I bank with Wells Fargo and after hearing of the data breach, I called to cancel my card. As soon as I mentioned Sony and Playstation, the rep told me that they have been receiving calls all day from Playstation users who are taking similar, proactive measures. In my case, I have a separate card that I use for online transactions, so my exposure was limited, but it is still a PITA to have to go through.
This episode just goes to show how far we are from having a truly secure, digital economy. If a company with the resources that Sony has cannot even store payment information safely, it really dampens the public's enthusiasm for a completely digital payment system.
My question is, why wasn't the information encrypted? Why weren't there access controls in place to prevent people from getting at that data? Why were the two systems linked in such a way that they could be compromised? All of these problems have been solved. Was the system even audited by an outside party?
My company works with Fortune 50 companies and the US government on a regular basis. Our clients expect that we have been subjected to audits by neutral third parties (and we have). We do not even store credit card information like Sony does. How did were they not aware of the risks inherent in their architecture?
If people can sue Apple over the location tracking issue, what is Sony's liability like on an issue like this one?
That's the answer I was looking for. The question was mainly rhetorical, and intended to get the OP to reconsider his statement that "only an idiot" does not store local backups of their hosted data. There are certain scenarios that have been architected by non-idiots, where trying to backup data is not reasonable. In my environment we use a Data Domain box and replicate offsite. For a lot of smaller companies, they are relying on their SLAs and their provider to maintain good backups in accordance with the SLAs.
What do you consider a lot of network bandwidth? Where we are co-located, we have a 20mb commit rate that bursts up to 100mb if needed. We have a VMware farm that can spin up new servers in a few minutes.
I think the cloud is targetted at people who think they are going to experience "explosive growth", but don't really know what that means. If you are developing an application on a LAMP stack running on a single server, and you need to spin up three more servers, that is 300% growth. That's pretty explosive. On the other hand, if you're already co-located somewhere and have 100 (or more servers), you don't need "the cloud" to cover your growth because it has already been factored in.
I'm with you on that one. I used to pay all of my bills by mail because of the same theory. I stopped doing that though when someone told me that on the receiving end, the process is automated. There is nobody there to actually open the envelopes and retrieve the checks and pay slips.
Netflix is not hosed. It works as long as you allow the login process to time out a couple of times. I use a unique password for every online service I am a part of and I was able to access Netflix last night.
You can play single player games, and in fact the entire system is not offline. I fired up Fallout: New Vegas and I have not played it in months. It told me that I needed to upgrade the game to the latest version, and I figured I was SOL. I clicked on OK and it downloaded the 22mb patch file just fine.
I'm miffed about the whole thing. I'm miffed about losing access to NetFlix. But there are not any problems playing single player games.
In this case you get what you pay for and users do not have a leg to stand on because the online play is free. It is not like the Xbox where you have to pay a monthly fee to play online.
I'm a PS3 owner and this has irked me, but it's not the end of the world. It just meant that instead of playing Medal of Honor during my game play time, I went back to Fallout: New Vegas and am working on finishing it.
My server was down at amazon for maybe 12 hours, that's when I noticed and simply reloaded it from backup in a different working availability zone. Took a few minutes. Had I cared enough to keep backups in a different region then I could have simply reloaded it instantly over there.
How did you architect the data storage for your applications? Is the data kept with the servers? How much data are you working with?
It seems to me that Amazon is decent for the web tier, or any application with a relatively small data set. Yet the idea of spinning up multiple terabytes of data in an alternate location seems to be too good to be true.
Given the accuracy of Google Latitude, I'm not too concerned. It often times reports my location as being blocks away from where I really am, even after I have been stationary for hours. The accuracy seems to have gone down hill recently. I'm not sure if it is my device, or the service. When I had Google Apps on my old Blackberry 8700, it would place the location marker so accurately that on the Satellite view (via Google Maps), it was accurate down to the part of the house I was in. Now four years later with my Blackberry Bold, it can't even get my location within 1000 meters (via Latitude and Google Maps).
You're done being wrong. You won't own up to the fact that you're just trying to justify theft. You talk about the good of civilization, but you won't allow a person to make a living by providing music or "human needs" that enrich the lives of those who experience them. You're full of shit, and I'm glad you're done trying to come up with flimsy justifications for your anti-social, twisted logic that does not belong in a productive, just society.
