so your choices are:
You are a troll like everyone else has indicated. You now drop to -5 in my personal viewing.
You back up what you've stated with something intelligent. I listen (may not agree) but I do listen.
Let me ask you this: In your mind, are there no good uses for trusted computing? Are there never circumstances where trusted computing could be applied without evil effect? Or is all trusted computing inherently evil and must be stamped out?
yes. "Trusted Computing" is evil, and must be stamped out. The 'trust' in the phrase is that you must trust someone else to decide what your hardware can and can not do, and it will be a question of your hardware doesn't trust you. At this point, the General Computing Machine will be dead.
Explain to me why I should let Sony decide what my computer is going to do?
This will be acceptable when it's acceptable for my car manufacturer to tell me which roads I can drive on ...when it's acceptable for my telephone company to tell me which numbers I can dial ...when it's acceptable for my TV manufacturer to tell me which channels I can watch ...when it's acceptable for my stove to tell me I what I can and can't cook, and what time I can cook at ...when it's acceptable for my couch to say I can't sit on it just now....
My personally owned objects are to serve me. At my discretion. Not some corporation.
If you like your "freedom" to be at the mercy of Thomas Hesse, that's your problem. I'm not interested.
Lastly, there's nothing beneficial that can be accomplished in hardware (ref:TPM) that can't be done in software and thereby be at the control of the user instead of at the control of software and media vendors.
Perhaps what you see as short-sightedness is actually an even longer sightedness. Perhaps, Linus looking into his crystal ball, sees a future where a subset of freedom loving consumers are forced to become open (non-DRMed) hardware developers and compete with all the closed (via DRM) consumer electronics hardware
I've looked into this. and yes I think that maybe one day open hardware is going to exist. but not in any kind of near to mid term. the problem is money. A CPU fab costs intel in the billions to make. Open source software can be run on a used sub-$100 desktop computer.
In the mean time, if orgs like RIAA, MPAA, WIPO et al have their way, all hardware is going to require some kind of TPM.
If I had to place my life's savings on which one will happen first (freedom hardware, or all intel/amd systems including some form of hardware TPM, I'd place my money on the TPM.
Worse than that, sure if it exists, Windows will implement it. Will linux? doesn't have to, and I suspect it won't. But that won't stop the Intellectual Monopoly holders from making it law... effectively making non-TPM compliant versions of Linux illegal.
this is not the boogieman.
This is the capitalist, and I for one do not welcome the new capitalist overlord.
When you are able to download music, how can the store hope to cope with the huge array of music online?
the human connection
While I agree that to a large degree this is diminishing today, don't underestimate the human requirement for human contact, nor the human need to hold a physical object in their hand when they shop.
Is this 100%? hell no, but it is a big weapon when you target a niche market. The ability to connect on a human and physical level will generate sales.
Like I said: this approach won't make you rich, but it might let you stay self-employed. And to a lot of people that's more important...
damn i used the word 'human' a lot... but that is what it's all about;)
Your ignorance is sickening, of course people still use CD players, especially when you know... music is sold on CD"S!
The disc player I use in my home stereo system is a DVD player. When my CD player died earlier this year I felt no compelling reason to replace it.
Sure, my portable media player is flash-based (samsung that plays OGG!)
About the last place I still have a CD player is in the car, and I suspect that that will end in the next generation: replaced by media inputs and probably DVD players.
So I don't think PP was elitist, just realist. The CD player's life is coming to and end, and/. tends to have a lot of early adopters, so on this forum they're probably not far off.
I kinda feel sorry for the guy how owned the two music stores, but he became complacent and should have got out a while ago. If there is any room for small players in the music store business, there won't be soon. How can you compete with the online retailers?
While I agree that in the long term (maybe even medium term?) the Music Store is going to die off and be replaced by a combination of on-line and mega-store "music sections" there will always be a place in retail for a store that sells to a niche.
The e-tailers can write fancy alogrithms that help most people find most of what they are looking for, and the big-box stores don't even bother to try: if it's not top-40 they pretty much don't have it.
For a retailer to try and compete with the volume that amazon and wallmart can generate is a quick suicide.
On the other hand, becoming a specialty shop; an interested and knowledgable staff, carry rare stuff etc. Niche market.
Do you get rich selling like this? probably not, but you do get to stay in business.
So imho the guy needs to re-invent himself or close the doors... (and I don't see anyone buying into retail music sales in this market)
remind me again what the point is in them wasting money on a product that's doomed from the start?
that hasn't slowed the music industry down any:
it seems to me like introducing failed ideas is part of their business plan.
these guys haven't had to have a new idea in a hundred years -- they are so used to raking in m/billions without working for it...
