This reminds me of Disclosure
on
MUD Shell
·
· Score: 2
I never saw the movie, but in the book there is a virtual-reality filing system that you walk through, open drawers, etc.
Sounds like this shell is the first step.
- JoeShmoe
"i defy you to go find a web page that contains all my thoughts"
Are you a Republican? There are pages about that. Are you of Spanish decent? There are pages about that. Are you into gay midget porn? Well there are pages about that too. Same for the guy next to you or your grandmother (mine loves to cook recipies I download for her from Martha Stewart).
My point was the punchline, as best as I could express it at 3AM in the morning. All governments by nature want to control thought. They can't, but they can try by using censorship which may vary from government to government.
On one end of the spectrum you have some Middle Eastern countries where connections to the Internet are banned. Those countries don't want their citizens thinking about the Western lifestyle...so they censor it all.
Moving down the spectrum you have countries like China that only allow connections to the China-approved Internet. China doesn't want its citizens thinking of Taiwan as a separate country or Falun Gong as a peaceful group...so any site not depicting Taiwan as a spoiled child and Falun Gong as a hideous cult are censored.
And so on until you get to the other end of the spectrum, countries like the US, Europe, Australia. However those governments also have an agenda. They don't want their citizens thinking about porn, drugs, violence and bombs. They would like nothing better than to censor them. And gradually they are moving in that direction, with repeated attempts at CDA, the new rider against drug information sites, and the way the media always depicts any bomb-maker as being taught by the Internet.
And so on. Controlling the Internet, which is basically millions of people talking about something they think about, is as futile as controlling human thought. We will never be rid of ________ (fill in with racism, child pornography, gaybashing, whatever is the current outrage) on the Internet. There will always be someone who is thinking about ________ and as long as he/she can find others that also think about ________ there will always be some ________ out there on the Internet. The only way to truly get rid of ________ is for people to stop thinking about it.
Anything that people could possibly have thought of is going to be expressed on a website somewhere. Therefore, a better way to picture the Internet is the sum of all human thought.
So basically this topic is:
"Australian IT are reporting that the South Australian Government are about to pass a bill which mandates censorship of thoughts."
And hasn't that been the secret goal of every governement since time began?
I remember reading several months ago that Covad sued PacBell for various dirty deeds they were doing to screw up Covad's customers.
They won a settlement of several million dollars and then, I think, PacBell appealed.
So what ever became of that? Does anyone know?
Personally, I think SBC communications needs to be slapped with an anti-trust lawsuit much more than Microsoft. I have a friends who is an installer for PacBell and another friend who is an installer for Covad. You would not believe some of the stories I hear them tell.
The whole problem is forcing PacBell to do what they don't want to do: serve their competitors.
If you have six pairs of wire in the average phone box, is it any surprise that PacBell DSL customers get the best ones and Covad customers get the ones with interferrance? If there's a bad port at the CO, do you think it will be a PacBell customer who gets told "sorry, we have no ports available until we install a new backplane"?
My PacBell friend has even witnessed other PacBell installed pulling pairs that have Covad tags on them off the screws while winking and saying "Oops". Of course when the eventual repair report is filed, it's "Covad tech failed to secure wires properly" and such.
It wasn't enough to divide PacBell the phone company from PacBell the DSL company. They still operate as one and will always operate as one.
Look at California. Since 1996 PacBell has been required to allow other companies to provide local phone service. At first, there was Sprint, GTE, and AT&T all getting into the local market. Now, four years later, it's only PacBell because the other companies couldn't keep customers due to PacBell persecution.
I think that local governments should use the power of emminent domain to buy all the first-mile infrastructure and then PacBell and Covad and everyone else will finally be competing on equal ground.
I didn't mean to start a whole nature vs. nurture argument but I guess that's what it is turning out to be.
What I mean is, I'm pretty damn happy with myself. I'm intelligent, successful and reasonable attractive (if I could change that we would be having a discussion about genetic engineering not cloning). I don't have a substance abuse problem, I'm in pretty good shape and definitely not a homosexual ("Not that there's anything wrong with that!"). I'm the pride and joy of my parents. Nothing in my genetic code seems to have predisposed me to anything remotely problematic.
