You can download and install Windows without any sort of licence key for free, but you will need to live with the pop-up ads which effectivly pay for the operating system. You would still have the option of purchasing a licence and thereby getting rid of the ads.
Would this be a legitimate (i.e. not evil) use of this patent?
You can download and install Linux without any sort of licence key for free, and you don't get ads. No... Microsoft is not that stupid. They will never allow "Look mom! No ads." become a successful marketing strategy for OSS.
This is probably more along the lines of straight invasion of privacy and give you advertisements that are useful to you. They are competing with Google. Do you complain about Google's Ads? No? Well, if MS could deliver smart ads (it's 7:00pm, would you be interested in these five local dinner places where you can order your food by clicking here, and get it delivered by 7:30pm?) in the OS then it could actually take a piece of the Ad pie.
Is it evil? Probably. But I think you are off target thinking that M$ will develop an intrusive ad delivering system instead of charging for their OS (which is an indirect fee paid by OEMs anyway).
people will be so horrified by the user experience in the Windows, they will be pushed into adopting Linux.
You are wrong. This is a defensive move for M$. When Linus adds these features to the Kernel, Microsoft will pounce and get to take advantage of *actually* holding a patents upon which the Linux Kernel is offending.
Either that, or the government will regulate the equivalent of "This is the emergency broadcast system" for computers and Linux and Mac will be SOL because they will have to license this patent from M$.
Either way, Windows and software in general will be worse off because of this.
once games and other software starts to include Linux binaries/installers on the disks that you can buy retail.
I'll take the source code for the next big game for free and compile it myself, then pay for the the rights to join their servers and/or pay for the hardware to setup and run my own servers.
Quake 3: Arena source is open.... maybe one of these are appealing alternates to Halo and Half Life.
Also... if any of these developments does ever provide a good diversion for me (and I'm not paying for the use of the developer's servers), then $20-40 from myself and each of my friends playing the game to the developer's for their troubles.
I am more productive with Office 2007, despite the fact that OOo is closer to the interface I've been using for over a decade.
Isn't that the TCO argument where magical math makes Linux cost more than Windows because of "productivity decreases"? Don't get me wrong, but the reason MSO-2007 makes you more productive than MSO-2003 is because Microsoft has fudged up formatting and other areas of the software that should have been better designed and more intuitive in the first place.
Of course, there is the comparison where OO-2.2 is very close to MSO-2003 - but that ignores many areas where OO-2.2 was actually built with an intuitive interface from the start... though the differences are minimal and unless you spend an hour "fighting" with MSO-2003 and then try the same thing in OO-2.2 then you won't notice the difference.
My point is that OO-2.2 is better than MSO-2003, and it will continue to get better. MSO-2007 is still an argument for large orgs who would have to worry about macros and other broken MS "productivity" boosts breaking during the upgrade, plus training costs which are a "real" cost for a large organization with not-so-technical employees (the type that need to be trained not to click on the Monkey or open Spam).
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So, DragonWriter, if you really do wish "Open" alternatives succeed... adopt them, use them, and contribute to the maintainers when there are things that don't do what you want. You seem like you could have a noticable impact pushing OO-3.0 to be better than MSO-2011 when it is eventually released in 3 or 4 years.
It is a real problem, though. Which is solved in the US with Senate (each state has equal rep) and House of Representatives (each state has representation based on population).
This backfires sometimes, when people move from a state where their ideals are widely held to a state that is split. I recall Kansas being a hot-bed of activity in the 1850's because of anti/pro-slavery ideals.
That being said... it does seem like giving 50 Million people in a small country equal voting rights versus 1+ Billion people is a bit unfair. On the other hand, it is strangely suspicious that pro-Globalization countries like India and China feel one way and much smaller nations who are potentially easier to buy feel the opposite.
Has anybody ever considered emigrating to these smaller nations and establishing Open technologies like Linux, Apache, Firefox, MySQL, OpenOffice, etc can be the de facto standard there so that when M$ comes knocking for support they can say, "We've already got support, and they give us a better deal because they weren't trying to sell us something at 3 year intervals indefinitely." It would only take 2 or 3 big Open Source shops like Red Hat, Ubuntu, Sun, or IBM to open up shop and influence the small group who is voting (plus getting lots of cheap labor... after years of training to educate the people of the small nations).
YouTube is Google, and ViaCom is already suing them for a Billion dollars.
