How quickly would people migrate to better browsers if sites actually started doing that? How much better would the web be in five years if people were forced to write valid code? That error message is fine, because there are plenty of browsers out there capable of doing an excellent job rendering HTML and CSS, and I guarantee it wouldn't stick around for long. If IE actually lost its majority Microsoft might actually have a reason to make it competitive.
For a competent developer, writing valid code isn't difficult. A competent developer is already doing it. All this would do is out the bad developers, which I have absolutely no problem with. People think they can buy DreamWeaver and call themselves developers. That's how bad it is. That's what needs to stop. Good developers would get the money they deserve, and bad developers would no longer be able to parade themselves around as knowing WTH they're doing.
This is why web developers need to stop working around shitty rendering engines en masse. Every single time we - as developers - utilize hacks to make things work in IE where they're fine in WebKit, Gecko, et. al., we further allow IE to be as bad as it is. Do you honestly think IE would be the POS it is today if the world's web sites didn't work in it? Every single time we work around it we provide Microsoft reason not to change anything. Literally. Microsoft's biggest concern has always been backwards compatibility, and it is that reason that so many of the issues we have now we also had then. It would be one thing if IE7 had shown considerable improvement in this regard, but that simply isn't the case. IE7 kept some bugs, and swapped out some well-known ones for others, which we now have to hack around, again.
If browsers actually required that we provide valid code each and every time, things would be a lot better. How many browser security holes can be traced to a parser that would not have been affected had it simply seen invalid input and rejected it? How much simpler and faster would browsers be if they didn't spend so much time trying to figure out what the person who wrote the code intended? How much more accessible would the content on those pages be to alternative browsers, like screenreaders?
We've been running for way too long on the mindset that anybody can build web pages. Web browsers were built with this mentality. If I'm integrating with an enterprise XML API, and I feed it bad data, it gives me the proverbial finger. Why should web pages be any different? If you want to put stuff online, learn how to do it properly. The web is a cesspool for precisely this reason, and you can't blame the standards themselves. The XHTML and CSS specs are by no means perfect, but writing well-formed XHTML and CSS is not difficult. Requiring developers to ensure that every start tag has an end tag, proper nested order, alt tags, and the like, would go a long way toward keeping the architecture of the Internet sustainable. Granted, it might put sites like Myspace out of business, but I'll go out on a limb and say that's not a bad thing.
Our PCs would be a lot safer, too. Call that a bonus.
The RIAA and MPAA claim billions of dollars in damages due to piracy each year, yet when asked how much an individual download costs, they have no clue.
Get a clue: Clamping down on casual trading is not going to bring increased revenues. People aren't paying because they either see no value, or they feel the process is flawed. Making it harder to find these works won't make anyone suddenly feel as though there is value. People will just start to look elsewhere, or - as usual - get smarter, and find means around this. Virtually all deep packet inspection can be thwarted by encryption, so what exactly is there to be gained except more headaches for those running ISPs and higher prices for their customers?
I'm inclined to believe that this format war really doesn't matter all that much. The age of physical media for distributing entertainment works (music, videos, etc.) is coming to an end. In a few years DOCSIS 3.0 and Fiber are going to make ultra high speed connections ubiquitous. When it only takes an hour to download 50GB of data, I simply see no point in purchasing an (overpriced) disc, particularly when the DRM on the disc is as bad as or worse than what you'll find attached to any mainstream downloadable.
I also don't see how what Microsoft is doing is any different than what Sony is doing, especially when you consider that Sony has far more to gain than Microsoft has to lose.
To the assholes at the RIAA, the "use" comes in scaring people into doing one of two things: 1- Pay whatever ransom they ask, or 2- Stop downloading and/or distributing copies of copyrighted works.
You're right, and also wrong. While no document can strip you of Constitutionally protected rights, the DOJ is saying that she effectively acknowledged that the statutory damages were not in violation of her rights because she agreed to the instructions. So really, you have two separate issues.
Incorrect. They are providing reasoning for why statutory awards are not necessarily related to actual monetary damages: instances where determining the exact monetary damage is difficult or impossible.
