> "Well, I AM a rocket scientist working for NASA; the project existed in the 60s, but no one here is working on it anymore. Sorry, have to go back to work getting that Space Shuttle up there."
Hate to tell you, but that talk page comment was from my 10-year-old little sister.
OK, not really, but how are you so sure it wasn't? I got my own education (partially) here on Slashdot while moderating, when I stumbled over a troll who mostly starts his posts "As one of the {original|first|...} {inventors|founders|programmers|...} {of|at|responsible for|...} <something connected with the article>,..."
Since then, whenever I moderate a post where someone claims authority in an analogous fashion, I always check out his comment history.
I'll start to list some of the things you're assuming, that are wrong:
(1) The probability distribution of the individual bytes of the memory of your computer is uniform; (2) The individual bytes of the memory of your computer are independently distributed (i.e., there is no correlation whatsoever between the value of a byte and the values of the surrounding bytes); (3) If you could invent a "sufficiently arbitrary" method for selecting the bytes, it wouldn't already pay to use the address itself as the random number; (4) If you construct a float from independently uniformly distributed bytes, the distribution of the value of the float would be the distribution you are interested in (see IEEE_754);
On the other hand, you are correct that this announcement is mostly a big yawn because:
(1) High quality truly random numbers have been available via the Internet a long time (just not from direct quantum sources) (2) Hardware for generating large quantities of truly random numbers from various noise sources has been available for a long time (3) Hardware for generating large quantities of truly random numbers directly from quantum sources is now available (Quantis) (4) A DIY solution for (2) was posted on Slashdot recently
From the Wikipedia article (sorry about the broken link in the last post, the URL: autolinker failed or something):
> In the computing community, the primary meaning is a complimentary description for a particularly brilliant programmer or technical expert.
In what way is being "a particularly brilliant programmer or technical expert" criminal? Is there some kind of sociological correlation I am unaware of which would lead one to expect that most hackers of this kind would be criminals?
Clear enough now? Hopefully I haven't left any trivial points you can quibble with?
I hope whoever modded your pitifully binary views on the meaning of language terms as Insightful gets his due via meta-moderation... It is true that the new meaning of this term seems to be the more used one now, in what way does that make the old meaning obsolete, or the more exact and unambiguous term "cybercriminal" superfluous or undesirable?
So where are the "paginateLikeFrameMakerV2.73" (and similar... that particular version number was totally made up) tags in OOXML so I can retain my non-MS legacy documents?
> ODF, and it's proponents, ignore this vital issue.
Because they cannot possible succeed. And neither can Microsoft. (and btw, you should have used "its")
> or you hire a lot of staff to reformat documents that don't convert correctly
Most of those legacy documents will not need to be edited, now, will they? So just converting them to PDF would be sufficient. I'm sure someone provides that service. I've even heard rumors here on Slashdot that Microsoft provides some kind of plug-in which can read most of the old Office file formats in the newer versions of Office. Luckily I don't need that. With my minuscule experience with trying to read old MS docs, I doubt it works in all cases (say, documents with embedded math formulas).
> If you can't figure this out you need to put the computer back in the box and send it back.
Hm, "Word Document"... yes, that label really makes it clear what the exact file format of that will be and what other Microsoft products will be compatible with it...
Frankly, if everyone took your advice, there'd be a lot less computer users.
At least with ODF, the goal is that the same users won't need to understand. It'll just work... at least for the next 100 years or so.
Actually, now that I think of it, CAPTCHA's already pose problems to some (visual CAPTCHA's for the visually impared), but I wasn't thinking about that. I probably should have, since one can think of other CAPTCHA's where other specific handicaps would be a problem (human facial recognition comes to mind, for example; see Prosopagnosia).
Since brain damage can cause very peculiar and specific cognitive problems, probably every kind of CAPTCHA will give trouble to someone. So I suppose there will be a variety of choices, just like there is sometimes an auditory choice given now.
Eventually (but don't hold your breath) the arms race for solving CAPTCHA's will start to cause problems for significant numbers of humans who are otherwise capable of browsing the Internet, and at that point we can say that AI has solved a kind of limited version of the Turing test.
I've already seen at least one announcement of technology which embeds crypto-aware RFID chips into HD disks in order to "prevent piracy". CRI's announcement seems to concern a similar idea (but might not be contactless).
