Every few years music gets more expensive, even though production, manufacturing, and distribution costs decrease.
While I'm no fan of the RIAA, I find this statement pretty funny. While manufacturing costs have gone done, they are a small portion of the cost. Distribution costs have gone up. It costs more to ship things today than it did 10 years ago. That is just inflation. Production is probably the same as it was then, or possibly more expensive as equipment has gotten better. The cost of candy bars has also risen in the last 10 years, but the cost of manufacturing them has gone down, so where is the outrage? It's a simple fact that the majority of cost for a CD goes into production and marketing. And that most CDs never even make enough money to recoup what was put into them. I'm no fan of the RIAA and their tactics, but writing the whole thing off as "CDs only cost $1 to make, so they are charging way to much and deserve to have their stuff stolen" oversimplifies the whole thing to the point of being ridiculous.
Funny. Compaq (now HP) is running large ads in the trade press touting that they were the first major company to support Linux and Open Source.
Now they fire a major advocate? Sounds like the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.
Does being a Linux advocate make him the best person for the job? Does supporting Linux mean employing Linux advocates even at the expense of other parts of you company? There is a world of difference between supporting Linux and open source and bashing MS. The feel Bruce is bashing MS and that may (or is) causing them problems. They can still support Linux and open source without Bruce around, and not have to worry about the potential for problems with MS.
Except for the part where several PTP members happened to be at Starbucks the day the T-mobile installers came. As I mention in my comment above, they talked for quite a while, with the T-mobile installers being made aware of a) the PTP node, b) how long it had been installed (some 6+ months by then, longer in testing), and c) what channel it was on.
Not to point out the obvious, but just because Joe Installer chatted with some PTP members doesn't mean anyone knew anything about the network. The average installer doesn;t know anything about corporate policy, doesn't care about corporate policy, and doesn't want to get involved in corporate policy. This guy was hired to install everything on channel one, and that's what he did. He didn't worry about who else was on channel one, because he doesn't get paid to do that.
All OSS no better than all CSS
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Mega-Geek March?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I don't understand why people are supporting this. Requiring the government to use a specific type of software is a bad idea, whether that software be open source or closed source. The government should be using the best software for the job. All types of software should be considered, and all aspects of the software (availability of source code, price, features, easy of use, etc) should be considered. The minute you lock into one type of software, you set yourself up for major problems. Sure, Linux and Open Office are good enough to replace Windows and MS Office, but if they require all their software be OSS, what are they going to use for their financial system? The OSS financial products are no where near as good as the closed source products. There are some places where there just isn't a good OSS alternative and requiring them to use an inferior product makes no sense at all. We should be encouraging the government to consider all products equally, not trying to pull the same tactics that MS is pulling. It's no more right for the OSS community to lock people in than it is for the CSS people (even less right when we are trying to make it a law that cannot easily be changed if the policy is bad).
So if you don't make any money you should have absolute rights to do anything you want with other people's property without paying them anything? So if I don't make money I can make photocopies of a new book and hand them out? Redistribute GPL software without following the GPL rules?
I think the rates are too high, but the RIAA owns the rights to the songs. Just as we shouldn't safeguard the RIAA because their business model is outdated and being killed, we shouldn't safeguard radio stations whose business models don't allow them to make enough money to pay for what they are using. Should I be able to pay less for a BMW because I don't make as much as other people? No, I have to pay what they set the price at. Just because internet radio doesn't have a good enough business model doesn't mean they should pay less, it means they should get a better business model. If they don't want to pay the RIAA, they should play non-RIAA music exclusively.
There's a LOT of stuff that doesn't get canned by the RIAA corporations -- and that's what they're actually worried about. There are a few things to remember here:
Recording contracts rob artists blind everybody BUT the musicians makes money on most recording contracts 90% of all recording artists end up owing money to the record label. most artists are just happy to know that somebody is listening to their stuff. Most musicians make money from touring. They eat losses on the recording contracts because it gives them exposure for their tours P2P music distribution could replace recording contracts for many musicians.
Let's look at your points. 1. Artists are not robbed. They willing sign unfair contracts of their own free will. I agree the contracts are unfair, but if you agree to give me $5 in exchange for me giving you nothing, you can't complain that I have robbed you. 2. The only people that make money on most recording contracts are the people that are paid up front, i.e. engineers, the recording studio itself, producers, etc. Labels lose money on most CDs produced. 3. It is true that 90% of artists end up owing money to the label, but that is a direct result of 2. If the CD does not sell enough to make back the money the label has lent the artist, then the artist owes the label (mind you this is usually never repaid). So while the artist ends up owing money he will never have to repay, the label is out actual money they have spent. 4.If most artists are just happy with people listening to their stuff, why are they signing horrible contracts with big labels? They can sign with a small, non-RIAA label, or put stuff out themselves, and never have to worry about the RIAA at all. The truth is most artists love what they do, but they want to make a lot of money doing it as well. very few people in this world want to do something (even something they love) and not get paid for it. They want to make money doing what they love, just like anyone else. 5. Most bands lose money touring (although they do make money from merchandise sales on tour). The label once again fronts the money for the tour, and usually the tour loses money (unless it is a huge band like the Stones). The tour is advertising for the CD, not the other way around. 6. This is correct, except the bands then have to come up with the money to make their own CD and they don't get all the advertising that comes with a big label. How do people know to go out and download The Dog Woker's Union if there is no advertising for them? No one has heard of them, so most people won't pay money to go to their show. The one big thing that is missing from bands going totally online is the advertisement. An unknown band will have a hard time getting known if there is no place for people to first find out about them. This is the biggest thing major labels offer, even bigger than the money. They offer a small artist the chance to have their song pushed with millions of dollars in advertising. They have the power to get people to listen to the music, and that is something that P2P doesn't offer.
