And what pray tell excludes Real or any other vendor from selling non RIAA music?
Oh lord, our father who art in Heaven it is profit. When the 100 top-selling albums are all RIAA produced, any online music business that wants to be larger than a gnat compared to iTunes must sell RIAA music.
What pray tell excludes them from growing a pair of balls and fighting the industry over it?
Oh lord, our father who art in Heaven it is Apple's monopoly. When the ipod accounts for over 90% of all downloadable music players, and iTunes has the market locked-up, Real has no stick with which to "fight the industry."
If you can propose one, even semi-reasonable plan for Real to "fight the industry" you would have a point. Otherwise you are just hand-waving in an attempt to distract from your deliberate obtuseness.
They've gone to court over breaking the DRM system which the iPod uses. Had real decided to instead release their files in an iPod compatible format without breaking the encryption scheme used by Apple there would have been no lawsuit.
You are being deliberately obtuse.
The lock-in is predicated on the absolute requirement by all RIAA members that any music sold online must be copy-restricted. Thus the only ipod-compatible source for downloadable RIAA-member music is iTunes.
It teeters on brainwashing in much the same way fundamentalists are up in arms about Harry Potter seducing children to the black arts.
Unless you are saying that you see imaginary boogeymen behind every "christian" movie, I don't think that is a good analogy. I'm pretty confident that number of people using Harry Potter stories to recruit kids to "the black arts" is close to zero, unless playing D&D is considered a "black art" nowadays...
and we laughed about it for like two hours until my sister made us delete it because she didn't want to get sued - my nephew has now internalized that meme - downloads are like shoplifting to him - which is to say wrong).
At 9, your nephew is at that stage of development in which he will see all forms of authoritarianism as the good and righteous way to live. Right now he's got very rigid beliefs about following rules. Just wait until he's 13 or so, all that was wrong will suddenly be right.
The difference is that when a US exec screws up at this magnitude, reguardless of how much apologizing happens, they will be canned in the very near future.
However, his fall from grace will almost certainly be cushioned by an enormous golden parachute.
If idols that had nothing to do with fertility, but, say, the harvesting of crops
Bad example. Fertility of the soil and fertility of women are very closely associated most cultures that use fertility idols. To the uneducated eye they look the same, you'd have a tough time telling the difference and in some cases it really is the same gods that are responsibile for both.
That all presumes that Apple R somehow "deserves" that business. They don't. They are the owner of the copyright for the beatles recordings. Apple Computer is just fantastically unlucky to have chosen a corporate name that was already in use in the music industry. At the time, there was no overlap between computers and music, so trademark law said there was no chance of people confusing the two companies, thus it was ok. Just to make sure, Apple Records sued (a couple of times, IIRC) and got Apple Computer to promise to stay out of the business of "producing" music.
But nowadays, Apple R is just "in the way" - there is no way they could create something like itunes, or the itunes store. Few, if anyone, would confuse them with the Apple that built itunes. Yet their trademarked name prevents Apple C from making the obvious next step with itunes - direct "representation" of independent artists.
This is a clear case were trademark law is not producing the intended effect - allowing a company to uniquely brand its products so the public can correctly identify them in the marketplace.
$1.99 for TV quality, $2.99 for DVD quality, and $3.99 for HD quality, perhaps?
I would pay more for HD, but $2 for TV quality is too high a baseline. I'm thinking $1 for 480p (DVD) and $1.50 for 1080p at the very most. Here's why:
Lost has been averaging over 20M viewers per episode this season Citation: http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20051117/n ews_lz1c17nielsen.html>
If we presume that for-pay tv downloading will become the dominate form of distribution, then at $1/episode that would translate into about a 700% return on investment - that kind of ROI is absolutely unheard of for a TV show - I mean it is so ridiculous that the entire management structure at ABC would die overnight from overdosing on the cocaine they bought with their bonuses if that should ever come to pass.
In fact, most shows, probably even including Lost today, lose money during their initial airing and only become profitable during syndication. It is those profitable shows that enable the funding for a lot of riskier and ultimately money-losing shows like Firefly, for example. Ultimately a ROI of 5-10% is probably close to what hollywood averages over all tv shows.
Thus even $1/episode is a heck of a lot for a popular show, although it might be appropriate for a show with a much smaller, niche market.
