Your precious little GPS receivers wouldn't work if they could [not] get as accurate a time measurement as possible from the US Naval Observatory.
Not true. GPS receivers get all the information they need directly from the GPS satellites - which track their own "GPS Time" that dispenses with the leap-seconds.
You're right that having an accurate astronomically-relevant time is important for navigation - if you are determining your position with a sextant. It's the decreasing relevance of sextants to the world of navigation, and the increasing need to keep electronic equipment of all sorts in lock-step, that is driving this movement away from the leap-seconds.
See a summary of the issues from one of the US Naval Observatory scientists in charge of this stuff: PDF, Postscript.
-renard
Re:Trademarks and loss of trademarks
on
Verbing Weirds Google
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
*If* Google wants to keep their trademark, and there are good reasons for them to do so, then this is exactly what they need to do, whether you like it or not.
Apparently you didn't read the linked article (it's okay - not the first time on Slashdot, and won't be the last).
Verb usage is specifically exempted from US trademark law. So while it is true that Google would have to sue to prevent dilution of its trademark in the case of other "Google sites" or "Google services", when it comes to "googling" (esp. as in the current case, that is, dictionary, word, and usage tracking) they have no legal leg to stand on.
Converting xml to xml is a whole lot easier than xml to pdf...:)
Exactly the point - wouldn't it be nice to have an open-source tool that could do it for you?
This way you could convert Keynote presentations to PDF, without needing to have a functional copy of Keynote around. Keynote exports to PDF (so they say) but it's not open-source, nor does it run (yet) on any environment other than OS X.
AC, AC, what are you thinking? Please brush up a little on your background prior to your next senseless post, lest you be mistaken for a troll.
If Castle does not accept the terms of the GPL, or the GPL is declared to be invalid, then standard copyright law applies and they are infringing. They cannot and will not be allowed, by any Court, to "cherry pick" from among the various clauses of the GPL those that they choose to accept, and those that they choose to decline.
Every time we see one of these GPL-violation cases, people start talking about "testing the GPL".
But invariably the guilty corporations are violating copyright law first before they are violating the GPL. This makes sense, because the GPL is actually more permissive than copyright law. And copyright law has been tested, many times - and it does have teeth.
If someone can present an argument why Castle in this case is violating the GPL, and not violating standard copyright law in the process, then I would like to hear it.
where do you draw the line about code being stolen?
Well the first thing to say is that if you're just programming for yourself and not for distribution to others, then you can cut & paste GPL'd code to your heart's content, develop your own kernel branch with your own proprietary extensions, whatever you like. It's only when you try to distribute your program that you're going to run up against the "share and share alike" provisions of the GPL.
Programming for distribution, you will find yourself in one of the big legal gray areas (County of IP; City of Copyright Law). Consider music sampling - where even taking one note can get you busted - or the "fair use" and "parody" exceptions to copyright law - where you can get away with snippets of the original but will get spanked if you take "too much".
How much is too much for programming? Almost certainly any given line is not going to get you in trouble - and how is anyone going to know you cut & pasted it in, anyway? - but by the time you're copying nonobvious functions wholesale - or even obvious functions byte for byte - you should think again.
If King's claims are accurate then this case would be in the "way egregious" category.
The problem with this is that knowledge (or even simply ideas) once taken out cannot be jammed back into the can.
That's the point: Therefore, we need to establish prohibitions on such research preemptively. In the article, Dyson discusses the 10-month worldwide moratorium on recombinant DNA research that was enacted in the seventies. After two international conferences, different types of recombinant DNA research were grouped into different classes, including a class of "too dangerous and hence forbidden."
All in all, it seems like this has been a good thing. Or perhaps you would prefer that we had antibiotic-resistant radiation-hardened botulism toxin-producing strains of E. coli culturing in the labs of our nation's bioweapons researchers?
You did charge it to your credit card, didn't you? Under the Fair Credit Billing Act you are entitled to a refund from your credit card company if the product was not as represented, and you complain (dispute the charges) within 60 days of receiving the billing statement that had the bogus charge.
Many credit card companies also have "buyer protection" plans which supplement this (mandatory) coverage.
I think you've missed a point here. Like politicians - or, indeed, any political entity - corporations occasionally float "trial balloons" by means of leaks or confidential briefings (where others may be expected to do the leaking for them). The purpose of these trial balloons is to test out controversial new policies while maintaining full deniability, including the ability to reverse course without loss of face.