Myself, I wonder how these players will play personally recorded/generated HD content. Without an unbreakable watermarking scheme protecting the content of the media moguls, the only alternative I can see is that the consumer will be unable to get full HD playback of his own content. Makes us customers just drool, eh?
You're probably right, but "zip" might do a stellar job on the patch file which is the binary difference of the VM vs. a vanilla VM immediately before installing the media.
bsdiff (yes, that is the correct link, I didn't pick the domain name, just Google "binary diff" to check) doesn't seem quite right for creating the patch file, considering its memory requirements, but I'm sure it wouldn't be that hard to work something up...
I'm glad to hear that they're finally replacing their proprietary crash report system. The old one never worked for me at my work, and without it working no one at Mozilla was interested in any of my bug reports (OK, actually only one).
You're the one doing the legwork... I'm just criticizing your experimental methods.
> is pretty much none.
OK, I'll take your word for that.
> You can get a lot of the new documents in PDF (which is an open format) - but not ODF.
This is probably a logical choice for documents which the recipient doesn't need to edit, and might need to print. That would cover most governmental forms or informational reports.
ODF would seem to be mainly useful (or at least required) for government correspondence with third parties like contractors. Actually, my impression of the Massachusetts decision was that the move to ODF is designed to enable the internal archive of government documents to be readable "forever". That archive possibly may not be open to the public, or perhaps will be opened to the public only after a certain period set in law (and not necessarily distributed via the Internet).
Wow, by the same reasoning, something like 99.999999% of all existing human documents don't use Unicode, therefore Unicode is a dead standard. (Let's go to Netcraft to confirm that...)
What's important isn't how many old documents there are which aren't using ODF, it's whether new documents are being supplied in that format. In addition, it doesn't matter one bit if Massachusetts also supplies those new documents in 10 zillion additional proprietary formats.
So your statistics actually are relatively meaningless. And have no connection to your conclusion. Try again.
> Whereas, printed media... requires nothing more than a pair of Mark I eyeballs
Just to add something you forgot: this is a big advantage to certain religious sects. I don't think printed editions of the Talmud or the Amish Bible are going to go out of style in the near future, no matter how good the electronic equivalents get.
When will I be able to use it for my laptop?
on
Driving on Starch
·
· Score: 1
As a lot of previous posters have noted, it will be a while before this technology will be in wide use to power cars, because of the need to provide a viable distribution infrastructure, and the fact that the rate at which the hydrogen is generated isn't fast enough yet to power a car.
However, the minute I have a source of hydrogen I can use it to run a fuel cell to generate electricity to power my laptop or other portable electronic device. The rate at which I need hydrogen is a lot smaller. The heat from the fuel cell could be used to help run the reaction which generates the hydrogen (only needs 30 degrees Celsius). Sounds like it could be available within only a few years.
Nu? Is someone out there listening and starting to work on this?
You forgot to add that, at least in some ways, it's less of a monoculture than Microsoft, and therefore harder to attack.
This isn't quite as big a factor as some Linux zealots would have us believe, however.... It's most likely that the hypothetical throngs of ex-Windows users will congregate in a very small set of Linux distributions, at least until Linux knowhow increases in the ranks of the less technical....
I'd guess that almost everyone on Slashdot is waiting for their personal vendetta objects to fade, be they Microsoft, Apple, the open source movement, Google, MySpace, the music industry cartel, the movie industry cartel, and a list of thousands more, including for some people (probably not mainstream Slashdotters) large organized nations and religions....
Much as I would like to fantasize to the contrary, even if you believe in future shock / technological singularity / etc. I don't see how it directly applies to the fading of organizations like MySpace or others listed above, considering that their existence and power have more to do with organizing or influencing people to act in a cooperative fashion than with the power of newer and newer technology.
It could (and probably will) take a lot longer than you think....
>... since it probably won't benefit them financially. When we figure out why people like them try to win AI...
Probably for the same reason, more or less, that people buy lottery tickets? Except that in this case there are extra incentives; just off the top of my head, one being satisfying the human drive to succeed at competition (I'm assuming that most lottery winners do not get a feeling of increased self-value that they are so much better at choosing winning lottery numbers than others)...
> especially since the GPL relies on copyright law
Yeah, we see the FSF lobbying for copyright extension all the time. Face it, in the eyes of the FSF, copyright is an evil which they have decided to pervert for good.
> Am I alone in actually paying the programmers, musicians, and directors for their work?