The only reason that tune is on the radio for you to hit record is because a lot of other people have invested money in putting it there. You're just a bottom sucking leech.
Art and human culture are needs? Great. Produce your own. Share it with whomever you want to share it with. The music put out by the major labels is not the only music out there. Don't consume it if it bugs you so much. Do you consume it, without paying for it? Do you reproduce it and give it to others? You may be making friends, but your disincentivising the production of the very thing that you so freely share with others. You're actively working to reduce the likelihood of the production of the very thing that you claim is a need. I think you're too obtuse to comprehend that, but that's okay, because you're done with this conversation anyway, fleeing like the chickenshit that you are because your warped logic does not hold up.
You can communicate whatever you want to communicate. What you cannot do is reproduce someone else's work. You can make your own semi-conductor, but you cannot make a Xeon X5560. That belongs to Intel. They developed it and they patented it. You can sign whatever song you want to sing, but you cannot perform Nirvana's greatest hits. Yet copyright law does not stop the hundreds of cover bands that play in bars every weekend.
Copyright is a commercial tool. Nobody is going to come beat you over the head if you want to play some Zepplin on your guitar at a backyard party. However if you want to redo the songs and press a CD, you need to pay the people who came up with them in the first place. If you don't want to pay, find something else to play. I mean, if you're such a creative type, what's the problem? Make your own music.
In the capitalist system a person has a right to recoup their investment. Lets take the example of a record company. This addresses your right to trade. The sound engineer agrees to trade his time, and access to his studio and equipment for money. The artist agrees to trade his talent and time in exchange for money. Everything from the recording process, to purchasing the music in a store, or downloading it from iTunes involves trading money for a good or a service.
People do not need the convenience of listening to music any time they wish. It is a luxury.
I'm not claiming that people have a right to control others. They do have a right to seek compensation from those who steal from them. Our society works based on contracts. Our legal system determines which contracts are reasonable and enforceable, and which ones aren't. The fact of the matter is that someone who copies a song never entered into a contract with anyone. They are bucking the system. That's fine. They are entitled to. Just like they're entitled to whine when they're fined. Not liking the rules does not exempt a person from them.
Whether you like it or not, music, movies and other digital productions are assets according to the law. You cannot help yourself to someone else's assets without compensating them for it. What is so hard to understand about that? It has nothing to do with slavery, or taking rights away from anyone.
No, you're an idiot.;) (Okay, now that we have that out of the way)
You make some good points about hearing copyrighted music. If you hear music on the radio, whether you want to or not, it has already been paid for. The radio station has to pay to play that music for you. They recoup their costs through advertising and other means.
I think I can sum up where I'm coming from with a few sentences. I study martial arts. My sifu once told me, "David, the art is free. You're just paying sifu for his time." (He likes to refer to himself in the third person a lot, maybe it's a Chinese thing, who knows.) Music is free. Dance is free. Drama is free.
The issue is that if you want it "on demand", it is a reasonable expectation that you pay for it. I love Beethoven. The Berlin Symphony Orchestra recorded his symphonies. I bought them. By doing so I encourage them, AND OTHERS LIKE THEM, to do it again. That helps society. It encourages artist expression and supports those who perform. I'm sure that they all enjoyed the experience of playing some of the greatest music ever made. I like being able to listen to it whenever I want. That is worth paying for. What is not right is for someone else to copy those CDs without paying for it.
You mention a fear that I think is completely irrational. You mention a world where people are not free to express themselves, because expression is just a re-creation of previous expression. That's a red herring. It's false. You can create whatever you want as long as it is sufficiently unique. Look at movies. The same basic themes are played out over and over again, yet nobody is stopping it from happening. Nobody is saying, "Romance between man and woman has already been done, sorry, come up with another idea." Nobody is saying, "Whiney song about being dumped by your girlfriend has already been done, sorry, come up with another idea."
Your partner is a chef. She loves doing it. Is your neighbor entitled to her cooking whenever he wants it? If she puts some left overs in the fridge, is he entitled to come over and enjoy them whenever he wants?
I love tai chi. I am willing to pass it along to my friends who are interested. On the other hand, if they expect me to be there to teach them tai chi whenever they want to learn it, I want some compensation for my time.