At the same time, I really wish I had gotten started with computers at a much earlier age. I got into the game rather late, and now my career is a great deal of catch-up. I flopped from interest to interest until I found something I was good at. Imagine if I could have known earlier and taken C/ASM instead of music?
Consider Tiger Woods...his parents started teaching him golf when he was what, four? How did they know he wouldn't become fat and uncoordinated after adolescence? They didn't, it was pretty much a crap shoot. There are probably a hundred other kids that could have been even better at golf than Tiger Woods, the only problem being they didn't identify their talents until they were adults.
Obviously, raising a kid knowing his strengths and weakness would alter the result. But as someone else pointed out, parents are always trying to manipulate their child's outcome. But I think parents would also like to know what their child is naturally good at so they can focus on nuturing those talents.
It would also be helpful for health reasons. If I develop diabetes or heart disease, my cloned child would have enough warning to alter his/her lifestyle to avoid aggrevating that condition. This is all just speculation.
Of course, there is one downside that I just realized. This wouldn't really work for couples. Imagine a father trying to raise a daughter that was the clone of the woman he was sexually involved with. Or a mother trying to raise a son that was the clone of the man she was sexually involved with. Talk about your mixed messages. Then again, maybe if the guy is shallow enough, when his wife turns 40 he can dump her for the younger 20-something version of herself! It wouldn't be incest technically cause the genetics are the same as his wifes, would it?
I think a better comparison would be a son/daughter that is literally the spittin' image of his/her father/mother.
Personally, I'd love to raise a clone of myself as a child. I'd already know what talents the child would have, what health issues, what physical characteristics, sexual predisposition, etc. No surprises.
It'd be like all those movies where you get to go back in time and right all the wrongs you did that made you life turn out a little less than perfect.
I think this type of project could actually be turned into a commercial venture. It doesn't have to be a dot-com that bleeds money and tries to throw ads at people while they download the converted file.
Convertion tools can cost hundreds of dollars. True, there are some nice free ones, but is anyone else sick of having ten different programs to do ten different file formats?
Imagine paying a fee and then having a site that can convert thousands of different files. If someone sends you a format you've never seen, sends it to the site for identification and conversion into something you can read. The first time someone gave me a.PS file I had no idea how to view it. I hate installing Acrobat and I'd love for a site that can send me TIFF file of the pages instead of a PDF file.
This type of functionality is easily worth $10 or $20 a month, in my opinion.
I've had this idea for a long time that what the Internet needs is a "file in file out" type site that can use large processing farms (or perhaps distributed computing) and turn a link to a file into any size/format you want.
For instance...as much as I like the high quality image of MPEG-2 streams, I just don't want to download them and find out they aren't in SVCD-compliant format. It's way to much work to reencode them. If they aren't ready to burn as SVCD they are just going to park on my hard drive and chew up space. If they are staying on my hard drive, I'd rather have some nice compact MPEG-4 files. Of course, since the quality on this old films probably isn't that great, maybe I would want VCD versions?
So imagine there's this site with a form. I type in the link to the file (like "http://www.archive.org/oldmovie.mpg" or anything). Then I use radio buttons to choose my preferred format (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, Quicktime, AVI, RealMedia...although why the hell anyone would choose that is beyond me). Last, I choose the sub-format. If I pick MPEG-1, I can choose VCD-compliant, or XVCD maybe. Or I can type in a custom width/height. I can alter pretty much anything you can do in your basic home video editor (resize, crop, basic effects).
Then I hit go. The converter site connects to the link I gave it, and starts downloading the file. If the file is streaming, it hands the processing off to the pool of servers and immediately hands me a link to the final stream. With enough hardware, this could be real time. Of course, if it isn't a streaming format, it would have to download the file and then process it and hand me the link.
Anyway, think about how cool this would be, for text documents, sound files, anything. A legally questionable extension would be, if someone requested a VCD version of a file, could the site cache that file and then offer it immediately the next time someone else requested it?