If you RTFA, you'll find that the DOJ is siding with the RIAA because the defendant agreed to the terms put forth to the jury. She acknowledged and went along with the instructions, which included precisely how much she could be liable for if found guilty. In so doing she effectively waived her right to make this claim.
I'm one of the last people who would take something the DOJ says seriously these days, but their reasoning on this issue is sound.
The greater problem is that the patent system has morphed from being a means to protect intellectual property into a system for fighting competition. "Ideas" should not be patentable, and software should break ground before it's patented, if you buy that software should be patentable at all. This isn't an issue of ATT and/or Apple reverse engineering a software system and then selling the reimplementation. This is a carrier-specific implementation that is similar only in concept. It simply boggles the mind that effectively moving from a linked list to an array can cost you $360M. Here's hoping Apple doesn't cave in yet again, and together with ATT wipes the floor with these trolls.
It sounds better than a lot of stuff being released today, considering all the compression and volume boosting that goes into modern albums to ensure they can be heard in club environments. The indie is far more likely to record an album with the intent that it is an accurate reproduction of the original.
I'll play devil's advocate for a moment, and address your points individually:
Labels ensure that the only top-tier, signed artists get play in each of the mediums you've mentioned. They serve to keep the little guy out.
This is the area most in flux. "Publishing" can mean many things, and there's no reason that copyright law couldn't be simplified to make collecting royalties something much more manageable
Physical media is dying. You're just going to have to deal with that. It makes absolutely no sense to continue distributing music on CDs when it's possible to distribute bit-perfect copies at a lower cost over the web.
Again, labels are the reason why giant budgets are required to promote songs. They serve to reinforce the status quo, which means Joe Anotherguitarplayer can't compete.
See #2.
I agree with your points about having a good manager, etc.
Good point, although I have to think that the commercially-produced crap is liked more because decades of social conditioning have made it that way, and less because the music is actually enjoyable. Don't take this as a criticism of "pop" in general; I'm referring specifically to "groups" like the Backstreet Boys, etc.
Does the industry really need billboards in every city? I'm talking about a grassroots, fundamental reformulating of the industry as a whole. It makes no sense that a shitty, commercially-architected pop group can gross $10m on a single album while truly talented artists can't even get off the ground. We need to go back to square one, focus on the music, and let the industry reinvent itself from there. The music, and the artist(s) that produce it.
Think about a music industry where artists don't need labels to get "beer, coke and groupies." Imagine an industry where new channels make it easier for unknown artists to get noticed. It's hard to get noticed right now because you almost can't do it at all without going through labels. Right now, labels are necessary because the system has been architected such that you can't go it without them. That is what stands to change.
So far as online delivery goes, I think you're flat-out wrong. iTunes accounts for more than 2% of music sales on its own, and in an increasingly "green-friendly" world the concept of digital distribution, which requires no printing presses, no petroleum-based products, etc., is the way forward. That's why I laugh a little every time I think about the BD vs HD-DVD argument. In a few years when DOCSIS 3 is ubiquitous, and fiber is available to many homes, the idea of having to go buy a little round piece of plastic looks increasingly stupid.
Don't be so sure. When a band can distribute its albums by posting a zip file on a web site, there's a lot less incentive to turn to labels. The industry exists right now because it exists - not because it's necessary. As people start to see how the economics of giant media labels work against them, the tide can turn.
Entire industries (as we think of them) don't disappear overnight, but they do sometimes disappear, or change into something so different you couldn't really call it the same industry with a straight face. That's where we are. They're a dying breed, whether they know it or not.
Again, it's an issue of semantics. I don't think that anyone is denying that video game violence may have some effect. The question is whether or not that effect is to increase the likelihood of violent activity, and if so, by how much. Couple that with the vague-at-best definition of "aggression" and there's plenty of room to criticize this study.
"Exposure to violent electronic media has a larger effect than all but one other well known threat to public health. The only effect slightly larger than the effect of media violence on aggression is that of cigarette smoking on lung cancer" (emphasis mine)
You can chalk it up to semantics, but it sure sounds like these guys went into the study assuming that violent media was already a threat. They set out to measure the "how much," completely bypassing "if" as though it were a moot point.