In this case, let us say (and it is only a possibility) that SCO Linux is considering suing Linux users for patent violations. This would be controversial, and so they float a trial balloon first. If a big enough fuss is made, NOW, then they will reconsider. If not, they will proceed with the legal nasty-grams to the smallish, underfunded websites to start building their precedents.
This is just plain not true. While the sun (and solar-type stars) will outshine any Earth-type civilization in the broad-band radio bandpasses, terrestrial signals can easily outshine the sun within narrow bandpasses (e.g., radio stations and radar installations). Check out the Project Phoenix webpages if you want a refresher on this topic.
We can pick up radio-type signals from stars, but these are... stars
And the fact that we can detect them proves that we have the capability to detect alien civilizations, of a technological sophistication roughly similar to our own, within a relatively small region of neaby space (about 10 parsecs, for those of you who are counting).
The Project Phoenix Parkes Observatory run of 1995 had narrow-band sensitivity down to a few tens of gigawatts (10^10 watts) for the 19 solar-type stars within that radius that they observed. There are several military-radar emplacements on Earth that exceed that threshold.
Next-generation radio antenna arrays will increase sensitivity by a factor of roughly 1000. Are you sure you still want to bet against radio-wavelength SETI?
You may recall last year Home Depot announced they were deploying Linux at 90,000 point-of-sale terminals across the nation. Well, time went by... until now, when Home Depot announced they would be upgrading their POS systems with technology from... Microsoft
Another case when corporate HQ's "We're considering transitioning to Linux..." turns out to be biz-speak for "Gimme a discount, Ballmer!"
We'll know Linux has won this battle when the shoe's on the other foot and HQ mulls over "transitioning to Windows" until, I dunno, some widget-manufacturer agrees to release open-source drivers that work on the latest RedHat release... or something.
Whether people believe or don't believe that this effect is real or non-existent is completely irrelevant.
Actually, it all depends on their reasons - which may be good (hydrinos contradict more than a century of quantum mechanics; the second law of thermodynamics makes perpetual motion impossible) or bad (independent researchers can't possibly make interesting discoveries).
any "opinions" volunteered by experts and lay readers alike are not just irrelevant, but actually harmful to the success of that method.
I have trouble seeing how any Slashdot discussion could possibly have any impact on "the success of [the scientific] method" for good or ill. Meanwhile, we often have a pretty good time...
The company will in due course provide all the info necessary for independent verification,
Actually, since they're an independently owned private enterprise, I wouldn't count on it. As long as they can continue to either (a) generate themselves electric power for free; and/or (b) bilk naive investors out of millions of dollars, what incentive do they have to give away their secrets?
Opinions are, quite literally, just a waste of time.
As I said above, it all depends on what arguments those opinions are based upon. Personally, I would urge Slashdot and the wider world generally to carefully and painstakingly ignore Blacklight Power absolutely and categorically.
While the spectrum of the hydrogen atom was cutting-edge research two turns of a century ago, and Niels Bohr triggered a scientific revolution just thinking about it, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, and the rest pretty much put the baby to bed. By the time Feynman was done with the hydrogen atom and its associated E&M processes, it had no secrets left before the 13th decimal place. So please, if you want to turn up fundamental new physics, look somewhere else.
A classic audiophile comment. Show me an audiophile who's convinced that the 10x or (as here) 100x premium he paid for his equipment was well worth it, and I'll show you an audiophile who hasn't given his own system a double-blind listening test against its consumer-electronic counterpart.
Jerry Lewis sits at an editing console, editing his latest film. Unfortunately he is not happy with the way it is going. Stanley Kubrick stops in, asks is he can watch. Jerry says sure.
Jerry Lewis (coining the phrase): You can't polish a turd.
Stanley Kubrick (without missing a beat): You can if you freeze it.
-renard
Re:It's in their best interest to put out crap...
on
Congress Passes SWSA
·
· Score: 2
No one can tell what you look like on the radio...
They can, though, if they see you on the cover of a magazine, or on the label of your CD, or on Jay Leno late at night, or in your new movie...
Much as we all love to hate MTV (and I do!), I think there's a larger culture-of-celebrity thing going on here. Being, as Zoolander would say, "unbelievably good looking," is just part of the celebrity package these days - playing a role in journalism,
fiction and nonfiction writing, and politics.