Well, not legally, anyway
In the USA, yeah. elsewhere circumvention for legal use is still legal.
If not limited personal liability, what reason do you see for organizing a business as a corporation?
Just everything that's left: A legal construct that can have assets (i.e. property, buildings, inventory etc), is allowed to employ people, pay taxes and performs some sort of operation (like builds cars, or sells trinkets), and can sell shares (either public or privately) to allow multiple persons or other corporations to take partial ownership...
I'm probably missing a couple of things, but there's more to a corporation than just shielding real people from having to answer for their misdeeds.
Interesting... sounds like we have pretty similar views.
sadly and unfortunatly I don't see this vision being implemented. anywhere. ever.
I don't see any group of people being at once social enough to decide that people need basic stuff, and yet being so anti-social as to stigmatise those that aren't working for a living.
In other words, the only way to enforce "no iPod for you" is to give no money, but to give tokens/credits/whatever instead. A second set of money that is only good for food, but not smokes and beer.
But then we are also relying on the honesty of the stores: sadly, the end result will be that beer will still be sold to people on assistance, but now it will arrive via some form of black-market, and will in all liklihood cost more than retail, further diminishing their buying power.
Or! we create an entire food delivery system for these people which costs more as well...
I don't know what the right answer is here. I do in general terms agree that the consumer economy drives people to want more, and that can be leveraged to convince them to work for a living. I'm just not convinced that any social program that results in people getting paid not to work won't be abused, and won't result in a cycle for their offspring.
But hey, that's just my (personal!) canadian observation!
A social safety net prevents desperation, which leads to violence and other negative social trends
I saw a study recently (maybe even on/. ?) that suggested that the link between income and crime and violence was not to lower income, but to disparity of income. So I agree.
Provide only the necessities for society via socialism: food, basic clothing, basic shelter, medical care, communication, sanitation, and education. Beyond that, if anyone wants a luxury, like meat or a car or an iPod they have to work for it
For some people, the freedom of not having to work for a living is worth doing without an iPod.
Worse than that though, is that people will quickly disagree with the fact that you've included meat on your list. While you and I can debate this endlessly -for me, steak is a *requirement* of life;-) that is the exact problem.
Even in the 'basic clothing' - I just want a $500 suit, not the $5000 Armani. And I justfy it by saying I need it for job interviews. Basic shelter? I want my own pad. Can't share. No communal living. Communication? I need internet --high-speed no less, and a home and cell-phone (for emergencies).
All I'm getting at is that different people will have different views on what is necessary. In an age when prisoners have cable-TV, what exactly do you hold back from the people who don't want to work for a living, and leech off the rest of us?
And lastly, for many of these people on social assistance, they have the basic choice of working to earn $18k or not working and getting $15k from the mail-man in twelve easy installments. And after taxes, fees (like unemployment deductions!), that $3k difference less than $2k. And when you *work* for $18k and you're short one month the boss says, tough sh*t... with pogey you wander down to the office and cry some sob story about how you're hungry and can't eat and they stroke you another check...
flame war? damn, no, not really. Discussion sure. I was curious if you'd stick with the 'anyone' or if you'd back down some more than anything. And I guess you did with the bit about people having larger estates than others, so you're OK with people making a ton of change, you'd just like to see a more equitable distribution of the wealth.
I'd not have agreed with you in the past, but I'm mellowing in my old age.:) I still think that in general terms capitalism is the best system... the usual paraphrase: the system sucks, it's just the best one we've come up with yet.
I do think that some massive corporate and political reform are necessary, but I don't agree with removing for-profit corporations. I think that probably all the same ends can be acheived if personal liability (economically, criminally) was re-introduced into corporate ownership, but letting them strive for the efficiencies of a for-profit company which benefits us all.
I think I'd also make a wall between corporations and politicians. imho, a lot of problems are a direct result not of corporations who make a huge profit, but their ability to use those profits to influence politics in a way that individual people can never hope to.
Living in a fairly socialist country myself, I see that there are benefits to social nets, but I also see the abuse. Those that see the safety net as a hammock and have no reason or desire to even attempt to get out and contribute. It's a question of how, in a socialist state, you manage to convince people to contribute to the best of their abilities.
Not lookin' for a flame war... just curious about other people's point of view.
A company is worthles without it's employees. Select good people, pay them well and treat them fairly. Next question... How do you remove paranoid executives from positions of power and stop them from inflating operating costs through needless and morale busting authoritarian technology.
But this precludes the McEmployeeisation of IT.
