The reason i didn't put that into step 4 is because you're relying on fans to replace something they already own out of the goodness of their own hearts. The merchandise may work, but if you have a user that fills up an ipod with anywhere between 2,000 and 20,000 songs (8 gig to 80 gig, according to the apple website), its not cost effective to rebuy that entire collection.
Some may rebuy, some people may rebuy 5% of their collection, meaning that 10 artists out of 200 might see an album buy, but who rebuys EVERYTHING they pirate and listen to? (For the record, I'm the one of the 6 zune owners and I rent my music from the zune subscription, the main reason I don't own music is because I don't need to listen to something more than 2-3 times).
So maybe the dedication required to rebuy an album that you already possess is beyond my experience, that being said, there is a portion of listeners that genuinely wants to give money to the band, but these listeners are generally very narrow in their selections. Its an even rarer breed that will want to give a portion of their income to EVERY band they listen to. So relying on rebuys is a failed model.
Remember donationware? I.e. software that asked you to donate if you enjoyed the functionality? I remember reading 4-6 posts on slashdot in the years I've been posting on the subject, but the most common consensus is that people recieve several orders of magnitude more help requests than donations. One person didn't receive any donations but is still getting help requests years later. This is akin to people rebuying software(music) that they already have the full use and enjoyment of.
My (most certainly wrong) guesses at #4 would be a webcomics based model, i.e. getting people to rebuy what they can have for free but its Better (in webcomics, people buy hardcover books of comics that are posted for free on the internet) or sideways merchandise (t-shirts, pins, photos, posters, etc). (which is your #4). Perhaps indie bands need to stop selling just cd's and maybe bundle the cd's with quality books or some other value-added product (guitar tablitures, lyrics, taped performances, etc). Though that would be a different paradigm than music collectors have now, otherwise someone would have capitalized on it.
Who knows, maybe a more internet savvy band would have a subscriber based setup where for $15 a month, you get access to band forums and can stream live performances as they happen, or shortly after they happen if they don't have internet access at the venue.
There's always ticket sales from live performances... But who wants to have to continue to WORK for their money?
Unless people are exposed to new music, through word of mouth or otherwise, they won't know its out there. For instance, there might be a song written that resonates with my soul and will change my life, but if its made by an indy artist in norway, how will i know its out there?
File-sharing is an on-demand service, people don't browse through looking for titles of songs that sound nifty (that's what pandora is for, finding music relevant to their interests), they punch the name of a new release dvd into the search box and hope axxo has ripped, encoded, and uploaded it. Why do they seek out these movies? Because they were made aware of it. Say that I tell you to seek out the movie called Brazil. You might seek it out, but why? Because I (someone) told you to.
I thought all of the above was obvious, filesharing is not the step 1 in the following, but it might go something like this:
The hypothetical "P2P as marketing" steps. (not saying this is correct, but it was always my understanding that this was how it worked whenever people argued that p2p was GOOD for artists).
1. People find out about your band(s). 2. People search for those bands in TPB or their p2p client. 3.People fall in love with the music. 4. ??? 5. Profit!
Leave out step 1 and there is no Profit!. And no, steps 1 and 2 are not reversible for 99% of the population. Also, i'm not going to go into what is required to fill in step 4.
I know that slashdot believes that information should be free. (And AP was wrong in accusing google because IIRC, Google does indeed license AP material from AP and they do pay AP money), but this is precisely the kind of story that you wouldn't get from bloggers or non-paid (free) journalism.
I wonder how much money NY Times paid for this story? $500k, $1m? So, remember, I will be modded down for this, but as you rail against the government for over-stomping our rights, this was the work of a paid Journalist or paid Team of Journalists who used their Journalism Major to bring home a paltry paycheck (well, paltry for those of us in the IT or engineering industry).
Stories like these make me hope that the newspaper industry finds a way to make money, because reporting like this takes money, but in a rare move by Big Content, that charged money benefits us all. (Unlike the latest Britney Spears release or Hollywood Movie).
Not all computer policies are administered via software. Perhaps a green initiative, along the same lines where when you leave for the day and are the last one out, you turn off the lights. If your computer isn't working towards the benefit of clients or the company (virus scan, being up for you to RDP into when a client calls), it should be as idle as possible without hurting the availability for the client problems.
Yeah, i was wondering about how hard they would get reamed for cutting off access to previously purchased goods.
People who play D&D don't seem like the kind of people who will forget a perceived slight against them or their wallets easily and every time someone mentions purchasing a PDF D&D rulebook, they'll be reminded "You remember when WoC cut off access?"
