If he's paid any attention he's got to know that it has a very large Anarcho-Libertarian user base.
Which version of Slashdot do you read?
Among the most prevalent views on Slashdot are:
- Microsoft: The government should impose massive limitations on Microsoft and decide for them how they should be able to bundle their software.
- Immigration: Slashdot is mostly anti-immigration, and does not believe there is a tech worker shorter, and does not agree that immigration should be free and total (as any Libertarian, including Browne, believes)
- Privacy: The government should put up massive checks and make it illegal for private companies to collect information which you voluntary send them
- Spam: Most slashdot readers believe that the government should put up massive legislation making it illegal to send email which is commercial in nature (freedom of speech, anyone?)
These four views are diametrically opposed to any libertarian and/or anarchist politics.
The only view which meshes with anarchy is patents/Napster/DeCSS/etc. (and does NOT mesh with Libertarianism, either, which is very pro-intellectual properpty)
First of all, there is a moral problem with collecting on taxes on drugs. Any state which profitted as people killed themselves with cocaine or heroine would not be looked at favorably by the rest of the world. (yet we already do this with cigarettes and to some extent gambling/alcohol).
Second, sales tax is gorvernment intrusion into the economy, and excise taxes and tariffs are ESPECIALLY intrusive, since different products have different taxes. Who decides how the tax rate of gas is relative to cigarettes?
Third, I'm not sure that the LP actually wants these taxes. They are militantly pro free trade, which tariffs would contradict. Ayn Rand advocated a voluntary contribution system (which, of course, is unworkable for items of public good).
Unfortunately, since you say that Browne gt Nader gt Gore gt Bush, then your agenda does not have anything to do with their policies. Their is no set of policies for which you could come to that conclusion. What is your ranking based on? Looks?
Your implication (that Nine Inch Nails isn't cultural dialectic) is naive at best. If anything NIN is a perfect example of modern culture. The fact that it's also good music is irrelevant, but they ARE talented and their music IS good.
You are culturally illiterate. How many books have you read in the past week? And I mean real books, not novels, sci-fi, or technology books.
As recording technology lifted music out of the domain of the concert-going elite, mp3 should liberate music from the clutches of the recording companies and bring it to a wider audience. What I reckon will happen is that there will be fewer Britney-Spears-alikes, as the pace at which bad music fades from the collective consciousness increases. Proportionally, there will be more acts of quality, working on a similar basis to the software industry ("You want our music? Pay us, or we stop")
On the contrary.
The democratization of media ALWAYS lessens the quality. The path of music from the Renaissance to the digerati-controlled 21st century is court -> concert -> records -> free MP3's.
In each of these the quality of overall music has decreased. The officials in the court were musically educated and did not admit fluff from their composers. The concert going public were also educated elite, and barely a step down from the court. The early days of the phongraph were also elite (because it was an expensive instrument), though it was not musically advanced until the middle of the first decade of the 1900's (mostly consisting of operas) and not further until the 1930's, where the symphony was first recorded in entirety. The compact disc democratized things further, to the point where you could buy symphonies in tin cans in drug stores, and culminates in free MP3's, where the repertoire consists of youth orchestras recording war horses.
You can also see this in literature. The pre-Gutenberg texts were exclusively for the educated elite (at the time, very elite). The early printing press brought the advent of the novel, but the mass market paperback brought the advent of the romance novel, and dummy books.
Correct. I have bought over 1,000 CD's in my life, investing well over $20,000 into my collection of my own hard owned money. I had bought them with the expectation that they would have some re-sale value (even at least 10%)when I decided to sell them. Unfortunately, due to the pirates, they are now worthless, and have no re-sale value. Thanks pirates!
A. The recording industry is not a government granted monopoly. The recording industry is made up of thousands of different companies competing in a free market.
B. The recrding industry has signficantly decreased prices since the dawn of the industry. In 1906 Red Seal records, which were one-sided, three-minute long records of extremely low fidelity, cost as much as $7 each, at a time when a suit of clothes cost $7, while today a CD twenty times as long, with infinitely higher sound reproduction quality, costs $12.99, even though inflation has decreased the value of the dollar by ten-fold. The effect is a decrease in real price per minute of music of over a factor of 100. CD's have decreased in nominal price since the introduction by about 50% while increasing quality trmendously, during a period when the CPI has increased by over 50% (a decrease in real price of 75% not even accounting for the quality increase)
C. The recording industry does not use high costs of production to justify high prices. It loses money off of 90% of titles, and makes it up only through mega-stars. If it used the high cost to justify the price, CD's of the 90% of non-profitable artists would be a lot higher than $12.99.