From an MBA perspective, tech replaces people. So if you can implement tech to monitor/stop people from doing anything when you don't treat them fairly, (or when you hire substandard* people...or whatever) then there is the perception of a long-term cost savings.
*meaning someone who might work for less than market. -for a variety of reasons, including (but not limited to) their intention to 'steal' the difference in their income and the market value....
This is just marketing/FUD. It's important for them to keep stating that Downloading Is Illegal, despite the fact that this not universally true.
(1) As you stated, downloading even copyright material is legal in Canada.
(2) They noticably never state that (even elsewhere!) a lot of downloading is legal -- for example all the cc-license stuff.
Copyright Law doesn't make Downloading illegal. And this sort of talk is not accidental. It's important for this issue to be black and white. By repeatedly stating that downloading is illegal they are entrenching this in people's mind. They don't want cc-type license music out there: it will destroy they business model.
So TFA states:
It focuses on pirated CDs and illegal music downloads which...[blahblahblah] Some of the worst offenders, says the IFPI, include Brazil and Canada. The two countries downloaded more than two billion tracks.
but technically, in Canada, there is no such thing as an illegal music download... so WTF is he talking about?
rather than those copyright holders whose music was actually downloaded
You're either forgetting that the CRIA/RIAA/IFPI types ARE the Labels (and so the "copyright holders" are effectively, if not actually, getting the money) or you're under the mistakened* impression that artists hold the copyright to the music they write...
*excepting artists who never signed with a label...and well, they wouldn't be represented in this anyways, right?
It seems really sad that there's any validity to this method of restriction. To me, it's like selling a book to you and saying, "Since I'm selling it to you at $1, you can only read it in your bathroom. If you want to read it anywhere, that'll be $6.99"
That's exactly what it is, and it's only because we continue to give MS the monopoly power that it can dictate like this.
If they felt it was in their financial interest, the EULA would state that the SOFTWARE must be used whilst standing on ones HEAD. And this would be enforceable.
Fight back. Demand MS comply with anti-trust and anti-competative rulings.
Fight back. Don't buy any more computers that include the MS tax. Ever.
Fight back. Demand copyright reform.
Fight back. Install Linux.
There's no sane person left on the planet who claims that our current resource usage is sustainable.
Perhaps not, but there are very sane people who say that it's not relevent: Since necessity is the mother of invention, some enterprising person(s) will solve the problems (at a profit, no less) when it's necessary to solve them.
For example: we're running out of oil, but we need oil to run our cars and factories and such.
Solution: There are already people 'manufacturing' oil in a variety of ways, including converting pig-shit and doing a high-speed version of what Ma-Nature did over a million years (turning deceased life into oil by way of heat and pressure). So, as the price of oil rises, it becomes more and more profitable to engineer a solution which then makes having to 'find' oil unnecessary, eliminating the oil-shortage problem. So their point isn't so much as to disagree that the current state isn't sustainable, as to assert that it's not relevant*.
It's just that mainstream political parties have no interest in doing anything about it.
Far more extreme, imho. They not only have no interest in doing anything, they have a vested interest in explicitly maintaining the status quo. Those political donations aren't nearly as big from the conservation crowd as they are from the consume-as-fast-as-possible crowd.
*I'm not saying I agree. While the planet is self-correcting, and although I think that humans will always adapt and innovate our way out of problems, I'm just not sure I want to pay the (possible!?) price of not conserving resources now... I guess the real question is how smoothly the transition goes from problem to solution. If there is sufficient overlap most people won't even notice that there was ever really a problem. If, however, there is a giant cliff before the solution we just might have anarchy...the fabled SF dark-age of a post-industrial post-tech-advanced people.
Ports are a pretty poor way to determine traffic contents. Router/traffic shapers already exist and don't care about the port numbers. About the only way I know of to get around this is encryption.
This is great as long as both parties are using it...
As usual, the Professional Pirates (tm) can easily overcome this obstacle. At most this new law will increase the cost of internet access in Spain, decrease, diminish, and increase the difficulty of the ligitimate usage of the net, and possibly result in some legal actions that ruin some kids lives and criminalise some ISPs (further increasing the cost of internet access!).
Overall though, you're right: Except for those lives that get ruined for the profit of a mega-corp, nothing substantial will change as a result of this.
Slashdot Mirror
There... fixed it for ya.
the Cummin spice group, pls. plc whatever
You are a troll like everyone else has indicated. You now drop to -5 in my personal viewing.
You back up what you've stated with something intelligent. I listen (may not agree) but I do listen.
Pick one.
Explain to me why I should let Sony decide what my computer is going to do?