The issue is not the creation of the work. The issue is the business model and the costs associate with making that creation available to others. Copyright is the only mechanism to protect that business. You may not believe that the convenience of an MP3 of your favorite song is worth anything. That's your opinion. The reality is that the creation of that MP3 cost time and money.
You're an idiot too. Slavery? Right. Being expected to pay for music makes you a slave. Seriously? Pull your head out of your ass. You're as big of a troll as the other idiot. How are recording studios, engineers and everyone else involved in the PRODUCTION of music, akin to those supporting slavery? Your analogy sucks. What rights are being stripped from you by expecting you to pay 99 cents to listen to some music, as many times as you want? On the other hand, when you steal music, you're stripping the artist, composer, sound engineer, et al of their right to make a living from their labor. Who is the slave driver now? Oops, did I just flip the script on you? Yup, that's right. When you steal from an arist, you are enslaving them. You are telling them that they are worthless, and that their contributions of music (or movies) are worthless. Good job buddy.
If you have a problem with the DISTRIBUTION mechanism, come up with another one. That has nothing to do with replacing lost income. I'm suggesting that if you have such a problem with the business, compete with it. Come up with a better mouse trap. Unless you can do that, you're worthless and just looking for a way to justify theft. Come on, the internet is here. It's easy to move music around. You just need a web server and some bandwidth. Go ahead, make it happen. Sign up all of the artists. Stick it to the man!
Just don't come crying when you're spending tens of thousands a month on hosting and bandwidth, and you can't sell enough music to cover your costs.
When I'm willing to cooperate? You're the uncooperative one who apparently believes that you do not need to compensate people for their time. I notice how you conveniently left out of your reply any mention to all of the people who make a living producing music, and their entitlement to be compensated for their time.
You're selfish, and I'll even go so far as to say that you're a prick. You claim "The force only appears when you try to stop me, having listened to your production, from using what I have heard as I please." You have zero right to re-produce anything you did not create. What is so hard to understand about that?
The reality is that nobody needs you. If you are not going to contribute to society, and instead just leech off of others, you're dead weight. You're the worthless member of the group.
If you don't like the middlemen, the socially responsible solution is to come up with a different method, a different process to get the music / videos / etc into the hands of the consumer. Theft does not solve the "problem" that you are taking issue with. If the middlemen are so bloated and ineffecient, then there is room to edge them out. Put in some real work, figure out what it really takes to offer a 99 cent song to the public, then you can talk. Until then, you're full of shit and you're a troll.
This has been shown (several studies) to be socially destructive, yet it's perfectly legal, and they keep on tightening the screws.
I will argue that it is socially destructive to steal the labor of everyone involved in producing a recording. The 99 cents that people pay for a song covers a lot more than the time the artist spends singing into a microphone. Does the artist have a band? They need to be paid. Does the band have instruments? Those cost money. Did the rent them? Money there too. How about the sound engineer? The studio he records in? He needs to pay rent. What about all the sound equipment? That wasn't free either. How did you know there was even a new song out? Webpage? Money there (hosting fees, etc) Maybe you were at a concert and the artist mentioned it? Tours aren't free.
Copyright is the only mechansim society has to make sure that creative people get paid for their work. Do you have a job? Do you get paid for it? Why do you have a problem with other people getting paid for their labor?
People do not have a right to steal. People do not have a right to expect other people to labor for their entertainment for free. You're full of bullshit.
Copyright is a tool used to try to monetize other people's actions. If a person has the talent to produce music that you want to listen to, is it unreasonable for that person to wants to be compensated for his or her time? Or do you feel that you are some sort of monarch, who deserves to be serenaded for free? If a group of people put together a piece of software that entertains you (like a game), or that makes you more productive (like an application), do they not deserve to be compensated for their time and labor?
It seems to me that copyright is the only framework we have to protect content creators. You can rail all day against the evil music companies, the entertainment industry, the BSA and what have you. Those organizations might suck, but they are only there because people are tired of getting ripped off, and those organizations can prey upon those fears. If we lived in a morally just society where people treated each other fairly, we wouldn't need copyright as a mechanism to protect IP. The reality is that we live in an age of digital looters who will take anything that isn't nailed down.
I'm not completely blameless either. I couriered more than my fair share of warez as a kid, and up until about five or six years ago, downloaded a slew of MP3s.