Slashdot Mirror
How quickly would people migrate to better browsers if sites actually started doing that? How much better would the web be in five years if people were forced to write valid code? That error message is fine, because there are plenty of browsers out there capable of doing an excellent job rendering HTML and CSS, and I guarantee it wouldn't stick around for long. If IE actually lost its majority Microsoft might actually have a reason to make it competitive.
For a competent developer, writing valid code isn't difficult. A competent developer is already doing it. All this would do is out the bad developers, which I have absolutely no problem with. People think they can buy DreamWeaver and call themselves developers. That's how bad it is. That's what needs to stop. Good developers would get the money they deserve, and bad developers would no longer be able to parade themselves around as knowing WTH they're doing.
This is why web developers need to stop working around shitty rendering engines en masse. Every single time we - as developers - utilize hacks to make things work in IE where they're fine in WebKit, Gecko, et. al., we further allow IE to be as bad as it is. Do you honestly think IE would be the POS it is today if the world's web sites didn't work in it? Every single time we work around it we provide Microsoft reason not to change anything. Literally. Microsoft's biggest concern has always been backwards compatibility, and it is that reason that so many of the issues we have now we also had then. It would be one thing if IE7 had shown considerable improvement in this regard, but that simply isn't the case. IE7 kept some bugs, and swapped out some well-known ones for others, which we now have to hack around, again.
If browsers actually required that we provide valid code each and every time, things would be a lot better. How many browser security holes can be traced to a parser that would not have been affected had it simply seen invalid input and rejected it? How much simpler and faster would browsers be if they didn't spend so much time trying to figure out what the person who wrote the code intended? How much more accessible would the content on those pages be to alternative browsers, like screenreaders?
We've been running for way too long on the mindset that anybody can build web pages. Web browsers were built with this mentality. If I'm integrating with an enterprise XML API, and I feed it bad data, it gives me the proverbial finger. Why should web pages be any different? If you want to put stuff online, learn how to do it properly. The web is a cesspool for precisely this reason, and you can't blame the standards themselves. The XHTML and CSS specs are by no means perfect, but writing well-formed XHTML and CSS is not difficult. Requiring developers to ensure that every start tag has an end tag, proper nested order, alt tags, and the like, would go a long way toward keeping the architecture of the Internet sustainable. Granted, it might put sites like Myspace out of business, but I'll go out on a limb and say that's not a bad thing.
Our PCs would be a lot safer, too. Call that a bonus.
The RIAA and MPAA claim billions of dollars in damages due to piracy each year, yet when asked how much an individual download costs, they have no clue.
Get a clue: Clamping down on casual trading is not going to bring increased revenues. People aren't paying because they either see no value, or they feel the process is flawed. Making it harder to find these works won't make anyone suddenly feel as though there is value. People will just start to look elsewhere, or - as usual - get smarter, and find means around this. Virtually all deep packet inspection can be thwarted by encryption, so what exactly is there to be gained except more headaches for those running ISPs and higher prices for their customers?
I'm inclined to believe that this format war really doesn't matter all that much. The age of physical media for distributing entertainment works (music, videos, etc.) is coming to an end. In a few years DOCSIS 3.0 and Fiber are going to make ultra high speed connections ubiquitous. When it only takes an hour to download 50GB of data, I simply see no point in purchasing an (overpriced) disc, particularly when the DRM on the disc is as bad as or worse than what you'll find attached to any mainstream downloadable.
I also don't see how what Microsoft is doing is any different than what Sony is doing, especially when you consider that Sony has far more to gain than Microsoft has to lose.
To the assholes at the RIAA, the "use" comes in scaring people into doing one of two things: 1- Pay whatever ransom they ask, or 2- Stop downloading and/or distributing copies of copyrighted works.
Excellent point. I stand corrected.
IANAL, but something tells me there's a difference between being forced to pay $200K+ and choosing how to die, in the eyes of the law.
You're right, and also wrong. While no document can strip you of Constitutionally protected rights, the DOJ is saying that she effectively acknowledged that the statutory damages were not in violation of her rights because she agreed to the instructions. So really, you have two separate issues.
