It is exactly this sort of attitude that is ALLOWING Bush to commit acts that are blatantly illegal.
The press is called "the fourth estate" because it has a definitive place in government. The only thing that exists to keep politicians even pretending to be honest is fear of public reprisal. Public reprisal will come when a reporter exposes the activities of the politician. Protecting reporters is tantamount to protecting your right to know what your government is up to. I agree if they commit an actual crime they should be held accountable but as many have pointed out that is not the case here. The government is violating their rights on suspicion alone. This will make it much less likely that reporters will be approached and thus limit their ability to gather information.
If you are happy NOT knowing what our leaders are up to then by all means, allow reporters to loose the traditional protections that allow them to do their jobs. From what I have seen however the only "State secrets" I have seen exposed are violations of rights and illegal activity. These are things I WANT exposed.
Actualy the problem is usualy created by end game characters who have nothing better to do. They go farm gold and then start new characters with it driving up the lower level economies.
Do I have a good solution to this? Nah... but I wanted to point it out anyway.
Ah but it does make a difference when you get ten database servers behind the router all returning ten requests at 100ms... then you NEED the router to respond at 10ms or better yes?
Routers are not about the speed of any individual machine... they are about keeping up with ALL machines sitting behind them.
Not disagreeing with you... I think eventualy for speed increases we WILL have to move to specialized hardware for other things. Why not make a processor that only divvied up tasks? It would send audio to the audio processor, video to the gpu etc. That is the next gen of "general" computing, not faster processors.
I agree. I am very much an advocate of the "right tool for the right job" theory. Making a system designed to be a general purpose tool (ie a 1u computer) into a single purpose device is bound to not be as good as a device designed to do that job.
If I want a firewall or router I want it to be capable of doing it's job to the best of it's ability, not limited by the processor if another type could have been faster. Also not limited by the OS if a small bit of highly dedicated code could do a better job than something written on top of an OS designed to be all-purpose.
On the contrary, they very much count (posting from a mac mini because it fits on my desk and all my real work is on servers I ssh to anyway) and I whole heartedly support them. I just find it a bit odd that a -convicted- (in more than one court mind you) monopoly would be allow to do this.
Of course a lot of the things comming out of the U.S. government boggle me lately. At least the EU will back it's conviction, says more for them than I can say about Bushy boy.
Has anyone in the DOJ looked into this Microsoft anti-spyware anti-virus bit? Anyone else feel this is the epitomy of anti-competative practices? Hell their OS is the REASON these other companies exist, and now Microsoft gets to profit from thier own security holes?
Someone else HAS to see the flaw in this idea... I can only pray the EU once again has more sense than the DOJ.
Very well said and an excellent point. I would add, although you eluded to this, that the way to combat the **AA behavior is not to pirate but to spend your money on CDs and DVDs produced by labels that follow your personal ethics. It will require educating yourself on the various labels and companies but if you truly believe in a solution that is what you MUST do.
Companies must SEE solid numbers showing what consumers want and what they will tolerate. So long as people still buy, they have not found the limit yet. They can pass all the laws they want, if their sales drop 50% one month and a label that advertises "DRM free and we won't sue you" suddenly jumps 400% in sales the **AA WILL notice and that will matter to them my friends.
I see on here often the phrase "vote with your money" well that is what you must do. -BUY- CDs and DVDs but from companies who operate the way you want.
A portion of our software we build at my company requires 3D acceleration for design work. After about a week of wrestling with ATI drivers and cards we gave up and decided it was cheaper to ship an NVIDIA card with Linux driver CD with our software than to try and support ATI.
The ATI drivers never could do a cloned display correctly with differing resolutions, despite spending hours trying to tweak 30 or so parameters in the config file. The NVIDIA drivers did it in two lines first try.
Most of our customers who have switched thank us for forcing them to do it.
Second point... your comment that comments about "how dangerous ActiveX is and yada yada" not mattering to management or IT is hogwash.
First... any IT guy worthy of being even an intern would add disabling of ActiveX if not outright banning the use of IE to his corporate security policy. The number of security issues it presents make it simply not worth the effort or down time of patching. You don't have to shut down other apps or reboot the computer for a firefox update... calulate the man hour savings of JUST that.
Now... managers... they care about bottom line and cost. Why on earth would you beleive they would not care to listen about the cost savings involved in using php/mysql over activex/mssql? The portability and down time reductions? All of these are things managers care VERY much about.
I would be interested to see how your theory would apply to my companies website. Approximately 80% of our hits (as tallied by webalizer) are from Unix/Mac machines. How exactly do you intend I ask them to "switch back" to IE?
