Any filtering based on simple voting will be subject to the problem known as the tyranny of the majority. In fact, we are suffering that exact problem under the RIAA system today where $1 == 1 vote. All the mtv-brainwashed masses have a lot more dollars put together than the rest, which is why the market is dominated by pretty-boy-bands and tits-with-mouths soloists.
The marginal cost of disk space is so small as to make it effectively free. Bandwidth is almost as cheap as disk. So trying to use physical constraints (aka economics of scarcity) as a way to deal with the complexity of the content isn't a very good approach.
First, although you didn't directly comment on funding, let me get that out of the way: Charge the customers an "infrastructure fee" that covers maintaining the company, the basic facility. Then charge a per song fee that accurate reflects the marginal cost of disk space and bandwidth (i.e. really tiny) and then tack on top direct revenue to the band again per song as decided by the band itself. That should cover your costs and scale as large as could ever be needed.
Filtering or how to seperate the wheat from the chaff without throwing the baby out with the bathwater: The solution is collaborative or community filtering. Through player plugins or worst case, manual registration, you can set up a feedback system that makes recommendations by comparing each person's likes and dislikes with all other customers. Kind of like a way more sophisticated version of what Amazon does when you look at product X and at the bottom of the page it says, "People who bought X also looked at or bought A, B and C." There would be a couple of knobs to tweak about how tightly or loosely you want to track other people with similar listening preferences to avoid getting too insular. The more people contributing their playing habits back to the system, the wider ranging and more accurate it will get.
There is already one such system in existence today, for free. I did a quick search of feshmeat and couldn't find it, but if anyone else knows the links to projects like this, please follow-up with them.
So far, all you've succeeded in doing is making money for the people who run the study courses and who hand out the certs. Seems to me you ought to turn that around and look for a job teaching some of those study courses. Your lack of production experience shouldn't be much of a problem because everyone knows the old adage, "those who can do, those who can't teach."
Say you are a regular non-denominational guy who married a devout Hindu woman. Say you promised her to go vegan in a big way. Say she was out of town for a week and you got the beef cravings bad. So you bought some meat, with your discount card, and since it has been like two years since you've had any beef, you used it to make yourself the best damn tasting hamburger you've ever had.
Now, your wifey is back in town and she gets a phone call from the market telling her that the meat you bought might be contaminated. You are going to be in the dog house, if not a motel, when you get home from work that day.
Great. So, either we get guaranteed fulltime employment for a couple of magnitude more lawyers or we get a bunch of half-assed, hokey copy and functionality prevention schemes. I'm not sure which is worse.
I disagree. When the tweaks only involve changes in grammar, sentence structure and vocabulary they are much easier to make than actual research and critical thought. Those kind of changes are on the verge of what could almost be automated. How funny would that be - an anti-anti-plageriser program that automates the feedback loop.
Of course, if their system is somehow able to avoid being fooled by that level of changes, then yes real work would be required. But, I don't think that algorithms of that level of sophistication are generally available (yet) and if they are, I think the people capable of implementing them would be working on more lucrative projects (or holed up in some skunkworks for the dept of homeland insecurity).
Ah, so it is just like this CAPS II bullshit actually makes it easier for terrorists to get on airplanes because they now have the chance to do test runs until they find people who can pass the system without extra scrutiny.
Since the student is submitting to the plagarism detector himself, he can plagarize, then tweak then test and if it fails the test, he can tweak it some more until eventually it passes the plagarism test. Since he now has the official stamp of approval from the infallible computer - there is no need for a human to check for plagarism.
With electronic breakins you can no longer trust most of the accessable systems, and you have to rebuild them from scratch.
With electronic breakins, you couldn't trust most of the accessable systems ANYWAY because you can't know if the guy who you caught (or in this case, told you what he did) was the FIRST guy to do that. Ten other guys could have been in and out of there with no notice being taken before someone like Lamo shows up and spills the beans.
