. I mean, look at what's happened with music. Don't be fooled; just because iTunes is now the third largest music retailer, it's plain that people value physical media such as CDs more than the content. I'm sure it's just a fluke and they'll go out of business any day now, and that it's not analogous to DVDs vs. digital downloads at all...
I don't know where you heard this, but HD-DVD has many more backers than "only" Toshiba and Microsoft. Here is a short list. Also, keep in mind that HD-DVD is the format supported by the DVD Forum, aka the DVD consortium, the builders and maintainers of the original DVD format, which means that every company that backs DVDs is indirectly backing HD-DVD, whether they want to or not.
And while it's true that a common misconception is that Sony "owns" Blu-ray, it's also true that Sony is THE major backer and has the most at stake in Blu-ray winning the format war. The movie studios are still on the fence. Even the studios that released Blu-ray versions of movies have only released minor movies and old movies, and could switch at the drop of a hat at any time. Ditto Blockbuster video. If Blu-ray suddenly and dramatically lost the format war to HD-DVD, they wouldn't be impacted very much. (They've planned it that way, incidentally.) However, Sony sold its soul in including the Blu-ray drive in its PS3, and if the format fails, they'll be FUBAR.
Of course, I personally don't think that Blu-ray or HD-DVD will win the format war. The next major format is not media at all; it's network delivery of content. Ten years from now, the concept of having to put a disc into a drive to watch a movie will seem quaint.
Someone should sue Comcast for false advertising. I constantly hear commercials on the radio about how much faster their Internet connections are than DSL's, about how "the other guys" sell you slow connections and make you pay extra for higher speed connections, and all sorts of other crap.
Of course, they don't bother telling you that if you get Comcast, you might not even be able to use your connection, or that they're going to play mommy and tell you what you can and can't do, and punish you for doing things they don't like.
If they're going to do this kind of shit, the FCC and/or the FTC needs to make them disclose it in their commercials. It's a substantial factor in the decision whether or not someone might want to subscribe. And I'd love to see what happens to their subscription numbers when they have to say something like, "We will restrict or forbid some popular services you might want to use on the Internet. Oh, and we require you to use the browser that we prefer, even if you have a Mac and don't have access to it. And last, but not least, if you actually use the Internet, we'll cut you off entirely."
Whereas you, I suppose, are the picture of objectivity?
If you find the articles and/or conversations here, you always have the option of, you know, not reading them.
He's obviously missing the point. Among all of the software that does nothing, his is clearly the best.
Seriously, is this any surprise? Every time I go looking for some generic piece of software (as opposed to some specific software I already know and trust), I usually have to sift through a bunch of crap links to sites that exists for no other purpose than to collect ad revenue.
It's not just software, though. Good review sites are really hard to find. A while back, I was looking for a decent web host that would provide inexpensive VPS hosting. I ran across a lot of "review" sites where, surprise surprise, the winner of the review was owned by the same people who posted the review. The really scummy thing was that I would see three or four different review sites, and three or four hosting providers would be at the top of those reviews, and it turned out that all three or four hosting providers--and "review" sites--were all owned by one big company using a bunch of different names.
The lesson to be learned here is that you should never believe anything you read on the Internet that you don't know to already be true or that you get from a source that has proven its trustworthiness repeatedly. Assume that everyone out there is a scum-sucking bottom-feeder who wants to rip you off. I have a short list of around 15 or 20 sites that I know are dependable to be relatively honest, and I consider pretty much everything else junk. (And I often even look at my top 15 or 20 with a skeptical eye, especially when it comes to user-submitted reviews and such.)
Well, damn. Every time I've been planning capital murder in public, I've always just said, "Um, we're talking about CounterStrike tactics here..."
I guess that excuse is shot. >:-(
I posted a comment at news.com with basically the same idea.
If the bits and bytes can be adjusted in an undetectable manner to put a watermark on, say, an audio or video file, why can't someone just come along after and adjust the bits and bytes again in some random manner to effectively erase the watermark? I mean, if they can't read the bits and bytes that they put on the media because they've been altered, they wouldn't be able to track it, and the watermark would pretty effectively be broken.
