Great, now the asshole on the cellphone next to me is going to lean over me to look through the transparent aisle of the floor as he describes the view to the person on the other end of his call.
In all seriousness, I'd find transparent planes cool, but I'm willing to bet that relatively few people would want to fly on them. A surprising number of people are very anxious about air travel. (Personally, I find flying relaxing. It's getting through the security checkpoints in the airport while hoping not to be the guy selected for a random full GI tract search that worries me.)
Shock! The attack surface is proportional to the amount of functionality offered! Ergo, we can build more secure applications by eliminating functionality!
I have a lot of respect for the security community, but sometimes they confuse the newsworthy with the merely obvious.
From personal experiences only, I would say it is the fundamental difference in mindset required to practice a science over engineering. Self doubt and questioning are par for the course in the physical sciences, indeed it would be extremely difficult to do the job without the question "Are you sure?" running through your head every 15 min. Engineers on the other hand tend to deal in absolutes, laws carved in stone, it works or it doesn't, black and white. This does appeal to those with a predisposition to ignore shades of gray and are exactly the same traits as those of a fundamentalist of any persuasion, making them the ideal recruiting target.
I think this is a gross overgeneralization, but it does point out the significant difference between scientists and engineers. Scientists are primarily engaged with figuring out how the world works, while engineers are primarily engaged with using the discoveries of scientists to accomplish specific goals. There's some overlap, of course, but you can be a great scientist without being an engineer and vice versa.
As far as terrorism goes, if I need a bomb, I'll go to an engineer. But that said, it wouldn't occur to me to have the engineer actually deliver it. I'd just use the engineer to design some drool-proof instructions for building bombs from commonly available materials and then use garden-variety religious/political fanatics to do the suicidal grunt work. If more bombers are engineers than otherwise, I'd think that says more about the mindset of their managers than the bombers.
Real continuous curves are pretty much useless for gaming, as they are an artificial restriction that really doesn't help much with anything, unless its CAD or you want to fit your game into 64KiB.
Actually, there are two benefits aside from reduced memory consumption (which is nothing to sneeze at): many continuous shapes render faster than polygon meshes when ray-traced, and they look better. I have yet to see a 3D game where the triangle mesh wasn't obvious along the boundaries of objects or, for that matter, where the mapping of textures to meshes wasn't also flat and obvious. Look at the barrel-vaulted ceiling and where it meets the wall in TFA. With ray-tracing, it's possible to entirely eliminate the faceting.
Vector is only good for low detail stuff like logos, if you want to get photorealism you go with pixels.
Maybe you missed the part about the analogy. Here's another one: ray-traced, mathematically defined shapes are to polygonal meshes as clay is to Legos. Yes, you can build anything out of Legos, but it's not necessarily the best tool for the job, it's not very flexible, it makes modeling simple shapes harder than it should be, and it's painfully obvious that you built it out of Legos.
This is the "cool people" phenomenon, like we see in music. These people will go round telling everyone how much they like X niche band as long as nobody knows about it, but if/when that band becomes popular, they'll start saying "Oh, I don't like that any more!". Same here, except with niche software.
There's some of that, but mostly, I think it's that people (almost always wrongly) assume that everyone else is like them. I think Canonical does a good job with Ubuntu, but Slackware suits my purposes better. I don't for a minute assume that most users would benefit from my personal choices -- Ubuntu is probably the best distro for non-technical users -- but a lot of people, like some of Canonical's critics, are unable or unwilling to see things from any point of view other than their own personal interests.
There's also probably a certain level of frustration that many people have when they really like something that most people are indifferent to. Learning to accept that is a basic aspect of maturity that eludes some folks, apparently including the critics in question. If you care, I'll be happy to tell you all about why the 8-bit Apple II was the coolest thing ever, but if you don't care, I'm okay with keeping it to myself.
Even paying attention to these squabbles is a waste of time. If someone has a beef with Canonical, that's pretty much between those two parties. Why should anyone else care? Canonical hasn't done anything that harms me, and the bulk of their critics haven't done anything to help me. It's like the media jumping all over that one crank of a preacher and his fifty-person church in a small town in rural Florida who was going to burn the Qu'ran. Without all the media attention, no one more than a few blocks away from that bozo would have cared.
In any case, until Microsoft launches a Linux distro, the sky isn't falling.
The model is highly detailed with around one million triangles.