This will be acceptable when it's acceptable for my car manufacturer to tell me which roads I can drive on
...when it's acceptable for my telephone company to tell me which numbers I can dial
...when it's acceptable for my TV manufacturer to tell me which channels I can watch
...when it's acceptable for my stove to tell me I what I can and can't cook, and what time I can cook at
...when it's acceptable for my couch to say I can't sit on it just now....
My personally owned objects are to serve me. At my discretion. Not some corporation.
If you like your "freedom" to be at the mercy of Thomas Hesse, that's your problem. I'm not interested.
Lastly, there's nothing beneficial that can be accomplished in hardware (ref:TPM) that can't be done in software and thereby be at the control of the user instead of at the control of software and media vendors.
In the mean time, if orgs like RIAA, MPAA, WIPO et al have their way, all hardware is going to require some kind of TPM.
If I had to place my life's savings on which one will happen first (freedom hardware, or all intel/amd systems including some form of hardware TPM, I'd place my money on the TPM.
Worse than that, sure if it exists, Windows will implement it. Will linux? doesn't have to, and I suspect it won't. But that won't stop the Intellectual Monopoly holders from making it law ... effectively making non-TPM compliant versions of Linux illegal.
this is not the boogieman.
This is the capitalist, and I for one do not welcome the new capitalist overlord.
While I agree that to a large degree this is diminishing today, don't underestimate the human requirement for human contact, nor the human need to hold a physical object in their hand when they shop.
Is this 100%? hell no, but it is a big weapon when you target a niche market. The ability to connect on a human and physical level will generate sales.
Like I said: this approach won't make you rich, but it might let you stay self-employed. And to a lot of people that's more important...
damn i used the word 'human' a lot ... but that is what it's all about ;)
Sure, my portable media player is flash-based (samsung that plays OGG!)
About the last place I still have a CD player is in the car, and I suspect that that will end in the next generation: replaced by media inputs and probably DVD players.
So I don't think PP was elitist, just realist. The CD player's life is coming to and end, and /. tends to have a lot of early adopters, so on this forum they're probably not far off.
just my 2-cents.
The e-tailers can write fancy alogrithms that help most people find most of what they are looking for, and the big-box stores don't even bother to try: if it's not top-40 they pretty much don't have it.
For a retailer to try and compete with the volume that amazon and wallmart can generate is a quick suicide.
On the other hand, becoming a specialty shop; an interested and knowledgable staff, carry rare stuff etc. Niche market.
Do you get rich selling like this? probably not, but you do get to stay in business.
So imho the guy needs to re-invent himself or close the doors... (and I don't see anyone buying into retail music sales in this market)
it seems to me like introducing failed ideas is part of their business plan.
these guys haven't had to have a new idea in a hundred years -- they are so used to raking in m/billions without working for it... In the USA, yeah. elsewhere circumvention for legal use is still legal.
I'm probably missing a couple of things, but there's more to a corporation than just shielding real people from having to answer for their misdeeds.
sadly and unfortunatly I don't see this vision being implemented. anywhere. ever.
I don't see any group of people being at once social enough to decide that people need basic stuff, and yet being so anti-social as to stigmatise those that aren't working for a living.
In other words, the only way to enforce "no iPod for you" is to give no money, but to give tokens/credits/whatever instead. A second set of money that is only good for food, but not smokes and beer.
But then we are also relying on the honesty of the stores: sadly, the end result will be that beer will still be sold to people on assistance, but now it will arrive via some form of black-market, and will in all liklihood cost more than retail, further diminishing their buying power.
Or! we create an entire food delivery system for these people which costs more as well...
I don't know what the right answer is here. I do in general terms agree that the consumer economy drives people to want more, and that can be leveraged to convince them to work for a living. I'm just not convinced that any social program that results in people getting paid not to work won't be abused, and won't result in a cycle for their offspring.
But hey, that's just my (personal!) canadian observation!
Worse than that though, is that people will quickly disagree with the fact that you've included meat on your list. While you and I can debate this endlessly -for me, steak is a *requirement* of life
Even in the 'basic clothing' - I just want a $500 suit, not the $5000 Armani. And I justfy it by saying I need it for job interviews.
Basic shelter? I want my own pad. Can't share. No communal living. Communication? I need internet --high-speed no less, and a home and cell-phone (for emergencies).
All I'm getting at is that different people will have different views on what is necessary. In an age when prisoners have cable-TV, what exactly do you hold back from the people who don't want to work for a living, and leech off the rest of us?
And lastly, for many of these people on social assistance, they have the basic choice of working to earn $18k or not working and getting $15k from the mail-man in twelve easy installments. And after taxes, fees (like unemployment deductions!), that $3k difference less than $2k. And when you *work* for $18k and you're short one month the boss says, tough sh*t ... with pogey you wander down to the office and cry some sob story about how you're hungry and can't eat and they stroke you another check...