Your statement about control over other peoples actions is a load of shit. Those actions are theft. Those actions are the actions of pompous assholes who feel that they should be able to dictate prices. That shit only happens on the internet. Go to the gas station and try to tell the attendant that you feel his prices are unfair. Go to the grocery store and try to haggle over the price of a gallon of milk. The perceived value of digital media is skewed. People think that because they can easily copy it from one place to another, it should be nearly free. They fail to account for everything required to create the file in the first place.
If an MP3 is so easy to produce, then instead of copying it, go ahead and put a band together and record your own copy of the song. Listen to that one. Give it to all your friends for free. "Hazel Bergeron's Top 40 Hits" I'm sure everyone will be so happy with your professionally recorded re-creation of the original songs that they love listening to on the radio.
Believe it or not, the DoJ is actually pretty savvy when it comes to technical issues. They went over Cisco's acquisition of Tandberg with a fine toothed comb. It is next to impossible to do any sort of M&A activity in the technology sector without drawing some sort of scrutiny from the DoJ.
When DVDs came out to replace VHS cassettes, you could use both of them on the same television. On the other hand, unless you have a good HD TV, you will not notice the improved picture quality that Blu-ray offers. For a lot of people, the added cost of an HD TV makes Blu-Ray unattractive.
In my case, I love my Blu-ray player (PS3). I do not feel the need to go to the movies to see any of the special effects blockbusters anymore, except for purely social reasons. For me, the Samsung LCD TV and a good set of headphones plugged into the PS3 provide a great viewing experience.
I know I'd be angry if I came up with a design that impacted an industry as much as the iPhone did, only to have every product in the industry look like what I had come up with just a year or two later. And since people are so prone to forget, you'll hear them saying, "Well, duh. That's obvious. How else would it be?" when talking about innovation after it happens, completely forgetting that a mere 3-4 years prior there was no product that resembled what every product looks like today.
When I read what you wrote here, I'm reminded of the Motorola flip phones. As far as I remember, Motorola came up with that form factor, but soon enough they were ubiquitous. I do not know the answer to this one, but did Motorola patent that design? IMO, if Motorola was able to patent the flip / clam shell style phone, Apple should be able to patent the touch screen, iPhone-esque form factor.
I'll do you one better. In the mid-1990s I participated in market research on LCD monitors while they were still being prototyped. There were numerous variations on display, and among the physical qualities they asked us to evaluate were our preferences for thin or thick bezels, and sharp or rounded corners. To the best of my knowledge, I don't think that Apple paid for that research. Maybe the LCD consortium that put it together should sue Apple for stealing their research.
He may not be a moron, but he's socially incompetent. He wants what he wants and he's going to do whatever he wants to do to make it happen, IT be damned. Maybe he should spend less time learning to install Linux and more time learning to work cooperatively with those who he needs help from. Whose fault is it going to be when some automated script finds a hole in his "free as in beer" calendaring solution, roots his box, and then uses it as a launching point to own the rest of the network?
The original NEED is for on-call schedules. The ISSUE is that some idiot plugged his own server into the network and wants to allow access to it from the outside world.
Exactly. Setting up a calendaring server for a single department is a lot different from getting the entire facility to sign off on funding for it. The down side of IT in a large organization is that you cannot do things piecemeal. What the division head should be doing is selling the idea to his peers at the same level in other departments. If his department needs it, maybe he should find room in his budget to make it a reality for the entire hospital. IT is always short on funding, so he could build some bridges to IT, and other departments, and get EVERYONE a good calendaring solution.
It does not sound like the guy is a department head. He sounds like a pompous ass hat who wants to do things his way. He reminds me of a VP I knew once who decided he didn't like the way the database system worked, so he did everything for his department in Access. Despite being warned repeatedly about what a piece of crap Access is, he plowed on. 18 months later, Access took a crap on him and he lost everything. The shitty thing about it is that the data loss fell on IT. Senior management decided that IT should have been more forceful in nipping the Access adventure in the bud, even though they failed to back up IT when IT first raised the issue.
I'm sure there are similar dynamics at work in the hospital. Who is going to fix the server when the application takes a big dump and nobody can get their schedules? I bet you it sure as hell won't be Mr. Department Head guy. He'll be too busy doing his real job, and that's how it should be. Let IT handle the computers and software.