ut could this mean that newsgroup posts will be treated more as a formal publications than a public conversation? we should be able to say more in public at the mall or in a newsgroup than we can publish in the local paper.
Posting on the internet is more akin to publishing in a newspaper than to talking in a mall. The big difference is the intent to publish. If you are talking to another person in a mall, you know other people may here you, but your intent is to talk to the other person in the conversation. If you publish something in a newspaper, your intent is for anyone who picks up that publication to read it (i.e. wide distribution).
Writing on a newsgroup is much closer to publishing in a newspaper. Your intent is to have everyone who reads the newsgroup to read your post. This "conversation" is more like two people having a conversation by sending letters to the editor of a newspaper and having them published. The other people aren't "listening in" to your conversations, you are publishing your conversation for everyone to read.
Mine says I "may not connect more than 5 computers at a single location" and that I can't "resell the Service or any portion thereof," but it doesn't say anything about giving it away for free (assuming fewer than 5 computers at a time are connected).
This is exactly why the TOS agreements are getting more restrictive. People are constantly complaining about how they spell out every little situation in a TOS and make it as restrictive as possible, but that is because if they don't, people will take advantage of the company and exploit it. I think it is a completely fair assumption that if you have a cable modem in your home, it is for use in your home and not for the entire neighborhood. Anyone with half a brain can figure out that is what they are marketing the cable modems for. If people continue to flaunt the fact they are using a cable modem meant for a single household to give access to anyone and everyone they can, then it will have to be placed in the TOS that sharing is not allowed. And this will restrict people who have legitimate reasons for sharing and aren't abusing it. Why are companies making more restrictive TOS agreements? Because if they don't, people will continue to abuse their services with the excuse of "it didn't say I couldn't do it in the TOS". These people are no better than the people that say "It didn't say I couldn't use my hair dryer in the bathtub."
There are technological ways around deep linking, of course. Checking the Referer header in an HTTP request is one option, and dynamically creating unique URIs on the pages you allow people to visit from is another.
It would be nice if technology was used to prevent this rather than court rulings, but hey, what can you do?
I am all for deep linking in most cases, and feel it should be legal. But I hate the idea that "there's a way to prevent it, so it shouldn't be ruled illegal." To me, that is the same as saying "There are ways to make your house burglar proof, so we shouldn't have to make breaking and entering illegal." Just because someone can prevent something from happening doesn't means they should have to prevent it. If we refuse to rule on things because there are ways to prevent it, what happens when those ways to prevent it are circumvented? Can we rule then? Or do we just wait for more ways to prevent the circumvention? I think deep linking is legal in most cases, but I want to see it remain legal because it is the right thing to do, not because there's a way to prevent it.
Compare this to leaving a book in a public library. Someone borrows it and makes a cover to cover copy. Who commits the crime? The library or the copier.
I think it has more to do with intent than the actual act. If you take a library book and copy it, you are at fault. The library does not have the books for you to take and copy, they have them for you to read. You took it upon yourself to make a copy of the book when you simply could have (and were supposed to) read the book and put it back. In the case of MP3 trading, you are intentionally putting the MP3s on the netowkr to be copied by other people. Unlike the library, your intention is for them to be copied, which means you are actively distributing them. Intention has a lot to do with the law.
Re:This is what they should do, but still won't wo
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RIAA to Sue You Now
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The RIAA has tried (successfully) to paint P2P networks as festering cesspools of piracy and other sorts of illegal activity.
Whether you like the RIAA or not, this is a pretty acurate description of what most P2P networks are. Log onto Kazaa or Gnutella and see what is there. It seems like a bunch of pirated MP3, some pirated movies, some pirated software, and lots and lots of porn (some of which is priated, the rest is wholesale stolen from porn sites). There is very little "legal" content on P2P networks. Even the few independant artists who have released their work on P2P networks get very little traffic, because P2P is set up mainly to be used by searching, and it's hard to search for new material since you don't know what it is your looking for (yes, you can find some stuff based on looking at a users files, but even then, you need to find the user somehow). The P2P networks are painted as havens for piracy because that is how they are used, and mostly what they were designed for.
You're still dodging the obvious question - what does MS get out of the deal? I suppose they're doing this for philanthropic reasons, right?
I am assuming here, but what they would be gaining would be websites paying to use the Passport service. As Passport takes off, more and more websites sign up to use it, and (I'm assuming here, but it makes perfect sense) pay MS for the use of the Passport service. It works like a credit card service, where the consumer pays nothing for it, because the business pays the fees up front. So yes, they are doing it to make money, just like Visa would be.