The point is the Do No Evil mantra and when you post to Google, they only take enough of your rights to be a distributor of your content to the audience who you grant them the rights to distribute to at the price you choose to provide your material for distribution.
unlike some other companies, they acknowledge that work submitted by you is by default copyrighted to you
Like Publishing Companies that pay you quarterly royalties? In this respect Google is actually pretty great in that they handle the roll of digital distribution for free... and still offer you the ability to make money by selling digitally or redirecting users to a sales page for your wares.
Is there any evidence that throwing "buckets of money" at such artists will improve the quality?
Which software will have more errors? One that was completed two weeks before the delivery date and rushed out the door, or one which was completed and had a 6 month test cycle to find bugs and work through unforeseen errors?
Like software, much music doesn't just "come together" and it has to go through several revisions until the "bugs" are out. My point about "throwing buckets of money" was so that the indie-artists could quit their day jobs and put more effort into doing that which they love (i.e. making music).
For corporate bands... I think many probably work in the "rush a product out the door" mentality, because they exist to produce, produce, produce to make money for their industry overlords. This may not be true for all commercial bands, but the ones you are complaining about seem like they may fill this mold.
As for condemning yourself to repetition... do what works for you. If you would want to take my recommendation (and in you are in the USA)... subscribe to Sirius Satellite Radio and listen to that. You can get a free 3 day internet trial and sample the 60+ all-music channels. For me, there are about 6 stations that I like and at any given time one of these has something that I like. This is 4 more stations than FM has in my local area that are good.... isn't limited to my local area... never plays commercials... at the reasonable price of $12.95 a month.
As far as promoting "Open" music... I have heard ccmixter.com (My Morning Jacket) tunes on the esoteric stations (The Underground) of Sirius... and since they are an organization which isn't controlled by the industry I can see them being a force that can bring "good copyleft material" to listeners across the country. At the moment though, my belief is that many of the artists they play are still slaves to the industry.
My problem is with the consumers who don't want to pay for copyrighted material and so make freebie copies citing "I don't want my money to go to the RIAA", or, "its not stealing its copyright infringement". Utter bollox.
Absolutely. There is a caveat with musical performances, though. People are willing to pay to see you perform live. If a band with 5 members can pack a 1,000 seat room every week of the year and charge $5 per seat then each member can earn a reasonable $52k salary. This is very reasonable... and the challenge is promoting themselves which can be accomplished quite easily by making there songs available for free and finding ways to promote themselves through the "new media" (i.e. links in YouTube and friends exchanging e-mails with said links).
A harder act to sell is publishing in a medium that isn't really suitable for live performances... which is where I start to look towards a solution like Open Publication.
Good post, parent. I appreciate the links to the various Open music download portals.
As far as blocking p2p... I have read about corporate distribution methods that have wanted to use p2p to reduce the load on their servers. Imagine a digital movie distribution site where you can buy a 4 GB HD film and then download it. When 10,000 people are downloading the copy of the latest Rambo movie that they just bought... it is much easier for such a service to function by letting their customers download from each other and not a centrally located server.
For this reason... I don't think p2p will go away completely.
Ok, there's their mistake, they didn't hire a lawyer. Three paragraphs? That's just crazy. Hopefully they'll hire one before the time to appeal expires. So judges in this country can't reason if I don't hire a $200/hr lawyer? What if I've got 5 kids to feed and don't have money for a lawyer? That means everything the other side says is true regardless of whether or not they proved it?
There was a story on/. recently from NewYorkCountryLawyer that talked about somebody having success in a case against the RIAA without a lawyer.
Also, three well written paragraphs should be enough to present a compelling argument against the RIAA. You needn't pay a lawyer to write them for you. It shocks me that in matters of law and baseless accusations... quantity still has the judicial power to trump quality.
It is easy to suggest that the community should begin producing copyleft music/movies/books/art, but people have to earn a living. The phrase "don't quit your day job" comes to mind.
What the community needs is a resource to easily congregate copyleft material. To some extent, ccmixter.com accomplishes this... and I have used a handful of tunes from that site to score a film that I produced... but it is still challenging to find "good copyleft material" there and a person can spend an hour searching only to uncover 5 or 6 good songs.