VB is pretty new; Linux was almost certainly available by then. You could have learned on that (and probably would have ended up a better programmer also).
Even if this was before Linux, there have been a variety of programming tools for DOS since the beginning such as the A86 assembler, and various free C compilers.
Also, at the time (early 90's), things like Turbo C and C++ were available very cheap ($100) which I was readily able to afford with my part time job after school. Perhaps VB was more expensive (I don't know), but it certainly wasn't the only (or the best) alternative for learning to program.
Slashdot needs to start selling clues -- wholesale -- to its readers.
If you think no "encrypted" media will be accepted by consumers, explain the massive success of DVD (which is the fastest ramping new media format in history).
The recorded music industry is less than 125 years old. To suggest that humanity was deprived of culture for the preceding three million years is ignorant at best.
Fin-de-siecle France, or early Nineteenth Century Vienna (the former emerging when recorded music was only in its extreme infancy) were almost infinitely more "cultural" than 20th Century teen culture where all recorded music is simultaneously and instantaneously available, but yet most youths would rather play a Moby or Nine Inch Nails song really loud, than experience anything resembling serious cultural dialectic.
It's unfortunate that such a flawed view is so pervasive on Slashdot that it gets posted (and modded up) regularly.
The reason you are wrong, is because the fixed cost of a CD is much more than the marginal cost of a CD (which is almost 0).
Most records costs hundreds of thousand or (for bigger name rock albums) millions of dollars to produce. When you buy the CD, you are paying to cover this cost. When you pirate the CD, you retain value for this extremely costly service, yet you don't pay for it.
If nobody paid for a CD, and everybody copied it, would be negative the cost of production (and not 0, as you claim). This is why you are wrong.
If you think when you buy a CD all you are paying for is the media and the packaging, then buying a blank CD and a jewel case would be the same thing as buying a pre-packaged CD.
There's no difference between buying a CD today and an LP thirty years ago. Many people still pay for songs they don't want.
Obviously, you are very new to music. The main format for FM radio thirty years ago - AOR - was album oriented rock, where the stations played selections from albums. For example, "Stairway to Heaven" was never released as a single, and yet is almost always considered one of the top two or three "classic rock" singles of all time.
Today, in contrast, practically every song played on the radio is available for consumption via CD single. CD singles are also longer, and contain more different types of songs, than the 45 RPM thirty years ago. You are "forced to buy the album" much less frequently today than thirty years ago.
Of course, a fundamental tenent of business that almost no Slashdolts understand, is that you can only buy what business wants to sell you. You may think that you have the right to buy songs without buying the album (if you are so musically clueless that you buy music made up of "songs"), and 100 million people may also, but it doesn't mean that anyone will sell it to them. I bet 100 million people would love to buy a BMW for $1000 too, but I don't expect anyone to sell it to them. Of course, the free market says that if it is possible to supply the consumer with what he wants, the market it eventually will.
While the RIAA is making it really hard for you to get music on the Net.
That's odd. All five major labels either have extensive on-line distribution already (and have bigger plans), or have extensive operations in progress. Four of the five companies agreed to license their content with My.MP3.com for online delivery.
Oh yeah - they make you pay for it, so that doesn't count for you (when a Slashdolt says "get music on the Net", he means "get music on the net for free").
You are correct. The limitation on exchanging for the same title is something I forgot.
Still, you can claim ownership of the CD which you bought through the verification service, and then sell it (if CD's actually have any value after this service is implemented). You will not recover all of your money, but some.
The whole thing of a CD independent of the media is tricky, because there is no verification at listening time that you have the license. The only license now is the physical CD (i.e. they go together). But, suppose you use the physical CD as a license to it in some disposable media. Now you sell the CD. Does the owner of that CD have the license to listen to it? Technically, no, because you retained the license, so the CD has no license. But there is no infrastucture for a CD without a license.
Re:Um, because it burns up too much electricity?
on
VIC20 As Wap Client
·
· Score: 1
I don't think a VIC20 is a warm device. There are fewer than 1,000,000 transistors total in the machine. The machine is running very slow - 1 megaherz. (Clock speed and transistor count are the main components of semiconductor power). There is no disk drive. There is not even a fan in the power supply (or anywhere in the machine). What component in the system do you believe draws so much power?