Anyone want to fund this type of venture? All we would need is a few good server farms, or a good distributed processing client.
Please discuss if you think this is a good idea and lets see if we can't get something started!
Speaking of which, if you write a program that create a FRESH connection, be careful what you name it because Mentos already has a trademark on "FRESHmaker". =P
Okay, sorry, I should have been more clear. I was lumping "author permission" and "paying royalties" into a single category in my mind.
Paying royalties for use of a song is, in my mind, getting author permission. Even if it isn't really the author giving the permissiong but the authorized agent (ASCAP, CMI, SECAM) acting on his/her behalf.
So yes, you can play a song without an artist's direct knowledge or even permission...but you sure as hell can't do it without getting permission (ie, paying for it) from someone, as Shayne implied.
Trading a thick heavy but otherwise low-maintenance copper cable for a thin light but very high-maintenance superconducting one?
I'm trying to picture this setup in my mind. As best I can figure, there is an underground conduit that has a single cable running through it, that they then pump full of liquid nitrogen.
They say it can carry electricity with virtually no resistance, but consider the electricity to cycle the liquid nitrogen and cool it down when it evaporates?
Since it's all underground, I don't see the space saving aspects of reducing nine wires to three.
Can anyone explain the key advantage to this new system? Is copper becoming that scarce/rare that they can't just throw down three more copper cables to increase capacity?
The Metalica/Metallica convention I mentioned actually exists. For a while Napster was auto-banning anyone who shared files with the name "Metallica" in them, so people started using/searching Metalica instead.
Napster knew about it, but as far as I know they never bothered to block it. Because then they would have had to block M3tallica or any other variation.
As far as how the naming convention spreads, it is actually quite simple. Just look at the Hotlist for someone that shared your same taste in music. Eventually you figure out what to search for to get what you want.
A great example of this are the warez groups that allow or even put their releases on Napster. You can search for the group's tag "-XXX" and instantly see all their releases being spread around for download. Also, in case you didn't know, it is very useful to search for numbers like 01 etc because you most often find people who have complete CDs usually published in the
"Artist/Album/Track # - Track Title.MP3" format.
The flaw with that argument is that it is rather simple for someone to tell if a whole car has been stolen. If the VIN number shows up on a hot list then it's stolen.
So all the car salesmen has to do is check the VINs against a single hotsheet and they are in compliance.
Napster can't do that because music doesn't have a VIN number, nor is there a hot sheet!
A better analogy is for the courts to say that all cars sold must not have antennas that were stolen from other cars. Since there are no VIN number on car antenna and there is no practical way of reporting a stolen car antenna, how on earth could someone know a car they are selling has the original antenna or one that was stolen?
If I use 10 seconds of Metallica music in a mix of my own personal music, is that stolen? The record companies would say yes, the courts would say "Napster you should have stopped it" and Napster would say "WTF???"
Sorry Shayne, but I'm pretty damn sure that public performance of a copyrighted work is explicitly forbidden by copyright laws. You can't even do a cover without permission from the original author.
I know that Weird Al has to get permission from the author of every song he parodies, because even though the lyrics are his, the tune isn't.
If you held a concert for 100,000 and played a Buffett song, you would be hearing from Buffett's lawyers even if you didn't charge a dime. The reason being that by hearing your performance, 100,000 no longer have to pay through some other means to hear that same music, if not the same artist.
Now you can play it for a group of friends but ONLY because that type of activity is considered "fair use" and is exempted from the actual law.
Another example, jukebox owners and music webcasters have to pay royalties even if they don't charge for songs.
Any rights you think you have, you don't, you only think you do because so far the technology doesn't exist to enforce the laws.
When is the music no longer a copyrighted object? If I hear a song in the morning, and recall it during the day, is that not a copy of the intellectual content (stored in the memory cells of the brain)? By remembering the song, did I just infringe upon the copyright?
Well, according to the record companies, ANY copy is infringing on the copyright. The reason you can't be charged for that second copy is only because technology hasn't been invented to track it, not because of a lack of desire by the copyright holders. [he says sourly]
Let's look at the trends...