(and before any points out that I am ignoring infrastructure costs, they are in the noise at this level, particularly if a bandwdith-borrowing mechanism like bittorrent is employed).
On the off-chance that no one has patented a GPS spoofer yet, let this post be prior art to keep the idea in the public domain.
There are soo many of these cockamamie schemes coming out that depend on GPS - for examaple california was floating a mandatory GPS logger for highway use taxes - that there is certain to be a big market for GPS spoofers. The signals from the GPS satellites should be faint enough that overpowering them in a radius of say, 10 meters ought to be feasible with a handheld-sized device.
In this case, I see two popular uses.
1) Spoof your own GPS to "unlock" the accelerator. Make it think you are always in the booneys on a highway with an 80mph limit (or one with no limit in the system's database).
2) Spoof that idiot in front of you who is driving too slow or the jerk tailgating you. Put him in a school zone with limit of 10mph and watch him come to a near stand-still - slowpoke will eventually pull over to the shoulder and let you pass while the tailgater will quickly fall off your tailgate.
The people who wanted to make it mandatory were US politicians - those who control ICANN "just fine".
Although not obvious I think you and I are in agreement. The push for mandatory use was by politicians and they realized that no way that would pass muster with the US 1st ammendment so since it couldn't be used to censor the net, it was abandonded - at least by those moral crusaders. While not allowing an "opt-in".xxx domain is a bit censorial, it isn't anywhere in the same league since we don't have.xyz or.foofoo domains either and you'll note that the stated intent of this latest.xxx proposal was for the industry to "clean up its act" which is code for self-censorship.
Both false positives *and* false negatives will ruin the proposed automatic system.
Funny, because that is false.
Known expected behaviour is easy to control in a dedicated honeypot, and thus easy to filter out leaving only unexpected behaviour as a very reliable indicator of infection.
Microsoft's just-announce new feature in Windows Vista will allow you to patch most of the thing without rebooting. "No reboots"
You miss the point. If rebooting makes the virus go away, then it is easy to remove. Home users which make up the vaaaaaaaaaast majority of botnet members can be, and usually are powered down frequently. The whole no-reboots move on MS's part is for servers which will never be a major source of botnets because, at the very minimum, there aren't enough of them.
So why did they grant ".biz", ".info" etc.? And don't tell me they don't grant ".xxx" because they actually learned somthing..xxx was intended to be mandatory. No current domains have that requiremen and thus.xxx would be alone in causing all kinds of freedom of expression problems. Therefore your comparison is meaningless.
The key here is *reliable* virii detection. Idle honeypot or not, I say you can't reliably tell the machine is infected, hence the whole concept is flawed. There is no magic.
There is magic tinkerbell. It is called virtualization. Virtualize the honeypot and then watch his filesystem from "outside" - any unexpected writes will indicate infection. That should reliably catch all viruses that are intended to survive a reboot. Viruses that don't survive reboots aren't likely to be a problem.
The article is actually talking about high-bandwidth services such as streaming media and voice over IP... services that BellSouth themselves could offer and feel that their infrastructure should give priority to BellSouth first (or possibly another provider willing to pay for some of the backbone cost
And thus it is a perfect demonstration of why telco service providers - with their public utility monopolies - need to be prevented from entering the content biz. As long as it is more valuable for them to favor their bits versus someone else's bits, they have an inherent conflict of interest.
Does this mean Google will be targetting their advertising based on the kind and number of viruses they filter out?
For people who get a lot of viruses, they can advertise privacy tools, anti-virus software and adware removers. For people who do not get a lot of viruses, they get to see ads for social networks, dating sites, etc.
Truthfully, I don't want it to ask me (or my family). Too many people just click yes thinking they need the plugin to see the page, leading to the downloading of many, many bad things.
Perhaps, it should be a bit easier to get the plugin, but I don't want it too easy. However, I don't want to recreate the security nightmare of DirectX.
This is absolutely true. Plugin installation from non-approved sites is dangerous, it should be hard for a naive user to do.
Meanwhile, a sophisticated user will know that they can manually download the xpi file and install it from local disk with only minimal effort. Non-intuitiveness is a good thing in this case.
The only thing they accomplish is making it take longer to get the licensed release out, in my opinion. I've never heard a pro-dub that I would rather use than the subtitles. Most people around the world watch movies this way, except the lazy ones. Like the USians.