Sounds like the programmers are way too used to the dominant rendering model. One of the advantages of ray tracing is that you don't have to build everything out of triangles; you can have real continuous curves. For example, a ray-traced sphere can be an actual sphere. A lot of objects that require thousands of triangles with current GPUs can be produced using a much smaller number of objects using constructive solid geometry in a ray tracing context. It's analogous to the difference between raster and vector graphics.
However, what disturbs me about Seekfind is its apparent narrowness in what they deem as "Christian-enough."
And there, in a nutshell, is why religious people should be as alarmed by religious censorship as non-religious people: once they're done with the infidels, then they come after the heretics. And as each batch of heretics are dealt with, the deviations necessary to be considered a heretic become smaller and smaller.
It's an interesting concept, but won't government agents with an agenda simply look to non-Microsoft software as an excuse for a raid?
Probably, but for an awful lot of office workers -- and I presume this covers most of the NGOs and journalists in question -- all they need is covered by Microsoft software. And if it's a choice between being swept up by internal security agents or being a 100% Microsoft shop, I'm going to guess that the occasional BSOD beats the inside of a Russian prison.
The "intellectual capacity to store information" and the "ability to think innovatively" are controlled by two completely different cognitive mechanisms.
To say nothing of the less fundamental but still important fact that the abilities to use a search engine and evaluate the credibility of sources are independent skills. If anything, it's the latter that has become an issue, not because people have gotten worse at it, but just because many sources of information are now available to the vast majority of people who were never very good at evaluating sources to begin with.
In any case, considering the main uses of Google, it's not like the ability to store information about either porn or the URLs of shopping sites matters very much in any practical sense. The same can probably be said for the ability to think innovatively about porn and shopping, too.
Or why, with 600,000 in revenue, he's even using PayPal at all instead of just getting a merchant account with a real bank? Hell, *I* did that with a project that ended up making a whopping $750.
I don't know about the "nano-fibers", though I've gotten to be suspicious of "nano" as a meaningless marketing term like "cyber" was ten years ago, but activated carbon's efficacy as a filter depends on how long it is kept in contact with the water, which is why those pricey tap filters are generally a waste of money. It's probably better than nothing if you're drinking water out of a stream or lake, but I'd be genuinely surprised if it was much better than nothing.
This must be a clever joke. The story contains elements of things that would make up a typical Slashdot story: intellectual property rights, EU regulators, Australia, restraint of speech, and products with a fanatically devoted following that no one else gives a shit about.
The punchline? The story is about a beverage produced by technologies that are several millennia old.
In all fairness, the actors in this movie were all relative unknowns. I'd imagine a substantial chunk of the cost came from shooting it in the middle east. Hauling a large number of people and a lot of equipment to the other side of the planet and keeping them there for a couple of months is expensive.
I've never been sure why it is, but SQL (and the relational model it can be used to implement if you know what you're doing) attracts more wild-eyed fanatics than the Amiga and Ruby. Nowhere else will you find so many people so confidently and aggressively certain that the have the One True Way to do things, at least not without getting into actual religion. That anyone, anywhere does things differently (or even thinks about it) seems to deeply threaten them and provoke the sort of contempt that normal people reserve for child pornography. It frankly baffles me. DBA compensation isn't that good, and certainly not all DBAs can be such one-trick ponies.
The simple fact of the matter is that the relational model is probably the best general purpose data storage model we have, and it has the advantage of logical rigor and, as a result, the advantage of being extremely well-understood. But this in no way changes the fact that any general purpose approach, at least in some (but probably many if not most) cases, will be outperformed by a well-designed application-specific method. This remains the case no matter what your methodological hobby horse is, except in the tiny minority of cases where a truly optimal method can be rigorously proven.
Worse -- and this is true of all kinds of fanaticism, computer science-related and otherwise -- it tends to discourage research into unexplored areas that might yield new and better methods. E.F. Codd developed the relational model through precisely such an expedition into the mathematical unknown, and someday, the model that surpasses it (at least for certain cases) will be produced in the same way. It might be a descendant of one of the current so-called NoSQL approaches. It could be a reaction to their shortcomings. It might come from a completely unexpected corner. But wherever it comes from, you can be certain that we will enjoy its benefits later than we had to because it will have to push through the reactionary resistance of people who've stared at the relational model for so long that they can conceive of nothing else.
This is only the case in programming languages because context-free languages are easier to write parsers for and can be guaranteed to operate in linear time. Even then, the same literal token can have entirely different meanings in different lexical scopes.