They would laugh at me, and rightly so. They would also get very frustrated if my site did not work for them with whatever browser they DO choose to use.
Now, as we have established that there is a direct customer need for something other than IE, and our business requires customers be able to access the information on our site... how exactly do you propose I create a site to satisfy them?
Answer: I use standards. The fact that my standards compliant site does not look quite right in IE is irrelevant to the company as that is a small fraction of our hits and we are BETTER off asking IE users to come back using any other browser.
Who makes these standards? Who controls them? That is an issue for debate and I will gladly have it with you. What I will not debate is that they must exist. Otherwise sites become very unwieldy very quickly and it puts a HUGE burden on developers rather than where it should be, on the browser to follow standards.
See my previous post on the increasted cost of IE compliant sites if you need more info.
Ok, it is kind of sad this post is +5... lots of people have asked artists to prove they are not fairly compensated by allofmp3 and I have not seen one story to indicate this is the case. The RIAA wants it shut down, not artists. At least not that I have seen yet. If that changes, my opinion will change, until then, stick with the facts.
Just remember... if you want companies to make games for the Mac, buy them. I do not play the latest and greatest but I have never lacked for games to play. As is the ever so popular phrase here "vote with your money." Mac game sales go up, more companies port their games, simple as that.
An interesting idea... but you would need to allow for multiple dictionaries. I commonly get e-mail in english, american, french and japanese every day. And before anyone flames me I -do- make a distinction between english and american. They are spelled and pronounced differently so when discussing dictionaries they ARE different.
As another responder pointed out... perhaps this could be used in some form of "weight" calculation. I would think counting special characters and individual characters ( barring I and A ) would hold just as much "weight" however.
The proposed system I liked better was requiring mail servers to be "registered" and any email being received would check it's claimed registration against the IP it came from. Thus any email being sent via bot from a dsl line is automatically thrown out. If it is "legit" spam you have a record in the header of who sent it and can track them down.
How about this scenario. I buy a CD (relatively same price as an album due to RIAA price fixing but that is a separate issue) and listen to it in my car and on my stereo. Then decide I like it enough to rip it to mp3s. This is legal and I can now put those mp3s on any device I want including new cell phones etc and continue to listen to MY music that I PURCHASED in any way -I- CHOOSE using whatever program -I- choose on whatever OS I choose. If my hard drive dies it is fine I just re-rip the CD no problem. All of these I am allowed to do.
Now... joe or jane consumer buys a DRMed album from anyone offering them. They can play it using the specific DRM player, on an OS that supports this player or MAYBE on a device that specifically supports THAT DRM and no other. What choice is there? What rights do they have to back up the music, play it in my car etc? They have none. No choice in how they use the music they "purchased." Now XYZ company goes out of business and they simply cannot listen to their music at all. No one ever explained to the consumer they were not buying the music simply renting it from the company.
See the difference? That is why DRM = bad for consumer
Bill may have taken commercial airlines but shall we talk about he or his partners yachts? You know, the ones that are in magazines almost constantly because they are so big and so decked out? Or the small islands they own?
Just because you are jealous someone else has more money than you do not tell them how to spend it. They made a successful business, and now are spending the fruits of their labor. How is that evil? Sounds like every American or European's wet dream to me.
I fail to see where it is evil except that it makes you green with envy.
I completely agree. I bought a TiVo because there were a few shows I wanted to watch but contrary to the fact I am posting here I do have a life so could not move my schedule around when the networks wanted to air my show.
That is it... I wanted to watch the show on my schedule. No evil plot to rob them of money or whatever. Hell I pay my satellite company $60 a month for three channels. If I got to pick which three and it was commercial free like HBO is sometimes since you pay a premium I would GLADLY do it.
So lets calculate this here... we will assume half goes to the satellite company itself that leaves $30 for the networks. 90% of what I watch is on two channels and I would not care if I lost the rest. That means $15 to sci-fi and $15 to HDNET. If they got this from everyone they would have more money than they knew what to do with and NO ADS. They could let me record it, fast forward, rewind whatever and it would not cut into their profits AT ALL. In fact without spending so much time and money spazing about it they would SAVE money.
What these complete idiots do not get is they CAN make gobs of money... they just need to change their model. They cannot possibly make more than $1 per airing of an episode off me and if I could pay that to record it on my TiVo and watch whenever I had time I would pay it in a heartbeat.
They have options... they just refuse to acknowledge them. Makes me wonder if I could convince enough people to donate to the cause that I could become a lobbyist for the good guys.
