I can't do that with all computers. I try, but sometimes a problem with a system i am not familiar with (win 7 for example) i can only tell you to do the basics, reboot, run AV, etc.
most technologies have a shelf life, er go the skills necessary to use and support those technologies have a shelf life as well.
in the dark days i could work all sorts of magic on systems using a dos boot disk. all of that stuff is now a lost art.
today, knowing how to set up services and apps on mobile phones is only slightly less important to my job than knowing how to set up a server or a PC. if you had told me in 1999 that a significant portion of my job would be supporting mobile phones, i would have told you that you were crazy.
things change, and you have to change along with them.
Look, I not saying it's an organized attack on a marginalized group, all I'm saying is we need to be asking these questions and we need to keep asking until we get an answer. Look how the lawyers for the site and even the activist court just glossed over the parts about confusing the imbeciles and just went straight to what the case is actually about! What is that? Is that justice? Is that what you were brought up to believe in?
there was a march on washington. the morons in this country are organizing and taking to the streets:
The number of works coming from people who want/expect their works to be freely copied would remain constant, but in such a climate, one would eventually find that the signal to noise ratio would sink to practically unusable levels... the volume of quality works would simply be far too low for most people to easily find them or be notified of their existence amongst an overwhelming volume of tripe
and you think there isn't money to be made helping people find stuff they like? that's a salable scarcity called convenience.
that is just one of thousands of new scarcities that pop up from freely available content.
sure i can get anything i want whenever i want it right now, that shifts my focus from obtaining content to finding worthwhile content in an easy way.
now that i can snap my fingers and get any pop song i hear for free, my new music interests have shifted away from catchy, yet ultimately forgettable tunes, to things that interest me in a much more meaningful way. i would gladly pay for someone to find me "free" content that i had control over once it was mine.
this was supposed to be what the recording industry did: finding, investing in, and promoting talent, rather than demanding $20 a disc for auto-tuned excrement.
Would you prefer that they sold you 1Mbps at the same price, and gave it to you full?
if they were transparent about what they were selling, sure. we all know the over subscription model is how internet access works, so why not just level with us?
Marketing says that you want MORE bandwidth, even if it isn't possible at the price they are selling it at.
sure it's possible and at a significantly lower price. all you have to do is introduce some competition into the internet access market.
So you end up with the issue that marketing and reality don't match. They could cut your bandwidth in half, but then you wouldn't want to pay, because it wouldn't be 12Mbps. It's a marketing chicken and egg problem.
the chicken and egg problem is one of competition:
there is no competition, so prices are high and quality is low. there is no way to build out competing infrastructure without municipal/government subsidy, which the incumbents actively resist in order to protect their high prices and low quality.
how do i know that bandwidth lowers in price with competition? price out hosting or co-location services. in a colo you pay not for bandwidth (which starts at 10mbit up and down and goes up from there), but for total transfer, where every bit is accounted for. the per gigabyte price for data center transfer is *SIGNIFICANTLY* less than the residential rate.
this article raises some interesting points about bandwidth and competition (emphasis mine):
I’ve paid for bandwidth and worked at ISPs in many countries and one constant I’ve found is that increased competition directly translates into cheap bandwidth. In too many countries there is still not enough competition among ISPs. In the United States the number of ISPs a consumer may select further dwindled in the past decade.
All over the world you can see the same pattern. Countries with lots of competition among ISPs enjoy the cheapest and best internet service. The countries that are the worst off are the countries where 1 company controls all internet access. That was the case when I lived in India in 1998. Since then India opened itself up to competition and internet usage skyrocketed while bandwidth costs plummeted. Now India is basically on par with the USA for bandwidth costs. Much of Africa is still suffering under government controlled ISPs. The relatively modern country of South Africa has overpriced bandwidth for exactly this reason.
So, now "changing to match what customers want", I would have to guess that you are suggesting that the cable companies should drop their subscription model. Perhaps they could run on donations, or perhaps upsell people to dinner with a technician, perhaps selling limited edition "I met the cable company president" t-shirts, or perhaps autographed limited edition flat screen TVs that they could sell for double the price of normal.
uhh, internet access is non-scarce good. it cannot be produced for free (though it can be made significantly cheaper witht he right infrastructure) and there will always be demand for it.
if the cable companies are in trouble from piracy (they are not) then could spin off their content delivery business into another company and ramp up their internet infrastructure. in corporate speak it would be called "focusing on core competencies". this is a process that should have begun in the mid 1990's when people demanded high speed internet access. they didn't do it then and they never will because they cannot figure out how to get a monopoly.
this would open the gates for pure-play content providers to compete based on the quantity and quality of their content, but since there would be no monopoly, no cable company will do that.