Human brains, on the other hand, have hardwired structures devoted to parsing non-context-free languages. This turns out to be advantageous in a number of ways, one of the more important of which is that meanings are indexed by the word and the context, reducing the number of entries that must be searched in order to understand the word. If evolution had given us an indexing scheme based solely on phonemes, we could probably have a one-to-one relationship between words (actually, morphemes) and meanings, but at the expense of having a hugely expanded vocabulary. Anyway, there's no reason to leave wetware features unused just because we haven't figured out how to replicate them in silicon yet.
The point being -- to put it in programmer-friendly terms -- is that one shouldn't expect natural language documents to parse like formal language documents any more than one would expect 6502 assembly language to run on the JVM.
Purpose of the BSD license also is to let everyone use code freely the way they want, the only true form of freedom. Once you start demanding something more than attribution you're removing freedom and limiting what people can do, making it no better than just having a commercial license. This is also why I view BSD license as way more free than GPL, which has many, many limitations forced upon you. Not really the definition of freedom, is it?
I wish to heck that people would stop having arguments over the definition of "freedom" as if they were debating something substantial. It's like debating the definition of "art" or the value of the variable x. The meaning depends upon who's using it and in what context. The BSD license is more free in the sense that you're using the word, and less free in the sense that GPL advocates use the word. Neither side is right or wrong, and at least for a concept as vague (in both cases) as "freedom", there is no "true form of freedom". (In your case, public domain is freer than the BSD license.) Both sides are stubbornly arguing over terminology. More disturbingly, an awful lot of people seem to be unable to tell the difference between words/symbols and the things to which they refer.
Free software advocates really need to understand that if you want to have true freedom, you have to let people use the project the way the want to and stop tossing a fit when someone doesn't contribute back to it.
This much is obvious. If giving things away was a good way to get things in return, it would have supplanted the selling of things thousands of years ago. What free software advocates really need to do is to decide whether they're generously contributing to the common good or running a business. With the exception of full-blown non-profit organizations -- which are not trivial undertakings -- the two goals are mutually exclusive. And yes, expecting for-profit businesses not to take anything cheap or free they can get and turn around and sell it at a premium, value-added or not, is breathtakingly naïve. Speaking of definitions, that's what "business" means.
If this is indeed the case, then shouldn't a municipal broadband should be no threat at all to private industry, and therefore there should be nothing at all for them to worry about.
Yeah, except that the private sector has to deal with one built-in inefficiency that government doesn't: turning a profit. If a government utility delivers acceptable service and just manages to break even, everyone is happy. If a company just breaks even -- especially if it's publicly traded -- management gets replaced by people who are willing to charge more and/or deliver less. Nowhere is this more true than in the case of utilities, which by nature are monopolies.
Don't get me wrong, capitalism works great -- but only in those areas where it works at all. Monopolies aren't one of those places. Neither are cases like healthcare, where both sides aren't equally free to walk away from the deal, which is why your triple coronary bypass costs several orders of magnitude more than a whole year's worth of the cheeseburgers that led to your needing one.
I'm surprised that it took this long, actually. Charity was only legal in the first place because there was no way for charities to significantly compete with for-profit businesses as long as we were talking about goods and services. Data is any entirely different matter, thanks to the negligible cost of duplication and distribution.
If you think large businesses are going to tolerate kindness and generosity when it cuts into their bottom lines, you are in for a long series of rude shocks. Abundance is bad for business.
At some point, they're actually doing society more harm than good.
The music industry has always been doing more harm than good. If you think artists are getting screwed now, you should see what was happening to them thirty or forty years ago.
The only thing that has changed recently is that the Internet has provided an alternative, low-cost distribution channel and promotional medium that obsoletes the RIAA racket. The only reason the RIAA is still around is that musicians, like artists in general, are terrible businessmen, and relatively few have figured out how to make money with the new medium. Given enough time, someone will figure out a generally applicable model, and everyone else will follow suit. That's the eventuality that the RIAA is desperately trying to forestall.
What will be enough for these people? Everybody just simply tithes to them?
Slashdot Mirror
Great, now the asshole on the cellphone next to me is going to lean over me to look through the transparent aisle of the floor as he describes the view to the person on the other end of his call.