Now, if the NYT compsec guys (assuming they even have any) had caught Lamo on their own without any help from the guy, then an argument could be made that he was the first, because they would have caught anyone else using the same methods and vulnerabilities. But, they didn't.
That would be the modern version of the emacs spook mode. Except the idea is to add a little spookiness to ALL conversations, making global keyword matching useless.
Contrary to another reply, the FBI doesn't need to prove squat to a judge anymore. The patriot act, and other related below-the-radar legislation, has things to the point where they pretty much just write a note to themselves saying, "this is terrorist related" -- but if they feel like being more official they can take it to a FISA judge, who have rubberstamped every single wiretap request ever made of them. Plus, if they aren't planning on using the info in court - you know a little COINTELPRO type action or worse, then they don't even have to go through any charade at all.
He probably means the FISA - Foreign Intelligence Surveillence Act - Court. Here's some info, both pre and post 9-11 about the FISA Court. In short - bad shit, almost certainly in violation of the constitution. EFF Ratical Slate
Here's a surprise for you - your "lossless" formats are in fact really lossy. To better understand this, consider the difference between 192KHz 24-bit PCM (the best DVD-Audio can do) and 44.1KHz 16-bit PCM (the format used on all CDs). Both are "lossless" per your definition, but all other things being equal, the DVD-A format provides a more complete reproduction than the CD format does. In fact, the CD format loses about 85% of the theoretical information content that the DVD-A format contains. Now compare the DVD-A format to a hypothetical 512KHz 32-bit PCM encoding, same sort of thing applies, ad infinitum.
My point is that while you may not like psycho-acoustical compression like mp3,vorbis,aac,etc - you are still losing information with your so-called "lossless" formats, it is just that the choice about what information to through away is not directly based on human perceptual capabilities but rather simple mechanical inability.
From a smart business point of view (which is not necessarily that of the RIAA) it is not if there has been a reduction in freeloading downloads, but rather if there has been an increase in people paying money for music (physical CDs or paid downloads). Since those numbers are not being hyped all over the news, I'm willing to bet that the actual dollar numbers are still declining or at the very least not increasing in anywhere near the proportion of the decreased freeloading downloads.
Well, I'm too fucking lazy to look stuff up too, but I think you will find a higher correlation between all of those "features" and a lack of a middle-class than you will with rates of taxation - effectively the rich will have 0% taxation since they are the government in such countries and the poor will have either 0% (since they have nothing to tax) or 100% (since they don't get to keep much, if any, of the fruit of their labor) depending on how you look at it.
RMS is a smart guy, if he had wanted to enforce the "spirit of the GPL" (whatever that is) he would have made compliance specific in the GPL. To expect more than what is written in the GPL is only setting yourself up for constant disappointment.
Although funny, it is also true. AOL has been randomly blocking entire ISPs - my hosting service's outgoing SMTP server was arbitrarily blocked by AOL for a total of about a month back around October. My hosting service had absolutely no violations of any kind, and after 2-3 weeks of bitcing and voice-mail-hell, AOL did finally respond, agree that they were not big-bad-purveyors-of-donkey-dick and unblocked them... Only to reblock them again in about 10 days, at which point my hosting service had to start all over again with them. It seems like the second time was the charm since I just sent email to an AOL user today and it didn't bounce (maybe AOL is now silently eating email instead of bouncing, that sure wouldn't make my life easier).
Anyway, from what I read on the net my hosting provider's experience with AOL's blocking of incoming SMTP connections is not out of the ordinary, many, maybe hundreds, of "little guys" have had the same experience. Makes me want to know the false positive rate for their spam blocking -- I'm willing to bet that AOL themselves don't even know the answer to that one.
Yes, that number sounds right and the "industry standard" licensing fees were about one-third of that. Not sure what IBM has to do with RAMBUS, but perhaps you could explain that comment in more detail.
Micron is the only American manufacturer of RAM of any significant size. All those other companies you name are resellers of RAM, usually in DIMM form for PCs - just look at the actual chips on the DIMMs, you won't see any of them labeled "Geil" or "Kingston" - you will see names like Micron, Winbond, Hynix, etc.