Middle Ages: No one owns the music or the performance of music. If RIAA had existed back then, every bard who wandered from tavern to tavern performing for tips would have had to pay royalties or get hung.
Colonial Times: Music is owned by the author but it can be played freely by bands and eventually jukeboxes. Authors sell a lot of sheet music and performers/jukeboxes get paid to play it.
This century: Music is owned by the author but the performance of music is owned by the artist. Now you have to pay for both to even hear the music. Physical copies of music recordings are yours to own, but not reproduce
This decade: Someone comes up with the brilliant idea that you no longer own media. Pay-per-view schemes start out. Licenses are written to grant you no rights of any kind to music regardless of what you paid, when you paid, or who you paid.
The future: Music will be only permitted via direct brain transmission that is immediately wiped from memory after listening. This allows an artist to sell the same song over and over again to the same people since no one ever gets tired of it. Ice Ice Baby and Chumbawumba top the charts.
Think I'm kidding? It's only a question of inventing the technology. The goal and purpose of the recording and media industries is to make sure than any time we obtain any pleasure or satisfaction from anything they own, we pay for it.
So what you are telling me is that I now can no longer just delete Spam on site? I now have to run it through this SpamMimic to make sure I'm not missing a top-secret message?
Who is going to volunteer to read that tripe aloud?
Although, technically there should be an audio version available from the US Court website for the visually-impaired...although if they can navigate the web then I suppose they must have some kind of text-to-speech technology anyway.
Napster has both the ability to use its search function to identify infringing musical recordings and the right to bar participation of users who engage in the transmission of infringing files.
Huh? How is this even possible? When did Napster get watermarking technology? How can a search function possible identify infringing recordings?
If I search "Britney Spears" am I searching for her music or the audio recording of her swearing on a live mic?
If I search "Metalica" (one L on purpose) aren't I bypassing any search-function ban because last time I checked the real band was "Metallica"?
If I have a song called "Metallica sucks" won't that get caught in the same filter that excludes all infringing Metallica songs?
The ONLY way to tell if a file is infringing is to download and listen to it. There is no technology that can do that except human ears. And even if you identify one particular infringing file and wipe all copies from the service, what about the copies that are missing one or two bytes from the end of the file or other copies of the same song that were made at a completely different bitrate?
The courts are insane. How can they order Napster to do something that isn't technologically possible...even for a well-funded group like SDMI?
What would make this ideal is if there was some CD/DVD changer that had a FireWire connection.
I mean, I can buy a 400 CD/DVD Sony changer for around $600-$700 but any computer solutions will cost me thousands of dollars because they feel the need to have servers and Ethernet.
Does anyone know if there is a device that will let me choose a single CD/DVD media and then pump it out FireWire? Imagine the possibilities.
From HD-100 to a FireWire burner. Burn your favorite TV shows, each episode on its own CD. Rack them all up and then you would have gigabytes of HD-quality media available at your fingertips. Rotate out some CDs that you are tired off and replace with new ones. Your own 200GB TiVo?
So does such a beast exist, if not, how difficult would it be to adapt a consumer CD changer to output either SCSI/IDE or FireWire? I know there are several SCSI/IDE to FireWire convertors so either output would suffice. Are they the same drive mechanics in both consumer and computer versions?
Slashdot Mirror
They do as long as you can sue. End of story.
Remember this story?
- JoeShmoe
I never saw the movie, but in the book there is a virtual-reality filing system that you walk through, open drawers, etc. Sounds like this shell is the first step. - JoeShmoe
"i defy you to go find a web page that contains all my thoughts"
Are you a Republican? There are pages about that. Are you of Spanish decent? There are pages about that. Are you into gay midget porn? Well there are pages about that too. Same for the guy next to you or your grandmother (mine loves to cook recipies I download for her from Martha Stewart).
My point was the punchline, as best as I could express it at 3AM in the morning. All governments by nature want to control thought. They can't, but they can try by using censorship which may vary from government to government.