In all seriousness, I'd find transparent planes cool, but I'm willing to bet that relatively few people would want to fly on them. A surprising number of people are very anxious about air travel. (Personally, I find flying relaxing. It's getting through the security checkpoints in the airport while hoping not to be the guy selected for a random full GI tract search that worries me.)
Shock! The attack surface is proportional to the amount of functionality offered! Ergo, we can build more secure applications by eliminating functionality!
I have a lot of respect for the security community, but sometimes they confuse the newsworthy with the merely obvious.
From personal experiences only, I would say it is the fundamental difference in mindset required to practice a science over engineering. Self doubt and questioning are par for the course in the physical sciences, indeed it would be extremely difficult to do the job without the question "Are you sure?" running through your head every 15 min. Engineers on the other hand tend to deal in absolutes, laws carved in stone, it works or it doesn't, black and white. This does appeal to those with a predisposition to ignore shades of gray and are exactly the same traits as those of a fundamentalist of any persuasion, making them the ideal recruiting target.
I think this is a gross overgeneralization, but it does point out the significant difference between scientists and engineers. Scientists are primarily engaged with figuring out how the world works, while engineers are primarily engaged with using the discoveries of scientists to accomplish specific goals. There's some overlap, of course, but you can be a great scientist without being an engineer and vice versa.
As far as terrorism goes, if I need a bomb, I'll go to an engineer. But that said, it wouldn't occur to me to have the engineer actually deliver it. I'd just use the engineer to design some drool-proof instructions for building bombs from commonly available materials and then use garden-variety religious/political fanatics to do the suicidal grunt work. If more bombers are engineers than otherwise, I'd think that says more about the mindset of their managers than the bombers.
Didn't Plan 9's filesystem combine journaling and block-level de-duplication years ago?
Real continuous curves are pretty much useless for gaming, as they are an artificial restriction that really doesn't help much with anything, unless its CAD or you want to fit your game into 64KiB.
Actually, there are two benefits aside from reduced memory consumption (which is nothing to sneeze at): many continuous shapes render faster than polygon meshes when ray-traced, and they look better. I have yet to see a 3D game where the triangle mesh wasn't obvious along the boundaries of objects or, for that matter, where the mapping of textures to meshes wasn't also flat and obvious. Look at the barrel-vaulted ceiling and where it meets the wall in TFA. With ray-tracing, it's possible to entirely eliminate the faceting.
Vector is only good for low detail stuff like logos, if you want to get photorealism you go with pixels.
Maybe you missed the part about the analogy. Here's another one: ray-traced, mathematically defined shapes are to polygonal meshes as clay is to Legos. Yes, you can build anything out of Legos, but it's not necessarily the best tool for the job, it's not very flexible, it makes modeling simple shapes harder than it should be, and it's painfully obvious that you built it out of Legos.
This is the "cool people" phenomenon, like we see in music. These people will go round telling everyone how much they like X niche band as long as nobody knows about it, but if/when that band becomes popular, they'll start saying "Oh, I don't like that any more!". Same here, except with niche software.
There's some of that, but mostly, I think it's that people (almost always wrongly) assume that everyone else is like them. I think Canonical does a good job with Ubuntu, but Slackware suits my purposes better. I don't for a minute assume that most users would benefit from my personal choices -- Ubuntu is probably the best distro for non-technical users -- but a lot of people, like some of Canonical's critics, are unable or unwilling to see things from any point of view other than their own personal interests.
There's also probably a certain level of frustration that many people have when they really like something that most people are indifferent to. Learning to accept that is a basic aspect of maturity that eludes some folks, apparently including the critics in question. If you care, I'll be happy to tell you all about why the 8-bit Apple II was the coolest thing ever, but if you don't care, I'm okay with keeping it to myself.
Even paying attention to these squabbles is a waste of time. If someone has a beef with Canonical, that's pretty much between those two parties. Why should anyone else care? Canonical hasn't done anything that harms me, and the bulk of their critics haven't done anything to help me. It's like the media jumping all over that one crank of a preacher and his fifty-person church in a small town in rural Florida who was going to burn the Qu'ran. Without all the media attention, no one more than a few blocks away from that bozo would have cared.
In any case, until Microsoft launches a Linux distro, the sky isn't falling.
The model is highly detailed with around one million triangles.
Sounds like the programmers are way too used to the dominant rendering model. One of the advantages of ray tracing is that you don't have to build everything out of triangles; you can have real continuous curves. For example, a ray-traced sphere can be an actual sphere. A lot of objects that require thousands of triangles with current GPUs can be produced using a much smaller number of objects using constructive solid geometry in a ray tracing context. It's analogous to the difference between raster and vector graphics.
