I am still trying to figure out how the US auto industry went wrong. But it is possible they did not, or at least Ford did not.
i can't speak for the rest of the country but i have always bought the same kind of car: small, fuel efficient, and unique looking. over the years my favorite cars have been a toyota tercel, a honda civic hatchback, and a VW golf.
american car makers have for the most part made big, generic looking gas guzzlers, so the only american car i ever owned was a ford festiva, a small generic looking economy car.
How can an individual have sole rights to information or ideas? Like ideas don't develop simultaneously by separate individuals or groups across the world? Does any scientific, technical or artistic information or works for that matter, not rest on what culturally went before. Is everything not just a product of the Universe?
go back to canada, hippie. this is america. we sell things to suckers to make money. that's the american way. you can all hold hands on the golden gate bridge and sing kumbaya if you want, but you won't make any money doing it, and what's the point of doing anything if you can't make money doing it?
but I rather doubt I will be one of those sipping my morning coffee at the dining room table and reading the news via a scroll bar on a monitor. I like that tactile sensation of turning pages, whether it be a newspaper or a new book.
yeah, and the news/entertainment industry can continue doing business the old fashioned way as long as the baby boomers are still alive to be sold to, but when they are all dead, what then?
there is a level of trust that is now missing. Whereas before we had large institutional sources, with reputations to protect, we now have thousands of effectively anonymous sources. It will take a while for people to realize that what they used to get for their $0.25 was a competent editor who provided at least some level of due diligence.
right, thankfully competent editing and people's reputations saved us from being sold a war that was based on faulty intel.
the mainstream media and the government are a feedback loop, the government says something, the media repeats it, and then the government goes on CNN says "don't take our word for it, look at the front page of the new york times".
when the truth about iraq came out, the media got it's feelings hurt over being made a fool of and now it barely reports on iraq, good, bad or indifferent. it's convenient to blame the administration for pulling a fast one on the media, but the news media is equally to blame for being had.
Now, you have to provide that due diligence yourself, and who has time for that?
i'm sorry that news no longer comes in a convenient drive thru package with a happymeal toy, but fear not. it takes 30 seconds to set up an rss reader with competing views of the news (conservative vs. liberal, british vs. american, etc.) or you could just talk about it with your friends, or are you too busy for those too?
How many 'average' people do not want to micro-manage their music collections? 95% of them. With 4% of the remainder syncing their OGG collection with some obscure linux based media player.
what's there to micromanage? you grab some files and drop them in a folder. it's literally no different that copying files to a thumb drive.
in william gibson's spawl trilogy, offline transactions weren't illegal, they were just not possible. cash was legal, but no one accepted it because no one but criminals had it.
i find myself having to pause to remember how to do things that are offline, like write a check or address an envelope. i wonder if some day it will be legal but impossible to be offline.
tor is just encrypted routing information. phorm will see plenty of data that indicates that you use tor. tor relays and exit nodes are well documented, access to them can be blocked.
network chaff is traffic that is in the open but false:
it does everything it can to keep your communications and documents a secret. It even throws up a bunch of "chaff" communications that are supposed to disguise the fact that you're doing anything covert. So while you're receiving a political message one character at a time, ParanoidLinux is pretending to surf the Web and fill in questionnaires and flirt in chat-rooms. Meanwhile, one in every five hundred characters you receive is your real message, a needle buried in a huge haystack.
~Cory Doctorow (Little Brother, 2008)
i remember in the early 90's when a friend of mine bought a 1GB hard drive and saying to him something to the effect of "you'll never fill it, there isn't enough data in the world to justify a whole gigabyte."
i also remember a few short years later, marvelling at the first 10gb seagate barracuda which was several hundred dollars at the time and laughing at myself for saying that 1gb was superfluous.
as the price of storage drops, so too does the cost of redundancy.
i use a few USB hard drives as backup devices. i keep one in a fireproof box at home, and one at a relative's house. i rotate them from time to time to keep them current.
if i had a 2TB sd card, you could probably snail mail them with a single stamp.
when I first entered the professional IT world, the term "SneakerNet" was used to describe transferring a file by walking a floppy disk from one location to another. Imagine how the SneakerNet would work when you have massive flash drives...
they're called hard drive parties. in the old days of the warez scene, that's how you got rare stuff, by trading floppies. copying files via removable media is really the whole point of removable media.
today they're called hard drive parties or cd swaps. it's a natural extension of darknet culture.