Before tech savvy people had the computer we had the radio and tape cassette. People could ALWAYS pirate music, yet michael jacksons triller sold 20 million copies, funny how no one decided to pirate him even though it was all over the radio all the damn time and everyone had it and could copy the cassette. I know, I had one of those dual cassette players, you stick both cassettes into it, play one and record on the other. Funny how when everyone was using cassettes the RIAA didnt complain about sales but now, that they are losing their monopoly, piracy is suddenly a big problem? Comparing cassette copying to Internet copying is like comparing a musket to a machine gun. Both technically do the same thing, but on such a different scale as to be incomparable. To get a copy of Thriller, you had to know someone who not only had the album, but also a way to copy it, and you had to pay for the blank cassette tape. Then you got a copy of the original which was slightly lower quality. You could then make a copy of your copy for someone else, and the quality got lower yet. Each generation of copy got lower in quality, meaning the only good copy came directly from an original (which meant someone close to you had to buy it). Compare this with digital copying, where 1 copy can be shared among millions of people with no loss of quality, essentially no effort expended, and no media costs. Asking why people care more about digital copying than analog copying is like asking why the printing press was a big deal. We had books before the printing press, so why did it matter?
You assume that 1) the "powers that be" couldn't make a mistake and 2) the "powers that be" would ignore any legal activity. Both of these have been proven false many times. In today's world, the mistakes that were made would mean both Wen Ho Lee and Richard Jewel would still be locked up, when in reality they were both innocent. And the "powers that be" have a nasty habit of keeping tabs on and prosecuting/persecuting anyone who disagrees with them. It is a well known fact that the FBI kept close tabs on people like Martin Luther King and Einstein. Now we look and it is clear they weren't doing anything wrong, but they were both under constant surveillance (with the FBI trying to get Einstein deported). So why should I care if they watch me? Maybe because they make mistakes. Or maybe because I don't agree with everything they do, which makes me a potential target, even if I don't do anything wrong.
CSS will have less bugs discovered for it Doesn't that really mean that the bugs will just be discovered more slowly? They should be discovered less slowly, but if all bugs will not be discovered (which I believe is a reasonable assumption) having 2 ways to find bugs means that more bugs will be found and patched, but having only 1 way to find bugs mean more bugs will go undiscovered.
It is harder to find bugs by trial and error than by reviewing the source. Can you explain how you arrived at that conclusion.
Many bugs are trivial to find in the source. Something like misassigning a variable would be much easier to find via looking at the source. In trial and error someone basically has to devise and check every possible way to break something, which not only takes time and ingenuity to devise all the tests, but to actually see if it breaks something. For example, if there is a bug in a program that mishandles a filename if it is longer than 128 characters, you can check the source and see potentially see the problem by just reviewing source. To find it through trial and error, someone must think to try a filename longer than 128 characters, and even if it does mishandle it, they have to be able to figure out what happens when it mishandles it, all through trial and error. This would be much simpler to do by stepping through the source.
MS patches most bugs in their products before their is an exploit How can you know that unless you have access to internal Microsoft information? Almost without exception the updates that I have seen from Microsoft are a reaction to problems found by others. The patches I assume you are talking about are the ones MS fix and we never hear of. How do you know they exist?
They may be found by someone else, but they then report them to MS and they get fixed before there is an exploit in the wild for them. This is no different than a white-hat finding a bug in OSS and releasing a fix. Both fix the bug before there is an exploit available for it. The key is to patch the whole before someone finds a way to take that bug and expand it into a true exploit. Knowing something has a buffer overflow isn't useful until someone has figured out how to make it execute code that will give them root on the system.
Assumptions: 1) When written, open source and closed source software have on average the same number of security bugs. Observasions: 1) The number of security bigs in a piece of software only decreases when they are fixed. 2) A security bug is typically fixed after, and as a result of it being discovered. (they can be fixed by accident, but i will neglect this as it's irrelivent anyway) 3) Closed source software and open source software can both have bugs discovered by trial and error style cracking. 4) Open source software can have bugs discovered due the sheer numbers of people with access to the source. Conclusion: 1) I conclude that open source sofware will tend to have any bugs discovered more quickly because there are more ways to discover them, and all ways available to closed source are also available to open source.
Two faults I see. First, you are assuming that all bugs will be discovered. An bu that is never discovered has zero affect on security. Closed source has a large advantage in this area, since it is harder to find bugs by trial and error than by reviewing the source. So if OSS and CSS have equal numbers of bugs, CSS will have less bugs discovered for it. Second, you are discounting that black hats can also find bugs in OSS as easy as white hats through the source. Having the source may let you fix a bug faster once it is revealed, but it also let's a black hat find a bug before you or someone else reveals it. This is harder to do with CSS because they cannot scource the source for bugs, they need to do trial and error (although is does still happen with CSS). MS patches most bugs in their products before their is an exploit, often because they are the ones to find it in the source, and no one else can do that.