We are in the same situation at my company. Management did an analysis of risk and TCO of running windows, which thanks to me included probability of getting sued by Microsoft, security etc and decided it was not a good business decision to stay with them. And yes, I gave a fair an impartial analysis and was realistic about training and maintenance times caused by the switch. Over the last year we have been slowly replacing all computers with either Linux for engineers or Macs for execs. Well, some of the engineers wanted Macs after the first couple came in too.
Bottom line... we have dropped IT costs in just machines and setup time by about 20k a year, and we are not a large company. It used to take one person an afternoon to set up two windows machines since they had to wipe and re-install to get rid of all the pre-installed crap. Then run bandwidth intensive updates, install and update virus software etc. We could not use an image as the hardware was always just enough different it did not work, but even if we did it would not reduce the time much as a lot if it is updates which need to be monitored.
With Linux we have an image we copy from CD onto the machine which has everything pre-done and bam, one machine out the door in 20-30 minutes (10 of which was getting it out of the box).
The Macs are just as easy... the only thing we install is Office (necessary evil for execs, they MUST have their powerpoint) and that is done via copying a folder and inputting a key. No complicated process. Hell it even picks up our wireless network during install (gigabit landline reserved for engineers) and considers it a native interface rather than a hack like Windows.
Now instead of spending 80% of my day troubleshooting Windows I spend maybe 15% on maintenance tasks and the rest adding value to the company by implementing new things like the VOIP phones that we can use thanks to the network not having so much unnecessary traffic on it, which incidentally is going to save us another $5k a year or so while we pay for the hardware and $10k a year after.
All made possible by dumping Microsoft Windows XP.
Let me start by saying I agree with you... pick a direction. Fact is however google checkout is backed by Citi Bank so I am pretty sure it is going to be considered safe and secure. e-bay just does not want to admit it. Citi is not known for taking risks, although since they cornered the 7-11 ATM market I have begun to wonder.
They were busted up yes... until the Bush administration at which time they began to re-assemble.
Have you been watching all the baby bells and such merge lately? SBC even bought AT&T in an attempt to steal their reputation and bypass the bad one they had and replace it with AT&Ts good one.
They are not the only ones either... Verizon is sure buying up quite a few telcos.
My point about them being government sponsored is a matter of public record. They got where they are because the government paid them to do build the infrastructure. They wine about how expensive it is and how "unfair" it is that others are using "their" infrastructure but fact is they did not pay for it... it was tax dollar subsidies. Now that they have the infrastructure they want to milk it, and not let competition in.
I think the only way to solve this is take the infrastructure away from them and let anyone who wants rent time on the network.
I am going to skip the usual wordy and subtle version of the "you have no clue" diatribe and skip right to my point.
Copy right originated as the RIGHT TO COPY protecting printing presses from trying to put a stranglehold on production and allowing education to not be impeded by finance. It was the right for the people who purchased something to copy it for their own use.
Extrapolate this now to modern era with media such as music and movies. It follows that I should have the RIGHT to copy anything I lawfully purchase. Any form of DRM impedes MY RIGHTS as outlined in the intent of this law. It is that I disagree with, and thus any laws that support it.
As for allofmp3.com maybe the **AA should take a clue from the success of this site and of iTunes and see that people ARE willing and able to pay, and they are telling the *AA what they are willing to pay. A smart organization would listen and adapt. They would say "Wow, people are willing to pay X amount for this in droves... how can we work that as to capitalize on all these sales" and "we can sell 100k copies at $20 or 500K copies at $10... how do we work a greater profit margin out of the $10 sale then?"
That is what people refer to as the "Business model," not piracy as a business model (although many companies *cough* microsoft *cough* have made it one and cornered a market via piracy. But looking at what people are showing themselves to be willing to do and adapting to that rather than trying to force what the **AA as an organization feels people should be willing to do.
I will admit to my own bout of piracy but have since realized it was not productive. Now I seek out means of legitimately acquiring the things I need at a price I am willing to pay. Wow... free market... what a concept. If it is legal for me to pay $2 to a company in Russia for an album in mp3 format I will do so. Russian law requires the artist receive a portion of this which I support. I see no need to pay the **AA to do ANYTHING. Now if someone proves the artist is not receiving their portion of the money then I will also support any legal action taken against the people who broke the law. Any artist who's music I have purchased is more than free to contact me asking for my assistance in this... or to make that argument publicly.
Someone found a business model which as far as I know is legal, to sell me something I want for a price I am willing to pay. If iTunes offered the same price I would still buy from allofmp3 because it lacks DRM and I can do what I want with what I purchased, as I have a RIGHT to do. If iTunes offered the same thing for the same price I would buy from them as their interface is better and I have a slight preference to supporting US companies. See the pattern? Sounds like free market to me.
