Now I am one who believes that people should have access to what they want, not just what they need. If it movies that they want then it is movies that should be produced, and if it is money that it takes to make these movies then it is money that should be paid. Not paid forever as the creators seem to think, but still paid nonetheless.
If someone wants to see a blockbuster enough, then why don't they pay ahead of time? If it is going to take $15M or $45M to make a movie, let the production studio open up an escrow account. People pay into the escrow account what they think such a movie is worth to them and when the account reaches the require level of funding, the production company begins work. If they never finish or the funding doesn't reach the required level, people get their money back.
Work once, paid once. Just like the rest of us peons.
This is the DoD we are taking about. You haven't seen management by ostrich (head in the sand, ass in the air with bullseye target painted on) until you've worked at the DoD.
If you ask me, democracy is already easy enough to steal with money. Why we're making it easier to steal with simple computer hacking is beyond me.
It was getting too expensive to pay off all the candidates via campaign contributions - after a few decades every Abe, George and Harry had figured out they could get lots of money just by running for office and even if they lost, they still got to keep the money!
So, all the Illumanti and the Masons got together and decided that since off-shoring software development was success a smashing success, they would follow suit and off-shore the corrupting of the electoral process.
Now that all the evoting machines are suitably insecure, they can hire cheap Indian and Russian computer hackers at mere pennies per hour to make sure that the candidates that have been suitably bribed are put into office, and all that money saved by not bribing the losers can pay for a couple of villas with harems of 72 virgins in the carribean for each member of Illumanti. (What? You didn't know Osama was a memember of Illumanti?)
Next election they are going to spend the saved money on getting cloned so they can leave somebody at home to fool the wives while they actually go and vacation at the villas they bought this time around. Just watch for the people and corps taking advantage of loopholes in the human embryo cloning research ban and you'll see whose who behind the scenes.
Uh oh, I think I hear some black helicopters outside. Gotta go!
If some of them were undercover agents, their lives might be in danger for all you know.
If I were an undercover agent and if photographs of me were on the web showing me in places where I ought not to be, it's quite understandable.
No it's not. Taking photographs of demonstrators is an intimidation tactic. If they were serious about taking photos to put into some big database somewhere or whatever, they could easily have done it with telephoto lenses from a distance such that the photographees did not know they were being photographed.
Instead, it sounds like they stood right out in front of the demonstrators and made it a point to be seen by the people. But, the idiots who thought a little public intimidation would be a good thing forgot about one minor detail - the freaking internet.
From the reports, it sounds like they just got a little more sauce of the goose than they could handle. So they tried to take their toys and go home.
Either that, or there is something completely unrelated going on the undercover agent thing is just a thin cover story. Aren't conspiracies great?
Reports are that the disk is flakey, not the firmware. Or maybe the disk's own firmware, but not the karma's. Same difference.
Applying a little percussive maintenance is always a last resort, but when there is a good chance your disk has already failed it probably won't hurt to slap it around a little.
If you think watching a movie in the theater only costs $9.50 you have very poor math skills:
1) Transportation - Most people can't walk to the theater
2) Scheduling - Most theaters play movies when they want to, not when you want to
3) Multiple people - Add another $9.50 for each person, for a family of four, that's more than $30 even assuming your kids get the cheaper tickets
4) Food - The theaters make no profit on movie tickets, only concessions, consquently the food is outrageously priced, so you can go hungry, sneak it in and hope the "anti-terrorism" searches don't find your contraband, or you can pay about as much as you paid for your ticket
5) Bathroom breaks - Try pausing the theater
6) Noisy kids - In your house, if someone is talking during the movie you can get away with slapping them in the back of the head
So, it is easy to see how a movie in the home can easy save $50+ over a trip to the theatre. That's more like one movie a week for two years. Then you get all the other uses like sports and regular tv shows, stuff you'd probably use a ~$500 - $1K TV for anyway.
Go download net-snmp (it's free!) and try to do something useful with it, talk to one of your snmp-enabled devices or something. While doing so remember that it's all supposed to be quite "simple" and robust.
That's like complaining that SMTP sucks because sendmail is such a bitch.
I thought he was a kook, but then I tried it myself and I've upgraded him to just misinformed. I went to the mashup page and started hitting my menus left to right starting with File. Between View and Go the browser went to 99% cpu utilization for at least a minute before I killed it. Tried it two more times just randomly poking at the menus and got about the same result.
But I am running a 2004-10-01 nightly build off the TRUNK (not the more stable branch) of FireFox so it might just be something flakey in this specific build and I am too lazy to try other versions. Also, this is on Win XP SP1.