Incorrect. They are providing reasoning for why statutory awards are not necessarily related to actual monetary damages: instances where determining the exact monetary damage is difficult or impossible.
If you RTFA, you'll find that the DOJ is siding with the RIAA because the defendant agreed to the terms put forth to the jury. She acknowledged and went along with the instructions, which included precisely how much she could be liable for if found guilty. In so doing she effectively waived her right to make this claim.
I'm one of the last people who would take something the DOJ says seriously these days, but their reasoning on this issue is sound.
More on this at Ars Technica.
The greater problem is that the patent system has morphed from being a means to protect intellectual property into a system for fighting competition. "Ideas" should not be patentable, and software should break ground before it's patented, if you buy that software should be patentable at all. This isn't an issue of ATT and/or Apple reverse engineering a software system and then selling the reimplementation. This is a carrier-specific implementation that is similar only in concept. It simply boggles the mind that effectively moving from a linked list to an array can cost you $360M. Here's hoping Apple doesn't cave in yet again, and together with ATT wipes the floor with these trolls.
I'm an Apple fan, and I also happen to be a software developer. I use Linux regularly, an have built many PCs by hand.
Save the stereotypes for Digg, please.
Granted, but it's just another reason why digital distribution is such a good idea. It makes business sense.
Well said. I'd mod you up if I had the points.
Google hasn't been David for a long time. Google is a Goliath, although - to date - not a particularly evil one.
It sounds better than a lot of stuff being released today, considering all the compression and volume boosting that goes into modern albums to ensure they can be heard in club environments. The indie is far more likely to record an album with the intent that it is an accurate reproduction of the original.
I'll play devil's advocate for a moment, and address your points individually:
I agree with your points about having a good manager, etc.
Good point, although I have to think that the commercially-produced crap is liked more because decades of social conditioning have made it that way, and less because the music is actually enjoyable. Don't take this as a criticism of "pop" in general; I'm referring specifically to "groups" like the Backstreet Boys, etc.
Does the industry really need billboards in every city? I'm talking about a grassroots, fundamental reformulating of the industry as a whole. It makes no sense that a shitty, commercially-architected pop group can gross $10m on a single album while truly talented artists can't even get off the ground. We need to go back to square one, focus on the music, and let the industry reinvent itself from there. The music, and the artist(s) that produce it.
Kind of missing the point, no?
Think about a music industry where artists don't need labels to get "beer, coke and groupies." Imagine an industry where new channels make it easier for unknown artists to get noticed. It's hard to get noticed right now because you almost can't do it at all without going through labels. Right now, labels are necessary because the system has been architected such that you can't go it without them. That is what stands to change.
So far as online delivery goes, I think you're flat-out wrong. iTunes accounts for more than 2% of music sales on its own, and in an increasingly "green-friendly" world the concept of digital distribution, which requires no printing presses, no petroleum-based products, etc., is the way forward. That's why I laugh a little every time I think about the BD vs HD-DVD argument. In a few years when DOCSIS 3 is ubiquitous, and fiber is available to many homes, the idea of having to go buy a little round piece of plastic looks increasingly stupid.
Don't be so sure. When a band can distribute its albums by posting a zip file on a web site, there's a lot less incentive to turn to labels. The industry exists right now because it exists - not because it's necessary. As people start to see how the economics of giant media labels work against them, the tide can turn.
Entire industries (as we think of them) don't disappear overnight, but they do sometimes disappear, or change into something so different you couldn't really call it the same industry with a straight face. That's where we are. They're a dying breed, whether they know it or not.
So that's what made me gay... Case closed!
Again, it's an issue of semantics. I don't think that anyone is denying that video game violence may have some effect. The question is whether or not that effect is to increase the likelihood of violent activity, and if so, by how much. Couple that with the vague-at-best definition of "aggression" and there's plenty of room to criticize this study.
FTFA:
You can chalk it up to semantics, but it sure sounds like these guys went into the study assuming that violent media was already a threat. They set out to measure the "how much," completely bypassing "if" as though it were a moot point.
Ars Technica has a great article on this here.