Under no circumstances will I give these files to anyone else, as that is illegal and unethical unless I then delete them. As I feel I was charged a reasonable price I should direct others to buy it at the same place. It is equally unethical in my mind to prevent me from doing so. If I want to give a book to my friend for them to read I can do so. No one would dispute this, even the **AA, although they would like to. Why should a CD or mp3 be different? So long as I do not have a duplicate of the item when I give it, that should be a legally protected transaction.
The difference between me and most is I feel an obligation to "fight the system" I disagree with but by simply not giving my money to those I disagree with. If you want to sign on as an artist with an RIAA label that is your right... just don't expect my money or for me to support you when ask me to vote for laws that impede my rights. Now if you want to sell me your album direct for $2-5 and pocket everything but the bandwidth costs be my guest, you will probably get my money. If your any good you will probably get my money more than once because I did not back up your mp3 before a HD crash or some such.
Lets start with buying companies just to shut down any possible competition... we will then move on to raping these companies pension funds after firing all the employees and counting it as "profit" on their quarterly report.
I will continue with the fact Microsoft has NEVER innovated or invented anything. NOTHING. They have bought, sued for or outright stolen and then sued to keep the people they stole from quiet, everything they have. Now it could be pointed out companies like Google do not either... they only refine. But they don't CLAIM to be based on innovation and use the need for innovation to fight off law suites levied in return against them.
During their anti-trust case I was also PRESENT (i.e. not anecdotal in any way... I watched this happen) a Microsoft stooge offer a huge campaign contribution to a politician's campaign I was working on if he would agree to help them in their anti-trust case soon as all the elections finished. I mean common, they outright admitted they were stalling till they could buy enough support in the new administration.
Sorry but as a free site subsidized by advertising slashdot could not afford the telcos rates in your future world and went under. It happened slowly as people originally would wait the five minutes for each page to load as it was low priority traffic... but eventually just gave up and went to watch their HD streaming reality show as that was the only thing they could get quickly. You will have to find some MSNBC archives instead to point out how right you were.
What I am amazed you have not picked up on is that the telco's are a government protected monopoly which your tax dollars subsidize. You are paying them an enormous amount in order to keep those lines up, personally. Even if you do not see it on your bill look at your taxes next year and wonder how much of that goes to SBC pretending to be AT&T or Verizon.
I will also use your analogy to explain how they have shot themselves in the foot, not Google or Skype. They rented you a government subsidized apartment (your phone/DSL line) but did so based on the assumption you would only live there a few days a month. They then rented the SAME apartment to 5 other people, collected rent from all of them (as well as the government subsidies) and prayed no one would ever show up at the same time and find out, nor would the government notice they had 50 apartments and 250 people registered to live in them. They extracted HUGE profits from doing this and sat back with their fat bonuses and laughed.
Now people have actually started to show up at the same time... they have started to notice that more than one person lives in their apartment and are complaining (not enough bandwidth). The telcos are then going to the government and complaining saying they cannot afford to house people at affordable prices any more and will have to charge their employers for the "privilege" of housing their employees close to work. If the companies do not pay this the telcos do not promise there will be no traffic jams and these employees will get to work.
At the same time they are going to the people complaining and saying "you wanted to live close to work didn't you? you don't want traffic jams do you? We are not going to put any money into increasing the infrastructure (the highways) as that would cut into our bottom line. Instead we are just going to find a way to charge your companies for your housing so we can add a few stories to existing buildings. Isn't that better than you paying for it? What? You want to start your own building and make a co-op to avoid our fees and actually have an apartment to yourself? Too bad, we already made that illegal so pay up and shut up and tell your employer to do the same."
Actualy since I test my sites for standsards compliance they usualy break when viewed in IE. Something will be rendered just a little wrong or an extra space where it should not be etc.
I refuse to do extra work just to satisfy microsofts refusal to play along with standards they usualy pushed for and/or helped write. I also do not care about people who use IE, and after a breif explination neither do most of my clients... and so if you view my companies site in IE it is a bit off and will politely ask you to use any browser but IE if you want to see it the way it was meant to be. I then include my standard "why" page explaining standards and how microsoft does not follow them along with code examples showing all the extra work microsoft tries to create for me.
And yes... some of what I do is professional web development. When I explain the extra cost of making thier site "IE compliant" instead of "Standards compliant" almost always companies go with standards. Just one more way Microsoft raises your total cost of ownership as a business.
Slashdot Mirror
It is exactly this sort of attitude that is ALLOWING Bush to commit acts that are blatantly illegal.