Other sites have sprung up that let you listen to streams for free... but require you to throw down a couple of bucks to download the mp3/ogg (I've seen albums on sale for like $3-4). I discovered Convey through one of these copyleft reseller sites. These offerings are mainly of the Creative Commons Attribution, No Commercial, Share Alike variety because even these artists want to maintain control over their creative output.
Bottom line... throw buckets of money towards copyleft supportive artists and they will have a chance to "quit their day jobs" and produce content that is "Open". Failing that... they will struggle in a profession that they are capable of doing with limited time to sit down and produce the copyleft material that you want.
Publishing companies that allow such advertising into their products are doing their customers a disservice, as well as the industry. Look at what it has brought us - the necessity for ad blocking on the web, TiVO, etc..
I've said it before and I'll say it again... the reason I block ads online is because of the one for Mortgages with the dancing silhouettes.
the publishing industry will ever be able to regain the trust of our consumers (I work in the newspaper industry).
Promote groups and individuals who don't have profit driven agendas in the "non-paid" sections. When the Culture section of the Sunday paper features links to Creative Commons and similarly licensed artists... I will trust that beneath the corporately funded exterior that newspapers still have my best interests in mind.
As an example of one such organization, check out Architecture for Humanity. They certainly don't have tons of money to waste funding themselves through advertising... so if a newspaper can help spread their good message that would be a blessing.
Thank you for the explanation (and the link to the article explaining SneakerNet costs - it was a good read). It seems like I was mostly wrong about bandwidth cost at everything but the highest level, and that I was right about BitTorrent with the assumptions that the peer groups are (a) within the same subnetwork and (b) the subnetwork is not overloaded.
In theory, I would imagine BT could fairly easily be designed to try to find intra-subnetwork sources to download from and then meter itself when peaks occur... though I wouldn't be so bold as to assume that those features would be implemented in most of the P2P clients.
By negotiating contracts to that effect with Verizon or SBC? If they break the contract, they can then be sued for damages. So the way to preserve net neutrality is for our ISPs to pay the big carriers not to downgrade our packets? And this is a good thing because otherwise they might demand payment from our ISPs in order for them not to downgrade our packets?
I have doubts on any business model that has "sue your vendor" as a fail-safe for profitability, especially when the vendors are the big and powerful telcos. I suppose it beats the current trend of business models that include "sue your customers" or "sue a company that has successfully implemented a business plan that you had vaguely described on paper several years ago".
This is a step in the right direction, and it suddenly makes the "300kbps or less" deals that ISPs have been selling for years look particularly smart.
The trouble is, this is expensive, and while the routers are a sunk cost, bandwidth is a running cost.
Would the running cost be operating and powering the servers, which provide the bandwidth? Maybe I am nitpicking but it seems oversimplified to say that bandwidth is a running cost. If the servers have an achievable 99.999% uptime, and can auto-recover during the 0.001% when they are down per year, and if the servers are connected to some self-sustained power factory (like a wind farm, or something) then the cost of "running the bandwidth" would go to zero, would it not?
Oh well, nobody's paying there, so BT is just going to have crappy performance on your network.
I thought BT was a distributed application... which makes it better for serving content to the internet than the client/server model anyway. I've seen business plans in Wired for "Movie Distribution" to use a BT-like distribution model to spread the cost of bandwidth across the internet (i.e. monopolize their customers) to keep their costs down. Is there something I am missing which would give a server who is paying for their pipes such a big advantage over the BT distributed method? I can imagine a server paying for service to be assured 500kbps upload speeds, but isn't that offset by BTs ability to connect to 10 different client-servers at 50kbps a pop?
These competing standards (that's an oxymoron if I've ever heard one) are both losers. When I go buy movies, I still buy DVDs (despite having an HD TV for 3+ years). Know why? Because it plays in my player.
Eventually, a common player will be affordable for both HD and Blu. At that point, do you know who will win my business? That's right... Netflix. With the industry proving to me that ownership is dumb... I've gone from buying 3-5 DVDs a month to 1 every three months. When I get an upgraded player, I don't expect that there will ever be a movie that I'll want to own.
Am I wrong, or has the format "war" done nothing but alienated consumers and shown that companies are too egotistical to work together to create standards that are actually beneficial to the end users... and for that, I trust them as far as I can throw them.
When your boss e-mails you ODF files, what are the chances that you won't have the upgraded software needed to read it? Bosses are dumb and will use whatever format the computer uses for them by default. However, the upgrade to MSO '07 will be a large expense for an IT staff to shoulder... and it is needed by everybody and not just the PHB.