And once you demand good looks, it's hard to get a really large helping of that "talent" thing in the same package... and so much easier to go to an external songwriting team. So that's what they do.
Not that I disagree with your point about the interchangeable sex-widgets. It's just that that's sort of an added benefit.
But what about some collaborative filtering P2P system? Imagine hooking it up with Gnutella so that you can not only download music, but add in your ratings.
This idea is right on, imho. Gnutella and its progeny need to do a lot more to enable collaborative filtering and ratings - of media and nodes, as well as groups and producers.
P2P could be so much more than efficient ''pr0n & britney'' distribution... more even than the ''universal digital library'' that first Napster and now Kazaa have promised... but it has to get much smarter before that will happen. I feel like Freenet, by tackling the much more difficult problem of anonymous p2p, has been confronting these issues for longer, and by implementing such "smarter network" features may gain a leg up on the competition (and the last shall be first)... I don't know why the commercial Gnutella folks aren't setting the pace in this area (instead of bulking up on, no kidding, their chat and music capabilities), but really, they're not.
by all means take your time in reading the opinion, but when you get the chance: how exactly were you involved in the settlement talks / case appeal / lobbying effort? and could you elaborate on how the settlement falls short of your (primary/central) hopes?
Sorry, but the parent post's (+3 insightful) claim is unsupported
by any source except a single MS executive (cited in the NYT story) who, when asked what the issuing agency was for those "permits", conferred with her ad agency team and after due consideration refused to say.
All fact-checking aside, it defies belief that
any NYC agency has the power or the
inclination to issue permits for the plastering
of decals over public subway signs, private
building facades, and public sidewalks.
While I have never depended on a "publisher to make an editorial decision," I do depend on my friends....
This is a silly thing to say, since by reading only published books you are in fact doing precisely that. Where do you think your friends get their book leads? Talking to author agents at book conventions and trolling through publishers' slush piles? How many unpublished manuscripts have you read? Ever? It is even harder to get one of those in bound form than free and online.
No, all black holes with a neutral charge and no spin have the same average density within their swarzchild radius.
Are you posting this AC because you know it's false?
Schwartzschild radius scales as mass; density scales as mass divided by radius cubed; hence the density of black holes scales as 1/mass^2, i.e., as the inverse square of the mass.
Supermassive black holes are indeed quite un-dense. Taking the extreme limit of this relation, in fact, one finds that the observable universe is approximately the size of its own Schwartzschild radius, i.e., perhaps we are all living inside a giant black hole.
Damn! There I go again - it makes my head hurt every time I say that.
In my case, having a random and immediate access to of 100s of songs on my hard drive beats the hell out of a pile of CDs.
Yeah that's a really good point, and something I thought of after posting. IMHO it only goes to show the extreme nature of the tragedy the RIAA and its members are fomenting here - if they were to allow unencumbered downloading, for a price, they might well be able to charge more than they charge now for CD's (greater functionality). In any case it seems like the margins would be a lot better.
But I think the point I was trying to make is that, to a small degree, it displaces the actual purchase of music.
And the point I was trying to make is that it ain't necessarily so. Free music is free advertising, and just because you buy fewer CD's now, and also listen to a lot of downloaded music, doesn't mean that there aren't other factors in play that have a greater effect. Absent those other factors, you might be purchasing more CDs because of online music. Causality can be a tricky thing.
Other factors that may be playing a role: the recession; increasing CD prices; availability of DVD's, video games, and cellphones; RIAA strongarm tactics; overall poorer quality of music (if such is the case); poor selection of radio stations (Clearchannel); even, lack of access to more/different online music (Napster effect)!
My point is not that online music isn't hurting CD sales, or couldn't possibly - just that one thing we know for certain about online music is that in its function as advertising, it is guaranteed to be stimulating CD sales, and that it's an unsolved question whether the sum total effect is positive or negative.
But whenever someone downloads music, in general terms, it pushes them down the continuum towards being a non-purchaser.
NOT TRUE. Free MP3's/Ogg's are NOT the same as free CD's. Think about that for a moment. Even when/if you burn it onto a blank, it is STILL NOT A CD like the one sold at Tower or Amazon. What people are downloading from P2P networks, and copying from their friends' burned disks, may be many things, but it is not identical to the product as sold at retail music outlets. In particular, the free stuff is of lower sound quality, takes greater time and effort to procure, and comes without art, images, lyrics, and the feel-goodness of fandom, supporting the artist, etc. (which has economic value).