Nah, dubs are very common around the world. Anything remotely popular will probably end up dubbed for a lot of the local markets. Even in countries with high literacy rates, for example - My Sassy Girl is being dubbed in Tagalog for the Philippines - a country with about a 95% literacy rate, and probably 100% literacy of both Tagalog and English among those who can afford to see the movie.
I watch a lot of foriegn-langauage "live-action" movies and always watch with subtitles because, there are hardly any english dubs available, and when they are available the lip-sync differences are too distracting, plus the typically bad foley can be really annoying.
Meanwhile, I almost never watch anime with subtitles. Dubs are much more convenient for the casual fan, and unlike real-life, even the original audio track rarely syncs perfectly to the animated mouth movements. At least I don't notice synch problems with anime dubs the way I do with "live-action" and being able to look away from the screen and still track the story is handy.
I think everyone is aware that this is the basic principle of how technological warfare works and I believe that the police will win this race.
Except that every new 'weapon' the state develops in this arms race costs tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars. While every new counter-weapon from the criminals only costs hundreds or possibly thousands of dollars. Even if you get to print the money, you can't sustain an arms race like that for very long. Especially when the benefits received do not even cover the costs.
Texas is seeking civil penalties of $2 * 2 * 2 * 2 * 2 * 5 * 5 * 5 * 5 * 5 per violation of the state's Consumer Protection Against Computer Spyware Act,
Good thing Texas hasn't been teaching "intelligent math" (the theory that big numbers are too BIG to ever come from little numbers) else they'd never figure out how much sony's penalities will be.
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And what pray tell excludes Real or any other vendor from selling non RIAA music?
Oh lord, our father who art in Heaven it is profit. When the 100 top-selling albums are all RIAA produced, any online music business that wants to be larger than a gnat compared to iTunes must sell RIAA music.
What pray tell excludes them from growing a pair of balls and fighting the industry over it?
Oh lord, our father who art in Heaven it is Apple's monopoly. When the ipod accounts for over 90% of all downloadable music players, and iTunes has the market locked-up, Real has no stick with which to "fight the industry."
If you can propose one, even semi-reasonable plan for Real to "fight the industry" you would have a point. Otherwise you are just hand-waving in an attempt to distract from your deliberate obtuseness.
They've gone to court over breaking the DRM system which the iPod uses. Had real decided to instead release their files in an iPod compatible format without breaking the encryption scheme used by Apple there would have been no lawsuit.
You are being deliberately obtuse.
The lock-in is predicated on the absolute requirement by all RIAA members that any music sold online must be copy-restricted. Thus the only ipod-compatible source for downloadable RIAA-member music is iTunes.
I DIDN'T say Harry Potter is recruiting kids to the black arts
You compared "the recruiting in to the black arts" to "the recruiting in to christianity."
but I ASSURE there are Christian fundamentalist groups who are the rampage against the books for this reason.
And thus my comment about imaginary boogeymen.
It teeters on brainwashing in much the same way fundamentalists are up in arms about Harry Potter seducing children to the black arts.
Unless you are saying that you see imaginary boogeymen behind every "christian" movie, I don't think that is a good analogy. I'm pretty confident that number of people using Harry Potter stories to recruit kids to "the black arts" is close to zero, unless playing D&D is considered a "black art" nowadays...
My nephew is 9 -
and we laughed about it for like two hours until my sister made us delete it because she didn't want to get sued - my nephew has now internalized that meme - downloads are like shoplifting to him - which is to say wrong).
At 9, your nephew is at that stage of development in which he will see all forms of authoritarianism as the good and righteous way to live. Right now he's got very rigid beliefs about following rules. Just wait until he's 13 or so, all that was wrong will suddenly be right.
The difference is that when a US exec screws up at this magnitude, reguardless of how much apologizing happens, they will be canned in the very near future.
However, his fall from grace will almost certainly be cushioned by an enormous golden parachute.
non-jerk-new-wordphobes
I can't figure out if you mean neologophiles or a neologophobes - either way there is an old-word for whatever you are trying to say.
If idols that had nothing to do with fertility, but, say, the harvesting of crops
Bad example. Fertility of the soil and fertility of women are very closely associated most cultures that use fertility idols. To the uneducated eye they look the same, you'd have a tough time telling the difference and in some cases it really is the same gods that are responsibile for both.
untold numbers of demassified niches.