The new wording is more accurate, but not stating it runs Windows apps will be a killer for many sales. This box is meant for Joe Enduser, who probably has never heard of Linux, and thinks Windows is the greatest OS around. All he really cares is if Word, Quicken, and Quake 3 will run on it. Most users don't want thousands of applications, they want the 2 or 3 they use. While this is a great line for geeks, that isn't the market for the PC. I predict this line of PCs will last about 4 months before they are pulled or have Windows put on them unless the marketing is changed ASAP.
But before you all get your panties in a twist and start crying out that warranties will kill off Open Source, remember that this only applies to commercially sold software. No one expects merchantibility for freely downloaded software. Second, the warranty should reside with the seller, not the developer. So Redhat can sell your software and you are off the hook, because it is Redhat that is claiming the software is merchantable and not you.
This is where I think you're wrong. If I advertise that I am giving away widgets which can make foo, I am responsible for those widgets. Just because I don't charge money for them doesn't mean I can falsely advertise them. So if you advertise a program that does X (and you must advertise somehow (even if it is only a web page), otherwise no one would ever know about it to d/l it, and it doesn't do X, you could be held accountable. Think of it this way, if I stand on a street corner and give out nails and tell people they are the best thing you can use to nail a house together, I will be held responsible if they can't hold a house together. If something is free, that doesn't mean the people giving it away can't be held accountable for it.
I'm not going to suggest ruling through fear, because it just doesn't work. What you need to do (and what we did here a long while ago) is to make it so people want to use the network drives. We set up a system where everything was organized and people could the have an easier time finding what they wanted. We set up multiple network drives, each with a specific purpose. One was for company documents (SOPs, forms, etc). One was for correspondence with other companies, and was organized by company. Things of that nature. It didn't happen overnight, but eventually people realized that this was easier than keeping everything locally and having to try and figure out who had this document or keeping multiple copies of things on different computers. It certainly won't happen overnight, and you will have to remind people constantly at first, but eventually they will realize the benefits of it (especially the first time they accidentally overwrite a file and you can recover it from the backup). The key is that it will take a long time to make everyone use it consistently, and there is no way to change that.
But the the question is, what happens when they have the right to give out the code. You can terminate someone who gives out company secrets because they have no rights to give out those secrets (and any company worth it's weight in piss has made it's employees sign an NDA). But with the GPL, you have a right to redistribute that program, and that right may override an NDA (not sure, hasn't been tested). And could you terminate someone for distributing software which you gave them explicit permission to distribute (through using the GPL).
This is a tad off-topic, but somewhat related. I know according to the GPL you only need to provide source to the people you provide the binaries to. If you don't provide binaries to anyone outside the company, you do not need to provide source to anyone outside the company. But isn't one of the other stipulations of the GPL that anyone can redistribute the source/binaries as long as the follow the GPL? What is to stop someone within your organization from taking the source from your internal app and distributing it outside the company? OR is there some part of the GPL that I'm missing that would prevent this?
Why should IE continue to support Gopher? It is a protocol that is rarely used. It is outdated, and there is no need for it in IE. It's what is commonly refered to as program bloat. It's not needed and should be removed. For the.001% of IE users who do use Gopher, they can use a seperate Gopher utility, which will probably support it better than an all-in-one option like IE. Isn't program bloat one of the things everyone has against MS? Shouldn't this decision be applauded?
While you make good points about why the example could not be, you never address the concerns of the example. This can be used for any number of other "sensitive" applications. If carnivore was Open Source, would it potentially be more open to being compromised? If the DOD systems were open source, would they be more open to being compromised?
This is a valid concern about using OSS for "sensitive" applications. Yes, in theory, more eyes means more bugs found. But most "sensitive" applications are not the type that lots of people would be interested in running, so most people would not find the bugs. But the source always is there for black hats to look at, and if they find a bug before anyone else, they can exploit it. You can pooh-pooh the idea all you want, but the added safety that obscurity gives you must be weighed against the added benefit OSS would give you. Depending on the system, obscurity may win.
The music industry has been a cash cow for years. And in an effort to make even more money they've stopped listening to what we want and tried feeding us over-priced pre-digested pap. And now, thanks to the Internet and the ubiquitous MP3 we have the ability to bypass the latest creation of the marketing department, and listen to what we want. And the music industry is desperately trying to stop us. They've used the law; and lately they've started mucking around with the CD format too.
Better watch out there, you're starting to sound like an old-timer. The music industry is listening, just not to you. They are selling millions of CDs, obviously it is what the people want, just not what you want. It amazes me the number of people who complain about "todays music" and how it's all crap, and don't realize this is the same thing that has been happening for years. Once you get out of the target demographic, it's all crap to you. It;s the same thing the people who loved 80's music said about grunge, and the disco kids said about new wave and punk. Just because you don't like it doesn't make it bad. You can say Britney Spears is a horrible musician, but there are millions of people who prove otherwise.
I can bitch about producy placement because if that is the revenue model, the advertisers will completely control the show. TV is by an large for the basic common denominator right now. If it was funded in this way, there would be no controversial television. Advertisers sometimes cave to small groups of people protesting a show now, and their product is not directly linked to the show. If a show wants to do something controversial, do you think advertisers will let their products be in the show itself? If there is a domestic violence episode, will they allow the abuser to talk about how much he loves Pepsi? Not a chance in hell. The shows will no longer be controled by the networks and the creators, but by advertisers how will veto anything that is controversial.