You acknowledge that "there are counter trends" but it's not clear at all that the sense of the effect is as you describe. On the contrary, music labels pay enormous sums of money to advertise their product, and one thing free online music most certainly is is free advertising - advertising whose tab is picked up entirely by the consumer - advertising that doesn't cost the labels a penny. How often have you (in your entire lifetime!) purchased a CD that you had not previously listened to in any way?
If the sum total of the effects of free online music (which is unknown, present article and its conjectures notwithstanding) is to decrease CD sales, then it is because the marginal utility of the actual CD product, 44.1kHz 16 bit, liner notes, fan sentiment, and all, over that provided by the free online music, has been judged in the marketplace to not be worth its sticker price - to the extent that this effect has overcome the demand stimulation provided by the free advertising that online music also provides.
Personally, I buy CD's, but only CD's that I know, and only second-hand or at discount. That's what it's worth to me, and that's what I pay.
Slashdot Mirror
Not true. GPS receivers get all the information they need directly from the GPS satellites - which track their own "GPS Time" that dispenses with the leap-seconds.
You're right that having an accurate astronomically-relevant time is important for navigation - if you are determining your position with a sextant. It's the decreasing relevance of sextants to the world of navigation, and the increasing need to keep electronic equipment of all sorts in lock-step, that is driving this movement away from the leap-seconds.
See a summary of the issues from one of the US Naval Observatory scientists in charge of this stuff: PDF, Postscript.
-renard
Apparently you didn't read the linked article (it's okay - not the first time on Slashdot, and won't be the last).
Verb usage is specifically exempted from US trademark law. So while it is true that Google would have to sue to prevent dilution of its trademark in the case of other "Google sites" or "Google services", when it comes to "googling" (esp. as in the current case, that is, dictionary, word, and usage tracking) they have no legal leg to stand on.
Google on, friends.
-renard
Exactly the point - wouldn't it be nice to have an open-source tool that could do it for you?
This way you could convert Keynote presentations to PDF, without needing to have a functional copy of Keynote around. Keynote exports to PDF (so they say) but it's not open-source, nor does it run (yet) on any environment other than OS X.
-renard
If Castle does not accept the terms of the GPL, or the GPL is declared to be invalid, then standard copyright law applies and they are infringing. They cannot and will not be allowed, by any Court, to "cherry pick" from among the various clauses of the GPL those that they choose to accept, and those that they choose to decline.
-renard
But invariably the guilty corporations are violating copyright law first before they are violating the GPL. This makes sense, because the GPL is actually more permissive than copyright law. And copyright law has been tested, many times - and it does have teeth.
If someone can present an argument why Castle in this case is violating the GPL, and not violating standard copyright law in the process, then I would like to hear it.
-renard
Well the first thing to say is that if you're just programming for yourself and not for distribution to others, then you can cut & paste GPL'd code to your heart's content, develop your own kernel branch with your own proprietary extensions, whatever you like. It's only when you try to distribute your program that you're going to run up against the "share and share alike" provisions of the GPL.
Programming for distribution, you will find yourself in one of the big legal gray areas (County of IP; City of Copyright Law). Consider music sampling - where even taking one note can get you busted - or the "fair use" and "parody" exceptions to copyright law - where you can get away with snippets of the original but will get spanked if you take "too much".
How much is too much for programming? Almost certainly any given line is not going to get you in trouble - and how is anyone going to know you cut & pasted it in, anyway? - but by the time you're copying nonobvious functions wholesale - or even obvious functions byte for byte - you should think again.
If King's claims are accurate then this case would be in the "way egregious" category.
-renard
That's the point: Therefore, we need to establish prohibitions on such research preemptively. In the article, Dyson discusses the 10-month worldwide moratorium on recombinant DNA research that was enacted in the seventies. After two international conferences, different types of recombinant DNA research were grouped into different classes, including a class of "too dangerous and hence forbidden."
All in all, it seems like this has been a good thing. Or perhaps you would prefer that we had antibiotic-resistant radiation-hardened botulism toxin-producing strains of E. coli culturing in the labs of our nation's bioweapons researchers?
-renard
that's the funniest, funniest thing I've seen on slashdot in a long, long time...
Many credit card companies also have "buyer protection" plans which supplement this (mandatory) coverage.
Don't give up yet!