Lol! Corporatespeak meets blogospeak.
Oh, and Newsweek, shame on you.
They lost all capacity for such shame decades ago.
If you've ever read an issue, you would know that the more appropriate name for the publication is Newsweak .
Even USAToday does a better job.
why does the military-industrial complex let him have such a bully pulpit?
Because they are not omnipotent?
Because not enough people listen to him to make a difference anyway?
That all presumes that Apple R somehow "deserves" that business. They don't. They are the owner of the copyright for the beatles recordings. Apple Computer is just fantastically unlucky to have chosen a corporate name that was already in use in the music industry. At the time, there was no overlap between computers and music, so trademark law said there was no chance of people confusing the two companies, thus it was ok. Just to make sure, Apple Records sued (a couple of times, IIRC) and got Apple Computer to promise to stay out of the business of "producing" music.
But nowadays, Apple R is just "in the way" - there is no way they could create something like itunes, or the itunes store. Few, if anyone, would confuse them with the Apple that built itunes. Yet their trademarked name prevents Apple C from making the obvious next step with itunes - direct "representation" of independent artists.
This is a clear case were trademark law is not producing the intended effect - allowing a company to uniquely brand its products so the public can correctly identify them in the marketplace.
$1.99 for TV quality, $2.99 for DVD quality, and $3.99 for HD quality, perhaps?
m l
n ews_lz1c17nielsen.html>
I would pay more for HD, but $2 for TV quality is too high a baseline. I'm thinking $1 for 480p (DVD) and $1.50 for 1080p at the very most. Here's why:
Production costs for Lost are under $3M per episode and it is considered the most expensive show on TV today.
Citation: http://starbulletin.com/2005/01/26/news/story2.ht
Lost has been averaging over 20M viewers per episode this season
Citation: http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20051117/
If we presume that for-pay tv downloading will become the dominate form of distribution, then at $1/episode that would translate into about a 700% return on investment - that kind of ROI is absolutely unheard of for a TV show - I mean it is so ridiculous that the entire management structure at ABC would die overnight from overdosing on the cocaine they bought with their bonuses if that should ever come to pass.
In fact, most shows, probably even including Lost today, lose money during their initial airing and only become profitable during syndication. It is those profitable shows that enable the funding for a lot of riskier and ultimately money-losing shows like Firefly, for example. Ultimately a ROI of 5-10% is probably close to what hollywood averages over all tv shows.
Thus even $1/episode is a heck of a lot for a popular show, although it might be appropriate for a show with a much smaller, niche market.
(and before any points out that I am ignoring infrastructure costs, they are in the noise at this level, particularly if a bandwdith-borrowing mechanism like bittorrent is employed).
Personally, I would have been honest.
Personally, I can understand hypotheticals.
You learned about them before kindergarten, its called "make-believe."
On the off-chance that no one has patented a GPS spoofer yet, let this post be prior art to keep the idea in the public domain.
There are soo many of these cockamamie schemes coming out that depend on GPS - for examaple california was floating a mandatory GPS logger for highway use taxes - that there is certain to be a big market for GPS spoofers. The signals from the GPS satellites should be faint enough that overpowering them in a radius of say, 10 meters ought to be feasible with a handheld-sized device.
In this case, I see two popular uses.
1) Spoof your own GPS to "unlock" the accelerator. Make it think you are always in the booneys on a highway with an 80mph limit (or one with no limit in the system's database).
2) Spoof that idiot in front of you who is driving too slow or the jerk tailgating you. Put him in a school zone with limit of 10mph and watch him come to a near stand-still - slowpoke will eventually pull over to the shoulder and let you pass while the tailgater will quickly fall off your tailgate.
The people who wanted to make it mandatory were US politicians - those who control ICANN "just fine".
.xxx domain is a bit censorial, it isn't anywhere in the same league since we don't have .xyz or .foofoo domains either and you'll note that the stated intent of this latest .xxx proposal was for the industry to "clean up its act" which is code for self-censorship.
Although not obvious I think you and I are in agreement. The push for mandatory use was by politicians and they realized that no way that would pass muster with the US 1st ammendment so since it couldn't be used to censor the net, it was abandonded - at least by those moral crusaders. While not allowing an "opt-in"
Both false positives *and* false negatives will ruin the proposed automatic system.