Will Microsoft start asking us whether or not we should get a discount and trust us to answer honestly?
No.
However, what disturbs me about Seekfind is its apparent narrowness in what they deem as "Christian-enough."
And there, in a nutshell, is why religious people should be as alarmed by religious censorship as non-religious people: once they're done with the infidels, then they come after the heretics. And as each batch of heretics are dealt with, the deviations necessary to be considered a heretic become smaller and smaller.
It's an interesting concept, but won't government agents with an agenda simply look to non-Microsoft software as an excuse for a raid?
Probably, but for an awful lot of office workers -- and I presume this covers most of the NGOs and journalists in question -- all they need is covered by Microsoft software. And if it's a choice between being swept up by internal security agents or being a 100% Microsoft shop, I'm going to guess that the occasional BSOD beats the inside of a Russian prison.
The "intellectual capacity to store information" and the "ability to think innovatively" are controlled by two completely different cognitive mechanisms.
To say nothing of the less fundamental but still important fact that the abilities to use a search engine and evaluate the credibility of sources are independent skills. If anything, it's the latter that has become an issue, not because people have gotten worse at it, but just because many sources of information are now available to the vast majority of people who were never very good at evaluating sources to begin with.
In any case, considering the main uses of Google, it's not like the ability to store information about either porn or the URLs of shopping sites matters very much in any practical sense. The same can probably be said for the ability to think innovatively about porn and shopping, too.
Or why, with 600,000 in revenue, he's even using PayPal at all instead of just getting a merchant account with a real bank? Hell, *I* did that with a project that ended up making a whopping $750.
I don't know about the "nano-fibers", though I've gotten to be suspicious of "nano" as a meaningless marketing term like "cyber" was ten years ago, but activated carbon's efficacy as a filter depends on how long it is kept in contact with the water, which is why those pricey tap filters are generally a waste of money. It's probably better than nothing if you're drinking water out of a stream or lake, but I'd be genuinely surprised if it was much better than nothing.
This must be a clever joke. The story contains elements of things that would make up a typical Slashdot story: intellectual property rights, EU regulators, Australia, restraint of speech, and products with a fanatically devoted following that no one else gives a shit about.
The punchline? The story is about a beverage produced by technologies that are several millennia old.
In all fairness, the actors in this movie were all relative unknowns. I'd imagine a substantial chunk of the cost came from shooting it in the middle east. Hauling a large number of people and a lot of equipment to the other side of the planet and keeping them there for a couple of months is expensive.
But other than that, point taken.
...maybe the film didn't do all that well because not that many people were interested in it. I know I had absolutely no interest in watching it.
I've never been sure why it is, but SQL (and the relational model it can be used to implement if you know what you're doing) attracts more wild-eyed fanatics than the Amiga and Ruby. Nowhere else will you find so many people so confidently and aggressively certain that the have the One True Way to do things, at least not without getting into actual religion. That anyone, anywhere does things differently (or even thinks about it) seems to deeply threaten them and provoke the sort of contempt that normal people reserve for child pornography. It frankly baffles me. DBA compensation isn't that good, and certainly not all DBAs can be such one-trick ponies.
The simple fact of the matter is that the relational model is probably the best general purpose data storage model we have, and it has the advantage of logical rigor and, as a result, the advantage of being extremely well-understood. But this in no way changes the fact that any general purpose approach, at least in some (but probably many if not most) cases, will be outperformed by a well-designed application-specific method. This remains the case no matter what your methodological hobby horse is, except in the tiny minority of cases where a truly optimal method can be rigorously proven.
Worse -- and this is true of all kinds of fanaticism, computer science-related and otherwise -- it tends to discourage research into unexplored areas that might yield new and better methods. E.F. Codd developed the relational model through precisely such an expedition into the mathematical unknown, and someday, the model that surpasses it (at least for certain cases) will be produced in the same way. It might be a descendant of one of the current so-called NoSQL approaches. It could be a reaction to their shortcomings. It might come from a completely unexpected corner. But wherever it comes from, you can be certain that we will enjoy its benefits later than we had to because it will have to push through the reactionary resistance of people who've stared at the relational model for so long that they can conceive of nothing else.
This is only the case in programming languages because context-free languages are easier to write parsers for and can be guaranteed to operate in linear time. Even then, the same literal token can have entirely different meanings in different lexical scopes.