The issue with RAMBUS is far more complicated than the general computer-using public is aware of. Even a general overview of the court testimony can prove enlightening - essentially it looks like ALL the world's RAM manufacturers did not want to pay RAMBUS's high licensing fees for RDRAM and so conspired to both steal parts of it and to make RAMBUS look very bad in the court of public opinion. RAMBUS hasn't done a very good job of getting their story out (it certainly didn't help when they became, or were forced to become, a pure litigation company in order to fight the conspiracy because nobody really likes a company full of lawyers) and it probably still isn't out fully.
There are a LOT of kooky penny-stock type theories bouncing around regarding RAMBUS and I don't claim to have the entire truth of the matter myself, I'm just an interested bystander (owning no shares of any memory manufacturer/licensor).
One last point - Micron was able to get anti-dumping tarrifs invoked against Hynix in the USA and Europe in the summer of 2003, on the order of 100% - I think that if Micron is found guilty of this conspiracy that they should no longer be given government-mandated protection from Hynix's pricing. (I want RAM to get even cheaper myself.)
So you are saying this is just another manifestation of "follow the money." I haven't checked, but it sounds plausible to me. And of course, if that is the case, you know the suit is being brought under the Hollywood Amendment to the Bill of Rights - the Right of an entrenched industry to maintain profitability shall be guaranteed, regardless of changes in market, culture or technology. The RIAA has been working a few cases under the aegis of the Hollywood Amendment themselves.
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who the hell would look at naked dolls?
I think you misunderstand the function of these "real dolls."
One man's trash is another man's treasure.
Any filtering based on simple voting will be subject to the problem known as the tyranny of the majority. In fact, we are suffering that exact problem under the RIAA system today where $1 == 1 vote. All the mtv-brainwashed masses have a lot more dollars put together than the rest, which is why the market is dominated by pretty-boy-bands and tits-with-mouths soloists.
The marginal cost of disk space is so small as to make it effectively free. Bandwidth is almost as cheap as disk. So trying to use physical constraints (aka economics of scarcity) as a way to deal with the complexity of the content isn't a very good approach.
First, although you didn't directly comment on funding, let me get that out of the way: Charge the customers an "infrastructure fee" that covers maintaining the company, the basic facility. Then charge a per song fee that accurate reflects the marginal cost of disk space and bandwidth (i.e. really tiny) and then tack on top direct revenue to the band again per song as decided by the band itself. That should cover your costs and scale as large as could ever be needed.
Filtering or how to seperate the wheat from the chaff without throwing the baby out with the bathwater: The solution is collaborative or community filtering. Through player plugins or worst case, manual registration, you can set up a feedback system that makes recommendations by comparing each person's likes and dislikes with all other customers. Kind of like a way more sophisticated version of what Amazon does when you look at product X and at the bottom of the page it says, "People who bought X also looked at or bought A, B and C." There would be a couple of knobs to tweak about how tightly or loosely you want to track other people with similar listening preferences to avoid getting too insular. The more people contributing their playing habits back to the system, the wider ranging and more accurate it will get.
There is already one such system in existence today, for free. I did a quick search of feshmeat and couldn't find it, but if anyone else knows the links to projects like this, please follow-up with them.
So far, all you've succeeded in doing is making money for the people who run the study courses and who hand out the certs. Seems to me you ought to turn that around and look for a job teaching some of those study courses. Your lack of production experience shouldn't be much of a problem because everyone knows the old adage, "those who can do, those who can't teach."
Say you are a regular non-denominational guy who married a devout Hindu woman. Say you promised her to go vegan in a big way. Say she was out of town for a week and you got the beef cravings bad. So you bought some meat, with your discount card, and since it has been like two years since you've had any beef, you used it to make yourself the best damn tasting hamburger you've ever had.
Now, your wifey is back in town and she gets a phone call from the market telling her that the meat you bought might be contaminated. You are going to be in the dog house, if not a motel, when you get home from work that day.