Nope. You don't understand the trial (or the law). A Diamond RIO gadget is a "recording device", and thus protected by the AHRA. A computer is not a recording device (it's a computer), and thus not protected by the AHRA. The AHRA only allows people to make digital copies with recording devices, but not other machines such as computers.
A. You are premised on the fact that the "verification system" uses the CD itself (and thus requires opening). It could use something else (such as the barcode - which would eliminate the case where you have a COPY of the CD)
B. Exchanging an opened CD is almost the same thing as returning it: just keep returning CD's day after day and very quickly have you an infinite numbers of CD's for the price of one.
The law states that you can listen to the CD: provided that the transmission is received only by a recipient who has provided to the transmitting organization proof that the recipient lawfully possesses a phonorecord of such sound recording.
Ok, how do I prove that I own it?
My MP3.com's solution of testing once for the physical presence of the CD is not adequate. Because I can:
1. Borrow the CD from the library, "prove" that I own it, and then return it
2. Buy the CD from a store, prove than I own it, and then return it for a refund.
3. Borrowing CD's from a friend. Similar to #1.
4. I may NOT get credit for the recording when I own it, but not on CD. How do I prove that I own the record?
The only way around #1-#3 is to request that the requestor show to provide the CD each time, defeating the point of convenience.
The trendy digerati world exemplified by Slashdot is anti-Intel/pro-AMD for the same reason they are anti-Microsoft/pro-Linux. They want to differentiate themselves from the "normal" consumer. Very few people outside of the digerati are anti-Intel, and are in fact quite pro-Intel (for example, compare INTC's market cap and P/E to AMD's).
I talked to a competitor (DEC)'s engineers around that time and they said that while they'd looked at Rambus, it was not a very stable memory technology; the complexities it introduced into their engineering were not worth the performance gain and cost hit.
Strange. The Alpha EV7 (21364) is also using Rambus (and only Rambus).
Slashdot Mirror
If he's paid any attention he's got to know that it has a very large Anarcho-Libertarian user base.
Which version of Slashdot do you read?
Among the most prevalent views on Slashdot are:
- Microsoft: The government should impose massive limitations on Microsoft and decide for them how they should be able to bundle their software.
- Immigration: Slashdot is mostly anti-immigration, and does not believe there is a tech worker shorter, and does not agree that immigration should be free and total (as any Libertarian, including Browne, believes)
- Privacy: The government should put up massive checks and make it illegal for private companies to collect information which you voluntary send them
- Spam: Most slashdot readers believe that the government should put up massive legislation making it illegal to send email which is commercial in nature (freedom of speech, anyone?)
These four views are diametrically opposed to any libertarian and/or anarchist politics.
The only view which meshes with anarchy is patents/Napster/DeCSS/etc. (and does NOT mesh with Libertarianism, either, which is very pro-intellectual properpty)
What's the user fee for things in the public good, such as missile defence?
Does everybody get a bill when it shoots down something?
First of all, there is a moral problem with collecting on taxes on drugs. Any state which profitted as people killed themselves with cocaine or heroine would not be looked at favorably by the rest of the world. (yet we already do this with cigarettes and to some extent gambling/alcohol).
Second, sales tax is gorvernment intrusion into the economy, and excise taxes and tariffs are ESPECIALLY intrusive, since different products have different taxes. Who decides how the tax rate of gas is relative to cigarettes?
Third, I'm not sure that the LP actually wants these taxes. They are militantly pro free trade, which tariffs would contradict. Ayn Rand advocated a voluntary contribution system (which, of course, is unworkable for items of public good).
Unfortunately, since you say that Browne gt Nader gt Gore gt Bush, then your agenda does not have anything to do with their policies. Their is no set of policies for which you could come to that conclusion. What is your ranking based on? Looks?
Gateway's long-term goal is 50/50 Intel/AMD. Right now they are at about 80/20.
The whole industry is 85% Intel, 9% AMD.
Your implication (that Nine Inch Nails isn't cultural dialectic) is naive at best. If anything NIN is a perfect example of modern culture. The fact that it's also good music is irrelevant, but they ARE talented and their music IS good.
You are culturally illiterate. How many books have you read in the past week? And I mean real books, not novels, sci-fi, or technology books.