No, I pay them directly, it's just the (big) labels which don't get my money. Of course, this seriously limits the kind of media I watch and listen to, but I'm not a big media consumer, and there's a lot of interesting indie content out if you look for it.
> as studios are forced to rely on tried-and-tested money-makers because piracy makes risky investments not worth the cost?... > Haven't you guys made the connection as to why popular music today sounds the same
Frankly, judging by how they treat the artists, I have the impression that they feel any jerk they pick off the street can be marketed into the next big hit. And because they are most likely using research on the current market preferences to decide what to push, it's no wonder that their product evolves very, very slowly.
And yes, I am on the side of The Pirate Bay, considering that what they do is, as far as I know, perfectly legal in Sweden.
> Huh? I was referring to retail margins -- the markup that the retailer charges. The GPP believes that the retailers should be paid less than the artists.
Yes, I agree that the GPP was not being realistic, but my reply had to do with your blithe statement: "Music is no different." It is. You continue to show exactly how much you don't understand about the difference in the continuation of your post. Or at the very least, you greatly deemphasize the differences in order to be able to view the situation as being parallel to your own.
> I sell computer peripherals. Amazon makes about 15 points on my products; Best Buy makes about 50 points. This is out of my control,
I somehow guessed that you would make some kind of analogy between music distribution and physical goods distribution. The retail margin is out of your control for two reasons, neither of which applies to the music industry. First, you are (I would guess) a smaller player than Amazon or Best Buy. The music industry, on the other hand, is an extremely powerful cartel with billions of dollars of income. Secondly, and more importantly, you have competition. Unless you sell some kind of very specialized peripherals which are heavily protected by patents, there is no legal problem for someone else to produce competing products, and Amazon and Best Buy can choose to work with your competitors if you don't agree to their terms. In the music industry, competition is prevented by copyright and the fact that demand is largely generated via advertising and the advertising is almost totally controlled (or was, until the Internet sprang up) by the music industry.
> If, say, in selling computer peripherals my salary averages 9% of the sell-in price, it's not accurate to say that my employer gets to keep the other 91%.
First of all, even though the music industry pushed through legislation in the US which enabled them to consider their signed musicians as employees (with respect to gaining copyright control over all of their work), they're not. Musicians are artists. They are the geese which lay the golden eggs. I'll admit that some employees in other industries are perhaps as especially creative in what they do as musicians in the music industry, but the vast majority of employees are not. Even if you don't agree with that, musicians are performers, and those other creative employees are not.
> Warner Music managed to keep about 3% of their income last year. The other 97% all went to other people. If their average artist collected even a 4% royalty, they did better than the record company.
When I look at WMG on Yahoo Finance I see a profit margin of only 0.3%! Checking the income statement there shows SG&A of 72% of gross income. For comparison, GE and Johnson & Johnson had SG&A's more in the line of 50% of gross income, and Microsoft was running 37%. Unfortunately, since this is a lumped expenditure which includes the entire payroll of WMG and all its advertising expenses, I cannot judge whether the big difference here is because the music industry is more heavily dependent on advertising, or whether its other expenses, like top executive salaries, are larger. Frankly, I'd guess that even though the music industry does depend on advertising, its advertising costs are offset by the monopoly it has on its product (e.g., radio stations are dependent on the music industry to provide them with content, because if they went elsewhere, the independent content they would obtain wouldn't be on MTV, and visa versa).
> There are new and exciting ways to market products, such as the Internet
And those ways were what I was actually talking about; in the case of the music industry, its product can even be distributed via the Internet (another difference).
> As for why record labels aren't paying artists more.... They're not looking out for the art
Totally weird, when I saw the comment http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=232289 &cid=18881359 above, and the poster's Slashdot ID, I thought about a totally different part of that exact same book, the matter duplicator stuff at the end.... Strange coincidence....
Actually, I don't exactly remember the part you're referring to, I guess it's time to reread it!
Slashdot Mirror
> "Well, I AM a rocket scientist working for NASA; the project existed in the 60s, but no one here is working on it anymore. Sorry, have to go back to work getting that Space Shuttle up there."
..."
Hate to tell you, but that talk page comment was from my 10-year-old little sister.
OK, not really, but how are you so sure it wasn't? I got my own education (partially) here on Slashdot while moderating, when I stumbled over a troll who mostly starts his posts "As one of the {original|first|...} {inventors|founders|programmers|...} {of|at|responsible for|...} <something connected with the article>,
Since then, whenever I moderate a post where someone claims authority in an analogous fashion, I always check out his comment history.