Really, to defeat MOOXML, it is important to avoid the upgrade to MSO '07. The slow acceptable rate of Vista in businesses is a boon to this, because it takes away the chance for MS to package the 2-for-1 OS+Office Suite in a reasonably priced "package deal".
The plateau of desktop hardware is another boon. Three years ago, it would have been painful to run a computer purchased in 2001. Today, computers from 2004 run about the same as when they were new. If there is no reason to upgrade... there is no reason to get a new version of Microsoft in the organization.
But Microsoft is patient... and they have until 2009 or so to push Vista and MSO '07 into the market to win the current fight to be the continued "de facto" standard. Does ODF/OO have enough steam to become the standard, preferred Office software when people get their post-XP upgrades?
This would be good... find a place where MSO '07 violates the MOOXML "Standard", then publicize the hell out of it. How long would it take ISO to rule out MOOXML as a standard if someone found an example of how MS doesn't even implement it correctly?
Or the easier thing... find two places in the standard that contradict each other, because in 6,000 pages there is going to be some internal inconsistancy.
Consider the belief that the earth revolves around the sun in Ancient Times... imagine how long it took the whole continent to understand the simple truth that the earth *does* revolve around the sun...
Fast forward to 1859 when Darwin published "On the Origin of Species". We are still working an adapting that belief... but we'll get there.
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As for the serious question at stake here (how to make the GOP look dumb with an evolution question), I would suggest beginning with a leading question that the monkey can't answer negatively to... "Do you support the human pursuit of knowledge through science and experimental exploration?" Anybody who answers "No" at this point would not stand a prayer in the general election because you can attack him (notice, I didn't say "or her") for simply not supporting basic research that America needs to stay competitively in the global technological economy.
Thus, it is established that "science is supported". Now, step two is to determine that "Science is good". The question should be phrased as simply as it can be (to keep it Yes/No), "Has science during the last decade played a large roll in the modern boom of invention and economic growth that has helped us achieve the high standards of living that we currently enjoy?" Again, an answer "No" here could make the candidate appear foolish, even to individuals that hold unscientific views that the world was designed by an intelligent (mystical) being.
From here on out... it gets harder because the questions deviate from the predictable. I would not suggest concentrating on Creationism, but rather embrace science as a whole (because your ultimate goal isn't making them look bad -- is it? -- it is making sure science is respected in the upper levels of government, right?)
During your lifetime, what do you think has been the most notable scientific discovery, and how do you think it has enhanced everybody's lives?
If you could push for any single area of science to make an influencial discovery during your potential presidency, what area would you foresee that discovery being made in?
How do you regard controversial scientific concepts such as global warming, stem cells, and creationism? Do you believe scientific evidence could reverse legislative actions that have aimed to create rules around these topics?
At this point, you've served up a couple of easy/opinion questions... and have begun your attack. However, a good politician could answer either "Yes" or "No" to the last question or simply refuse to answer it by speaking in circles about something tangentially related (the W. debate method).
IANAL... but here's a layman's guess to justify the claims....
negligence - The RIAA initiated lawsuits without significant evidence
fraud - Evidence was faked (RIAA probably didn't do this)
negligent misrepresentation - RIAA attacked an I.P. address instead of a person, then later found out anybody who recently held that I.P. address.
federal and state RICO - RICO stands for "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", and the quantity of lawsuits pursued by the RIAA seem to suggest they are a Racket.
abuse of process - Attempts to rush trials or start trials with the intent to offer a "payment plan" to extort money without following through in court.
malicious prosecution - They sued children
intentional infliction of emotional distress - They sued children who belonged to single mother's who absolutely couldn't afford the extortionary settlements
violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act - This seems like a beefed up accusation of the generalized negligance/abuse/malicious accusations above.
trespass - Did the RIAA have any right viewing the lists of songs on the computers of the citizens that they are accusing?
invasion of privacy - Did the RIAA have any right to petition the ISP to identify who had an I.P. address at a particular time?
libel and slander - Any time you say somebody did something negative that they didn't do - it is libel and slander.
deceptive business practices - I don't know how deceptive the RIAA has been, but any organization that is formed to sue its customers certainly has questionable business practices.
misuse of copyright law - Have they ever sued for a song that was not copyrighted, or for a file named "Metalica - Enter Sandman.mp3" that actually contained a recording of the sound it makes when I take a piss? That would seem like abuse to me.
civil conspiracy - I'm not sure what this means... maybe this accusation is a reach too...