You've got the wrong end of the stick there. Thats when he'll start campaigning to 'protect' the public from video games.
that is sooo 2004. the world is liberal again thanks to all the money raised by the obama campaign. video games are a kerbillion dollar a year industry... it's an industry that is drenched in income.
conservative christian family values don't have nearly the kind of profit margins that video games have so clearly the industry needs protection.
in a few years the real estate markets will pick up and the family values crowd will be able to afford legislation again and we will need to protect society from video games, but until then, please think of the developers.
More likely, they think newer/popular music is worth a premium and that people will pay more for it thus more $$$ for the record companiess.
the popular mainstream stuff is what gets pirated most. check any tracker and the top 100 releases are the top 100 songs.
the gold here is the back catalogue, which let's be real, will never see $0.69 but will stay at $0.99 and be drm free. at that point it might actually be worthwhile to buy a track or two if i need it in a hurry.
Price it reasonably (say the cost of a popular video game subscription) and you have something better than free, a bit-torrent/usenet killer.
fuck the database, just give me a pass that let's me do what i am doing right now, just legally. i call it "the piracy pass". i'd pay 20 bucks a month to not have to mess with private trackers and tunneling thru russia or getting my plug pulled and calling to get it switched back on (6 times and counting).
the industries and everything could keep spying and snooping, and when i get busted i just show them my pass and we move on with our lives. they could even use their snoop data to demand their cut of the piracy pass profits.
the systems are all in place, the technology is here and in widespread use, the people that want to get paid just have to come around to the idea.
I think the risk of losing all my files keeps my from putting all those eggs in one basket. I had a friend lose two hard drives in a row last year...there went all his digital music.
i moved to a new file server and didn't check that my music was properly backed up so it's gone. which is a shame cuz i had about a hundred gigs in music alone. thankfully you can always just download it again :-)
On the post: How ASCAP And BMI Are Harming Up-And-Coming Singers
Re: Re:
everything is music is for profit, even the nonprofits.
On the post: Creative Destruction Happens Quickly; Those Who Wait End Up In The Rubble
Re: Re:
i can't speak for the rest of the country but i have always bought the same kind of car: small, fuel efficient, and unique looking. over the years my favorite cars have been a toyota tercel, a honda civic hatchback, and a VW golf.
american car makers have for the most part made big, generic looking gas guzzlers, so the only american car i ever owned was a ford festiva, a small generic looking economy car.
On the post: Creative Destruction Happens Quickly; Those Who Wait End Up In The Rubble
Re: Some ideas for the new economy
http://imagechan.com/img/6238/Wolf%20Jacket/
On the post: Creative Destruction Happens Quickly; Those Who Wait End Up In The Rubble
Re: Business Model
go back to canada, hippie. this is america. we sell things to suckers to make money. that's the american way. you can all hold hands on the golden gate bridge and sing kumbaya if you want, but you won't make any money doing it, and what's the point of doing anything if you can't make money doing it?
On the post: Creative Destruction Happens Quickly; Those Who Wait End Up In The Rubble
Re:
yeah, and the news/entertainment industry can continue doing business the old fashioned way as long as the baby boomers are still alive to be sold to, but when they are all dead, what then?
On the post: Creative Destruction Happens Quickly; Those Who Wait End Up In The Rubble
Re:
right, thankfully competent editing and people's reputations saved us from being sold a war that was based on faulty intel.
the mainstream media and the government are a feedback loop, the government says something, the media repeats it, and then the government goes on CNN says "don't take our word for it, look at the front page of the new york times".
when the truth about iraq came out, the media got it's feelings hurt over being made a fool of and now it barely reports on iraq, good, bad or indifferent. it's convenient to blame the administration for pulling a fast one on the media, but the news media is equally to blame for being had.
Now, you have to provide that due diligence yourself, and who has time for that?
i'm sorry that news no longer comes in a convenient drive thru package with a happymeal toy, but fear not. it takes 30 seconds to set up an rss reader with competing views of the news (conservative vs. liberal, british vs. american, etc.) or you could just talk about it with your friends, or are you too busy for those too?
On the post: Apple Still A Big Fan Of DRM Outside Of Music
Re:
what's there to micromanage? you grab some files and drop them in a folder. it's literally no different that copying files to a thumb drive.
On the post: The Cost Of Not Being Online
postively gibsonian
i find myself having to pause to remember how to do things that are offline, like write a check or address an envelope. i wonder if some day it will be legal but impossible to be offline.