> What am I missing?
I'll start to list some of the things you're assuming, that are wrong:
(1) The probability distribution of the individual bytes of the memory of your computer is uniform;
(2) The individual bytes of the memory of your computer are independently distributed (i.e., there is no correlation whatsoever between the value of a byte and the values of the surrounding bytes);
(3) If you could invent a "sufficiently arbitrary" method for selecting the bytes, it wouldn't already pay to use the address itself as the random number;
(4) If you construct a float from independently uniformly distributed bytes, the distribution of the value of the float would be the distribution you are interested in (see IEEE_754);
On the other hand, you are correct that this announcement is mostly a big yawn because:
(1) High quality truly random numbers have been available via the Internet a long time (just not from direct quantum sources)
(2) Hardware for generating large quantities of truly random numbers from various noise sources has been available for a long time
(3) Hardware for generating large quantities of truly random numbers directly from quantum sources is now available (Quantis)
(4) A DIY solution for (2) was posted on Slashdot recently
From the Wikipedia article (sorry about the broken link in the last post, the URL: autolinker failed or something):
> In the computing community, the primary meaning is a complimentary description for a particularly brilliant programmer or technical expert.
In what way is being "a particularly brilliant programmer or technical expert" criminal? Is there some kind of sociological correlation I am unaware of which would lead one to expect that most hackers of this kind would be criminals?
Clear enough now? Hopefully I haven't left any trivial points you can quibble with?
> even most of the "white hat" hackers are "cybercriminals"
n troversy gives Linus Torvalds as an example of a hacker of the "other definition"... in what way is he a cybercriminal?
Checking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_definition_co
I hope whoever modded your pitifully binary views on the meaning of language terms as Insightful gets his due via meta-moderation... It is true that the new meaning of this term seems to be the more used one now, in what way does that make the old meaning obsolete, or the more exact and unambiguous term "cybercriminal" superfluous or undesirable?
So where are the "paginateLikeFrameMakerV2.73" (and similar... that particular version number was totally made up) tags in OOXML so I can retain my non-MS legacy documents?
> ODF, and it's proponents, ignore this vital issue.
Because they cannot possible succeed. And neither can Microsoft. (and btw, you should have used "its")
> or you hire a lot of staff to reformat documents that don't convert correctly
Most of those legacy documents will not need to be edited, now, will they? So just converting them to PDF would be sufficient. I'm sure someone provides that service. I've even heard rumors here on Slashdot that Microsoft provides some kind of plug-in which can read most of the old Office file formats in the newer versions of Office. Luckily I don't need that. With my minuscule experience with trying to read old MS docs, I doubt it works in all cases (say, documents with embedded math formulas).
> If you can't figure this out you need to put the computer back in the box and send it back.
Hm, "Word Document"... yes, that label really makes it clear what the exact file format of that will be and what other Microsoft products will be compatible with it...
Frankly, if everyone took your advice, there'd be a lot less computer users.
At least with ODF, the goal is that the same users won't need to understand. It'll just work... at least for the next 100 years or so.
Actually, now that I think of it, CAPTCHA's already pose problems to some (visual CAPTCHA's for the visually impared), but I wasn't thinking about that. I probably should have, since one can think of other CAPTCHA's where other specific handicaps would be a problem (human facial recognition comes to mind, for example; see Prosopagnosia).
Since brain damage can cause very peculiar and specific cognitive problems, probably every kind of CAPTCHA will give trouble to someone. So I suppose there will be a variety of choices, just like there is sometimes an auditory choice given now.
Eventually (but don't hold your breath) the arms race for solving CAPTCHA's will start to cause problems for significant numbers of humans who are otherwise capable of browsing the Internet, and at that point we can say that AI has solved a kind of limited version of the Turing test.
I've already seen at least one announcement of technology which embeds crypto-aware RFID chips into HD disks in order to "prevent piracy". CRI's announcement seems to concern a similar idea (but might not be contactless).
Myself, I wonder how these players will play personally recorded/generated HD content. Without an unbreakable watermarking scheme protecting the content of the media moguls, the only alternative I can see is that the consumer will be unable to get full HD playback of his own content. Makes us customers just drool, eh?