Just an example...
Great. So, either we get guaranteed fulltime employment for a couple of magnitude more lawyers or we get a bunch of half-assed, hokey copy and functionality prevention schemes. I'm not sure which is worse.
I disagree. When the tweaks only involve changes in grammar, sentence structure and vocabulary they are much easier to make than actual research and critical thought. Those kind of changes are on the verge of what could almost be automated. How funny would that be - an anti-anti-plageriser program that automates the feedback loop.
Of course, if their system is somehow able to avoid being fooled by that level of changes, then yes real work would be required. But, I don't think that algorithms of that level of sophistication are generally available (yet) and if they are, I think the people capable of implementing them would be working on more lucrative projects (or holed up in some skunkworks for the dept of homeland insecurity).
Ah, so it is just like this CAPS II bullshit actually makes it easier for terrorists to get on airplanes because they now have the chance to do test runs until they find people who can pass the system without extra scrutiny.
Since the student is submitting to the plagarism detector himself, he can plagarize, then tweak then test and if it fails the test, he can tweak it some more until eventually it passes the plagarism test. Since he now has the official stamp of approval from the infallible computer - there is no need for a human to check for plagarism.
If you have pussyfoot, is it illegal to wear open-toed shoes?
No problem, if anyone gives you a hassle about it, just tell them it is a camel-toe.
With electronic breakins you can no longer trust most of the accessable systems, and you have to rebuild them from scratch.
With electronic breakins, you couldn't trust most of the accessable systems ANYWAY because you can't know if the guy who you caught (or in this case, told you what he did) was the FIRST guy to do that. Ten other guys could have been in and out of there with no notice being taken before someone like Lamo shows up and spills the beans.
Now, if the NYT compsec guys (assuming they even have any) had caught Lamo on their own without any help from the guy, then an argument could be made that he was the first, because they would have caught anyone else using the same methods and vulnerabilities. But, they didn't.
That would be the modern version of the emacs spook mode. Except the idea is to add a little spookiness to ALL conversations, making global keyword matching useless.
Contrary to another reply, the FBI doesn't need to prove squat to a judge anymore. The patriot act, and other related below-the-radar legislation, has things to the point where they pretty much just write a note to themselves saying, "this is terrorist related" -- but if they feel like being more official they can take it to a FISA judge, who have rubberstamped every single wiretap request ever made of them. Plus, if they aren't planning on using the info in court - you know a little COINTELPRO type action or worse, then they don't even have to go through any charade at all.
Don't worry about it, our politicians haven't read it either.
He probably means the FISA - Foreign Intelligence Surveillence Act - Court. Here's some info, both pre and post 9-11 about the FISA Court. In short - bad shit, almost certainly in violation of the constitution.
EFF
Ratical
Slate
So, basically, 20bit/96KHz contains more information than 16bit/44KHz. Glad you cleared that up.
Here's a surprise for you - your "lossless" formats are in fact really lossy. To better understand this, consider the difference between 192KHz 24-bit PCM (the best DVD-Audio can do) and 44.1KHz 16-bit PCM (the format used on all CDs). Both are "lossless" per your definition, but all other things being equal, the DVD-A format provides a more complete reproduction than the CD format does. In fact, the CD format loses about 85% of the theoretical information content that the DVD-A format contains. Now compare the DVD-A format to a hypothetical 512KHz 32-bit PCM encoding, same sort of thing applies, ad infinitum.
My point is that while you may not like psycho-acoustical compression like mp3,vorbis,aac,etc - you are still losing information with your so-called "lossless" formats, it is just that the choice about what information to through away is not directly based on human perceptual capabilities but rather simple mechanical inability.
From a smart business point of view (which is not necessarily that of the RIAA) it is not if there has been a reduction in freeloading downloads, but rather if there has been an increase in people paying money for music (physical CDs or paid downloads). Since those numbers are not being hyped all over the news, I'm willing to bet that the actual dollar numbers are still declining or at the very least not increasing in anywhere near the proportion of the decreased freeloading downloads.