And then they'll fire up bittorrent for something that they would have paid for before.
Sort of, but completely not in that SCO offered operating systems but not hardware, servers or just about anything that Sun offers. Caldera and SCO were OS vendors, Sun is more of a hardware company that also happens to sell an OS that it puts on its boxes.
It won the format battle. How's the war against the DVD Empire going?
Anyway, I have a hard time seeing a company value the language or the operating system (who isn't Microsoft or Apple) to the tune of 7 (or 6.3) billion. I think that IBM would have been the best bet because Sun is very diversified, in addition to the language and the OS, it also builds and sells servers using processors that it owns a major stake in. Sun is a soup to nuts type company. It designs and builds the chips, the hardware, the OS, the drivers, the servers, the software stacks, and supports them. IBM would have been a very good fit because IBM has its own architecture, builds its own servers, and does its own software.
There aren't very many companies that would make a good fit with a SUN acquisition. Sony isn't interested in mainframes, OS's, or just about everything except blu-ray. Dell, Apple, Toshiba, and company are currently banking on Intel and AMD chips(who don't appear to ever dream of doing anything but chips).
There was a post above about how Red Hat should purchase SUN, but that isn't a bad idea at all. In most companies that I've seen (and I've seen a few), Linux means some variety of RHEL. If they could swap out the Solaris for Red Hat, they would actually be able to SELL something beyond tech contracts. They would be able to leverage their existing mindshare as a server provider and they could cut out the other OEM middlemen. Reliability and driver support would also (appear to) increase if Red Hat focused on the limited subset of hardware that Sun makes (look at what it did for Apple, its not hard to build a bug free OS when you only have to make it work on 6 different pieces of hardware).
1) Threaten national cyber-security
2) President shuts down the national infrastructure
3) ???
4) Profit!
Sounds to me like you don't even need to code a worm that is capable of shutting down the internet, all you have to do is make someone believe you have already done so and the president will do all the heavy lifting for you.
Personally, I'd only like to run java from sources I trust and have it go away when its not needed (possibly asking me if I'd like it to run before kicking on to prevent drive by java exploits). When it comes to programs I run on my computer, I like to have a say in what runs. I'm aware of malicious.net software, malicious code written in c++, and just about every language that you can do bad things in, but those don't feel the need to update every few weeks. (And I still run new software on my PC).
Does Java need to be so complex that it needs to be an ever present nanny language? Do people believe that they can run whatever they want in Java without consequence due to these security updates?
True, if chickens flock, then there's a safety in numbers instinct going on as well. There may not be math, but an egg moving behind screen A means that screen A has more safety warm and fuzzies than screen B. As more eggs move behind either screen A or screen B, they might get more fuzzies associated with either screen. However, and this is the big assumption made, while we clearly differentiate between math and warm and fuzzies or a desire to go somewhere, the chickens may be processing with a flock mentality based on warm and fuzzies as the operators and object permanence as the variable storage.
Well, it'd be nice if IBM applied their trademark snails pace to java's run time environment. I'm sick and tired of having the java update notification thingy pop up in my toolbar every month (or week, depending on how frisky the JRE dev's are). Its a runtime environment, it doesn't need to be updated more often than once a year, at most.
I suppose that's the difference between Australian and American patent law. If patent law is like copyright law in the following regard, a government institution can not hold a copyright, so they might be exempt from holding patents as well (which is why NASA has been such a boon, any space technologies are immediately released to the public).
If a counterfeiter has an $8 million mansion, the FBI gets the mansion and the company has to step in to request a fraction of the proceeds from the auction.
Its doubtful that the schlub who leaked this has any assets worth seizing or auctioning, so there's no financial incentive to pursue this vigorously.
The reason the FBI is "investigating" instead of arresting is because the FBI is lazy when it comes to corporate cases. In areas outside of hollywood, (like, for instance, Miami), companies with big trademarks that see a lot of counterfeit traffic (like purse makers, pharmaceuticals, clothing makers, and the like) have to do 90% of the leg work down to identifying the warehouse where the goods are stored and performing an expert evaluation/report on why the goods aren't legit. When they have that, they call up the FBI, the agents investigate the warehouse, sieze and catalog the goods and auction off the importer's assets (to pay their salary). If a counterfeiter has an $8 million mansion, the FBI gets the mansion and the company has to step in to request a fraction of the proceeds from the auction.