The press is called "the fourth estate" because it has a definitive place in government. The only thing that exists to keep politicians even pretending to be honest is fear of public reprisal. Public reprisal will come when a reporter exposes the activities of the politician. Protecting reporters is tantamount to protecting your right to know what your government is up to. I agree if they commit an actual crime they should be held accountable but as many have pointed out that is not the case here. The government is violating their rights on suspicion alone. This will make it much less likely that reporters will be approached and thus limit their ability to gather information.
If you are happy NOT knowing what our leaders are up to then by all means, allow reporters to loose the traditional protections that allow them to do their jobs. From what I have seen however the only "State secrets" I have seen exposed are violations of rights and illegal activity. These are things I WANT exposed.
Actualy the problem is usualy created by end game characters who have nothing better to do. They go farm gold and then start new characters with it driving up the lower level economies.
Do I have a good solution to this? Nah... but I wanted to point it out anyway.
Ah but it does make a difference when you get ten database servers behind the router all returning ten requests at 100ms... then you NEED the router to respond at 10ms or better yes?
Routers are not about the speed of any individual machine... they are about keeping up with ALL machines sitting behind them.
Not disagreeing with you... I think eventualy for speed increases we WILL have to move to specialized hardware for other things. Why not make a processor that only divvied up tasks? It would send audio to the audio processor, video to the gpu etc. That is the next gen of "general" computing, not faster processors.
I agree. I am very much an advocate of the "right tool for the right job" theory.
Making a system designed to be a general purpose tool (ie a 1u computer) into a single purpose device is bound to not be as good as a device designed to do that job.
If I want a firewall or router I want it to be capable of doing it's job to the best of it's ability, not limited by the processor if another type could have been faster. Also not limited by the OS if a small bit of highly dedicated code could do a better job than something written on top of an OS designed to be all-purpose.
Just my 2$ (inflation and all)
On the contrary, they very much count (posting from a mac mini because it fits on my desk and all my real work is on servers I ssh to anyway) and I whole heartedly support them. I just find it a bit odd that a -convicted- (in more than one court mind you) monopoly would be allow to do this.
Of course a lot of the things comming out of the U.S. government boggle me lately.
At least the EU will back it's conviction, says more for them than I can say about Bushy boy.
Has anyone in the DOJ looked into this Microsoft anti-spyware anti-virus bit?
Anyone else feel this is the epitomy of anti-competative practices? Hell their OS is the REASON these other companies exist, and now Microsoft gets to profit from thier own security holes?
Someone else HAS to see the flaw in this idea... I can only pray the EU once again has more sense than the DOJ.
Very well said and an excellent point.
I would add, although you eluded to this, that the way to combat the **AA behavior is not to pirate but to spend your money on CDs and DVDs produced by labels that follow your personal ethics. It will require educating yourself on the various labels and companies but if you truly believe in a solution that is what you MUST do.
Companies must SEE solid numbers showing what consumers want and what they will tolerate. So long as people still buy, they have not found the limit yet. They can pass all the laws they want, if their sales drop 50% one month and a label that advertises "DRM free and we won't sue you" suddenly jumps 400% in sales the **AA WILL notice and that will matter to them my friends.
I see on here often the phrase "vote with your money" well that is what you must do. -BUY- CDs and DVDs but from companies who operate the way you want.
A portion of our software we build at my company requires 3D acceleration for design work.
After about a week of wrestling with ATI drivers and cards we gave up and decided it was cheaper to ship an NVIDIA card with Linux driver CD with our software than to try and support ATI.
The ATI drivers never could do a cloned display correctly with differing resolutions, despite spending hours trying to tweak 30 or so parameters in the config file. The NVIDIA drivers did it in two lines first try.
Most of our customers who have switched thank us for forcing them to do it.
Second point... your comment that comments about "how dangerous ActiveX is and yada yada" not mattering to management or IT is hogwash.
First... any IT guy worthy of being even an intern would add disabling of ActiveX if not outright banning the use of IE to his corporate security policy. The number of security issues it presents make it simply not worth the effort or down time of patching. You don't have to shut down other apps or reboot the computer for a firefox update... calulate the man hour savings of JUST that.
Now... managers... they care about bottom line and cost. Why on earth would you beleive they would not care to listen about the cost savings involved in using php/mysql over activex/mssql? The portability and down time reductions? All of these are things managers care VERY much about.
I would be interested to see how your theory would apply to my companies website. Approximately 80% of our hits (as tallied by webalizer) are from Unix/Mac machines. How exactly do you intend I ask them to "switch back" to IE?
They would laugh at me, and rightly so. They would also get very frustrated if my site did not work for them with whatever browser they DO choose to use.