Note that I did not have any problems with any of the corante pages initially because I just tab-opened them and then closed the tabs when I was done so I never hit a menu.
Yeah, like WTF, how did kidsock's post get modded +5 interesting? If anything, it shoulda been +5 funny because he probably couldn't have done more to show he doesn't have a clue about SNMP if he tried. Well, maybe if he had also said that what we really need is to use ASN1 encoding...
You misunderstand my use of the term subscription - it is not a fee for access to restricted information, it is a fee for production of information. It only gets produced if the money is there ahead of time. That way everyone is free to give it away because the people who did the work to produce it have already been paid up front.
The idea is that the people who value the product will pay for it ahead of time - both kinds of subscriptions are about pay first and get the product later. If not enough people value the product, they won't pay for it ahead of time and it won't get produced. It is all about tying payment to the creation of information not the copying of it.
I think one big hurdle to this sort of thing would be how do you cover you're costs.
Producing even a basic news show still costs money, even if all the people running it are volunteers.
Charge a subscription fee. As long as the number of paying subscribers is high enough, you keep producing content and giving it away. If the number of subscribers drops below the minimum required to cover the production costs, that means you got bad ratings and it is time to come up with a new show.
That said your system probably would actually work better.
Right up to the point when teenage boys figure out how to either clone rfids or just remove and reattach them so that they can start changing 35-MPH signd into 65-MPH signs. Since the change won't be visible to the naked eye, it won't get noticed and fixed for a long time.
And what if the people making the music want paid for copies? Not every band or artist wants to tour, or can represent their music live - so what are they to do?
They could work on comission, find a group of people willing to pay them to make recordings. If they are good enough, the internet will give them a consumer base of billions to draw from. They could provide a subscription service with monthly fees, as long as the total take from fees was a pre-determined "enough" the band would release 1 or more recordings that month.
Or, they could just get another job. Relying on an impractical economic model for your livelihood is just as bad an idea for regular people as it was for Enron.
Back when the RIAA was focused on Napster and P2P, didn't we say they shouldn't be focusing on the technology, but on those who misuse it?
Now they're doing just that - focusing on the people, not the technology.
What, is only the RIAA allowed to gain a little wisdom through time? We, assuming there really even is a "we," can't get a little smarter too? The RIAA is now were "we" were about 5-6 years ago. Plenty of time to think about the topic in a lot more depth. Plenty of time to come to a more sophisticated and better thought out position.
If there such a thing as the slashdot hive-mind I really don't see a problem with it changing its mind after thinking about a topic for over half a decade.
It sounds like the war between its content producing arms and consumer electronics groups has been decided in favor of the electronics group.
Let's hope the outcome is the same in the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD field since Sony now owns TWO movie studios, it would be wonderful if blu-ray came to market with either no copy-prevention or something that was as ultimately half-assed as CSS is.
Somehow I think that internal battle is going to be a lot more bloody than the copy-prevented CD fight was.
people will pirate stuff and do things with non-protected discs illegally, but this is becoming less frequent
You must live in the warm fuzzy part of the internet. Based on what I see, such as the continuing increase in usenet spool sizes, illegal sharing continues to gain popularity.
Ultimately, the "media" companies are going to have to come up with a new business model. Something that involves getting paid up front once and only once for their work. Digital copying is just too easy for any royalty based model to remain profitable.
HP is going down the tubes due to a combination of Carly and the Compaq merger. The Compaq managment mentality has certainly taken over.
It is pretty well known that Carly replaced a huge chunk of HP management with Compaq management. I guess she was thinking that it would be a way to loosen up the inertia and make the company as a whole more receptive to whatever her grande plans are.
But as someone who was, pre-fiorina, on the inside and now spends a lot of time looking in on HP from the outside on behalf of my clients, I'm hard pressed to think of a worse way to handle integrating the two companies. Best that I can tell, she took the very same people that were responsible for COMPAQ's death spiral and put them into position to do exactly the same thing to HP.
I think the Hpod is a perfect example of this stupidity - HP's own LOGO has one english word in it, "invent" and yet HP did zero inventing with the Hpod. She and all the compaq deadwood seem bound and determined to make that logo (which was adopted under her reign) a lie by outsourcing all the inventing as well as manufacturering, etc.
Oh well, at least HP is such a behemoth had she suck corporate blood for at least a few more years and the company will still have a chance of recovery. Just as long as she doesn't put a pistol to its head before she leaves.
As if ANY politician these days (including Diane Feinstein) writes their own speeches, instead of having them "massaged by their campaign operatives"...