-renard
In this case, let us say (and it is only a possibility) that SCO Linux is considering suing Linux users for patent violations. This would be controversial, and so they float a trial balloon first. If a big enough fuss is made, NOW, then they will reconsider. If not, they will proceed with the legal nasty-grams to the smallish, underfunded websites to start building their precedents.
Think it can't happen here? Think again.
-renard
This is just plain not true. While the sun (and solar-type stars) will outshine any Earth-type civilization in the broad-band radio bandpasses, terrestrial signals can easily outshine the sun within narrow bandpasses (e.g., radio stations and radar installations). Check out the Project Phoenix webpages if you want a refresher on this topic.
We can pick up radio-type signals from stars, but these are... stars
And the fact that we can detect them proves that we have the capability to detect alien civilizations, of a technological sophistication roughly similar to our own, within a relatively small region of neaby space (about 10 parsecs, for those of you who are counting).
The Project Phoenix Parkes Observatory run of 1995 had narrow-band sensitivity down to a few tens of gigawatts (10^10 watts) for the 19 solar-type stars within that radius that they observed. There are several military-radar emplacements on Earth that exceed that threshold.
Next-generation radio antenna arrays will increase sensitivity by a factor of roughly 1000. Are you sure you still want to bet against radio-wavelength SETI?
-renard
Another case when corporate HQ's "We're considering transitioning to Linux..." turns out to be biz-speak for "Gimme a discount, Ballmer!"
We'll know Linux has won this battle when the shoe's on the other foot and HQ mulls over "transitioning to Windows" until, I dunno, some widget-manufacturer agrees to release open-source drivers that work on the latest RedHat release... or something.
-renard
Actually, it all depends on their reasons - which may be good (hydrinos contradict more than a century of quantum mechanics; the second law of thermodynamics makes perpetual motion impossible) or bad (independent researchers can't possibly make interesting discoveries).
any "opinions" volunteered by experts and lay readers alike are not just irrelevant, but actually harmful to the success of that method.
I have trouble seeing how any Slashdot discussion could possibly have any impact on "the success of [the scientific] method" for good or ill. Meanwhile, we often have a pretty good time...
The company will in due course provide all the info necessary for independent verification,
Actually, since they're an independently owned private enterprise, I wouldn't count on it. As long as they can continue to either (a) generate themselves electric power for free; and/or (b) bilk naive investors out of millions of dollars, what incentive do they have to give away their secrets?
Opinions are, quite literally, just a waste of time.
As I said above, it all depends on what arguments those opinions are based upon. Personally, I would urge Slashdot and the wider world generally to carefully and painstakingly ignore Blacklight Power absolutely and categorically.
While the spectrum of the hydrogen atom was cutting-edge research two turns of a century ago, and Niels Bohr triggered a scientific revolution just thinking about it, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, and the rest pretty much put the baby to bed. By the time Feynman was done with the hydrogen atom and its associated E&M processes, it had no secrets left before the 13th decimal place. So please, if you want to turn up fundamental new physics, look somewhere else.
-Renard
A classic audiophile comment. Show me an audiophile who's convinced that the 10x or (as here) 100x premium he paid for his equipment was well worth it, and I'll show you an audiophile who hasn't given his own system a double-blind listening test against its consumer-electronic counterpart.
-renard
True story:
Jerry Lewis sits at an editing console, editing his latest film. Unfortunately he is not happy with the way it is going. Stanley Kubrick stops in, asks is he can watch. Jerry says sure.
Jerry Lewis (coining the phrase): You can't polish a turd.
Stanley Kubrick (without missing a beat): You can if you freeze it.
-renard
They can, though, if they see you on the cover of a magazine, or on the label of your CD, or on Jay Leno late at night, or in your new movie...
Much as we all love to hate MTV (and I do!), I think there's a larger culture-of-celebrity thing going on here. Being, as Zoolander would say, "unbelievably good looking," is just part of the celebrity package these days - playing a role in journalism, fiction and nonfiction writing, and politics.
And once you demand good looks, it's hard to get a really large helping of that "talent" thing in the same package... and so much easier to go to an external songwriting team. So that's what they do.
Not that I disagree with your point about the interchangeable sex-widgets. It's just that that's sort of an added benefit.
-renard
This idea is right on, imho. Gnutella and its progeny need to do a lot more to enable collaborative filtering and ratings - of media and nodes, as well as groups and producers.