Not exactly, if you had read the whole comment, you'd see I was pushing for delta encoding followed by standard compression (zip, bzip2, 7zip).
Thanks for the link, via it I found xdelta{,3}.
You're probably right, but "zip" might do a stellar job on the patch file which is the binary difference of the VM vs. a vanilla VM immediately before installing the media.
bsdiff (yes, that is the correct link, I didn't pick the domain name, just Google "binary diff" to check) doesn't seem quite right for creating the patch file, considering its memory requirements, but I'm sure it wouldn't be that hard to work something up...
I'm curious, please post the court decision which is the precedent for any reporter whatsoever being a public figure.
I'm glad to hear that they're finally replacing their proprietary crash report system. The old one never worked for me at my work, and without it working no one at Mozilla was interested in any of my bug reports (OK, actually only one).
> Which, you'll note,
You're the one doing the legwork... I'm just criticizing your experimental methods.
> is pretty much none.
OK, I'll take your word for that.
> You can get a lot of the new documents in PDF (which is an open format) - but not ODF.
This is probably a logical choice for documents which the recipient doesn't need to edit, and might need to print. That would cover most governmental forms or informational reports.
ODF would seem to be mainly useful (or at least required) for government correspondence with third parties like contractors. Actually, my impression of the Massachusetts decision was that the move to ODF is designed to enable the internal archive of government documents to be readable "forever". That archive possibly may not be open to the public, or perhaps will be opened to the public only after a certain period set in law (and not necessarily distributed via the Internet).
Wow, by the same reasoning, something like 99.999999% of all existing human documents don't use Unicode, therefore Unicode is a dead standard. (Let's go to Netcraft to confirm that...)
What's important isn't how many old documents there are which aren't using ODF, it's whether new documents are being supplied in that format. In addition, it doesn't matter one bit if Massachusetts also supplies those new documents in 10 zillion additional proprietary formats.
So your statistics actually are relatively meaningless. And have no connection to your conclusion. Try again.
> Even selling used CDs hasn't come under fire.
o rd-shops-used-cds-ihre-papieren-bitte.html
Several states are considering highly regulating (commercial) trading of used CD's. Florida already has such a law.
see http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070507-rec
> Whereas, printed media ... requires nothing more than a pair of Mark I eyeballs
Just to add something you forgot: this is a big advantage to certain religious sects. I don't think printed editions of the Talmud or the Amish Bible are going to go out of style in the near future, no matter how good the electronic equivalents get.
As a lot of previous posters have noted, it will be a while before this technology will be in wide use to power cars, because of the need to provide a viable distribution infrastructure, and the fact that the rate at which the hydrogen is generated isn't fast enough yet to power a car.
However, the minute I have a source of hydrogen I can use it to run a fuel cell to generate electricity to power my laptop or other portable electronic device. The rate at which I need hydrogen is a lot smaller. The heat from the fuel cell could be used to help run the reaction which generates the hydrogen (only needs 30 degrees Celsius). Sounds like it could be available within only a few years.
Nu? Is someone out there listening and starting to work on this?
You forgot to add that, at least in some ways, it's less of a monoculture than Microsoft, and therefore harder to attack.
This isn't quite as big a factor as some Linux zealots would have us believe, however.... It's most likely that the hypothetical throngs of ex-Windows users will congregate in a very small set of Linux distributions, at least until Linux knowhow increases in the ranks of the less technical....
> As altavista faded so will ....
....
You are certainly correct, but
I'd guess that almost everyone on Slashdot is waiting for their personal vendetta objects to fade, be they Microsoft, Apple, the open source movement, Google, MySpace, the music industry cartel, the movie industry cartel, and a list of thousands more, including for some people (probably not mainstream Slashdotters) large organized nations and religions....
Much as I would like to fantasize to the contrary, even if you believe in future shock / technological singularity / etc. I don't see how it directly applies to the fading of organizations like MySpace or others listed above, considering that their existence and power have more to do with organizing or influencing people to act in a cooperative fashion than with the power of newer and newer technology.
It could (and probably will) take a lot longer than you think....
> ... since it probably won't benefit them financially. When we figure out why people like them try to win AI ...
Probably for the same reason, more or less, that people buy lottery tickets? Except that in this case there are extra incentives; just off the top of my head, one being satisfying the human drive to succeed at competition (I'm assuming that most lottery winners do not get a feeling of increased self-value that they are so much better at choosing winning lottery numbers than others)...