When Schwarzenegger's staff starts writing Feinstein's speeches to congress, then you'll have a point. Until then, try to pay a little closer attention to the details of the events.
The great irony, of course, is that very few of the talking heads in the "non-fake news" business seem to have this level of understanding of the responsibility they bear.
I suspect it is a self-selecting exclusion. If the talking heads actually knew at their core the responsibility of their position and how destructive their mismanagement of that responsibility has become, then any of them with even a shred of a conscience would have to quit (in Japan, they'd probably commit seppuku). It is only ignorance of their collosal betrayal of the public trust that allows them to continue living as relatively sane humans.
It's easy for Stewart to see the situation clearly because, officially at least, his show does not bear that responsibility, it is supposed to be comedy. You watch though, should the Daily Show ever break out from the fairly limited audience of the comedy channel, you can bet that he and all the writers get the boot and are replaced with similarly clueless automatons.
Which is why a wiretapped society could be good for democracy. You see, after they've tapped the 'net, you won't have to enter any identifying details. Ideally, you won't even have to fill out a form. When they want your opinion, they'll be able to just pull it out of the database!
Reminds me of a joke about the STASI - the East German secret police who were world renowned for tracking the minutiae of the country's populace:
After the wall fell, the STASI were pretty much all out of jobs and many ended up becoming taxi cab drivers. It was a good job transition because you could hail a cab to go home, when you got in you could just tell the driver your name, and he already knew where you lived.
I wish that there was a way to compel the copyright holder to distribute something, or else lose some of their copyright protection, thus allowing people to copy and distribute as long as it is not for profit.
Until just a few years back when the US con-gress passed the NET (no electronic theft) Act, it was completely legal to redistribute copyrighted material. The NET Act was written in response to the DoJ's inability to charge Robert LaMacchia (I think that was the guy) at MIT with any crime for operating a warez FTP site. Since he was giving it away for free, it was completely legal at the time.
Slashdot Mirror
Now I am one who believes that people should have access to what they want, not just what they need. If it movies that they want then it is movies that should be produced, and if it is money that it takes to make these movies then it is money that should be paid. Not paid forever as the creators seem to think, but still paid nonetheless.
If someone wants to see a blockbuster enough, then why don't they pay ahead of time? If it is going to take $15M or $45M to make a movie, let the production studio open up an escrow account. People pay into the escrow account what they think such a movie is worth to them and when the account reaches the require level of funding, the production company begins work. If they never finish or the funding doesn't reach the required level, people get their money back.
Work once, paid once. Just like the rest of us peons.
This is the DoD we are taking about. You haven't seen management by ostrich (head in the sand, ass in the air with bullseye target painted on) until you've worked at the DoD.
If you ask me, democracy is already easy enough to steal with money. Why we're making it easier to steal with simple computer hacking is beyond me.
It was getting too expensive to pay off all the candidates via campaign contributions - after a few decades every Abe, George and Harry had figured out they could get lots of money just by running for office and even if they lost, they still got to keep the money!
So, all the Illumanti and the Masons got together and decided that since off-shoring software development was success a smashing success, they would follow suit and off-shore the corrupting of the electoral process.
Now that all the evoting machines are suitably insecure, they can hire cheap Indian and Russian computer hackers at mere pennies per hour to make sure that the candidates that have been suitably bribed are put into office, and all that money saved by not bribing the losers can pay for a couple of villas with harems of 72 virgins in the carribean for each member of Illumanti. (What? You didn't know Osama was a memember of Illumanti?)
Next election they are going to spend the saved money on getting cloned so they can leave somebody at home to fool the wives while they actually go and vacation at the villas they bought this time around. Just watch for the people and corps taking advantage of loopholes in the human embryo cloning research ban and you'll see whose who behind the scenes.
Uh oh, I think I hear some black helicopters outside. Gotta go!
If some of them were undercover agents, their lives might be in danger for all you know.
If I were an undercover agent and if photographs of me were on the web showing me in places where I ought not to be, it's quite understandable.
No it's not. Taking photographs of demonstrators is an intimidation tactic. If they were serious about taking photos to put into some big database somewhere or whatever, they could easily have done it with telephoto lenses from a distance such that the photographees did not know they were being photographed.
Instead, it sounds like they stood right out in front of the demonstrators and made it a point to be seen by the people. But, the idiots who thought a little public intimidation would be a good thing forgot about one minor detail - the freaking internet.
From the reports, it sounds like they just got a little more sauce of the goose than they could handle. So they tried to take their toys and go home.
Either that, or there is something completely unrelated going on the undercover agent thing is just a thin cover story. Aren't conspiracies great?