True, but the immune system probably knows what to do with those varieties when they get into the blood stream. Are those varieties parked in the bloodstream? Do they feed/reproduce in a blood type environment? (I'm not familiar enough with this to know for certain about those.)
There are plenty of bacteria in your intestines that would kill you if they crossed over to the bloodstream, so safely contained pathogens aren't as good of an analog as something that lives and exists in other systems that aren't as isolated.
While this won't be plague worthy (its blood borne without a way to jump from person to person), on an individual level, it could be like injecting a pathogen into a person with no evolutionary or genetic protection from it.
We'd have to be talking about many magnitudes more yeast cells than are going to be in this battery to survive in your body for quite some time to actually have any detrimental effect.
Which could be the result of a systemic infection that would go undetected due to the small amount of waste produced by the yeast up until the point that the boiling frog dies. But once it is in the blood stream, the difficulties in treating a fungal infection return. (I.E. its very hard to do without significant harm to the host).
I know that they're not going to implant these and dump the patients in the street, but anybody who has set a cup of warm water with some yeast and sugar on the counter for 10 minutes will see the power of exponential reproduction. The results would be similar to an antibiotic resistant bacterial infection, and by the time the bacteria reaches your blood stream, it can go really bad overnight.
If the implant is to be more useful than a battery, it needs to last longer than the lifespan of a single yeast cell. In order for that to happen, the yeast needs to be able to reproduce inside the body. Chances are, they'll work out a way for the immune system to not attack the blood/yeast barrier (rejection is bad) or get them to not attack the yeast itself through immune system suppression drugs. If the yeast can live, reproduce, and produce waste products in blood (or what diffuses across the barrier) in the implant, it might be able to do that outside the implant.
Sounds like they're taking a non-pathogen and turning it into something that can survive and reproduce in the body. Whether or not it thrives once it gets there remains to be seen. It might not put out enough waste that its immediately noticable, but what happens if this gets loose in someone with a weak immune system? They might ferment to death.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason i didn't put that into step 4 is because you're relying on fans to replace something they already own out of the goodness of their own hearts. The merchandise may work, but if you have a user that fills up an ipod with anywhere between 2,000 and 20,000 songs (8 gig to 80 gig, according to the apple website), its not cost effective to rebuy that entire collection.
Some may rebuy, some people may rebuy 5% of their collection, meaning that 10 artists out of 200 might see an album buy, but who rebuys EVERYTHING they pirate and listen to? (For the record, I'm the one of the 6 zune owners and I rent my music from the zune subscription, the main reason I don't own music is because I don't need to listen to something more than 2-3 times).
So maybe the dedication required to rebuy an album that you already possess is beyond my experience, that being said, there is a portion of listeners that genuinely wants to give money to the band, but these listeners are generally very narrow in their selections. Its an even rarer breed that will want to give a portion of their income to EVERY band they listen to. So relying on rebuys is a failed model.
Remember donationware? I.e. software that asked you to donate if you enjoyed the functionality? I remember reading 4-6 posts on slashdot in the years I've been posting on the subject, but the most common consensus is that people recieve several orders of magnitude more help requests than donations. One person didn't receive any donations but is still getting help requests years later. This is akin to people rebuying software(music) that they already have the full use and enjoyment of.
My (most certainly wrong) guesses at #4 would be a webcomics based model, i.e. getting people to rebuy what they can have for free but its Better (in webcomics, people buy hardcover books of comics that are posted for free on the internet) or sideways merchandise (t-shirts, pins, photos, posters, etc). (which is your #4). Perhaps indie bands need to stop selling just cd's and maybe bundle the cd's with quality books or some other value-added product (guitar tablitures, lyrics, taped performances, etc). Though that would be a different paradigm than music collectors have now, otherwise someone would have capitalized on it.
Who knows, maybe a more internet savvy band would have a subscriber based setup where for $15 a month, you get access to band forums and can stream live performances as they happen, or shortly after they happen if they don't have internet access at the venue.
There's always ticket sales from live performances... But who wants to have to continue to WORK for their money?
Unless people are exposed to new music, through word of mouth or otherwise, they won't know its out there. For instance, there might be a song written that resonates with my soul and will change my life, but if its made by an indy artist in norway, how will i know its out there?
File-sharing is an on-demand service, people don't browse through looking for titles of songs that sound nifty (that's what pandora is for, finding music relevant to their interests), they punch the name of a new release dvd into the search box and hope axxo has ripped, encoded, and uploaded it. Why do they seek out these movies? Because they were made aware of it. Say that I tell you to seek out the movie called Brazil. You might seek it out, but why? Because I (someone) told you to.