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By the way, THANK YOU NewYorkCountryLawyer for your time and energy to bring these stories to Slashdot and for your pursuit of change within an industry that is so important to us. It is more than music that is at stake... it is culture... and without that then life become one big huge business - and it wouldn't be any fun for anybody.
Open source? Sure - but how do I know that the machine is actually running the code I reviewed?
Provide a verifiable calculation on the binary that is loaded onto the voting machine.... I like md5sum. Publish the alphanumeric string that md5sum generates. Now, after reviewing the code you can build it to produce the same binary that was supposed to have been loaded onto the voting machine. You can confirm that *your* build matches the loaded build. The only step left is to attach the voting machine to a network before the election to download what is actually loaded and perform an addition check on the md5sum. If it checks out... disconnect the system and you would have a very safe feeling that voters at that election are voting with the proper version of the reviewed software.
I tried to look at the website but I can't. Any ideas?
Oh, wait...
I like that idea the content owners and advertisers can start to avoid targeting me based on demographic information.
If a webpage only exists for the purpose of paying some guy's salary so that he doesn't have to get a real job... I don't want to browse there anyway.
By having the page simply not load - it will be a friendly reminder that I am not supporting the efforts of freeloaders and self-important "entrepreneurs".
(By the way, after installing Firefox on any system - I usually keep Ads enabled *until* I see the ones with the dancing shadows that are trying to sell Mortgages... then I install what I need to so all Ads are blocked.)
Slashdot Mirror
You can download and install Linux without any sort of licence key for free, and you don't get ads. No... Microsoft is not that stupid. They will never allow "Look mom! No ads." become a successful marketing strategy for OSS.
This is probably more along the lines of straight invasion of privacy and give you advertisements that are useful to you. They are competing with Google. Do you complain about Google's Ads? No? Well, if MS could deliver smart ads (it's 7:00pm, would you be interested in these five local dinner places where you can order your food by clicking here, and get it delivered by 7:30pm?) in the OS then it could actually take a piece of the Ad pie.
Is it evil? Probably. But I think you are off target thinking that M$ will develop an intrusive ad delivering system instead of charging for their OS (which is an indirect fee paid by OEMs anyway).
You are wrong. This is a defensive move for M$. When Linus adds these features to the Kernel, Microsoft will pounce and get to take advantage of *actually* holding a patents upon which the Linux Kernel is offending.
Either that, or the government will regulate the equivalent of "This is the emergency broadcast system" for computers and Linux and Mac will be SOL because they will have to license this patent from M$.
Either way, Windows and software in general will be worse off because of this.
I'll take the source code for the next big game for free and compile it myself, then pay for the the rights to join their servers and/or pay for the hardware to setup and run my own servers.
Quake 3: Arena source is open.... maybe one of these are appealing alternates to Halo and Half Life.
Also... if any of these developments does ever provide a good diversion for me (and I'm not paying for the use of the developer's servers), then $20-40 from myself and each of my friends playing the game to the developer's for their troubles.
Isn't that the TCO argument where magical math makes Linux cost more than Windows because of "productivity decreases"? Don't get me wrong, but the reason MSO-2007 makes you more productive than MSO-2003 is because Microsoft has fudged up formatting and other areas of the software that should have been better designed and more intuitive in the first place.
Of course, there is the comparison where OO-2.2 is very close to MSO-2003 - but that ignores many areas where OO-2.2 was actually built with an intuitive interface from the start... though the differences are minimal and unless you spend an hour "fighting" with MSO-2003 and then try the same thing in OO-2.2 then you won't notice the difference.
My point is that OO-2.2 is better than MSO-2003, and it will continue to get better. MSO-2007 is still an argument for large orgs who would have to worry about macros and other broken MS "productivity" boosts breaking during the upgrade, plus training costs which are a "real" cost for a large organization with not-so-technical employees (the type that need to be trained not to click on the Monkey or open Spam).
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So, DragonWriter, if you really do wish "Open" alternatives succeed... adopt them, use them, and contribute to the maintainers when there are things that don't do what you want. You seem like you could have a noticable impact pushing OO-3.0 to be better than MSO-2011 when it is eventually released in 3 or 4 years.