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Every few years music gets more expensive, even though production, manufacturing, and distribution costs decrease.
While I'm no fan of the RIAA, I find this statement pretty funny. While manufacturing costs have gone done, they are a small portion of the cost. Distribution costs have gone up. It costs more to ship things today than it did 10 years ago. That is just inflation. Production is probably the same as it was then, or possibly more expensive as equipment has gotten better. The cost of candy bars has also risen in the last 10 years, but the cost of manufacturing them has gone down, so where is the outrage? It's a simple fact that the majority of cost for a CD goes into production and marketing. And that most CDs never even make enough money to recoup what was put into them. I'm no fan of the RIAA and their tactics, but writing the whole thing off as "CDs only cost $1 to make, so they are charging way to much and deserve to have their stuff stolen" oversimplifies the whole thing to the point of being ridiculous.
Funny. Compaq (now HP) is running large ads in the trade press touting that they were the first major company to support Linux and Open Source.
Now they fire a major advocate? Sounds like the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.
Does being a Linux advocate make him the best person for the job? Does supporting Linux mean employing Linux advocates even at the expense of other parts of you company? There is a world of difference between supporting Linux and open source and bashing MS. The feel Bruce is bashing MS and that may (or is) causing them problems. They can still support Linux and open source without Bruce around, and not have to worry about the potential for problems with MS.
Except for the part where several PTP members happened to be at Starbucks the day the T-mobile installers came. As I mention in my comment above, they talked for quite a while, with the T-mobile installers being made aware of a) the PTP node, b) how long it had been installed (some 6+ months by then, longer in testing), and c) what channel it was on.
Not to point out the obvious, but just because Joe Installer chatted with some PTP members doesn't mean anyone knew anything about the network. The average installer doesn;t know anything about corporate policy, doesn't care about corporate policy, and doesn't want to get involved in corporate policy. This guy was hired to install everything on channel one, and that's what he did. He didn't worry about who else was on channel one, because he doesn't get paid to do that.
I don't understand why people are supporting this. Requiring the government to use a specific type of software is a bad idea, whether that software be open source or closed source. The government should be using the best software for the job. All types of software should be considered, and all aspects of the software (availability of source code, price, features, easy of use, etc) should be considered. The minute you lock into one type of software, you set yourself up for major problems. Sure, Linux and Open Office are good enough to replace Windows and MS Office, but if they require all their software be OSS, what are they going to use for their financial system? The OSS financial products are no where near as good as the closed source products. There are some places where there just isn't a good OSS alternative and requiring them to use an inferior product makes no sense at all. We should be encouraging the government to consider all products equally, not trying to pull the same tactics that MS is pulling. It's no more right for the OSS community to lock people in than it is for the CSS people (even less right when we are trying to make it a law that cannot easily be changed if the policy is bad).
So if you don't make any money you should have absolute rights to do anything you want with other people's property without paying them anything? So if I don't make money I can make photocopies of a new book and hand them out? Redistribute GPL software without following the GPL rules?
I think the rates are too high, but the RIAA owns the rights to the songs. Just as we shouldn't safeguard the RIAA because their business model is outdated and being killed, we shouldn't safeguard radio stations whose business models don't allow them to make enough money to pay for what they are using. Should I be able to pay less for a BMW because I don't make as much as other people? No, I have to pay what they set the price at. Just because internet radio doesn't have a good enough business model doesn't mean they should pay less, it means they should get a better business model. If they don't want to pay the RIAA, they should play non-RIAA music exclusively.
There's a LOT of stuff that doesn't get canned by the RIAA corporations -- and that's what they're actually worried about. There are a few things to remember here:
Recording contracts rob artists blind
everybody BUT the musicians makes money on most recording contracts
90% of all recording artists end up owing money to the record label.
most artists are just happy to know that somebody is listening to their stuff.
Most musicians make money from touring. They eat losses on the recording contracts because it gives them exposure for their tours
P2P music distribution could replace recording contracts for many musicians.
Let's look at your points.
1. Artists are not robbed. They willing sign unfair contracts of their own free will. I agree the contracts are unfair, but if you agree to give me $5 in exchange for me giving you nothing, you can't complain that I have robbed you.
2. The only people that make money on most recording contracts are the people that are paid up front, i.e. engineers, the recording studio itself, producers, etc. Labels lose money on most CDs produced.
3. It is true that 90% of artists end up owing money to the label, but that is a direct result of 2. If the CD does not sell enough to make back the money the label has lent the artist, then the artist owes the label (mind you this is usually never repaid). So while the artist ends up owing money he will never have to repay, the label is out actual money they have spent.
4.If most artists are just happy with people listening to their stuff, why are they signing horrible contracts with big labels? They can sign with a small, non-RIAA label, or put stuff out themselves, and never have to worry about the RIAA at all. The truth is most artists love what they do, but they want to make a lot of money doing it as well. very few people in this world want to do something (even something they love) and not get paid for it. They want to make money doing what they love, just like anyone else.
5. Most bands lose money touring (although they do make money from merchandise sales on tour). The label once again fronts the money for the tour, and usually the tour loses money (unless it is a huge band like the Stones). The tour is advertising for the CD, not the other way around.