It just seems to me that although having a bit-for-bit identical copy of the original would be nice, they've already altered it so that we can't get that. Altering it a bit more (no pun intended) wouldn't really be harmful, and it would still meet the end goal of distributing the media untraceably.
But you're right, another option would be to have two (three? four?) accounts get multiple copies of the same file and do a bit-by-bit comparison, either averaging the differences or picking from one of the two copies at random. If you have multiple copies, you might even be able to derive a highly probable copy of the original.
Did you not read this at all?
They say that they're going to track your every move, and your response is, "Well, at least I don't live in that other place where they track my every move..."?
Maybe in England they're saying, at least I don't have to check the undercarriage of my car for GPS devices planted by the police without a warrant. (Of course, that's old news, so we've probably all forgotten about it by now.)
Besides, even if things are much worse in England (they're not), is that supposed to be some kind of justification for the gross invasion of privacy taking place? If our government starts deciding to randomly kill a bunch of its citizens just to demonstrate its power, would that be okay because there are other governments out there that randomly kill more of its citizens? Would you still say, "At least I don't live in that other country..." instead of actually feeling a bit of outrage?
No wonder this country is going to hell. With rationalization like that, our government will be able to get away with pretty anything it wants to.
Aw, come on, do you have a dog? If so, what did you name him (or her)? "Dog?"
I feel sorry for your kids.
"Hi there, little girl, what's your name?"
"Daughter."
If you owned an automobile company, we'd be driving Cars that come in imaginative models like the Red Car and the Gray Car.
Point is, hardly anything is simply given a descriptive name of what it is. It's boooring. These days in the age of "Cingular" and "Accenture", it's the rare exception that they are. Good or bad, it's the way it is.
For a small business? Probably simple file synchronization. Right-click on a network drive and pick "Make Available Offline." You'll still have to train people to store their shtuff on the network, but at least that way they'll have access to it even if they're not on the network.
Of course, you might run into some issues with files being locked and such, but you're probably going to have that anyway unless you go with either a big expensive solution or you just get people to use SQL server databases instead.
However, just because it needs to be said...
The first time that someone loses a million dollars' worth of data or one of your consultant's laptops (with customer data) gets stolen, it will start happening. I don't have much sympathy for this kind of thing. I mean, it's kind of like saying, "Ideally, the money in the bank should be behind the counters with the tellers instead of just laying around in the lobby, but this is not happening." Make it happen. If you can't, at least make your management aware of the risks they're facing so that when something horrible happens, you've got a nice paper trail showing that you're not the scapegoat they're looking for.
If you were a big company, you could probably buy something expensive to mitigate the risk, but it still wouldn't be a good idea. At my big company, we use Connected DataProtector, and I hate it. Once a day, it runs a backup of my laptop and everything on my machine comes to a grinding halt for five to ten minutes. Oh, and it doesn't back up files in use (you know, like MSDE files under development), so a lot of stuff doesn't get backed up anyway.
If something's cheap enough, there will always be someone willing to buy it.
If it gets low enough, someone could snag it if for no other reason than to liquidate its assets. All of those desks, computer monitors, and coffee machines have got to be worth something.
Do we? I mean really? You're honestly willing to let go of the notion that there is a god when formulating what is true?
That's the big difference I see between proponents of Intelligent Design and Evolutionists. If you ask an Evolutionist, "What would convince you that the Theory of Evolution is wrong," they'd probably balk, but if you persist long enough, most would agree that there are some things that would do it. Discovery that an alien species interceded in the development of our planet is a great Star Trekish one. Direct observation and thorough (and repeatable) testing and analysis of a supernatural event would probably make some big headway. Discovery of scientific evidence that makes the theory impossible or highly improbable in its current form would be pretty significant. And so on, and so on; the point is that there are things that would change our minds. Even the scientifically sacred theory of gravity has been turned on its head by Einstein, and is even now being poked at by quantum physicists and researchers of string theory.