Slashdot Mirror
I bank with Wells Fargo and after hearing of the data breach, I called to cancel my card. As soon as I mentioned Sony and Playstation, the rep told me that they have been receiving calls all day from Playstation users who are taking similar, proactive measures. In my case, I have a separate card that I use for online transactions, so my exposure was limited, but it is still a PITA to have to go through.
This episode just goes to show how far we are from having a truly secure, digital economy. If a company with the resources that Sony has cannot even store payment information safely, it really dampens the public's enthusiasm for a completely digital payment system.
My question is, why wasn't the information encrypted? Why weren't there access controls in place to prevent people from getting at that data? Why were the two systems linked in such a way that they could be compromised? All of these problems have been solved. Was the system even audited by an outside party?
My company works with Fortune 50 companies and the US government on a regular basis. Our clients expect that we have been subjected to audits by neutral third parties (and we have). We do not even store credit card information like Sony does. How did were they not aware of the risks inherent in their architecture?
If people can sue Apple over the location tracking issue, what is Sony's liability like on an issue like this one?
That's the answer I was looking for. The question was mainly rhetorical, and intended to get the OP to reconsider his statement that "only an idiot" does not store local backups of their hosted data. There are certain scenarios that have been architected by non-idiots, where trying to backup data is not reasonable. In my environment we use a Data Domain box and replicate offsite. For a lot of smaller companies, they are relying on their SLAs and their provider to maintain good backups in accordance with the SLAs.
What do you consider a lot of network bandwidth? Where we are co-located, we have a 20mb commit rate that bursts up to 100mb if needed. We have a VMware farm that can spin up new servers in a few minutes.
I think the cloud is targetted at people who think they are going to experience "explosive growth", but don't really know what that means. If you are developing an application on a LAMP stack running on a single server, and you need to spin up three more servers, that is 300% growth. That's pretty explosive. On the other hand, if you're already co-located somewhere and have 100 (or more servers), you don't need "the cloud" to cover your growth because it has already been factored in.
What's your solution for backing up tens of terabytes of data, with hundreds of gigabytes of differential data being generated every day?
I'm with you on that one. I used to pay all of my bills by mail because of the same theory. I stopped doing that though when someone told me that on the receiving end, the process is automated. There is nobody there to actually open the envelopes and retrieve the checks and pay slips.
Netflix is not hosed. It works as long as you allow the login process to time out a couple of times. I use a unique password for every online service I am a part of and I was able to access Netflix last night.
You can play single player games, and in fact the entire system is not offline. I fired up Fallout: New Vegas and I have not played it in months. It told me that I needed to upgrade the game to the latest version, and I figured I was SOL. I clicked on OK and it downloaded the 22mb patch file just fine.
I'm miffed about the whole thing. I'm miffed about losing access to NetFlix. But there are not any problems playing single player games.
In this case you get what you pay for and users do not have a leg to stand on because the online play is free. It is not like the Xbox where you have to pay a monthly fee to play online.
I'm a PS3 owner and this has irked me, but it's not the end of the world. It just meant that instead of playing Medal of Honor during my game play time, I went back to Fallout: New Vegas and am working on finishing it.
My server was down at amazon for maybe 12 hours, that's when I noticed and simply reloaded it from backup in a different working availability zone. Took a few minutes. Had I cared enough to keep backups in a different region then I could have simply reloaded it instantly over there.
How did you architect the data storage for your applications? Is the data kept with the servers? How much data are you working with?
It seems to me that Amazon is decent for the web tier, or any application with a relatively small data set. Yet the idea of spinning up multiple terabytes of data in an alternate location seems to be too good to be true.
Given the accuracy of Google Latitude, I'm not too concerned. It often times reports my location as being blocks away from where I really am, even after I have been stationary for hours. The accuracy seems to have gone down hill recently. I'm not sure if it is my device, or the service. When I had Google Apps on my old Blackberry 8700, it would place the location marker so accurately that on the Satellite view (via Google Maps), it was accurate down to the part of the house I was in. Now four years later with my Blackberry Bold, it can't even get my location within 1000 meters (via Latitude and Google Maps).
You're done being wrong. You won't own up to the fact that you're just trying to justify theft. You talk about the good of civilization, but you won't allow a person to make a living by providing music or "human needs" that enrich the lives of those who experience them. You're full of shit, and I'm glad you're done trying to come up with flimsy justifications for your anti-social, twisted logic that does not belong in a productive, just society.