6. This is correct, except the bands then have to come up with the money to make their own CD and they don't get all the advertising that comes with a big label. How do people know to go out and download The Dog Woker's Union if there is no advertising for them? No one has heard of them, so most people won't pay money to go to their show. The one big thing that is missing from bands going totally online is the advertisement. An unknown band will have a hard time getting known if there is no place for people to first find out about them. This is the biggest thing major labels offer, even bigger than the money. They offer a small artist the chance to have their song pushed with millions of dollars in advertising. They have the power to get people to listen to the music, and that is something that P2P doesn't offer.
ut could this mean that newsgroup posts will be treated more as a formal publications than a public conversation? we should be able to say more in public at the mall or in a newsgroup than we can publish in the local paper.
Posting on the internet is more akin to publishing in a newspaper than to talking in a mall. The big difference is the intent to publish. If you are talking to another person in a mall, you know other people may here you, but your intent is to talk to the other person in the conversation. If you publish something in a newspaper, your intent is for anyone who picks up that publication to read it (i.e. wide distribution).
Writing on a newsgroup is much closer to publishing in a newspaper. Your intent is to have everyone who reads the newsgroup to read your post. This "conversation" is more like two people having a conversation by sending letters to the editor of a newspaper and having them published. The other people aren't "listening in" to your conversations, you are publishing your conversation for everyone to read.
Mine says I "may not connect more than 5 computers at a single location" and that I can't "resell the Service or any portion thereof," but it doesn't say anything about giving it away for free (assuming fewer than 5 computers at a time are connected).
This is exactly why the TOS agreements are getting more restrictive. People are constantly complaining about how they spell out every little situation in a TOS and make it as restrictive as possible, but that is because if they don't, people will take advantage of the company and exploit it. I think it is a completely fair assumption that if you have a cable modem in your home, it is for use in your home and not for the entire neighborhood. Anyone with half a brain can figure out that is what they are marketing the cable modems for. If people continue to flaunt the fact they are using a cable modem meant for a single household to give access to anyone and everyone they can, then it will have to be placed in the TOS that sharing is not allowed. And this will restrict people who have legitimate reasons for sharing and aren't abusing it. Why are companies making more restrictive TOS agreements? Because if they don't, people will continue to abuse their services with the excuse of "it didn't say I couldn't do it in the TOS". These people are no better than the people that say "It didn't say I couldn't use my hair dryer in the bathtub."
There are technological ways around deep linking, of course. Checking the Referer header in an HTTP request is one option, and dynamically creating unique URIs on the pages you allow people to visit from is another.
It would be nice if technology was used to prevent this rather than court rulings, but hey, what can you do?
I am all for deep linking in most cases, and feel it should be legal. But I hate the idea that "there's a way to prevent it, so it shouldn't be ruled illegal." To me, that is the same as saying "There are ways to make your house burglar proof, so we shouldn't have to make breaking and entering illegal." Just because someone can prevent something from happening doesn't means they should have to prevent it. If we refuse to rule on things because there are ways to prevent it, what happens when those ways to prevent it are circumvented? Can we rule then? Or do we just wait for more ways to prevent the circumvention? I think deep linking is legal in most cases, but I want to see it remain legal because it is the right thing to do, not because there's a way to prevent it.
Compare this to leaving a book in a public library. Someone borrows it and makes a cover to cover copy. Who commits the crime? The library or the copier.
I think it has more to do with intent than the actual act. If you take a library book and copy it, you are at fault. The library does not have the books for you to take and copy, they have them for you to read. You took it upon yourself to make a copy of the book when you simply could have (and were supposed to) read the book and put it back. In the case of MP3 trading, you are intentionally putting the MP3s on the netowkr to be copied by other people. Unlike the library, your intention is for them to be copied, which means you are actively distributing them. Intention has a lot to do with the law.
The RIAA has tried (successfully) to paint P2P networks as festering cesspools of piracy and other sorts of illegal activity.
Whether you like the RIAA or not, this is a pretty acurate description of what most P2P networks are. Log onto Kazaa or Gnutella and see what is there. It seems like a bunch of pirated MP3, some pirated movies, some pirated software, and lots and lots of porn (some of which is priated, the rest is wholesale stolen from porn sites). There is very little "legal" content on P2P networks. Even the few independant artists who have released their work on P2P networks get very little traffic, because P2P is set up mainly to be used by searching, and it's hard to search for new material since you don't know what it is your looking for (yes, you can find some stuff based on looking at a users files, but even then, you need to find the user somehow). The P2P networks are painted as havens for piracy because that is how they are used, and mostly what they were designed for.
You're still dodging the obvious question - what does MS get out of the deal? I suppose they're doing this for philanthropic reasons, right?
I am assuming here, but what they would be gaining would be websites paying to use the Passport service. As Passport takes off, more and more websites sign up to use it, and (I'm assuming here, but it makes perfect sense) pay MS for the use of the Passport service. It works like a credit card service, where the consumer pays nothing for it, because the business pays the fees up front. So yes, they are doing it to make money, just like Visa would be.
Before tech savvy people had the computer we had the radio and tape cassette.