Now, as we have established that there is a direct customer need for something other than IE, and our business requires customers be able to access the information on our site... how exactly do you propose I create a site to satisfy them?
Answer: I use standards. The fact that my standards compliant site does not look quite right in IE is irrelevant to the company as that is a small fraction of our hits and we are BETTER off asking IE users to come back using any other browser.
Who makes these standards? Who controls them? That is an issue for debate and I will gladly have it with you. What I will not debate is that they must exist. Otherwise sites become very unwieldy very quickly and it puts a HUGE burden on developers rather than where it should be, on the browser to follow standards.
See my previous post on the increasted cost of IE compliant sites if you need more info.
Ok, it is kind of sad this post is +5... lots of people have asked artists to prove they are not fairly compensated by allofmp3 and I have not seen one story to indicate this is the case. The RIAA wants it shut down, not artists. At least not that I have seen yet. If that changes, my opinion will change, until then, stick with the facts.
Wow... do they even have someone tech savvy read those things?
That was horrible and the biggest load of FUD I have seen in a while.
Let me guess... a few days later they came out with Mac MacAffee?
Just remember... if you want companies to make games for the Mac, buy them.
I do not play the latest and greatest but I have never lacked for games to play.
As is the ever so popular phrase here "vote with your money."
Mac game sales go up, more companies port their games, simple as that.
An interesting idea... but you would need to allow for multiple dictionaries. I commonly get e-mail in english, american, french and japanese every day. And before anyone flames me I -do- make a distinction between english and american. They are spelled and pronounced differently so when discussing dictionaries they ARE different.
As another responder pointed out... perhaps this could be used in some form of "weight" calculation. I would think counting special characters and individual characters ( barring I and A ) would hold just as much "weight" however.
The proposed system I liked better was requiring mail servers to be "registered" and any email being received would check it's claimed registration against the IP it came from. Thus any email being sent via bot from a dsl line is automatically thrown out. If it is "legit" spam you have a record in the header of who sent it and can track them down.
How about this scenario. I buy a CD (relatively same price as an album due to RIAA price fixing but that is a separate issue) and listen to it in my car and on my stereo. Then decide I like it enough to rip it to mp3s. This is legal and I can now put those mp3s on any device I want including new cell phones etc and continue to listen to MY music that I PURCHASED in any way -I- CHOOSE using whatever program -I- choose on whatever OS I choose. If my hard drive dies it is fine I just re-rip the CD no problem. All of these I am allowed to do.
Now... joe or jane consumer buys a DRMed album from anyone offering them. They can play it using the specific DRM player, on an OS that supports this player or MAYBE on a device that specifically supports THAT DRM and no other. What choice is there? What rights do they have to back up the music, play it in my car etc? They have none. No choice in how they use the music they "purchased." Now XYZ company goes out of business and they simply cannot listen to their music at all. No one ever explained to the consumer they were not buying the music simply renting it from the company.
See the difference? That is why DRM = bad for consumer
Bill may have taken commercial airlines but shall we talk about he or his partners yachts? You know, the ones that are in magazines almost constantly because they are so big and so decked out? Or the small islands they own?
Just because you are jealous someone else has more money than you do not tell them how to spend it. They made a successful business, and now are spending the fruits of their labor. How is that evil? Sounds like every American or European's wet dream to me.
I fail to see where it is evil except that it makes you green with envy.
I completely agree. I bought a TiVo because there were a few shows I wanted to watch but contrary to the fact I am posting here I do have a life so could not move my schedule around when the networks wanted to air my show.
That is it... I wanted to watch the show on my schedule. No evil plot to rob them of money or whatever. Hell I pay my satellite company $60 a month for three channels. If I got to pick which three and it was commercial free like HBO is sometimes since you pay a premium I would GLADLY do it.
So lets calculate this here... we will assume half goes to the satellite company itself that leaves $30 for the networks. 90% of what I watch is on two channels and I would not care if I lost the rest. That means $15 to sci-fi and $15 to HDNET. If they got this from everyone they would have more money than they knew what to do with and NO ADS. They could let me record it, fast forward, rewind whatever and it would not cut into their profits AT ALL. In fact without spending so much time and money spazing about it they would SAVE money.
What these complete idiots do not get is they CAN make gobs of money... they just need to change their model. They cannot possibly make more than $1 per airing of an episode off me and if I could pay that to record it on my TiVo and watch whenever I had time I would pay it in a heartbeat.
They have options... they just refuse to acknowledge them. Makes me wonder if I could convince enough people to donate to the cause that I could become a lobbyist for the good guys.