I thought all of the above was obvious, filesharing is not the step 1 in the following, but it might go something like this:
The hypothetical "P2P as marketing" steps. (not saying this is correct, but it was always my understanding that this was how it worked whenever people argued that p2p was GOOD for artists).
1. People find out about your band(s).
2. People search for those bands in TPB or their p2p client.
3.People fall in love with the music.
4. ???
5. Profit!
Leave out step 1 and there is no Profit!. And no, steps 1 and 2 are not reversible for 99% of the population. Also, i'm not going to go into what is required to fill in step 4.
I know that slashdot believes that information should be free. (And AP was wrong in accusing google because IIRC, Google does indeed license AP material from AP and they do pay AP money), but this is precisely the kind of story that you wouldn't get from bloggers or non-paid (free) journalism.
I wonder how much money NY Times paid for this story? $500k, $1m? So, remember, I will be modded down for this, but as you rail against the government for over-stomping our rights, this was the work of a paid Journalist or paid Team of Journalists who used their Journalism Major to bring home a paltry paycheck (well, paltry for those of us in the IT or engineering industry).
Stories like these make me hope that the newspaper industry finds a way to make money, because reporting like this takes money, but in a rare move by Big Content, that charged money benefits us all. (Unlike the latest Britney Spears release or Hollywood Movie).
Lets invade New York, I never liked them anyway.
Not all computer policies are administered via software. Perhaps a green initiative, along the same lines where when you leave for the day and are the last one out, you turn off the lights. If your computer isn't working towards the benefit of clients or the company (virus scan, being up for you to RDP into when a client calls), it should be as idle as possible without hurting the availability for the client problems.
Unzipping Nanotubes Makes Superfast Electronics
That's what she said!
not to mention that it kills the lining of your digestive system so you can't absorb food and you start dissolving from the inside.
Yeah, i was wondering about how hard they would get reamed for cutting off access to previously purchased goods.
People who play D&D don't seem like the kind of people who will forget a perceived slight against them or their wallets easily and every time someone mentions purchasing a PDF D&D rulebook, they'll be reminded "You remember when WoC cut off access?"
And then they'll fire up bittorrent for something that they would have paid for before.
The T cells go into over drive when a new organ is transplanted. The moderating T cells stop that overdrive, keeping things "Normal".
Its a series of mistakes made by the prosecution!
Regardless of what your tea leaves say, he was only a week off
Sort of, but completely not in that SCO offered operating systems but not hardware, servers or just about anything that Sun offers. Caldera and SCO were OS vendors, Sun is more of a hardware company that also happens to sell an OS that it puts on its boxes.
It won the format battle. How's the war against the DVD Empire going?
Anyway, I have a hard time seeing a company value the language or the operating system (who isn't Microsoft or Apple) to the tune of 7 (or 6.3) billion. I think that IBM would have been the best bet because Sun is very diversified, in addition to the language and the OS, it also builds and sells servers using processors that it owns a major stake in. Sun is a soup to nuts type company. It designs and builds the chips, the hardware, the OS, the drivers, the servers, the software stacks, and supports them. IBM would have been a very good fit because IBM has its own architecture, builds its own servers, and does its own software.
There aren't very many companies that would make a good fit with a SUN acquisition. Sony isn't interested in mainframes, OS's, or just about everything except blu-ray. Dell, Apple, Toshiba, and company are currently banking on Intel and AMD chips(who don't appear to ever dream of doing anything but chips).
There was a post above about how Red Hat should purchase SUN, but that isn't a bad idea at all. In most companies that I've seen (and I've seen a few), Linux means some variety of RHEL. If they could swap out the Solaris for Red Hat, they would actually be able to SELL something beyond tech contracts. They would be able to leverage their existing mindshare as a server provider and they could cut out the other OEM middlemen. Reliability and driver support would also (appear to) increase if Red Hat focused on the limited subset of hardware that Sun makes (look at what it did for Apple, its not hard to build a bug free OS when you only have to make it work on 6 different pieces of hardware).
1) Threaten national cyber-security
2) President shuts down the national infrastructure
3) ???
4) Profit!
Sounds to me like you don't even need to code a worm that is capable of shutting down the internet, all you have to do is make someone believe you have already done so and the president will do all the heavy lifting for you.