But ask a proponent of Intelligent Design what evidence could possibly convince them that their belief is wrong--what new discovery could put the nail in the coffin once and for all and convince them that the Theory of Evolution is most likely correct and cause them to forsake Intelligent Design as we forsook the notion that the earth was flat centuries ago--and you will get the exact same answer around 99% of the time: There is none. (That question is especially fun to ask of Creationists. Nothing illustrates why they have no business interfering with teaching kids science more.) Every Intelligent Design proponent I've ever met has insisted that every shred of evidence that we have that points to evolution being a completely natural process without an Initiator is either not true, politically (in a religious context) motivated, or not good enough to displace the words of a 2,000-year-old book and what their parents taught them as a child. In other words, they flat-out refuse to poke at it because to an Intelligent Design proponent, the theory really is sacred and therefore irreproachable.
I wouldn't take that as a compliment. I capitalized it because the Truth that most Christians seek is just that--a proper noun that designates a specific idea that may or may not be shared by others, and that may or may not, in fact, be true. I did it to differentiate it from the "truth" (uncapitalized), which is a plain ol' noun that does means that which is true. Rarely they may coincide, most of the time they bear no relevance to each other, and sometimes they directly conflict. The question is, which are you going to believe when they do conflict? The Truth, or the truth?
I'm not jealous. Unlike the U.S., which I honestly believe is no longer capable of carrying out a project like this (hell, we can barely keep our 26-year-old space shuttle program afloat), I hope China has a real shot at making headway in the exploration of space.
Just because we can't do it doesn't mean that I hope it won't be done. If they can make progress where we can't, all the better!
Yes, it kind of does. Evolution ascribes the source for changes in species over time to a natural process, the hallmark of science. Intelligent Design ascribes it to a Master Planner, the hallmark of religion. The two are directly at odds with each other.
Think of it this way. What will humans evolve into in a million years? An Intelligent Design advocate will tell you "that which the Creator intends us to as part of his Plan." An evolutionist will tell you "that which natural selection determines is the best course for our species to survive and thrive."
That's not just a philosophical difference. There are more practical ramifications. The evolutionist will go about studying how the laws of nature operate to try to have better insight into the process. Thanks to evolutionists, we've made tremendous strides in fields such as genetics, pathology, and many others. The reactions of Intelligent Design vary wildly. Some do nothing at all, content that they know The Answer. Some deliberately belittle and obstruct academic research because it treads upon the Works of (their particular) God. Some manage to come to grips with it and still function, albeit it impaired by the confines of what they're willing to accept that might go against their religious beliefs.
No matter how they react, though, the fact that they're not willing to forsake supernatural explanations for natural phenomena will always be a handicap in the rigorous study of science. Some manage to do great work in spite of it. Most...not so great.
One more thing. When you're studying science, you must be willing to let go of your preconceptions and keep an open mind about results that you didn't expect, results that counter what everyone thought they knew for a long time. It's happened many times in the past that a scientist turned a field upside-down. Think of what Copernicus did to the Ptolemaic system, Einstein did to Newtonian physics, Michelson and Morley did to the luminiferous aether, and so on. Believe me, most scientists have considered the question, "What if there is an Intelligent Designer?" If we discovered that, for example, an alien species visited Earth a million years ago and seeded the planet to become what it is, scientists would be beside themselves with excitement and all over studying it.
However, I hardly ever see an Intelligent Design advocate even consider the possibility that there is no Creator and ask themselves in an unbiased fashion, "which explanation is more likely given what we know?" On the few occasions I have seen an Intelligent Design advocate address science, it's only to ridicule non-Intelligent Design position. The end goal of the study of science is not supposed to validate religion, it's to find the truth. The end goal of Intelligent Design is to make what we find fit neatly within the confines of their Truth, whatever the advocate deems that to be for his or her religion, and ridicule or completely disregard all other evidence. It's not compelling, and it's not science.
"There are two issues people need to come to grips with," BitTorrent CEO Ashwin Narvin told Slyck.com. "The genie is back in the bottle, and the cat is back in the bag."