On the post: Phorm, Apparently Deaf To Consumer Hatred Of Being Spied On, Plans Expansion
Re: Re:This will be fun
tor is close, but i'm thinking more like network chaff:
http://paranoidlinux.org
tor is just encrypted routing information. phorm will see plenty of data that indicates that you use tor. tor relays and exit nodes are well documented, access to them can be blocked.
network chaff is traffic that is in the open but false:
it does everything it can to keep your communications and documents a secret. It even throws up a bunch of "chaff" communications that are supposed to disguise the fact that you're doing anything covert. So while you're receiving a political message one character at a time, ParanoidLinux is pretending to surf the Web and fill in questionnaires and flirt in chat-rooms. Meanwhile, one in every five hundred characters you receive is your real message, a needle buried in a huge haystack.
~Cory Doctorow (Little Brother, 2008)
On the post: Obama Appoints Former RIAA Lawyer To Associate Attorney General
Re: Re: the dems love hollywood
- Kurt Vonnegut
it's a two party system. you only have two choices.
On the post: Oprah Sued For Patent Infringement Over Her Book Club
Re: Scott Harris
I wonder, does his mother know what he does for a living ....
no, she still thinks he sells crack cocaine to kindergartners. he doesn't want her to be disappointed when she finds out what he really does.
On the post: Entertainment Protectionism Doesn't Create Jobs, It Destroys Them
Re: Re: Re: Saving jobs and securing activity is not more important than ever...
in the case of the entertainment industry fighting file sharing, it's more like playing chicken with a train.
On the post: Storage Isn't Much Of An Issue Anymore
Re: Re: not convinced
who cares?
i remember in the early 90's when a friend of mine bought a 1GB hard drive and saying to him something to the effect of "you'll never fill it, there isn't enough data in the world to justify a whole gigabyte."
i also remember a few short years later, marvelling at the first 10gb seagate barracuda which was several hundred dollars at the time and laughing at myself for saying that 1gb was superfluous.
On the post: Storage Isn't Much Of An Issue Anymore
Re: Re: re: 2TB in your pocket..
Just use encryption and backups, problem solved.
as the price of storage drops, so too does the cost of redundancy.
i use a few USB hard drives as backup devices. i keep one in a fireproof box at home, and one at a relative's house. i rotate them from time to time to keep them current.
if i had a 2TB sd card, you could probably snail mail them with a single stamp.
On the post: Storage Isn't Much Of An Issue Anymore
Re: Re: The problem is bandwidth...
they're called hard drive parties. in the old days of the warez scene, that's how you got rare stuff, by trading floppies. copying files via removable media is really the whole point of removable media.
today they're called hard drive parties or cd swaps. it's a natural extension of darknet culture.
On the post: Despite Whining About Piracy, Secondhand Sales, Video Game Sales At All Time Highs
Re: Re: Michael Whitetail
that is sooo 2004. the world is liberal again thanks to all the money raised by the obama campaign. video games are a kerbillion dollar a year industry... it's an industry that is drenched in income.
conservative christian family values don't have nearly the kind of profit margins that video games have so clearly the industry needs protection.
in a few years the real estate markets will pick up and the family values crowd will be able to afford legislation again and we will need to protect society from video games, but until then, please think of the developers.
On the post: As Rumored, Apple Gives Record Labels Variable iTunes Pricing In Exchange For Ditching DRM
Re:
the popular mainstream stuff is what gets pirated most. check any tracker and the top 100 releases are the top 100 songs.
the gold here is the back catalogue, which let's be real, will never see $0.69 but will stay at $0.99 and be drm free. at that point it might actually be worthwhile to buy a track or two if i need it in a hurry.
On the post: As Rumored, Apple Gives Record Labels Variable iTunes Pricing In Exchange For Ditching DRM
Re: Better than free?
Price it reasonably (say the cost of a popular video game subscription) and you have something better than free, a bit-torrent/usenet killer.
fuck the database, just give me a pass that let's me do what i am doing right now, just legally. i call it "the piracy pass". i'd pay 20 bucks a month to not have to mess with private trackers and tunneling thru russia or getting my plug pulled and calling to get it switched back on (6 times and counting).
the industries and everything could keep spying and snooping, and when i get busted i just show them my pass and we move on with our lives. they could even use their snoop data to demand their cut of the piracy pass profits.
the systems are all in place, the technology is here and in widespread use, the people that want to get paid just have to come around to the idea.
On the post: Album Sales Fall, Of Course
Re: Re: CD Collection
i moved to a new file server and didn't check that my music was properly backed up so it's gone. which is a shame cuz i had about a hundred gigs in music alone. thankfully you can always just download it again :-)
On the post: Copyright Royalty Board Continues To Make Life Difficult For Webcasting
can't you just play independant music?
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