Well, I'm too fucking lazy to look stuff up too, but I think you will find a higher correlation between all of those "features" and a lack of a middle-class than you will with rates of taxation - effectively the rich will have 0% taxation since they are the government in such countries and the poor will have either 0% (since they have nothing to tax) or 100% (since they don't get to keep much, if any, of the fruit of their labor) depending on how you look at it.
RMS is a smart guy, if he had wanted to enforce the "spirit of the GPL" (whatever that is) he would have made compliance specific in the GPL. To expect more than what is written in the GPL is only setting yourself up for constant disappointment.
Sounds like they need to upgrade to the latest version of mplayer!
Although funny, it is also true. AOL has been randomly blocking entire ISPs - my hosting service's outgoing SMTP server was arbitrarily blocked by AOL for a total of about a month back around October. My hosting service had absolutely no violations of any kind, and after 2-3 weeks of bitcing and voice-mail-hell, AOL did finally respond, agree that they were not big-bad-purveyors-of-donkey-dick and unblocked them... Only to reblock them again in about 10 days, at which point my hosting service had to start all over again with them. It seems like the second time was the charm since I just sent email to an AOL user today and it didn't bounce (maybe AOL is now silently eating email instead of bouncing, that sure wouldn't make my life easier).
Anyway, from what I read on the net my hosting provider's experience with AOL's blocking of incoming SMTP connections is not out of the ordinary, many, maybe hundreds, of "little guys" have had the same experience. Makes me want to know the false positive rate for their spam blocking -- I'm willing to bet that AOL themselves don't even know the answer to that one.
Yes, that number sounds right and the "industry standard" licensing fees were about one-third of that. Not sure what IBM has to do with RAMBUS, but perhaps you could explain that comment in more detail.
Micron is the only American manufacturer of RAM of any significant size. All those other companies you name are resellers of RAM, usually in DIMM form for PCs - just look at the actual chips on the DIMMs, you won't see any of them labeled "Geil" or "Kingston" - you will see names like Micron, Winbond, Hynix, etc.
The issue with RAMBUS is far more complicated than the general computer-using public is aware of. Even a general overview of the court testimony can prove enlightening - essentially it looks like ALL the world's RAM manufacturers did not want to pay RAMBUS's high licensing fees for RDRAM and so conspired to both steal parts of it and to make RAMBUS look very bad in the court of public opinion. RAMBUS hasn't done a very good job of getting their story out (it certainly didn't help when they became, or were forced to become, a pure litigation company in order to fight the conspiracy because nobody really likes a company full of lawyers) and it probably still isn't out fully.
There are a LOT of kooky penny-stock type theories bouncing around regarding RAMBUS and I don't claim to have the entire truth of the matter myself, I'm just an interested bystander (owning no shares of any memory manufacturer/licensor).
One last point - Micron was able to get anti-dumping tarrifs invoked against Hynix in the USA and Europe in the summer of 2003, on the order of 100% - I think that if Micron is found guilty of this conspiracy that they should no longer be given government-mandated protection from Hynix's pricing. (I want RAM to get even cheaper myself.)
I despise collective opinions.
Heh. Looks like it is time to get started on some serious self-loathing.
So you are saying this is just another manifestation of "follow the money." I haven't checked, but it sounds plausible to me. And of course, if that is the case, you know the suit is being brought under the Hollywood Amendment to the Bill of Rights - the Right of an entrenched industry to maintain profitability shall be guaranteed, regardless of changes in market, culture or technology. The RIAA has been working a few cases under the aegis of the Hollywood Amendment themselves.
Two rebutting points:
1) Nowdays, no studio will release a movie on DVD with a full 1.5mbps DTS track, they are ALL half-rate DTS.
2) I believe it is dolby that allocates bandwidth on the fly, AC3 has a total bandwidth pool from which it allocates bits as needed to each channel.
Arguments based on bit-rates are meaningless. For example, a 128Kbps Ogg will usually sound better than a 160Kbps mp3.