On one end of the spectrum you have some Middle Eastern countries where connections to the Internet are banned. Those countries don't want their citizens thinking about the Western lifestyle...so they censor it all.
Moving down the spectrum you have countries like China that only allow connections to the China-approved Internet. China doesn't want its citizens thinking of Taiwan as a separate country or Falun Gong as a peaceful group...so any site not depicting Taiwan as a spoiled child and Falun Gong as a hideous cult are censored.
And so on until you get to the other end of the spectrum, countries like the US, Europe, Australia. However those governments also have an agenda. They don't want their citizens thinking about porn, drugs, violence and bombs. They would like nothing better than to censor them. And gradually they are moving in that direction, with repeated attempts at CDA, the new rider against drug information sites, and the way the media always depicts any bomb-maker as being taught by the Internet.
And so on. Controlling the Internet, which is basically millions of people talking about something they think about, is as futile as controlling human thought. We will never be rid of ________ (fill in with racism, child pornography, gaybashing, whatever is the current outrage) on the Internet. There will always be someone who is thinking about ________ and as long as he/she can find others that also think about ________ there will always be some ________ out there on the Internet. The only way to truly get rid of ________ is for people to stop thinking about it.
- JoeShmoe
Anything that people could possibly have thought of is going to be expressed on a website somewhere. Therefore, a better way to picture the Internet is the sum of all human thought.
So basically this topic is:
"Australian IT are reporting that the South Australian Government are about to pass a bill which mandates censorship of thoughts."
And hasn't that been the secret goal of every governement since time began?
- JoeShmoe
SpeakEasy (the BEST DSL provider, IMHO) has a great dictionary for keeping your acronyms straight:
l
For the link-fearing:
http://www.speakeasy.net/dsl/dsl_dictionary.htm
Or click Here
- JoeShmoe
I remember reading several months ago that Covad sued PacBell for various dirty deeds they were doing to screw up Covad's customers.
They won a settlement of several million dollars and then, I think, PacBell appealed.
So what ever became of that? Does anyone know?
Personally, I think SBC communications needs to be slapped with an anti-trust lawsuit much more than Microsoft. I have a friends who is an installer for PacBell and another friend who is an installer for Covad. You would not believe some of the stories I hear them tell.
The whole problem is forcing PacBell to do what they don't want to do: serve their competitors.
If you have six pairs of wire in the average phone box, is it any surprise that PacBell DSL customers get the best ones and Covad customers get the ones with interferrance? If there's a bad port at the CO, do you think it will be a PacBell customer who gets told "sorry, we have no ports available until we install a new backplane"?
My PacBell friend has even witnessed other PacBell installed pulling pairs that have Covad tags on them off the screws while winking and saying "Oops". Of course when the eventual repair report is filed, it's "Covad tech failed to secure wires properly" and such.
It wasn't enough to divide PacBell the phone company from PacBell the DSL company. They still operate as one and will always operate as one.
Look at California. Since 1996 PacBell has been required to allow other companies to provide local phone service. At first, there was Sprint, GTE, and AT&T all getting into the local market. Now, four years later, it's only PacBell because the other companies couldn't keep customers due to PacBell persecution.
I think that local governments should use the power of emminent domain to buy all the first-mile infrastructure and then PacBell and Covad and everyone else will finally be competing on equal ground.
- JoeShmoe
I didn't mean to start a whole nature vs. nurture argument but I guess that's what it is turning out to be.
What I mean is, I'm pretty damn happy with myself. I'm intelligent, successful and reasonable attractive (if I could change that we would be having a discussion about genetic engineering not cloning). I don't have a substance abuse problem, I'm in pretty good shape and definitely not a homosexual ("Not that there's anything wrong with that!"). I'm the pride and joy of my parents. Nothing in my genetic code seems to have predisposed me to anything remotely problematic.
At the same time, I really wish I had gotten started with computers at a much earlier age. I got into the game rather late, and now my career is a great deal of catch-up. I flopped from interest to interest until I found something I was good at. Imagine if I could have known earlier and taken C/ASM instead of music?