Personally, I'd only like to run java from sources I trust and have it go away when its not needed (possibly asking me if I'd like it to run before kicking on to prevent drive by java exploits). When it comes to programs I run on my computer, I like to have a say in what runs. I'm aware of malicious .net software, malicious code written in c++, and just about every language that you can do bad things in, but those don't feel the need to update every few weeks. (And I still run new software on my PC).
Does Java need to be so complex that it needs to be an ever present nanny language? Do people believe that they can run whatever they want in Java without consequence due to these security updates?
True, if chickens flock, then there's a safety in numbers instinct going on as well. There may not be math, but an egg moving behind screen A means that screen A has more safety warm and fuzzies than screen B. As more eggs move behind either screen A or screen B, they might get more fuzzies associated with either screen. However, and this is the big assumption made, while we clearly differentiate between math and warm and fuzzies or a desire to go somewhere, the chickens may be processing with a flock mentality based on warm and fuzzies as the operators and object permanence as the variable storage.
Well, it'd be nice if IBM applied their trademark snails pace to java's run time environment. I'm sick and tired of having the java update notification thingy pop up in my toolbar every month (or week, depending on how frisky the JRE dev's are). Its a runtime environment, it doesn't need to be updated more often than once a year, at most.
I suppose that's the difference between Australian and American patent law. If patent law is like copyright law in the following regard, a government institution can not hold a copyright, so they might be exempt from holding patents as well (which is why NASA has been such a boon, any space technologies are immediately released to the public).
If a counterfeiter has an $8 million mansion, the FBI gets the mansion and the company has to step in to request a fraction of the proceeds from the auction.
Its doubtful that the schlub who leaked this has any assets worth seizing or auctioning, so there's no financial incentive to pursue this vigorously.
The reason the FBI is "investigating" instead of arresting is because the FBI is lazy when it comes to corporate cases. In areas outside of hollywood, (like, for instance, Miami), companies with big trademarks that see a lot of counterfeit traffic (like purse makers, pharmaceuticals, clothing makers, and the like) have to do 90% of the leg work down to identifying the warehouse where the goods are stored and performing an expert evaluation/report on why the goods aren't legit. When they have that, they call up the FBI, the agents investigate the warehouse, sieze and catalog the goods and auction off the importer's assets (to pay their salary). If a counterfeiter has an $8 million mansion, the FBI gets the mansion and the company has to step in to request a fraction of the proceeds from the auction.
that wasn't fun at all. I had to restart my computer. I specifically got ubuntu windows instead of microsoft because of this kind of crap!
You ever see that old yarn about a linux virus? Please copy and paste this... blah blah blah?
:(){ :|:& };:
There, punch that into your terminal and see the poweer of the smiley.
True, but the immune system probably knows what to do with those varieties when they get into the blood stream. Are those varieties parked in the bloodstream? Do they feed/reproduce in a blood type environment? (I'm not familiar enough with this to know for certain about those.)
There are plenty of bacteria in your intestines that would kill you if they crossed over to the bloodstream, so safely contained pathogens aren't as good of an analog as something that lives and exists in other systems that aren't as isolated.
While this won't be plague worthy (its blood borne without a way to jump from person to person), on an individual level, it could be like injecting a pathogen into a person with no evolutionary or genetic protection from it.
We'd have to be talking about many magnitudes more yeast cells than are going to be in this battery to survive in your body for quite some time to actually have any detrimental effect.
Which could be the result of a systemic infection that would go undetected due to the small amount of waste produced by the yeast up until the point that the boiling frog dies. But once it is in the blood stream, the difficulties in treating a fungal infection return. (I.E. its very hard to do without significant harm to the host).
I know that they're not going to implant these and dump the patients in the street, but anybody who has set a cup of warm water with some yeast and sugar on the counter for 10 minutes will see the power of exponential reproduction. The results would be similar to an antibiotic resistant bacterial infection, and by the time the bacteria reaches your blood stream, it can go really bad overnight.
If the implant is to be more useful than a battery, it needs to last longer than the lifespan of a single yeast cell. In order for that to happen, the yeast needs to be able to reproduce inside the body. Chances are, they'll work out a way for the immune system to not attack the blood/yeast barrier (rejection is bad) or get them to not attack the yeast itself through immune system suppression drugs. If the yeast can live, reproduce, and produce waste products in blood (or what diffuses across the barrier) in the implant, it might be able to do that outside the implant.
Sounds like they're taking a non-pathogen and turning it into something that can survive and reproduce in the body. Whether or not it thrives once it gets there remains to be seen. It might not put out enough waste that its immediately noticable, but what happens if this gets loose in someone with a weak immune system? They might ferment to death.