The only reason that tune is on the radio for you to hit record is because a lot of other people have invested money in putting it there. You're just a bottom sucking leech.
Art and human culture are needs? Great. Produce your own. Share it with whomever you want to share it with. The music put out by the major labels is not the only music out there. Don't consume it if it bugs you so much. Do you consume it, without paying for it? Do you reproduce it and give it to others? You may be making friends, but your disincentivising the production of the very thing that you so freely share with others. You're actively working to reduce the likelihood of the production of the very thing that you claim is a need. I think you're too obtuse to comprehend that, but that's okay, because you're done with this conversation anyway, fleeing like the chickenshit that you are because your warped logic does not hold up.
You can communicate whatever you want to communicate. What you cannot do is reproduce someone else's work. You can make your own semi-conductor, but you cannot make a Xeon X5560. That belongs to Intel. They developed it and they patented it. You can sign whatever song you want to sing, but you cannot perform Nirvana's greatest hits. Yet copyright law does not stop the hundreds of cover bands that play in bars every weekend.
Copyright is a commercial tool. Nobody is going to come beat you over the head if you want to play some Zepplin on your guitar at a backyard party. However if you want to redo the songs and press a CD, you need to pay the people who came up with them in the first place. If you don't want to pay, find something else to play. I mean, if you're such a creative type, what's the problem? Make your own music.
In the capitalist system a person has a right to recoup their investment. Lets take the example of a record company. This addresses your right to trade. The sound engineer agrees to trade his time, and access to his studio and equipment for money. The artist agrees to trade his talent and time in exchange for money. Everything from the recording process, to purchasing the music in a store, or downloading it from iTunes involves trading money for a good or a service.
People do not need the convenience of listening to music any time they wish. It is a luxury.
I'm not claiming that people have a right to control others. They do have a right to seek compensation from those who steal from them. Our society works based on contracts. Our legal system determines which contracts are reasonable and enforceable, and which ones aren't. The fact of the matter is that someone who copies a song never entered into a contract with anyone. They are bucking the system. That's fine. They are entitled to. Just like they're entitled to whine when they're fined. Not liking the rules does not exempt a person from them.
Whether you like it or not, music, movies and other digital productions are assets according to the law. You cannot help yourself to someone else's assets without compensating them for it. What is so hard to understand about that? It has nothing to do with slavery, or taking rights away from anyone.
No, you're an idiot. ;) (Okay, now that we have that out of the way)
You make some good points about hearing copyrighted music. If you hear music on the radio, whether you want to or not, it has already been paid for. The radio station has to pay to play that music for you. They recoup their costs through advertising and other means.
I think I can sum up where I'm coming from with a few sentences. I study martial arts. My sifu once told me, "David, the art is free. You're just paying sifu for his time." (He likes to refer to himself in the third person a lot, maybe it's a Chinese thing, who knows.) Music is free. Dance is free. Drama is free.
The issue is that if you want it "on demand", it is a reasonable expectation that you pay for it. I love Beethoven. The Berlin Symphony Orchestra recorded his symphonies. I bought them. By doing so I encourage them, AND OTHERS LIKE THEM, to do it again. That helps society. It encourages artist expression and supports those who perform. I'm sure that they all enjoyed the experience of playing some of the greatest music ever made. I like being able to listen to it whenever I want. That is worth paying for. What is not right is for someone else to copy those CDs without paying for it.
You mention a fear that I think is completely irrational. You mention a world where people are not free to express themselves, because expression is just a re-creation of previous expression. That's a red herring. It's false. You can create whatever you want as long as it is sufficiently unique. Look at movies. The same basic themes are played out over and over again, yet nobody is stopping it from happening. Nobody is saying, "Romance between man and woman has already been done, sorry, come up with another idea." Nobody is saying, "Whiney song about being dumped by your girlfriend has already been done, sorry, come up with another idea."
Your partner is a chef. She loves doing it. Is your neighbor entitled to her cooking whenever he wants it? If she puts some left overs in the fridge, is he entitled to come over and enjoy them whenever he wants?
I love tai chi. I am willing to pass it along to my friends who are interested. On the other hand, if they expect me to be there to teach them tai chi whenever they want to learn it, I want some compensation for my time.