Consider Tiger Woods...his parents started teaching him golf when he was what, four? How did they know he wouldn't become fat and uncoordinated after adolescence? They didn't, it was pretty much a crap shoot. There are probably a hundred other kids that could have been even better at golf than Tiger Woods, the only problem being they didn't identify their talents until they were adults.
Obviously, raising a kid knowing his strengths and weakness would alter the result. But as someone else pointed out, parents are always trying to manipulate their child's outcome. But I think parents would also like to know what their child is naturally good at so they can focus on nuturing those talents.
It would also be helpful for health reasons. If I develop diabetes or heart disease, my cloned child would have enough warning to alter his/her lifestyle to avoid aggrevating that condition. This is all just speculation.
Of course, there is one downside that I just realized. This wouldn't really work for couples. Imagine a father trying to raise a daughter that was the clone of the woman he was sexually involved with. Or a mother trying to raise a son that was the clone of the man she was sexually involved with. Talk about your mixed messages. Then again, maybe if the guy is shallow enough, when his wife turns 40 he can dump her for the younger 20-something version of herself! It wouldn't be incest technically cause the genetics are the same as his wifes, would it?
Now THERE'S a moral issue that needs addressing!
- JoeShmoe
Um, except for the age difference?
I think a better comparison would be a son/daughter that is literally the spittin' image of his/her father/mother.
Personally, I'd love to raise a clone of myself as a child. I'd already know what talents the child would have, what health issues, what physical characteristics, sexual predisposition, etc. No surprises.
It'd be like all those movies where you get to go back in time and right all the wrongs you did that made you life turn out a little less than perfect.
Then again, it seems a little narcissistic...
- JoeShmoe
"I think I'm a clone now...."
- JoeShmoe
Oh, I forgot to mention one thing...
.PS file I had no idea how to view it. I hate installing Acrobat and I'd love for a site that can send me TIFF file of the pages instead of a PDF file.
I think this type of project could actually be turned into a commercial venture. It doesn't have to be a dot-com that bleeds money and tries to throw ads at people while they download the converted file.
Convertion tools can cost hundreds of dollars. True, there are some nice free ones, but is anyone else sick of having ten different programs to do ten different file formats?
Imagine paying a fee and then having a site that can convert thousands of different files. If someone sends you a format you've never seen, sends it to the site for identification and conversion into something you can read. The first time someone gave me a
This type of functionality is easily worth $10 or $20 a month, in my opinion.
- JoeShmoe
I've had this idea for a long time that what the Internet needs is a "file in file out" type site that can use large processing farms (or perhaps distributed computing) and turn a link to a file into any size/format you want.
For instance...as much as I like the high quality image of MPEG-2 streams, I just don't want to download them and find out they aren't in SVCD-compliant format. It's way to much work to reencode them. If they aren't ready to burn as SVCD they are just going to park on my hard drive and chew up space. If they are staying on my hard drive, I'd rather have some nice compact MPEG-4 files. Of course, since the quality on this old films probably isn't that great, maybe I would want VCD versions?
So imagine there's this site with a form. I type in the link to the file (like "http://www.archive.org/oldmovie.mpg" or anything). Then I use radio buttons to choose my preferred format (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, Quicktime, AVI, RealMedia...although why the hell anyone would choose that is beyond me). Last, I choose the sub-format. If I pick MPEG-1, I can choose VCD-compliant, or XVCD maybe. Or I can type in a custom width/height. I can alter pretty much anything you can do in your basic home video editor (resize, crop, basic effects).
Then I hit go. The converter site connects to the link I gave it, and starts downloading the file. If the file is streaming, it hands the processing off to the pool of servers and immediately hands me a link to the final stream. With enough hardware, this could be real time. Of course, if it isn't a streaming format, it would have to download the file and then process it and hand me the link.
Anyway, think about how cool this would be, for text documents, sound files, anything. A legally questionable extension would be, if someone requested a VCD version of a file, could the site cache that file and then offer it immediately the next time someone else requested it?