It is a real problem, though. Which is solved in the US with Senate (each state has equal rep) and House of Representatives (each state has representation based on population).
This backfires sometimes, when people move from a state where their ideals are widely held to a state that is split. I recall Kansas being a hot-bed of activity in the 1850's because of anti/pro-slavery ideals.
That being said... it does seem like giving 50 Million people in a small country equal voting rights versus 1+ Billion people is a bit unfair. On the other hand, it is strangely suspicious that pro-Globalization countries like India and China feel one way and much smaller nations who are potentially easier to buy feel the opposite.
Has anybody ever considered emigrating to these smaller nations and establishing Open technologies like Linux, Apache, Firefox, MySQL, OpenOffice, etc can be the de facto standard there so that when M$ comes knocking for support they can say, "We've already got support, and they give us a better deal because they weren't trying to sell us something at 3 year intervals indefinitely." It would only take 2 or 3 big Open Source shops like Red Hat, Ubuntu, Sun, or IBM to open up shop and influence the small group who is voting (plus getting lots of cheap labor... after years of training to educate the people of the small nations).
Sounds like a Technology Company Superhero Group... Oracle + Microsoft + Red Hat + Google + Sun Microsystems = Fantastic Five?
YouTube is Google, and ViaCom is already suing them for a Billion dollars.
The point is the Do No Evil mantra and when you post to Google, they only take enough of your rights to be a distributor of your content to the audience who you grant them the rights to distribute to at the price you choose to provide your material for distribution.
Like Publishing Companies that pay you quarterly royalties? In this respect Google is actually pretty great in that they handle the roll of digital distribution for free... and still offer you the ability to make money by selling digitally or redirecting users to a sales page for your wares.
Which software will have more errors? One that was completed two weeks before the delivery date and rushed out the door, or one which was completed and had a 6 month test cycle to find bugs and work through unforeseen errors?
Like software, much music doesn't just "come together" and it has to go through several revisions until the "bugs" are out. My point about "throwing buckets of money" was so that the indie-artists could quit their day jobs and put more effort into doing that which they love (i.e. making music).
For corporate bands... I think many probably work in the "rush a product out the door" mentality, because they exist to produce, produce, produce to make money for their industry overlords. This may not be true for all commercial bands, but the ones you are complaining about seem like they may fill this mold.
As for condemning yourself to repetition... do what works for you. If you would want to take my recommendation (and in you are in the USA)... subscribe to Sirius Satellite Radio and listen to that. You can get a free 3 day internet trial and sample the 60+ all-music channels. For me, there are about 6 stations that I like and at any given time one of these has something that I like. This is 4 more stations than FM has in my local area that are good.... isn't limited to my local area... never plays commercials... at the reasonable price of $12.95 a month.
As far as promoting "Open" music... I have heard ccmixter.com (My Morning Jacket) tunes on the esoteric stations (The Underground) of Sirius... and since they are an organization which isn't controlled by the industry I can see them being a force that can bring "good copyleft material" to listeners across the country. At the moment though, my belief is that many of the artists they play are still slaves to the industry.
Absolutely. There is a caveat with musical performances, though. People are willing to pay to see you perform live. If a band with 5 members can pack a 1,000 seat room every week of the year and charge $5 per seat then each member can earn a reasonable $52k salary. This is very reasonable... and the challenge is promoting themselves which can be accomplished quite easily by making there songs available for free and finding ways to promote themselves through the "new media" (i.e. links in YouTube and friends exchanging e-mails with said links).
A harder act to sell is publishing in a medium that isn't really suitable for live performances... which is where I start to look towards a solution like Open Publication.
Good post, parent. I appreciate the links to the various Open music download portals.
As far as blocking p2p... I have read about corporate distribution methods that have wanted to use p2p to reduce the load on their servers. Imagine a digital movie distribution site where you can buy a 4 GB HD film and then download it. When 10,000 people are downloading the copy of the latest Rambo movie that they just bought... it is much easier for such a service to function by letting their customers download from each other and not a centrally located server.
For this reason... I don't think p2p will go away completely.
There was a story on /. recently from NewYorkCountryLawyer that talked about somebody having success in a case against the RIAA without a lawyer.
Also, three well written paragraphs should be enough to present a compelling argument against the RIAA. You needn't pay a lawyer to write them for you. It shocks me that in matters of law and baseless accusations... quantity still has the judicial power to trump quality.