The issue is not the creation of the work. The issue is the business model and the costs associate with making that creation available to others. Copyright is the only mechanism to protect that business. You may not believe that the convenience of an MP3 of your favorite song is worth anything. That's your opinion. The reality is that the creation of that MP3 cost time and money.
You're an idiot too. Slavery? Right. Being expected to pay for music makes you a slave. Seriously? Pull your head out of your ass. You're as big of a troll as the other idiot. How are recording studios, engineers and everyone else involved in the PRODUCTION of music, akin to those supporting slavery? Your analogy sucks. What rights are being stripped from you by expecting you to pay 99 cents to listen to some music, as many times as you want? On the other hand, when you steal music, you're stripping the artist, composer, sound engineer, et al of their right to make a living from their labor. Who is the slave driver now? Oops, did I just flip the script on you? Yup, that's right. When you steal from an arist, you are enslaving them. You are telling them that they are worthless, and that their contributions of music (or movies) are worthless. Good job buddy.
If you have a problem with the DISTRIBUTION mechanism, come up with another one. That has nothing to do with replacing lost income. I'm suggesting that if you have such a problem with the business, compete with it. Come up with a better mouse trap. Unless you can do that, you're worthless and just looking for a way to justify theft. Come on, the internet is here. It's easy to move music around. You just need a web server and some bandwidth. Go ahead, make it happen. Sign up all of the artists. Stick it to the man!
Just don't come crying when you're spending tens of thousands a month on hosting and bandwidth, and you can't sell enough music to cover your costs.
When I'm willing to cooperate? You're the uncooperative one who apparently believes that you do not need to compensate people for their time. I notice how you conveniently left out of your reply any mention to all of the people who make a living producing music, and their entitlement to be compensated for their time.
You're selfish, and I'll even go so far as to say that you're a prick. You claim "The force only appears when you try to stop me, having listened to your production, from using what I have heard as I please." You have zero right to re-produce anything you did not create. What is so hard to understand about that?
The reality is that nobody needs you. If you are not going to contribute to society, and instead just leech off of others, you're dead weight. You're the worthless member of the group.
If you don't like the middlemen, the socially responsible solution is to come up with a different method, a different process to get the music / videos / etc into the hands of the consumer. Theft does not solve the "problem" that you are taking issue with. If the middlemen are so bloated and ineffecient, then there is room to edge them out. Put in some real work, figure out what it really takes to offer a 99 cent song to the public, then you can talk. Until then, you're full of shit and you're a troll.
This has been shown (several studies) to be socially destructive, yet it's perfectly legal, and they keep on tightening the screws.
I will argue that it is socially destructive to steal the labor of everyone involved in producing a recording. The 99 cents that people pay for a song covers a lot more than the time the artist spends singing into a microphone. Does the artist have a band? They need to be paid. Does the band have instruments? Those cost money. Did the rent them? Money there too. How about the sound engineer? The studio he records in? He needs to pay rent. What about all the sound equipment? That wasn't free either. How did you know there was even a new song out? Webpage? Money there (hosting fees, etc) Maybe you were at a concert and the artist mentioned it? Tours aren't free.
Copyright is the only mechansim society has to make sure that creative people get paid for their work. Do you have a job? Do you get paid for it? Why do you have a problem with other people getting paid for their labor?
People do not have a right to steal. People do not have a right to expect other people to labor for their entertainment for free. You're full of bullshit.
Copyright is a tool used to try to monetize other people's actions. If a person has the talent to produce music that you want to listen to, is it unreasonable for that person to wants to be compensated for his or her time? Or do you feel that you are some sort of monarch, who deserves to be serenaded for free? If a group of people put together a piece of software that entertains you (like a game), or that makes you more productive (like an application), do they not deserve to be compensated for their time and labor?
It seems to me that copyright is the only framework we have to protect content creators. You can rail all day against the evil music companies, the entertainment industry, the BSA and what have you. Those organizations might suck, but they are only there because people are tired of getting ripped off, and those organizations can prey upon those fears. If we lived in a morally just society where people treated each other fairly, we wouldn't need copyright as a mechanism to protect IP. The reality is that we live in an age of digital looters who will take anything that isn't nailed down.
I'm not completely blameless either. I couriered more than my fair share of warez as a kid, and up until about five or six years ago, downloaded a slew of MP3s.