Anyone want to fund this type of venture? All we would need is a few good server farms, or a good distributed processing client.
Please discuss if you think this is a good idea and lets see if we can't get something started!
- JoeShmoe
Speaking of which, if you write a program that create a FRESH connection, be careful what you name it because Mentos already has a trademark on "FRESHmaker". =P
- JoeShmoe
No! Because then the goatse.cx guy would actually be considered on-topic. [shudder]
- JoeShmoe
Okay, sorry, I should have been more clear. I was lumping "author permission" and "paying royalties" into a single category in my mind.
Paying royalties for use of a song is, in my mind, getting author permission. Even if it isn't really the author giving the permissiong but the authorized agent (ASCAP, CMI, SECAM) acting on his/her behalf.
So yes, you can play a song without an artist's direct knowledge or even permission...but you sure as hell can't do it without getting permission (ie, paying for it) from someone, as Shayne implied.
- JoeShmoe
Trading a thick heavy but otherwise low-maintenance copper cable for a thin light but very high-maintenance superconducting one?
I'm trying to picture this setup in my mind. As best I can figure, there is an underground conduit that has a single cable running through it, that they then pump full of liquid nitrogen.
They say it can carry electricity with virtually no resistance, but consider the electricity to cycle the liquid nitrogen and cool it down when it evaporates?
Since it's all underground, I don't see the space saving aspects of reducing nine wires to three.
Can anyone explain the key advantage to this new system? Is copper becoming that scarce/rare that they can't just throw down three more copper cables to increase capacity?
- JoeShmoe
The Metalica/Metallica convention I mentioned actually exists. For a while Napster was auto-banning anyone who shared files with the name "Metallica" in them, so people started using/searching Metalica instead.
Napster knew about it, but as far as I know they never bothered to block it. Because then they would have had to block M3tallica or any other variation.
As far as how the naming convention spreads, it is actually quite simple. Just look at the Hotlist for someone that shared your same taste in music. Eventually you figure out what to search for to get what you want.
A great example of this are the warez groups that allow or even put their releases on Napster. You can search for the group's tag "-XXX" and instantly see all their releases being spread around for download. Also, in case you didn't know, it is very useful to search for numbers like 01 etc because you most often find people who have complete CDs usually published in the
"Artist/Album/Track # - Track Title.MP3" format.
- JoeShmoe
The flaw with that argument is that it is rather simple for someone to tell if a whole car has been stolen. If the VIN number shows up on a hot list then it's stolen.
So all the car salesmen has to do is check the VINs against a single hotsheet and they are in compliance.
Napster can't do that because music doesn't have a VIN number, nor is there a hot sheet!
A better analogy is for the courts to say that all cars sold must not have antennas that were stolen from other cars. Since there are no VIN number on car antenna and there is no practical way of reporting a stolen car antenna, how on earth could someone know a car they are selling has the original antenna or one that was stolen?
If I use 10 seconds of Metallica music in a mix of my own personal music, is that stolen? The record companies would say yes, the courts would say "Napster you should have stopped it" and Napster would say "WTF???"
- JoeShmoe
Sorry Shayne, but I'm pretty damn sure that public performance of a copyrighted work is explicitly forbidden by copyright laws. You can't even do a cover without permission from the original author.
I know that Weird Al has to get permission from the author of every song he parodies, because even though the lyrics are his, the tune isn't.
If you held a concert for 100,000 and played a Buffett song, you would be hearing from Buffett's lawyers even if you didn't charge a dime. The reason being that by hearing your performance, 100,000 no longer have to pay through some other means to hear that same music, if not the same artist.
Now you can play it for a group of friends but ONLY because that type of activity is considered "fair use" and is exempted from the actual law.
Another example, jukebox owners and music webcasters have to pay royalties even if they don't charge for songs.
Any rights you think you have, you don't, you only think you do because so far the technology doesn't exist to enforce the laws.
- JoeShmoe
When is the music no longer a copyrighted object? If I hear a song in the morning, and recall it during the day, is that not a copy of the intellectual content (stored in the memory cells of the brain)? By remembering the song, did I just infringe upon the copyright?