P2P could be so much more than efficient ''pr0n & britney'' distribution... more even than the ''universal digital library'' that first Napster and now Kazaa have promised... but it has to get much smarter before that will happen. I feel like Freenet, by tackling the much more difficult problem of anonymous p2p, has been confronting these issues for longer, and by implementing such "smarter network" features may gain a leg up on the competition (and the last shall be first)... I don't know why the commercial Gnutella folks aren't setting the pace in this area (instead of bulking up on, no kidding, their chat and music capabilities), but really, they're not.
-renard
by all means take your time in reading the opinion, but when you get the chance: how exactly were you involved in the settlement talks / case appeal / lobbying effort? and could you elaborate on how the settlement falls short of your (primary/central) hopes?
thanks in advance,
renard
-renard
All fact-checking aside, it defies belief that any NYC agency has the power or the inclination to issue permits for the plastering of decals over public subway signs, private building facades, and public sidewalks.
-renard
This is a silly thing to say, since by reading only published books you are in fact doing precisely that. Where do you think your friends get their book leads? Talking to author agents at book conventions and trolling through publishers' slush piles? How many unpublished manuscripts have you read? Ever? It is even harder to get one of those in bound form than free and online.
-renard
Are you posting this AC because you know it's false?
Schwartzschild radius scales as mass; density scales as mass divided by radius cubed; hence the density of black holes scales as 1/mass^2, i.e., as the inverse square of the mass.
Supermassive black holes are indeed quite un-dense. Taking the extreme limit of this relation, in fact, one finds that the observable universe is approximately the size of its own Schwartzschild radius, i.e., perhaps we are all living inside a giant black hole.
Damn! There I go again - it makes my head hurt every time I say that.
-renard
no - you forget one important bit - at the end of each "lawsuit" we would be assured of having fewer lawyers...
i like your thinking...
renard
Yeah that's a really good point, and something I thought of after posting. IMHO it only goes to show the extreme nature of the tragedy the RIAA and its members are fomenting here - if they were to allow unencumbered downloading, for a price, they might well be able to charge more than they charge now for CD's (greater functionality). In any case it seems like the margins would be a lot better.
But I think the point I was trying to make is that, to a small degree, it displaces the actual purchase of music.
And the point I was trying to make is that it ain't necessarily so. Free music is free advertising, and just because you buy fewer CD's now, and also listen to a lot of downloaded music, doesn't mean that there aren't other factors in play that have a greater effect. Absent those other factors, you might be purchasing more CDs because of online music. Causality can be a tricky thing.
Other factors that may be playing a role: the recession; increasing CD prices; availability of DVD's, video games, and cellphones; RIAA strongarm tactics; overall poorer quality of music (if such is the case); poor selection of radio stations (Clearchannel); even, lack of access to more/different online music (Napster effect)!
My point is not that online music isn't hurting CD sales, or couldn't possibly - just that one thing we know for certain about online music is that in its function as advertising, it is guaranteed to be stimulating CD sales, and that it's an unsolved question whether the sum total effect is positive or negative.
-Renard
NOT TRUE. Free MP3's/Ogg's are NOT the same as free CD's. Think about that for a moment. Even when/if you burn it onto a blank, it is STILL NOT A CD like the one sold at Tower or Amazon. What people are downloading from P2P networks, and copying from their friends' burned disks, may be many things, but it is not identical to the product as sold at retail music outlets. In particular, the free stuff is of lower sound quality, takes greater time and effort to procure, and comes without art, images, lyrics, and the feel-goodness of fandom, supporting the artist, etc. (which has economic value).
You acknowledge that "there are counter trends" but it's not clear at all that the sense of the effect is as you describe. On the contrary, music labels pay enormous sums of money to advertise their product, and one thing free online music most certainly is is free advertising - advertising whose tab is picked up entirely by the consumer - advertising that doesn't cost the labels a penny. How often have you (in your entire lifetime!) purchased a CD that you had not previously listened to in any way?
If the sum total of the effects of free online music (which is unknown, present article and its conjectures notwithstanding) is to decrease CD sales, then it is because the marginal utility of the actual CD product, 44.1kHz 16 bit, liner notes, fan sentiment, and all, over that provided by the free online music, has been judged in the marketplace to not be worth its sticker price - to the extent that this effect has overcome the demand stimulation provided by the free advertising that online music also provides.
Personally, I buy CD's, but only CD's that I know, and only second-hand or at discount. That's what it's worth to me, and that's what I pay.
-Renard