Your statement about control over other peoples actions is a load of shit. Those actions are theft. Those actions are the actions of pompous assholes who feel that they should be able to dictate prices. That shit only happens on the internet. Go to the gas station and try to tell the attendant that you feel his prices are unfair. Go to the grocery store and try to haggle over the price of a gallon of milk. The perceived value of digital media is skewed. People think that because they can easily copy it from one place to another, it should be nearly free. They fail to account for everything required to create the file in the first place.
If an MP3 is so easy to produce, then instead of copying it, go ahead and put a band together and record your own copy of the song. Listen to that one. Give it to all your friends for free. "Hazel Bergeron's Top 40 Hits" I'm sure everyone will be so happy with your professionally recorded re-creation of the original songs that they love listening to on the radio.
Believe it or not, the DoJ is actually pretty savvy when it comes to technical issues. They went over Cisco's acquisition of Tandberg with a fine toothed comb. It is next to impossible to do any sort of M&A activity in the technology sector without drawing some sort of scrutiny from the DoJ.
When DVDs came out to replace VHS cassettes, you could use both of them on the same television. On the other hand, unless you have a good HD TV, you will not notice the improved picture quality that Blu-ray offers. For a lot of people, the added cost of an HD TV makes Blu-Ray unattractive.
In my case, I love my Blu-ray player (PS3). I do not feel the need to go to the movies to see any of the special effects blockbusters anymore, except for purely social reasons. For me, the Samsung LCD TV and a good set of headphones plugged into the PS3 provide a great viewing experience.
I know I'd be angry if I came up with a design that impacted an industry as much as the iPhone did, only to have every product in the industry look like what I had come up with just a year or two later. And since people are so prone to forget, you'll hear them saying, "Well, duh. That's obvious. How else would it be?" when talking about innovation after it happens, completely forgetting that a mere 3-4 years prior there was no product that resembled what every product looks like today.
When I read what you wrote here, I'm reminded of the Motorola flip phones. As far as I remember, Motorola came up with that form factor, but soon enough they were ubiquitous. I do not know the answer to this one, but did Motorola patent that design? IMO, if Motorola was able to patent the flip / clam shell style phone, Apple should be able to patent the touch screen, iPhone-esque form factor.
I'll do you one better. In the mid-1990s I participated in market research on LCD monitors while they were still being prototyped. There were numerous variations on display, and among the physical qualities they asked us to evaluate were our preferences for thin or thick bezels, and sharp or rounded corners. To the best of my knowledge, I don't think that Apple paid for that research. Maybe the LCD consortium that put it together should sue Apple for stealing their research.
Very well put. Thanks for the re-frame.
He may not be a moron, but he's socially incompetent. He wants what he wants and he's going to do whatever he wants to do to make it happen, IT be damned. Maybe he should spend less time learning to install Linux and more time learning to work cooperatively with those who he needs help from. Whose fault is it going to be when some automated script finds a hole in his "free as in beer" calendaring solution, roots his box, and then uses it as a launching point to own the rest of the network?
The original NEED is for on-call schedules. The ISSUE is that some idiot plugged his own server into the network and wants to allow access to it from the outside world.
Exactly. Setting up a calendaring server for a single department is a lot different from getting the entire facility to sign off on funding for it. The down side of IT in a large organization is that you cannot do things piecemeal. What the division head should be doing is selling the idea to his peers at the same level in other departments. If his department needs it, maybe he should find room in his budget to make it a reality for the entire hospital. IT is always short on funding, so he could build some bridges to IT, and other departments, and get EVERYONE a good calendaring solution.
It does not sound like the guy is a department head. He sounds like a pompous ass hat who wants to do things his way. He reminds me of a VP I knew once who decided he didn't like the way the database system worked, so he did everything for his department in Access. Despite being warned repeatedly about what a piece of crap Access is, he plowed on. 18 months later, Access took a crap on him and he lost everything. The shitty thing about it is that the data loss fell on IT. Senior management decided that IT should have been more forceful in nipping the Access adventure in the bud, even though they failed to back up IT when IT first raised the issue.
I'm sure there are similar dynamics at work in the hospital. Who is going to fix the server when the application takes a big dump and nobody can get their schedules? I bet you it sure as hell won't be Mr. Department Head guy. He'll be too busy doing his real job, and that's how it should be. Let IT handle the computers and software.