Sorry, I just thought that was funny. If you RTFA, though, it sounds like the sky isn't falling just yet. The client, which was closed source before, is still free (as in free beer), and the protocol is available to anyone who asks for it.
I have a theory. Since we have no other explanation for now, it must be a miracle of God.
A few years down the road, once so-called "scientists" do their so-called "research" and determine that there's some perfectly logical explanation for it that fits within the realm of what we know to be true and what can be tested, I'm still going to believe my theory. After all, it's just as valid as all of their "evidence."
I can't wait for one of their crazy theories to be developed and then another so-called "scientist" comes along with more data and tries to refine it to make it more accurate and valid. Obviously, it's just proof that they don't know what they're talking about. Since my theory is 100% right and won't need to be refined or changed over the course of thousands of years, it's obviously the right one.
Don't ask me to provide any evidence. I've been taught that if I question my theory, I'll go to hell. It doesn't matter much, though, because even if you do ask me for evidence, you are obviously going to hell, and you're the kind of person I teach my kids not to associate with. I'll pray for you, but please stop persecuting me as I try to force universities to present my theory as equal to that of those so-called "scientists" once they cobble one together.
(I know, it's flamebait, I admit it. Go ahead and mod it down. I'm just feeling disgusted right now and needed to vent after being on the other end of a depressingly similar conversation.)
This is definitely a start in the right direction, but it's not the whole story. I'm convinced that a massive part of the problem is that there's a widespread belief that spammers make millions of dollars.
No doubt, a very few do. A very few have mansions and island retreats in the Bahamas. But these people are like the Michael Jordans of spammers, the people who have spent an incredible amount of time and effort into honing their spamming skills not just into an art, but a lucrative profession.
The problem is that most spammers aren't the Michael Jordans of spam. They're just people who have heard that spammers make millions of dollars, and they want in on that action. They go out and download the latest scripts and fire off a few million e-mails. No one responds. So they fire off a few million more. After enough times, someone will respond, and they've made $20 bucks. Flush with the thought of new mansions, they fire off millions more. Whoops, that $20 was charged to a stolen card, so they're back to zero.
The point is that the world has changed. Back in the day, there was a lot of money to be made from spam. Now, though, you have a very few scummy individuals who have made massive amounts of money. You have thousands of scummy individuals who think they can do they same thing, but fail miserably. It doesn't matter, though, all you need are the few who do make millions to keep the perception alive that spam = TONS of money, and you'll have people lining up to do it.
What need to happen is that they need to stop focusing so much on the spam "kings" and go after the regular guys who send it out. The people without the million-dollar houses. The people who think that it doesn't hurt anything to fire off a few million e-mails to try to sell some Vigara (yes, I misspelled it deliberately). The press need to cover those stories too. (They really need to cover them more.) People stop seeing Bill the multi-millionaire spam king and start seeing Ted the worthless loser who was so desperate that he thought he could make a million dollars by sending spam.
It's not enough to make spam unprofitable. People have to know it's unprofitable, and that when caught, they'll end up in jail for nothing.
There's a reason why it's extremely unpopular. We need anonymity on the Internet.
Do you really want everything you do on the Internet to be trackable back to you? If they set up some sort of central ID authority, I can't help but think it will be expanded beyond spam service, and frankly, I don't want everything I do to be tracked.
I think that part of the problem is that people do stupid things without any thought of consequence. For example, several years ago, my sister called and asked my e-mail address, and I told her. I was kind of excited, because she hadn't had e-mail before, and apparently she had finally joined the Internet age. I asked her what she was going to send me. She kind of hemmed and hawed around, and finally said that Bill Gates sent out an e-mail saying to forward the message to everyone, and Microsoft would send her $1,000.
Of course, I told her it was a scam, but she still sent it out anyway. Why? Because, as she explained, "It's probably fake, but even if there's a one in a million chance that it's real, it will be worth it, because it doesn't cost anything to send an e-mail."
Needless to say, she never got her $1,000 from Bill Gates, and a few years later, she's not as naive as she used to be. Still, it took a depressingly long time for her to wise up to how the Internet works, and there are masses of naive people like that joining the Internet community every day.