Reports are that the disk is flakey, not the firmware. Or maybe the disk's own firmware, but not the karma's. Same difference.
Applying a little percussive maintenance is always a last resort, but when there is a good chance your disk has already failed it probably won't hurt to slap it around a little.
If you think watching a movie in the theater only costs $9.50 you have very poor math skills:
1) Transportation - Most people can't walk to the theater
2) Scheduling - Most theaters play movies when they want to, not when you want to
3) Multiple people - Add another $9.50 for each person, for a family of four, that's more than $30 even assuming your kids get the cheaper tickets
4) Food - The theaters make no profit on movie tickets, only concessions, consquently the food is outrageously priced, so you can go hungry, sneak it in and hope the "anti-terrorism" searches don't find your contraband, or you can pay about as much as you paid for your ticket
5) Bathroom breaks - Try pausing the theater
6) Noisy kids - In your house, if someone is talking during the movie you can get away with slapping them in the back of the head
So, it is easy to see how a movie in the home can easy save $50+ over a trip to the theatre. That's more like one movie a week for two years. Then you get all the other uses like sports and regular tv shows, stuff you'd probably use a ~$500 - $1K TV for anyway.
How old were your grand-grandfather, grandfather and father when they had children? I'm guessing they were minus eighteen years old.
Do not bother us with details.
This is the DMCA dammit!
Go download net-snmp (it's free!) and try to do something useful with it, talk to one of your snmp-enabled devices or something. While doing so remember that it's all supposed to be quite "simple" and robust.
That's like complaining that SMTP sucks because sendmail is such a bitch.
I thought he was a kook, but then I tried it myself and I've upgraded him to just misinformed. I went to the mashup page and started hitting my menus left to right starting with File. Between View and Go the browser went to 99% cpu utilization for at least a minute before I killed it. Tried it two more times just randomly poking at the menus and got about the same result.
But I am running a 2004-10-01 nightly build off the TRUNK (not the more stable branch) of FireFox so it might just be something flakey in this specific build and I am too lazy to try other versions. Also, this is on Win XP SP1.
Note that I did not have any problems with any of the corante pages initially because I just tab-opened them and then closed the tabs when I was done so I never hit a menu.
Why doesn't someone sue Disney, Universal, or the other Major DVD producers?
After all their TV ads almost all say OWN on DVD today.
It will never work. You aren't licensed to use their commercials as evidence in a court of law.
Come on.. this stuff ain't new. :)
Yeah, like WTF, how did kidsock's post get modded +5 interesting? If anything, it shoulda been +5 funny because he probably couldn't have done more to show he doesn't have a clue about SNMP if he tried. Well, maybe if he had also said that what we really need is to use ASN1 encoding...
Anyone know why this is suddenly being pushed, and not WBEM?
Because it sounds too much like a radio station.
Announcer: (in professional DJ as God voice) Listen in as the slashdot effects RAHWKS DOWN YOUR ROUTERS...
with DOUBLE-U BEE EEEE EHM!!!
You misunderstand my use of the term subscription - it is not a fee for access to restricted information, it is a fee for production of information. It only gets produced if the money is there ahead of time. That way everyone is free to give it away because the people who did the work to produce it have already been paid up front.
The idea is that the people who value the product will pay for it ahead of time - both kinds of subscriptions are about pay first and get the product later. If not enough people value the product, they won't pay for it ahead of time and it won't get produced. It is all about tying payment to the creation of information not the copying of it.
I think one big hurdle to this sort of thing would be how do you cover you're costs.
Producing even a basic news show still costs money, even if all the people running it are volunteers.
Charge a subscription fee. As long as the number of paying subscribers is high enough, you keep producing content and giving it away. If the number of subscribers drops below the minimum required to cover the production costs, that means you got bad ratings and it is time to come up with a new show.
That said your system probably would actually work better.
Right up to the point when teenage boys figure out how to either clone rfids or just remove and reattach them so that they can start changing 35-MPH signd into 65-MPH signs. Since the change won't be visible to the naked eye, it won't get noticed and fixed for a long time.
And what if the people making the music want paid for copies?
Not every band or artist wants to tour, or can represent their music live - so what are they to do?
They could work on comission, find a group of people willing to pay them to make recordings. If they are good enough, the internet will give them a consumer base of billions to draw from. They could provide a subscription service with monthly fees, as long as the total take from fees was a pre-determined "enough" the band would release 1 or more recordings that month.
Or, they could just get another job. Relying on an impractical economic model for your livelihood is just as bad an idea for regular people as it was for Enron.