Funny, because that is false.
Known expected behaviour is easy to control in a dedicated honeypot, and thus easy to filter out leaving only unexpected behaviour as a very reliable indicator of infection.
Microsoft's just-announce new feature in Windows Vista will allow you to patch most of the thing without rebooting. "No reboots"
You miss the point. If rebooting makes the virus go away, then it is easy to remove. Home users which make up the vaaaaaaaaaast majority of botnet members can be, and usually are powered down frequently. The whole no-reboots move on MS's part is for servers which will never be a major source of botnets because, at the very minimum, there aren't enough of them.
So why did they grant ".biz", ".info" etc.? And don't tell me they don't grant ".xxx" because they actually learned somthing. .xxx was intended to be mandatory. No current domains have that requiremen and thus .xxx would be alone in causing all kinds of freedom of expression problems. Therefore your comparison is meaningless.
The key here is *reliable* virii detection. Idle honeypot or not, I say you can't reliably tell the machine is infected, hence the whole concept is flawed. There is no magic.
There is magic tinkerbell.
It is called virtualization.
Virtualize the honeypot and then watch his filesystem from "outside" - any unexpected writes will indicate infection. That should reliably catch all viruses that are intended to survive a reboot. Viruses that don't survive reboots aren't likely to be a problem.
The article is actually talking about high-bandwidth services such as streaming media and voice over IP ... services that BellSouth themselves could offer and feel that their infrastructure should give priority to BellSouth first (or possibly another provider willing to pay for some of the backbone cost
And thus it is a perfect demonstration of why telco service providers - with their public utility monopolies - need to be prevented from entering the content biz. As long as it is more valuable for them to favor their bits versus someone else's bits, they have an inherent conflict of interest.
Does this mean Google will be targetting their advertising based on the kind and number of viruses they filter out?
For people who get a lot of viruses, they can advertise privacy tools, anti-virus software and adware removers.
For people who do not get a lot of viruses, they get to see ads for social networks, dating sites, etc.
Truthfully, I don't want it to ask me (or my family). Too many people just click yes thinking they need the plugin to see the page, leading to the downloading of many, many bad things.
Perhaps, it should be a bit easier to get the plugin, but I don't want it too easy. However, I don't want to recreate the security nightmare of DirectX.
This is absolutely true. Plugin installation from non-approved sites is dangerous, it should be hard for a naive user to do.
Meanwhile, a sophisticated user will know that they can manually download the xpi file and install it from local disk with only minimal effort. Non-intuitiveness is a good thing in this case.
The only thing they accomplish is making it take longer to get the licensed release out, in my opinion. I've never heard a pro-dub that I would rather use than the subtitles. Most people around the world watch movies this way, except the lazy ones. Like the USians.
Nah, dubs are very common around the world. Anything remotely popular will probably end up dubbed for a lot of the local markets. Even in countries with high literacy rates, for example - My Sassy Girl is being dubbed in Tagalog for the Philippines - a country with about a 95% literacy rate, and probably 100% literacy of both Tagalog and English among those who can afford to see the movie.
I watch a lot of foriegn-langauage "live-action" movies and always watch with subtitles because, there are hardly any english dubs available, and when they are available the lip-sync differences are too distracting, plus the typically bad foley can be really annoying.
Meanwhile, I almost never watch anime with subtitles. Dubs are much more convenient for the casual fan, and unlike real-life, even the original audio track rarely syncs perfectly to the animated mouth movements. At least I don't notice synch problems with anime dubs the way I do with "live-action" and being able to look away from the screen and still track the story is handy.
I think everyone is aware that this is the basic principle of how technological warfare works and I believe that the police will win this race.
Except that every new 'weapon' the state develops in this arms race costs tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars. While every new counter-weapon from the criminals only costs hundreds or possibly thousands of dollars. Even if you get to print the money, you can't sustain an arms race like that for very long. Especially when the benefits received do not even cover the costs.
Texas is seeking civil penalties of $2 * 2 * 2 * 2 * 2 * 5 * 5 * 5 * 5 * 5 per violation of the state's Consumer Protection Against Computer Spyware Act,
Good thing Texas hasn't been teaching "intelligent math" (the theory that big numbers are too BIG to ever come from little numbers) else they'd never figure out how much sony's penalities will be.