Where's the incentive?
I was curious if you'd stick with the 'anyone' or if you'd back down some more than anything. And I guess you did with the bit about people having larger estates than others, so you're OK with people making a ton of change, you'd just like to see a more equitable distribution of the wealth.
I'd not have agreed with you in the past, but I'm mellowing in my old age.
I do think that some massive corporate and political reform are necessary, but I don't agree with removing for-profit corporations. I think that probably all the same ends can be acheived if personal liability (economically, criminally) was re-introduced into corporate ownership, but letting them strive for the efficiencies of a for-profit company which benefits us all.
I think I'd also make a wall between corporations and politicians. imho, a lot of problems are a direct result not of corporations who make a huge profit, but their ability to use those profits to influence politics in a way that individual people can never hope to.
Living in a fairly socialist country myself, I see that there are benefits to social nets, but I also see the abuse. Those that see the safety net as a hammock and have no reason or desire to even attempt to get out and contribute. It's a question of how, in a socialist state, you manage to convince people to contribute to the best of their abilities.
Not lookin' for a flame war ... just curious about other people's point of view.
From an MBA perspective, tech replaces people. So if you can implement tech to monitor/stop people from doing anything when you don't treat them fairly, (or when you hire substandard* people...or whatever) then there is the perception of a long-term cost savings.
*meaning someone who might work for less than market. -for a variety of reasons, including (but not limited to) their intention to 'steal' the difference in their income and the market value....
err
I no longer buy music unless it's non-RIAA.
The madness will not end until the money does.
Every RIAA afiliate album you buy is money for another lawsuit.
If, like I do, you disagree with the business' tactics, there is only one language they understand: money.
Stop buying CRIA/RIAA tunes, but spend the same money on other (independant) albums.
(1) As you stated, downloading even copyright material is legal in Canada. (2) They noticably never state that (even elsewhere!) a lot of downloading is legal -- for example all the cc-license stuff.
Copyright Law doesn't make Downloading illegal. And this sort of talk is not accidental. It's important for this issue to be black and white. By repeatedly stating that downloading is illegal they are entrenching this in people's mind. They don't want cc-type license music out there: it will destroy they business model.
So TFA states:
but technically, in Canada, there is no such thing as an illegal music download... so WTF is he talking about?*excepting artists who never signed with a label...and well, they wouldn't be represented in this anyways, right?
If they felt it was in their financial interest, the EULA would state that the SOFTWARE must be used whilst standing on ones HEAD. And this would be enforceable.
Fight back. Demand MS comply with anti-trust and anti-competative rulings.
Fight back. Don't buy any more computers that include the MS tax. Ever.
Fight back. Demand copyright reform.
Fight back. Install Linux.
For example: we're running out of oil, but we need oil to run our cars and factories and such.
Solution: There are already people 'manufacturing' oil in a variety of ways, including converting pig-shit and doing a high-speed version of what Ma-Nature did over a million years (turning deceased life into oil by way of heat and pressure). So, as the price of oil rises, it becomes more and more profitable to engineer a solution which then makes having to 'find' oil unnecessary, eliminating the oil-shortage problem.
So their point isn't so much as to disagree that the current state isn't sustainable, as to assert that it's not relevant*. Far more extreme, imho. They not only have no interest in doing anything, they have a vested interest in explicitly maintaining the status quo. Those political donations aren't nearly as big from the conservation crowd as they are from the consume-as-fast-as-possible crowd.
*I'm not saying I agree. While the planet is self-correcting, and although I think that humans will always adapt and innovate our way out of problems, I'm just not sure I want to pay the (possible!?) price of not conserving resources now... I guess the real question is how smoothly the transition goes from problem to solution. If there is sufficient overlap most people won't even notice that there was ever really a problem. If, however, there is a giant cliff before the solution we just might have anarchy...the fabled SF dark-age of a post-industrial post-tech-advanced people.
what!?!? missionary is subversive? I thought that was the one position that wasn't going to get me into trouble.
This is great as long as both parties are using it...
As usual, the Professional Pirates (tm) can easily overcome this obstacle.
At most this new law will increase the cost of internet access in Spain, decrease, diminish, and increase the difficulty of the ligitimate usage of the net, and possibly result in some legal actions that ruin some kids lives and criminalise some ISPs (further increasing the cost of internet access!).
Overall though, you're right: Except for those lives that get ruined for the profit of a mega-corp, nothing substantial will change as a result of this.