Human brains, on the other hand, have hardwired structures devoted to parsing non-context-free languages. This turns out to be advantageous in a number of ways, one of the more important of which is that meanings are indexed by the word and the context, reducing the number of entries that must be searched in order to understand the word. If evolution had given us an indexing scheme based solely on phonemes, we could probably have a one-to-one relationship between words (actually, morphemes) and meanings, but at the expense of having a hugely expanded vocabulary. Anyway, there's no reason to leave wetware features unused just because we haven't figured out how to replicate them in silicon yet.
The point being -- to put it in programmer-friendly terms -- is that one shouldn't expect natural language documents to parse like formal language documents any more than one would expect 6502 assembly language to run on the JVM.
Too bad none of them are involved in this project.
Purpose of the BSD license also is to let everyone use code freely the way they want, the only true form of freedom. Once you start demanding something more than attribution you're removing freedom and limiting what people can do, making it no better than just having a commercial license. This is also why I view BSD license as way more free than GPL, which has many, many limitations forced upon you. Not really the definition of freedom, is it?
I wish to heck that people would stop having arguments over the definition of "freedom" as if they were debating something substantial. It's like debating the definition of "art" or the value of the variable x. The meaning depends upon who's using it and in what context. The BSD license is more free in the sense that you're using the word, and less free in the sense that GPL advocates use the word. Neither side is right or wrong, and at least for a concept as vague (in both cases) as "freedom", there is no "true form of freedom". (In your case, public domain is freer than the BSD license.) Both sides are stubbornly arguing over terminology. More disturbingly, an awful lot of people seem to be unable to tell the difference between words/symbols and the things to which they refer.
Free software advocates really need to understand that if you want to have true freedom, you have to let people use the project the way the want to and stop tossing a fit when someone doesn't contribute back to it.
This much is obvious. If giving things away was a good way to get things in return, it would have supplanted the selling of things thousands of years ago. What free software advocates really need to do is to decide whether they're generously contributing to the common good or running a business. With the exception of full-blown non-profit organizations -- which are not trivial undertakings -- the two goals are mutually exclusive. And yes, expecting for-profit businesses not to take anything cheap or free they can get and turn around and sell it at a premium, value-added or not, is breathtakingly naïve. Speaking of definitions, that's what "business" means.
If this is indeed the case, then shouldn't a municipal broadband should be no threat at all to private industry, and therefore there should be nothing at all for them to worry about.
Yeah, except that the private sector has to deal with one built-in inefficiency that government doesn't: turning a profit. If a government utility delivers acceptable service and just manages to break even, everyone is happy. If a company just breaks even -- especially if it's publicly traded -- management gets replaced by people who are willing to charge more and/or deliver less. Nowhere is this more true than in the case of utilities, which by nature are monopolies.
Don't get me wrong, capitalism works great -- but only in those areas where it works at all. Monopolies aren't one of those places. Neither are cases like healthcare, where both sides aren't equally free to walk away from the deal, which is why your triple coronary bypass costs several orders of magnitude more than a whole year's worth of the cheeseburgers that led to your needing one.
diesel fuel spilled on a roadway is not exceptionally slippery
Try going over it on a motorcycle sometime. After you've had time to recover, we can compare scars.
...if it means that we'll start getting computer monitors with higher resolutions again instead of repurposed HDTV screens.
I'm surprised that it took this long, actually. Charity was only legal in the first place because there was no way for charities to significantly compete with for-profit businesses as long as we were talking about goods and services. Data is any entirely different matter, thanks to the negligible cost of duplication and distribution.
If you think large businesses are going to tolerate kindness and generosity when it cuts into their bottom lines, you are in for a long series of rude shocks. Abundance is bad for business.
At some point, they're actually doing society more harm than good.
The music industry has always been doing more harm than good. If you think artists are getting screwed now, you should see what was happening to them thirty or forty years ago.
The only thing that has changed recently is that the Internet has provided an alternative, low-cost distribution channel and promotional medium that obsoletes the RIAA racket. The only reason the RIAA is still around is that musicians, like artists in general, are terrible businessmen, and relatively few have figured out how to make money with the new medium. Given enough time, someone will figure out a generally applicable model, and everyone else will follow suit. That's the eventuality that the RIAA is desperately trying to forestall.
What will be enough for these people? Everybody just simply tithes to them?
Exactly.