> especially since the GPL relies on copyright law
...
Yeah, we see the FSF lobbying for copyright extension all the time. Face it, in the eyes of the FSF, copyright is an evil which they have decided to pervert for good.
> Am I alone in actually paying the programmers, musicians, and directors for their work?
No, I pay them directly, it's just the (big) labels which don't get my money. Of course, this seriously limits the kind of media I watch and listen to, but I'm not a big media consumer, and there's a lot of interesting indie content out if you look for it.
> as studios are forced to rely on tried-and-tested money-makers because piracy makes risky investments not worth the cost?
> Haven't you guys made the connection as to why popular music today sounds the same
Frankly, judging by how they treat the artists, I have the impression that they feel any jerk they pick off the street can be marketed into the next big hit. And because they are most likely using research on the current market preferences to decide what to push, it's no wonder that their product evolves very, very slowly.
And yes, I am on the side of The Pirate Bay, considering that what they do is, as far as I know, perfectly legal in Sweden.
> I wonder if truth is a defense against slander/libel/defamation in Australia. It isn't in England
Yes it is, just that the burden of proof is on the defendent, not the plaintiff. Read the article in Wikipedia.
> Huh? I was referring to retail margins -- the markup that the retailer charges. The GPP believes that the retailers should be paid less than the artists.
.... They're not looking out for the art
Yes, I agree that the GPP was not being realistic, but my reply had to do with your blithe statement: "Music is no different." It is. You continue to show exactly how much you don't understand about the difference in the continuation of your post. Or at the very least, you greatly deemphasize the differences in order to be able to view the situation as being parallel to your own.
> I sell computer peripherals. Amazon makes about 15 points on my products; Best Buy makes about 50 points. This is out of my control,
I somehow guessed that you would make some kind of analogy between music distribution and physical goods distribution. The retail margin is out of your control for two reasons, neither of which applies to the music industry. First, you are (I would guess) a smaller player than Amazon or Best Buy. The music industry, on the other hand, is an extremely powerful cartel with billions of dollars of income. Secondly, and more importantly, you have competition. Unless you sell some kind of very specialized peripherals which are heavily protected by patents, there is no legal problem for someone else to produce competing products, and Amazon and Best Buy can choose to work with your competitors if you don't agree to their terms. In the music industry, competition is prevented by copyright and the fact that demand is largely generated via advertising and the advertising is almost totally controlled (or was, until the Internet sprang up) by the music industry.
> If, say, in selling computer peripherals my salary averages 9% of the sell-in price, it's not accurate to say that my employer gets to keep the other 91%.
First of all, even though the music industry pushed through legislation in the US which enabled them to consider their signed musicians as employees (with respect to gaining copyright control over all of their work), they're not. Musicians are artists. They are the geese which lay the golden eggs. I'll admit that some employees in other industries are perhaps as especially creative in what they do as musicians in the music industry, but the vast majority of employees are not. Even if you don't agree with that, musicians are performers, and those other creative employees are not.
> Warner Music managed to keep about 3% of their income last year. The other 97% all went to other people. If their average artist collected even a 4% royalty, they did better than the record company.
When I look at WMG on Yahoo Finance I see a profit margin of only 0.3%! Checking the income statement there shows SG&A of 72% of gross income. For comparison, GE and Johnson & Johnson had SG&A's more in the line of 50% of gross income, and Microsoft was running 37%. Unfortunately, since this is a lumped expenditure which includes the entire payroll of WMG and all its advertising expenses, I cannot judge whether the big difference here is because the music industry is more heavily dependent on advertising, or whether its other expenses, like top executive salaries, are larger. Frankly, I'd guess that even though the music industry does depend on advertising, its advertising costs are offset by the monopoly it has on its product (e.g., radio stations are dependent on the music industry to provide them with content, because if they went elsewhere, the independent content they would obtain wouldn't be on MTV, and visa versa).
> There are new and exciting ways to market products, such as the Internet
And those ways were what I was actually talking about; in the case of the music industry, its product can even be distributed via the Internet (another difference).
> As for why record labels aren't paying artists more
Totally weird, when I saw the comment http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=232289 &cid=18881359 above, and the poster's Slashdot ID, I thought about a totally different part of that exact same book, the matter duplicator stuff at the end.... Strange coincidence....
Actually, I don't exactly remember the part you're referring to, I guess it's time to reread it!