We are in the same situation at my company. Management did an analysis of risk and TCO of running windows, which thanks to me included probability of getting sued by Microsoft, security etc and decided it was not a good business decision to stay with them. And yes, I gave a fair an impartial analysis and was realistic about training and maintenance times caused by the switch. Over the last year we have been slowly replacing all computers with either Linux for engineers or Macs for execs. Well, some of the engineers wanted Macs after the first couple came in too.
Bottom line... we have dropped IT costs in just machines and setup time by about 20k a year, and we are not a large company. It used to take one person an afternoon to set up two windows machines since they had to wipe and re-install to get rid of all the pre-installed crap. Then run bandwidth intensive updates, install and update virus software etc. We could not use an image as the hardware was always just enough different it did not work, but even if we did it would not reduce the time much as a lot if it is updates which need to be monitored.
With Linux we have an image we copy from CD onto the machine which has everything pre-done and bam, one machine out the door in 20-30 minutes (10 of which was getting it out of the box).
The Macs are just as easy... the only thing we install is Office (necessary evil for execs, they MUST have their powerpoint) and that is done via copying a folder and inputting a key. No complicated process. Hell it even picks up our wireless network during install (gigabit landline reserved for engineers) and considers it a native interface rather than a hack like Windows.
Now instead of spending 80% of my day troubleshooting Windows I spend maybe 15% on maintenance tasks and the rest adding value to the company by implementing new things like the VOIP phones that we can use thanks to the network not having so much unnecessary traffic on it, which incidentally is going to save us another $5k a year or so while we pay for the hardware and $10k a year after.
All made possible by dumping Microsoft Windows XP.
Let me start by saying I agree with you... pick a direction.
Fact is however google checkout is backed by Citi Bank so I am pretty sure it is going to be considered safe and secure. e-bay just does not want to admit it. Citi is not known for taking risks, although since they cornered the 7-11 ATM market I have begun to wonder.
They were busted up yes... until the Bush administration at which time they began to re-assemble.
Have you been watching all the baby bells and such merge lately? SBC even bought AT&T in an attempt to steal their reputation and bypass the bad one they had and replace it with AT&Ts good one.
They are not the only ones either... Verizon is sure buying up quite a few telcos.
My point about them being government sponsored is a matter of public record. They got where they are because the government paid them to do build the infrastructure. They wine about how expensive it is and how "unfair" it is that others are using "their" infrastructure but fact is they did not pay for it... it was tax dollar subsidies. Now that they have the infrastructure they want to milk it, and not let competition in.
I think the only way to solve this is take the infrastructure away from them and let anyone who wants rent time on the network.
I am going to skip the usual wordy and subtle version of the "you have no clue" diatribe and skip right to my point.
Copy right originated as the RIGHT TO COPY protecting printing presses from trying to put a stranglehold on production and allowing education to not be impeded by finance. It was the right for the people who purchased something to copy it for their own use.
Extrapolate this now to modern era with media such as music and movies. It follows that I should have the RIGHT to copy anything I lawfully purchase. Any form of DRM impedes MY RIGHTS as outlined in the intent of this law. It is that I disagree with, and thus any laws that support it.
As for allofmp3.com maybe the **AA should take a clue from the success of this site and of iTunes and see that people ARE willing and able to pay, and they are telling the *AA what they are willing to pay. A smart organization would listen and adapt. They would say "Wow, people are willing to pay X amount for this in droves... how can we work that as to capitalize on all these sales" and "we can sell 100k copies at $20 or 500K copies at $10... how do we work a greater profit margin out of the $10 sale then?"
That is what people refer to as the "Business model," not piracy as a business model (although many companies *cough* microsoft *cough* have made it one and cornered a market via piracy. But looking at what people are showing themselves to be willing to do and adapting to that rather than trying to force what the **AA as an organization feels people should be willing to do.
I will admit to my own bout of piracy but have since realized it was not productive. Now I seek out means of legitimately acquiring the things I need at a price I am willing to pay. Wow... free market... what a concept. If it is legal for me to pay $2 to a company in Russia for an album in mp3 format I will do so. Russian law requires the artist receive a portion of this which I support. I see no need to pay the **AA to do ANYTHING. Now if someone proves the artist is not receiving their portion of the money then I will also support any legal action taken against the people who broke the law. Any artist who's music I have purchased is more than free to contact me asking for my assistance in this... or to make that argument publicly.
Someone found a business model which as far as I know is legal, to sell me something I want for a price I am willing to pay. If iTunes offered the same price I would still buy from allofmp3 because it lacks DRM and I can do what I want with what I purchased, as I have a RIGHT to do. If iTunes offered the same thing for the same price I would buy from them as their interface is better and I have a slight preference to supporting US companies. See the pattern? Sounds like free market to me.