People could ALWAYS pirate music, yet michael jacksons triller sold 20 million copies, funny how no one decided to pirate him even though it was all over the radio all the damn time and everyone had it and could copy the cassette.
I know, I had one of those dual cassette players, you stick both cassettes into it, play one and record on the other. Funny how when everyone was using cassettes the RIAA didnt complain about sales but now, that they are losing their monopoly, piracy is suddenly a big problem?
Comparing cassette copying to Internet copying is like comparing a musket to a machine gun. Both technically do the same thing, but on such a different scale as to be incomparable. To get a copy of Thriller, you had to know someone who not only had the album, but also a way to copy it, and you had to pay for the blank cassette tape. Then you got a copy of the original which was slightly lower quality. You could then make a copy of your copy for someone else, and the quality got lower yet. Each generation of copy got lower in quality, meaning the only good copy came directly from an original (which meant someone close to you had to buy it). Compare this with digital copying, where 1 copy can be shared among millions of people with no loss of quality, essentially no effort expended, and no media costs. Asking why people care more about digital copying than analog copying is like asking why the printing press was a big deal. We had books before the printing press, so why did it matter?
You assume that 1) the "powers that be" couldn't make a mistake and 2) the "powers that be" would ignore any legal activity. Both of these have been proven false many times. In today's world, the mistakes that were made would mean both Wen Ho Lee and Richard Jewel would still be locked up, when in reality they were both innocent. And the "powers that be" have a nasty habit of keeping tabs on and prosecuting/persecuting anyone who disagrees with them. It is a well known fact that the FBI kept close tabs on people like Martin Luther King and Einstein. Now we look and it is clear they weren't doing anything wrong, but they were both under constant surveillance (with the FBI trying to get Einstein deported). So why should I care if they watch me? Maybe because they make mistakes. Or maybe because I don't agree with everything they do, which makes me a potential target, even if I don't do anything wrong.
CSS will have less bugs discovered for it
Doesn't that really mean that the bugs will just be discovered more slowly?
They should be discovered less slowly, but if all bugs will not be discovered (which I believe is a reasonable assumption) having 2 ways to find bugs means that more bugs will be found and patched, but having only 1 way to find bugs mean more bugs will go undiscovered.
It is harder to find bugs by trial and error than by reviewing the source.
Can you explain how you arrived at that conclusion.
Many bugs are trivial to find in the source. Something like misassigning a variable would be much easier to find via looking at the source. In trial and error someone basically has to devise and check every possible way to break something, which not only takes time and ingenuity to devise all the tests, but to actually see if it breaks something. For example, if there is a bug in a program that mishandles a filename if it is longer than 128 characters, you can check the source and see potentially see the problem by just reviewing source. To find it through trial and error, someone must think to try a filename longer than 128 characters, and even if it does mishandle it, they have to be able to figure out what happens when it mishandles it, all through trial and error. This would be much simpler to do by stepping through the source.
MS patches most bugs in their products before their is an exploit
How can you know that unless you have access to internal Microsoft information? Almost without exception the updates that I have seen from Microsoft are a reaction to problems found by others. The patches I assume you are talking about are the ones MS fix and we never hear of. How do you know they exist?
They may be found by someone else, but they then report them to MS and they get fixed before there is an exploit in the wild for them. This is no different than a white-hat finding a bug in OSS and releasing a fix. Both fix the bug before there is an exploit available for it. The key is to patch the whole before someone finds a way to take that bug and expand it into a true exploit. Knowing something has a buffer overflow isn't useful until someone has figured out how to make it execute code that will give them root on the system.
Assumptions:
1) When written, open source and closed source software have on average the same number of security bugs.
Observasions:
1) The number of security bigs in a piece of software only decreases when they are fixed.
2) A security bug is typically fixed after, and as a result of it being discovered. (they can be fixed by accident, but i will neglect this as it's irrelivent anyway)
3) Closed source software and open source software can both have bugs discovered by trial and error style cracking.
4) Open source software can have bugs discovered due the sheer numbers of people with access to the source.
Conclusion:
1) I conclude that open source sofware will tend to have any bugs discovered more quickly because there are more ways to discover them, and all ways available to closed source are also available to open source.
Two faults I see. First, you are assuming that all bugs will be discovered. An bu that is never discovered has zero affect on security. Closed source has a large advantage in this area, since it is harder to find bugs by trial and error than by reviewing the source. So if OSS and CSS have equal numbers of bugs, CSS will have less bugs discovered for it. Second, you are discounting that black hats can also find bugs in OSS as easy as white hats through the source. Having the source may let you fix a bug faster once it is revealed, but it also let's a black hat find a bug before you or someone else reveals it. This is harder to do with CSS because they cannot scource the source for bugs, they need to do trial and error (although is does still happen with CSS). MS patches most bugs in their products before their is an exploit, often because they are the ones to find it in the source, and no one else can do that.
The new wording is more accurate, but not stating it runs Windows apps will be a killer for many sales. This box is meant for Joe Enduser, who probably has never heard of Linux, and thinks Windows is the greatest OS around. All he really cares is if Word, Quicken, and Quake 3 will run on it. Most users don't want thousands of applications, they want the 2 or 3 they use. While this is a great line for geeks, that isn't the market for the PC. I predict this line of PCs will last about 4 months before they are pulled or have Windows put on them unless the marketing is changed ASAP.