As recording technology lifted music out of the domain of the concert-going elite, mp3 should liberate music from the clutches of the recording companies and bring it to a wider audience. What I reckon will happen is that there will be fewer Britney-Spears-alikes, as the pace at which bad music fades from the collective consciousness increases. Proportionally, there will be more acts of quality, working on a similar basis to the software industry ("You want our music? Pay us, or we stop")
On the contrary.
The democratization of media ALWAYS lessens the quality. The path of music from the Renaissance to the digerati-controlled 21st century is court -> concert -> records -> free MP3's.
In each of these the quality of overall music has decreased. The officials in the court were musically educated and did not admit fluff from their composers. The concert going public were also educated elite, and barely a step down from the court. The early days of the phongraph were also elite (because it was an expensive instrument), though it was not musically advanced until the middle of the first decade of the 1900's (mostly consisting of operas) and not further until the 1930's, where the symphony was first recorded in entirety. The compact disc democratized things further, to the point where you could buy symphonies in tin cans in drug stores, and culminates in free MP3's, where the repertoire consists of youth orchestras recording war horses.
You can also see this in literature. The pre-Gutenberg texts were exclusively for the educated elite (at the time, very elite). The early printing press brought the advent of the novel, but the mass market paperback brought the advent of the romance novel, and dummy books.
Correct. I have bought over 1,000 CD's in my life, investing well over $20,000 into my collection of my own hard owned money. I had bought them with the expectation that they would have some re-sale value (even at least 10%)when I decided to sell them. Unfortunately, due to the pirates, they are now worthless, and have no re-sale value. Thanks pirates!
A. The recording industry is not a government granted monopoly. The recording industry is made up of thousands of different companies competing in a free market.
B. The recrding industry has signficantly decreased prices since the dawn of the industry. In 1906 Red Seal records, which were one-sided, three-minute long records of extremely low fidelity, cost as much as $7 each, at a time when a suit of clothes cost $7, while today a CD twenty times as long, with infinitely higher sound reproduction quality, costs $12.99, even though inflation has decreased the value of the dollar by ten-fold. The effect is a decrease in real price per minute of music of over a factor of 100. CD's have decreased in nominal price since the introduction by about 50% while increasing quality trmendously, during a period when the CPI has increased by over 50% (a decrease in real price of 75% not even accounting for the quality increase)
C. The recording industry does not use high costs of production to justify high prices. It loses money off of 90% of titles, and makes it up only through mega-stars. If it used the high cost to justify the price, CD's of the 90% of non-profitable artists would be a lot higher than $12.99.
VB is pretty new; Linux was almost certainly available by then. You could have learned on that (and probably would have ended up a better programmer also).
Even if this was before Linux, there have been a variety of programming tools for DOS since the beginning such as the A86 assembler, and various free C compilers.
Also, at the time (early 90's), things like Turbo C and C++ were available very cheap ($100) which I was readily able to afford with my part time job after school. Perhaps VB was more expensive (I don't know), but it certainly wasn't the only (or the best) alternative for learning to program.
Slashdot needs to start selling clues -- wholesale -- to its readers.
If you think no "encrypted" media will be accepted by consumers, explain the massive success of DVD (which is the fastest ramping new media format in history).
The recorded music industry is less than 125 years old. To suggest that humanity was deprived of culture for the preceding three million years is ignorant at best.
Fin-de-siecle France, or early Nineteenth Century Vienna (the former emerging when recorded music was only in its extreme infancy) were almost infinitely more "cultural" than 20th Century teen culture where all recorded music is simultaneously and instantaneously available, but yet most youths would rather play a Moby or Nine Inch Nails song really loud, than experience anything resembling serious cultural dialectic.
It's unfortunate that such a flawed view is so pervasive on Slashdot that it gets posted (and modded up) regularly.
The reason you are wrong, is because the fixed cost of a CD is much more than the marginal cost of a CD (which is almost 0).
Most records costs hundreds of thousand or (for bigger name rock albums) millions of dollars to produce. When you buy the CD, you are paying to cover this cost. When you pirate the CD, you retain value for this extremely costly service, yet you don't pay for it.
If nobody paid for a CD, and everybody copied it, would be negative the cost of production (and not 0, as you claim). This is why you are wrong.
If you think when you buy a CD all you are paying for is the media and the packaging, then buying a blank CD and a jewel case would be the same thing as buying a pre-packaged CD.
There's no difference between buying a CD today and an LP thirty years ago. Many people still pay for songs they don't want.