It is easy to suggest that the community should begin producing copyleft music/movies/books/art, but people have to earn a living. The phrase "don't quit your day job" comes to mind.
What the community needs is a resource to easily congregate copyleft material. To some extent, ccmixter.com accomplishes this... and I have used a handful of tunes from that site to score a film that I produced... but it is still challenging to find "good copyleft material" there and a person can spend an hour searching only to uncover 5 or 6 good songs.
Other sites have sprung up that let you listen to streams for free... but require you to throw down a couple of bucks to download the mp3/ogg (I've seen albums on sale for like $3-4). I discovered Convey through one of these copyleft reseller sites. These offerings are mainly of the Creative Commons Attribution, No Commercial, Share Alike variety because even these artists want to maintain control over their creative output.
Bottom line... throw buckets of money towards copyleft supportive artists and they will have a chance to "quit their day jobs" and produce content that is "Open". Failing that... they will struggle in a profession that they are capable of doing with limited time to sit down and produce the copyleft material that you want.
Actually, I may just e-mail him to inform him that he is very wise for choosing to use the same distro as me (Fedora), albeit for different reasons.
I've said it before and I'll say it again... the reason I block ads online is because of the one for Mortgages with the dancing silhouettes.
the publishing industry will ever be able to regain the trust of our consumers (I work in the newspaper industry).Promote groups and individuals who don't have profit driven agendas in the "non-paid" sections. When the Culture section of the Sunday paper features links to Creative Commons and similarly licensed artists... I will trust that beneath the corporately funded exterior that newspapers still have my best interests in mind.
As an example of one such organization, check out Architecture for Humanity. They certainly don't have tons of money to waste funding themselves through advertising... so if a newspaper can help spread their good message that would be a blessing.
Thank you for the explanation (and the link to the article explaining SneakerNet costs - it was a good read). It seems like I was mostly wrong about bandwidth cost at everything but the highest level, and that I was right about BitTorrent with the assumptions that the peer groups are (a) within the same subnetwork and (b) the subnetwork is not overloaded.
In theory, I would imagine BT could fairly easily be designed to try to find intra-subnetwork sources to download from and then meter itself when peaks occur... though I wouldn't be so bold as to assume that those features would be implemented in most of the P2P clients.
I have doubts on any business model that has "sue your vendor" as a fail-safe for profitability, especially when the vendors are the big and powerful telcos. I suppose it beats the current trend of business models that include "sue your customers" or "sue a company that has successfully implemented a business plan that you had vaguely described on paper several years ago".
This is a step in the right direction, and it suddenly makes the "300kbps or less" deals that ISPs have been selling for years look particularly smart.
Maybe you know something I don't....
The trouble is, this is expensive, and while the routers are a sunk cost, bandwidth is a running cost.Would the running cost be operating and powering the servers, which provide the bandwidth? Maybe I am nitpicking but it seems oversimplified to say that bandwidth is a running cost. If the servers have an achievable 99.999% uptime, and can auto-recover during the 0.001% when they are down per year, and if the servers are connected to some self-sustained power factory (like a wind farm, or something) then the cost of "running the bandwidth" would go to zero, would it not?
Oh well, nobody's paying there, so BT is just going to have crappy performance on your network.I thought BT was a distributed application... which makes it better for serving content to the internet than the client/server model anyway. I've seen business plans in Wired for "Movie Distribution" to use a BT-like distribution model to spread the cost of bandwidth across the internet (i.e. monopolize their customers) to keep their costs down. Is there something I am missing which would give a server who is paying for their pipes such a big advantage over the BT distributed method? I can imagine a server paying for service to be assured 500kbps upload speeds, but isn't that offset by BTs ability to connect to 10 different client-servers at 50kbps a pop?
These competing standards (that's an oxymoron if I've ever heard one) are both losers. When I go buy movies, I still buy DVDs (despite having an HD TV for 3+ years). Know why? Because it plays in my player.
Eventually, a common player will be affordable for both HD and Blu. At that point, do you know who will win my business? That's right... Netflix. With the industry proving to me that ownership is dumb... I've gone from buying 3-5 DVDs a month to 1 every three months. When I get an upgraded player, I don't expect that there will ever be a movie that I'll want to own.