What made it worse, of course, is that she didn't just send the message to me, she CC'ed it to everyone she could get an e-mail address for. So that means that several dozen people now have my e-mail address. Knowing her friends, at least several of them CC'ed it to everyone they could get e-mail addresses for, which means that hundreds of people now have my e-mail address. After just a very few iterations of this, I might as well get on national television and broadcast my e-mail during the Superbowl. No doubt I've gotten at least a few thousand spams from people who stupidly CC their whole address list on stuff.
You do know that the New York Times has more than one reporter, right? And that it's possible for them to write stories on silly little things like this and still cover the Taliban, homeless, floods, and government? Oh, and even give us a nifty new crossword every day?
That's all fine and good until some alien civilization builds an army of self-replicating robot cannibals.
On a more serious note, I see a fatal flaw in the "self-replicating robot" theory. I'd bet that it would take a pretty massive investment in money and resources to do this, and the technology to do it is probably at least several centuries away.
But even if it were possible, why would anyone do this? I mean, I could see investing in something like going to the moon or mars, where we would get results within our lifetime. But history--especially recent history--has proven that humans just aren't much up to the task of doing something that will only reap vaguely possible benefits generations down the road.
Something like this could never happen until all wars have been stopped and the entire world is peaceful, hunger has been stamped out, disease has been eliminated, and every person on the planet is brimming over with wealth and joy. Why? Because if there's so much as one hungry person on the planet, there will be a lot people who think that sending out self-replicating robots that we'll never hear from again to be a colossal waste of money that could be spent on better things.
It's the same reason why we'll never build generation ships. Very, very few people are going to agree that it's a good thing to build a massive (and very expensive) spaceship to carry a bunch of people off into space never to be seen or heard from again in their lifetimes unless, of course, they're one of the people who get to go.
Maybe, but I kind of doubt it. I was a NT server support person for a couple of years, then a systems admin (and a damned good one, if I do say so myself) for almost a decade. I've fought my fair share of battles, and my background is precisely why I know how to get around most of the shit they keep trying to push down to my workstation.
Did you try to fight it? Did you tell your manager, "This is a bad idea, and here's why..."? Like I've said, I've fought my fair share of battles. I haven't won them all. I had to delete Solitaire and Minesweeper at a smaller company I worked at because, as my boss said, "I hate those stupid timewasters." However, when he had a meeting to tell us that he read that you could lock down the desktop background image, I explained to him why that was a bad idea, and actually won that battle.
At my last job before the one I have now, I was the manager of server operations. I hate to say it, but my boss was a complete idiot who didn't know a thing about managing an IT department. It was ridiculous, and on more than one occasion, I found myself in the CFO's office (his boss) explaining why what my boss had told him was a load of hooey. I ended up quitting because I literally was afraid that I would be prosecuted at some point for something my boss would make me do and pinned on me as a scapegoat, and a few months later, he was finally fired because he screwed up a license scheme and it cost the company over $100 thousand (a LOT of money for that company). While I was there, I actually deliberately disobeyed him on many occasions when he asked me to do things that were illegal and/or unethical.
But the desktop goobers where I am now? They don't just implement management's decisions. Believe me, I've talked to them on many occasions, and they actually defend what they've done. I know for a fact that they are the ones who are instigating a lot of this crap, because in my company, it's how you get ahead; you lead a project that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and put together reports about how well it went. What? There isn't a project involving spending hundreds of thousands of dollars? Then you make one up.
So yeah, I guess I am one of those users. As a matter of fact, I do know more than most of our IT folks about how these systems work. And if they stand in the way of me doing my job, I'll go around them without an iota of guilt because frankly, what I'm doing is much more important then them locking down my home page and desktop background.
Sorry for the confusion, but my profanity filter was off. (One of my first steps, too.) Theirs was on. Thus, the ensuing hilarity. The person I was talking to thought I was saying something obscene; all I saw was that I told them they could count on me, and they were acting like I had just cussed them out.