Under no circumstances will I give these files to anyone else, as that is illegal and unethical unless I then delete them. As I feel I was charged a reasonable price I should direct others to buy it at the same place. It is equally unethical in my mind to prevent me from doing so. If I want to give a book to my friend for them to read I can do so. No one would dispute this, even the **AA, although they would like to. Why should a CD or mp3 be different? So long as I do not have a duplicate of the item when I give it, that should be a legally protected transaction.
The difference between me and most is I feel an obligation to "fight the system" I disagree with but by simply not giving my money to those I disagree with. If you want to sign on as an artist with an RIAA label that is your right... just don't expect my money or for me to support you when ask me to vote for laws that impede my rights. Now if you want to sell me your album direct for $2-5 and pocket everything but the bandwidth costs be my guest, you will probably get my money. If your any good you will probably get my money more than once because I did not back up your mp3 before a HD crash or some such.
Are you friggin kidding me?
Lets start with buying companies just to shut down any possible competition... we will then move on to raping these companies pension funds after firing all the employees and counting it as "profit" on their quarterly report.
I will continue with the fact Microsoft has NEVER innovated or invented anything. NOTHING. They have bought, sued for or outright stolen and then sued to keep the people they stole from quiet, everything they have. Now it could be pointed out companies like Google do not either... they only refine. But they don't CLAIM to be based on innovation and use the need for innovation to fight off law suites levied in return against them.
During their anti-trust case I was also PRESENT (i.e. not anecdotal in any way... I watched this happen) a Microsoft stooge offer a huge campaign contribution to a politician's campaign I was working on if he would agree to help them in their anti-trust case soon as all the elections finished. I mean common, they outright admitted they were stalling till they could buy enough support in the new administration.
Get the picture or should I continue?
Sorry but as a free site subsidized by advertising slashdot could not afford the telcos rates in your future world and went under. It happened slowly as people originally would wait the five minutes for each page to load as it was low priority traffic... but eventually just gave up and went to watch their HD streaming reality show as that was the only thing they could get quickly. You will have to find some MSNBC archives instead to point out how right you were.
What I am amazed you have not picked up on is that the telco's are a government protected monopoly which your tax dollars subsidize. You are paying them an enormous amount in order to keep those lines up, personally. Even if you do not see it on your bill look at your taxes next year and wonder how much of that goes to SBC pretending to be AT&T or Verizon.
:)
I will also use your analogy to explain how they have shot themselves in the foot, not Google or Skype. They rented you a government subsidized apartment (your phone/DSL line) but did so based on the assumption you would only live there a few days a month. They then rented the SAME apartment to 5 other people, collected rent from all of them (as well as the government subsidies) and prayed no one would ever show up at the same time and find out, nor would the government notice they had 50 apartments and 250 people registered to live in them. They extracted HUGE profits from doing this and sat back with their fat bonuses and laughed.
Now people have actually started to show up at the same time... they have started to notice that more than one person lives in their apartment and are complaining (not enough bandwidth). The telcos are then going to the government and complaining saying they cannot afford to house people at affordable prices any more and will have to charge their employers for the "privilege" of housing their employees close to work. If the companies do not pay this the telcos do not promise there will be no traffic jams and these employees will get to work.
At the same time they are going to the people complaining and saying "you wanted to live close to work didn't you? you don't want traffic jams do you? We are not going to put any money into increasing the infrastructure (the highways) as that would cut into our bottom line. Instead we are just going to find a way to charge your companies for your housing so we can add a few stories to existing buildings. Isn't that better than you paying for it? What? You want to start your own building and make a co-op to avoid our fees and actually have an apartment to yourself? Too bad, we already made that illegal so pay up and shut up and tell your employer to do the same."
There... now your analogy is complete
Actualy since I test my sites for standsards compliance they usualy break when viewed in IE. Something will be rendered just a little wrong or an extra space where it should not be etc.
I refuse to do extra work just to satisfy microsofts refusal to play along with standards they usualy pushed for and/or helped write. I also do not care about people who use IE, and after a breif explination neither do most of my clients... and so if you view my companies site in IE it is a bit off and will politely ask you to use any browser but IE if you want to see it the way it was meant to be. I then include my standard "why" page explaining standards and how microsoft does not follow them along with code examples showing all the extra work microsoft tries to create for me.
And yes... some of what I do is professional web development. When I explain the extra cost of making thier site "IE compliant" instead of "Standards compliant" almost always companies go with standards. Just one more way Microsoft raises your total cost of ownership as a business.