Obviously, you are very new to music. The main format for FM radio thirty years ago - AOR - was album oriented rock, where the stations played selections from albums. For example, "Stairway to Heaven" was never released as a single, and yet is almost always considered one of the top two or three "classic rock" singles of all time.
Today, in contrast, practically every song played on the radio is available for consumption via CD single. CD singles are also longer, and contain more different types of songs, than the 45 RPM thirty years ago. You are "forced to buy the album" much less frequently today than thirty years ago.
Of course, a fundamental tenent of business that almost no Slashdolts understand, is that you can only buy what business wants to sell you. You may think that you have the right to buy songs without buying the album (if you are so musically clueless that you buy music made up of "songs"), and 100 million people may also, but it doesn't mean that anyone will sell it to them. I bet 100 million people would love to buy a BMW for $1000 too, but I don't expect anyone to sell it to them. Of course, the free market says that if it is possible to supply the consumer with what he wants, the market it eventually will.
While the RIAA is making it really hard for you to get music on the Net.
That's odd. All five major labels either have extensive on-line distribution already (and have bigger plans), or have extensive operations in progress. Four of the five companies agreed to license their content with My.MP3.com for online delivery.
Oh yeah - they make you pay for it, so that doesn't count for you (when a Slashdolt says "get music on the Net", he means "get music on the net for free").
Yawn ... another clueless slashdolt who doesn't understand the difference between a service and a product.
You are correct. The limitation on exchanging for the same title is something I forgot.
Still, you can claim ownership of the CD which you bought through the verification service, and then sell it (if CD's actually have any value after this service is implemented). You will not recover all of your money, but some.
The whole thing of a CD independent of the media is tricky, because there is no verification at listening time that you have the license. The only license now is the physical CD (i.e. they go together). But, suppose you use the physical CD as a license to it in some disposable media. Now you sell the CD. Does the owner of that CD have the license to listen to it? Technically, no, because you retained the license, so the CD has no license. But there is no infrastucture for a CD without a license.
I don't think a VIC20 is a warm device. There are fewer than 1,000,000 transistors total in the machine. The machine is running very slow - 1 megaherz. (Clock speed and transistor count are the main components of semiconductor power). There is no disk drive. There is not even a fan in the power supply (or anywhere in the machine). What component in the system do you believe draws so much power?
Nope. You don't understand the trial (or the law). A Diamond RIO gadget is a "recording device", and thus protected by the AHRA. A computer is not a recording device (it's a computer), and thus not protected by the AHRA. The AHRA only allows people to make digital copies with recording devices, but not other machines such as computers.
A. You are premised on the fact that the "verification system" uses the CD itself (and thus requires opening). It could use something else (such as the barcode - which would eliminate the case where you have a COPY of the CD)
B. Exchanging an opened CD is almost the same thing as returning it: just keep returning CD's day after day and very quickly have you an infinite numbers of CD's for the price of one.
The law states that you can listen to the CD: provided that the transmission is received only by a recipient who has provided to the transmitting organization proof that the recipient lawfully possesses a phonorecord of such sound recording.
Ok, how do I prove that I own it?
My MP3.com's solution of testing once for the physical presence of the CD is not adequate. Because I can:
1. Borrow the CD from the library, "prove" that I own it, and then return it
2. Buy the CD from a store, prove than I own it, and then return it for a refund.
3. Borrowing CD's from a friend. Similar to #1.
4. I may NOT get credit for the recording when I own it, but not on CD. How do I prove that I own the record?
The only way around #1-#3 is to request that the requestor show to provide the CD each time, defeating the point of convenience.
If EV7 does direct to RAM, then how does it write to the framebuffer or read from the ROM?
The trendy digerati world exemplified by Slashdot is anti-Intel/pro-AMD for the same reason they are anti-Microsoft/pro-Linux. They want to differentiate themselves from the "normal" consumer. Very few people outside of the digerati are anti-Intel, and are in fact quite pro-Intel (for example, compare INTC's market cap and P/E to AMD's).
You can't HAVE a direct to RAM interface on a computer system, since the address space is shared between RAM and peripherals. Try again.
I talked to a competitor (DEC)'s engineers around that time and they said that while they'd looked at Rambus, it was not a very stable memory technology; the complexities it introduced into their engineering were not worth the performance gain and cost hit.
Strange. The Alpha EV7 (21364) is also using Rambus (and only Rambus).