But before you all get your panties in a twist and start crying out that warranties will kill off Open Source, remember that this only applies to commercially sold software. No one expects merchantibility for freely downloaded software. Second, the warranty should reside with the seller, not the developer. So Redhat can sell your software and you are off the hook, because it is Redhat that is claiming the software is merchantable and not you.
This is where I think you're wrong. If I advertise that I am giving away widgets which can make foo, I am responsible for those widgets. Just because I don't charge money for them doesn't mean I can falsely advertise them. So if you advertise a program that does X (and you must advertise somehow (even if it is only a web page), otherwise no one would ever know about it to d/l it, and it doesn't do X, you could be held accountable. Think of it this way, if I stand on a street corner and give out nails and tell people they are the best thing you can use to nail a house together, I will be held responsible if they can't hold a house together. If something is free, that doesn't mean the people giving it away can't be held accountable for it.
I'm not going to suggest ruling through fear, because it just doesn't work. What you need to do (and what we did here a long while ago) is to make it so people want to use the network drives. We set up a system where everything was organized and people could the have an easier time finding what they wanted. We set up multiple network drives, each with a specific purpose. One was for company documents (SOPs, forms, etc). One was for correspondence with other companies, and was organized by company. Things of that nature. It didn't happen overnight, but eventually people realized that this was easier than keeping everything locally and having to try and figure out who had this document or keeping multiple copies of things on different computers. It certainly won't happen overnight, and you will have to remind people constantly at first, but eventually they will realize the benefits of it (especially the first time they accidentally overwrite a file and you can recover it from the backup). The key is that it will take a long time to make everyone use it consistently, and there is no way to change that.
But the the question is, what happens when they have the right to give out the code. You can terminate someone who gives out company secrets because they have no rights to give out those secrets (and any company worth it's weight in piss has made it's employees sign an NDA). But with the GPL, you have a right to redistribute that program, and that right may override an NDA (not sure, hasn't been tested). And could you terminate someone for distributing software which you gave them explicit permission to distribute (through using the GPL).
This is a tad off-topic, but somewhat related. I know according to the GPL you only need to provide source to the people you provide the binaries to. If you don't provide binaries to anyone outside the company, you do not need to provide source to anyone outside the company. But isn't one of the other stipulations of the GPL that anyone can redistribute the source/binaries as long as the follow the GPL? What is to stop someone within your organization from taking the source from your internal app and distributing it outside the company? OR is there some part of the GPL that I'm missing that would prevent this?
Why should IE continue to support Gopher? It is a protocol that is rarely used. It is outdated, and there is no need for it in IE. It's what is commonly refered to as program bloat. It's not needed and should be removed. For the .001% of IE users who do use Gopher, they can use a seperate Gopher utility, which will probably support it better than an all-in-one option like IE. Isn't program bloat one of the things everyone has against MS? Shouldn't this decision be applauded?
While you make good points about why the example could not be, you never address the concerns of the example. This can be used for any number of other "sensitive" applications. If carnivore was Open Source, would it potentially be more open to being compromised? If the DOD systems were open source, would they be more open to being compromised?
This is a valid concern about using OSS for "sensitive" applications. Yes, in theory, more eyes means more bugs found. But most "sensitive" applications are not the type that lots of people would be interested in running, so most people would not find the bugs. But the source always is there for black hats to look at, and if they find a bug before anyone else, they can exploit it. You can pooh-pooh the idea all you want, but the added safety that obscurity gives you must be weighed against the added benefit OSS would give you. Depending on the system, obscurity may win.
The music industry has been a cash cow for years. And in an effort to make even more money they've stopped listening to what we want and tried feeding us over-priced pre-digested pap. And now, thanks to the Internet and the ubiquitous MP3 we have the ability to bypass the latest creation of the marketing department, and listen to what we want. And the music industry is desperately trying to stop us. They've used the law; and lately they've started mucking around with the CD format too.
Better watch out there, you're starting to sound like an old-timer. The music industry is listening, just not to you. They are selling millions of CDs, obviously it is what the people want, just not what you want. It amazes me the number of people who complain about "todays music" and how it's all crap, and don't realize this is the same thing that has been happening for years. Once you get out of the target demographic, it's all crap to you. It;s the same thing the people who loved 80's music said about grunge, and the disco kids said about new wave and punk. Just because you don't like it doesn't make it bad. You can say Britney Spears is a horrible musician, but there are millions of people who prove otherwise.
I can bitch about producy placement because if that is the revenue model, the advertisers will completely control the show. TV is by an large for the basic common denominator right now. If it was funded in this way, there would be no controversial television. Advertisers sometimes cave to small groups of people protesting a show now, and their product is not directly linked to the show. If a show wants to do something controversial, do you think advertisers will let their products be in the show itself? If there is a domestic violence episode, will they allow the abuser to talk about how much he loves Pepsi? Not a chance in hell. The shows will no longer be controled by the networks and the creators, but by advertisers how will veto anything that is controversial.