Well, according to the record companies, ANY copy is infringing on the copyright. The reason you can't be charged for that second copy is only because technology hasn't been invented to track it, not because of a lack of desire by the copyright holders. [he says sourly]
Let's look at the trends...
Middle Ages: No one owns the music or the performance of music. If RIAA had existed back then, every bard who wandered from tavern to tavern performing for tips would have had to pay royalties or get hung.
Colonial Times: Music is owned by the author but it can be played freely by bands and eventually jukeboxes. Authors sell a lot of sheet music and performers/jukeboxes get paid to play it.
This century: Music is owned by the author but the performance of music is owned by the artist. Now you have to pay for both to even hear the music. Physical copies of music recordings are yours to own, but not reproduce
This decade: Someone comes up with the brilliant idea that you no longer own media. Pay-per-view schemes start out. Licenses are written to grant you no rights of any kind to music regardless of what you paid, when you paid, or who you paid.
The future: Music will be only permitted via direct brain transmission that is immediately wiped from memory after listening. This allows an artist to sell the same song over and over again to the same people since no one ever gets tired of it. Ice Ice Baby and Chumbawumba top the charts.
Think I'm kidding? It's only a question of inventing the technology. The goal and purpose of the recording and media industries is to make sure than any time we obtain any pleasure or satisfaction from anything they own, we pay for it.
- JoeShmoe
So what you are telling me is that I now can no longer just delete Spam on site? I now have to run it through this SpamMimic to make sure I'm not missing a top-secret message?
ARRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGH!
- JoeShmoe
Who is going to volunteer to read that tripe aloud?
H E- PRO-GRAM-NAPS-TAR-TO-BE-EYE-LEE-GAL..."
Although, technically there should be an audio version available from the US Court website for the visually-impaired...although if they can navigate the web then I suppose they must have some kind of text-to-speech technology anyway.
"THE-YOU-ESS-SU-PREEM-COO-ORT-HAS-DE-CLAIR-ED-T
- JoeShmoe
Myself
?
- JoeShmoe
Napster has both the ability to use its search function to identify infringing musical recordings and the right to bar participation of users who engage in the transmission of infringing files.
Huh? How is this even possible? When did Napster get watermarking technology? How can a search function possible identify infringing recordings?
If I search "Britney Spears" am I searching for her music or the audio recording of her swearing on a live mic?
If I search "Metalica" (one L on purpose) aren't I bypassing any search-function ban because last time I checked the real band was "Metallica"?
If I have a song called "Metallica sucks" won't that get caught in the same filter that excludes all infringing Metallica songs?
The ONLY way to tell if a file is infringing is to download and listen to it. There is no technology that can do that except human ears. And even if you identify one particular infringing file and wipe all copies from the service, what about the copies that are missing one or two bytes from the end of the file or other copies of the same song that were made at a completely different bitrate?
The courts are insane. How can they order Napster to do something that isn't technologically possible...even for a well-funded group like SDMI?
- JoeShmoe
For the link-fearing:
http://www.msnbc.com/news/528921.asp
For the cut-and-paste impared:
Click Here
- JoeShmoe
What would make this ideal is if there was some CD/DVD changer that had a FireWire connection.
I mean, I can buy a 400 CD/DVD Sony changer for around $600-$700 but any computer solutions will cost me thousands of dollars because they feel the need to have servers and Ethernet.
Does anyone know if there is a device that will let me choose a single CD/DVD media and then pump it out FireWire? Imagine the possibilities.
From HD-100 to a FireWire burner. Burn your favorite TV shows, each episode on its own CD. Rack them all up and then you would have gigabytes of HD-quality media available at your fingertips. Rotate out some CDs that you are tired off and replace with new ones. Your own 200GB TiVo?
So does such a beast exist, if not, how difficult would it be to adapt a consumer CD changer to output either SCSI/IDE or FireWire? I know there are several SCSI/IDE to FireWire convertors so either output would suffice. Are they the same drive mechanics in both consumer and computer versions?
-JoeShmoe