--- You cannot lead if you send mexed missages. - George W. Bush
You cannot lead if you had Tex-Mex for lunch because no one will stand behind you.
Back when the RIAA was focused on Napster and P2P, didn't we say they shouldn't be focusing on the technology, but on those who misuse it?
Now they're doing just that - focusing on the people, not the technology.
What, is only the RIAA allowed to gain a little wisdom through time? We, assuming there really even is a "we," can't get a little smarter too? The RIAA is now were "we" were about 5-6 years ago. Plenty of time to think about the topic in a lot more depth. Plenty of time to come to a more sophisticated and better thought out position.
If there such a thing as the slashdot hive-mind I really don't see a problem with it changing its mind after thinking about a topic for over half a decade.
It sounds like the war between its content producing arms and consumer electronics groups has been decided in favor of the electronics group.
Let's hope the outcome is the same in the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD field since Sony now owns TWO movie studios, it would be wonderful if blu-ray came to market with either no copy-prevention or something that was as ultimately half-assed as CSS is.
Somehow I think that internal battle is going to be a lot more bloody than the copy-prevented CD fight was.
people will pirate stuff and do things with non-protected discs illegally, but this is becoming less frequent
You must live in the warm fuzzy part of the internet. Based on what I see, such as the continuing increase in usenet spool sizes, illegal sharing continues to gain popularity.
Ultimately, the "media" companies are going to have to come up with a new business model. Something that involves getting paid up front once and only once for their work. Digital copying is just too easy for any royalty based model to remain profitable.
HP is going down the tubes due to a combination of Carly and the Compaq merger.
The Compaq managment mentality has certainly taken over.
It is pretty well known that Carly replaced a huge chunk of HP management with Compaq management. I guess she was thinking that it would be a way to loosen up the inertia and make the company as a whole more receptive to whatever her grande plans are.
But as someone who was, pre-fiorina, on the inside and now spends a lot of time looking in on HP from the outside on behalf of my clients, I'm hard pressed to think of a worse way to handle integrating the two companies. Best that I can tell, she took the very same people that were responsible for COMPAQ's death spiral and put them into position to do exactly the same thing to HP.
I think the Hpod is a perfect example of this stupidity - HP's own LOGO has one english word in it, "invent" and yet HP did zero inventing with the Hpod. She and all the compaq deadwood seem bound and determined to make that logo (which was adopted under her reign) a lie by outsourcing all the inventing as well as manufacturering, etc.
Oh well, at least HP is such a behemoth had she suck corporate blood for at least a few more years and the company will still have a chance of recovery. Just as long as she doesn't put a pistol to its head before she leaves.
As if ANY politician these days (including Diane Feinstein) writes their own speeches, instead of having them "massaged by their campaign operatives"...
When Schwarzenegger's staff starts writing Feinstein's speeches to congress, then you'll have a point. Until then, try to pay a little closer attention to the details of the events.
The great irony, of course, is that very few of the talking heads in the "non-fake news" business seem to have this level of understanding of the responsibility they bear.
I suspect it is a self-selecting exclusion. If the talking heads actually knew at their core the responsibility of their position and how destructive their mismanagement of that responsibility has become, then any of them with even a shred of a conscience would have to quit (in Japan, they'd probably commit seppuku). It is only ignorance of their collosal betrayal of the public trust that allows them to continue living as relatively sane humans.
It's easy for Stewart to see the situation clearly because, officially at least, his show does not bear that responsibility, it is supposed to be comedy. You watch though, should the Daily Show ever break out from the fairly limited audience of the comedy channel, you can bet that he and all the writers get the boot and are replaced with similarly clueless automatons.
Which is why a wiretapped society could be good for democracy. You see, after they've tapped the 'net, you won't have to enter any identifying details. Ideally, you won't even have to fill out a form. When they want your opinion, they'll be able to just pull it out of the database!
Reminds me of a joke about the STASI - the East German secret police who were world renowned for tracking the minutiae of the country's populace:
After the wall fell, the STASI were pretty much all out of jobs and many ended up becoming taxi cab drivers. It was a good job transition because you could hail a cab to go home, when you got in you could just tell the driver your name, and he already knew where you lived.
I wish that there was a way to compel the copyright holder to distribute something, or else lose some of their copyright protection, thus allowing people to copy and distribute as long as it is not for profit.
Until just a few years back when the US con-gress passed the NET (no electronic theft) Act, it was completely legal to redistribute copyrighted material. The NET Act was written in response to the DoJ's inability to charge Robert LaMacchia (I think that was the guy) at MIT with any crime for operating a warez FTP site. Since he was giving it away for free, it was completely legal at the time.