Am I wrong, or has the format "war" done nothing but alienated consumers and shown that companies are too egotistical to work together to create standards that are actually beneficial to the end users... and for that, I trust them as far as I can throw them.
When your boss e-mails you ODF files, what are the chances that you won't have the upgraded software needed to read it? Bosses are dumb and will use whatever format the computer uses for them by default. However, the upgrade to MSO '07 will be a large expense for an IT staff to shoulder... and it is needed by everybody and not just the PHB.
Really, to defeat MOOXML, it is important to avoid the upgrade to MSO '07. The slow acceptable rate of Vista in businesses is a boon to this, because it takes away the chance for MS to package the 2-for-1 OS+Office Suite in a reasonably priced "package deal".
The plateau of desktop hardware is another boon. Three years ago, it would have been painful to run a computer purchased in 2001. Today, computers from 2004 run about the same as when they were new. If there is no reason to upgrade... there is no reason to get a new version of Microsoft in the organization.
But Microsoft is patient... and they have until 2009 or so to push Vista and MSO '07 into the market to win the current fight to be the continued "de facto" standard. Does ODF/OO have enough steam to become the standard, preferred Office software when people get their post-XP upgrades?
This would be good... find a place where MSO '07 violates the MOOXML "Standard", then publicize the hell out of it. How long would it take ISO to rule out MOOXML as a standard if someone found an example of how MS doesn't even implement it correctly?
Or the easier thing... find two places in the standard that contradict each other, because in 6,000 pages there is going to be some internal inconsistancy.
Consider the belief that the earth revolves around the sun in Ancient Times... imagine how long it took the whole continent to understand the simple truth that the earth *does* revolve around the sun...
Fast forward to 1859 when Darwin published "On the Origin of Species". We are still working an adapting that belief... but we'll get there.
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As for the serious question at stake here (how to make the GOP look dumb with an evolution question), I would suggest beginning with a leading question that the monkey can't answer negatively to... "Do you support the human pursuit of knowledge through science and experimental exploration?" Anybody who answers "No" at this point would not stand a prayer in the general election because you can attack him (notice, I didn't say "or her") for simply not supporting basic research that America needs to stay competitively in the global technological economy.
Thus, it is established that "science is supported". Now, step two is to determine that "Science is good". The question should be phrased as simply as it can be (to keep it Yes/No), "Has science during the last decade played a large roll in the modern boom of invention and economic growth that has helped us achieve the high standards of living that we currently enjoy?" Again, an answer "No" here could make the candidate appear foolish, even to individuals that hold unscientific views that the world was designed by an intelligent (mystical) being.
From here on out... it gets harder because the questions deviate from the predictable. I would not suggest concentrating on Creationism, but rather embrace science as a whole (because your ultimate goal isn't making them look bad -- is it? -- it is making sure science is respected in the upper levels of government, right?)
At this point, you've served up a couple of easy/opinion questions... and have begun your attack. However, a good politician could answer either "Yes" or "No" to the last question or simply refuse to answer it by speaking in circles about something tangentially related (the W. debate method).
Hows that for a start?
IANAL... but here's a layman's guess to justify the claims....
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By the way, THANK YOU NewYorkCountryLawyer for your time and energy to bring these stories to Slashdot and for your pursuit of change within an industry that is so important to us. It is more than music that is at stake... it is culture... and without that then life become one big huge business - and it wouldn't be any fun for anybody.
Provide a verifiable calculation on the binary that is loaded onto the voting machine.... I like md5sum. Publish the alphanumeric string that md5sum generates. Now, after reviewing the code you can build it to produce the same binary that was supposed to have been loaded onto the voting machine. You can confirm that *your* build matches the loaded build. The only step left is to attach the voting machine to a network before the election to download what is actually loaded and perform an addition check on the md5sum. If it checks out... disconnect the system and you would have a very safe feeling that voters at that election are voting with the proper version of the reviewed software.
I like that idea the content owners and advertisers can start to avoid targeting me based on demographic information.
If a webpage only exists for the purpose of paying some guy's salary so that he doesn't have to get a real job... I don't want to browse there anyway.
By having the page simply not load - it will be a friendly reminder that I am not supporting the efforts of freeloaders and self-important "entrepreneurs".
(By the way, after installing Firefox on any system - I usually keep Ads enabled *until* I see the ones with the dancing shadows that are trying to sell Mortgages... then I install what I need to so all Ads are blocked.)