Seriously, the only "change" they seem to need to make to meet what the customer wants is to give their product away for free, on demand, on any device, at any time, from anywhere, and at no cost. Sounds like a great plan, and as soon as you explain how they are going to pay for it...
yeah, no one is paying for cable. that's why comcast is reporting record income:
“The strength and resilience of our businesses combined with our continued emphasis on expenses and prudent capital management helped us achieve healthy operating and financial results in the third quarter,” Brian Roberts, Comcast’s chairman and CEO, said.
here is the breakdown: Comcast (NASDAQ:CMCSA,CMCSK) earned $944 million, or 33 cents per fully diluted share in the quarter, up from $771 million, or 26 cents per fully diluted share, in the third quarter of last year.
Are you suggesting that because 'a growing number of file sharing users have simply gone further underground using anonymizing services' this is justification for illegal activity?
it's not justification. it's pointing out that it is impossible to stop file sharing and it's therefore a waste of corporate and government resources to try to stop it.
Stealing is stealing whether its electronically or physically or whether you like or dislike the record industry.
wasting time and money trying to pass these ridiculous laws is just bad business. bad business is bad business whether it's governmental or corporate and whether you like or dislike the way the market has changed.
file sharing, right or wrong, cannot be stopped. every minute/dollar you spend fighting it is a minute/dollar wasted. it's time and money that corporations should be investing in their futures, and it's time and money that government should be using to protect, rather than erode, our civil liberties.
as this situation gets more and more out of hand, it won't just be time and money wasted, it will be time and money that corporations are investing in the ill will of a growing number of potential customers and that governments will be investing in the erosion of our civil liberties.
fighting file sharing is bad because file sharing cannot be stopped, it will go on long after content companies have bankrupted themselves out of existence, this is why we can't let important things, like privacy, be tossed out in a myopic attempt to protect failing businesses.
obvious is a strong word to use, but the point is valid, for now.
right now there is no need to disguise the pattern. if the need becomes apparent, then the tools will evolve. you can already rate limit most torrent clients as it is (the good ones anyway), and you can schedule times to seed and stop seeding automatically, plus tons of other stuff.
that's why this is a losing battle for the enforcement crowd. one side, those who would seek to stop file sharing, have only one weapon: money. file sharers have two weapons: time and talent. it's your basic war of attrition except the file sharers are using infinite resources.
Besides, all ISPs need to do really put a dent in P2P is enact a rather steep per-byte surcharge on all upstrean traffic.
we'll have to see how that plays out. with the grassroots resistance to those sorts of practices, ISPs may not be in a position to implement those policies.
and even if they succeed, there is always the hard drive party via the "small-world network."
Run up your internet bill a couple of hundred dollars a month, and I suspect that most people will stop (or greatly reduce) funding the habits of others.
i am not so sure that the super-nodes (the really good seeders) are residential users. most private trackers offer free accounts for people with 10mbit up, so there must be a market for people with data center boxes.
plus, on your basic public tracker torrent there are thousands of seeds for really popular torrents, presumably the popular torrents are the ones the MPAA and the like are watching and sending complaints on.
so, how is it that there could be thousands (sometimes tens of thousands) of seeds such that i can get 600k downloads on really popular stuff?
i suppose the complaints departments might just be outnumbered, and i suppose some seeders are very well hidden, but i suspect that a non-trivial number of seeders are just virtual private servers in some data center somewhere, paying data center rates for transfer.
How user friendly is it? I'm fairly technical, but certainly not a code monkey or command-line level guy...
it's friendly enough, once a container is opened (i.e. decrypted) it's like any other drive with a drive letter and whatnot. once you close the container (unmount the volume or shut the machine down) then it's encrypted again. every time you boot the machine/mount the container you have to enter a password.
the trouble isn't ease of use, it that fact that strong crypto is not forgiving. if you forget your key there is no force on this earth that will help you recover your data.
it's one of murphy's laws of combat: building it so the enemy can't get in means building it so you can't escape.
The actual argument is that the deterrent effect will, on the whole, steer more people to buying than "stealing" content. It's the same argument used to justify arresting people who frequent prostitutes: the punishment is about changing social behaviors, not necessarily about impacting future behavior of the few people actually arrested.
a deterrent, by definition, stops something. an incentive, by definition, encourages something. even if it were possible to stop file sharing (it's not), this legislation, i.e. the deterrent, can only stop file sharing. it does nothing to *encourage* anything. that's the point.
Why not simply put file sharers to death? It would prevent them from file sharing again, so next time they'll buy...
no, they'll buy, you just have to set it up like this:
1) if you are accused of file sharing, you will be put to death.
2) anyone who does not buy $100 of digital media every month will be accused of file sharing
3) er go: pay the MAFIAA $100 a month or be killed.
4) hooray! music is saved.
...all of which would create probably cause for a warrant. The harder you try to hide, the more guilty you look.
sorry, no. that's the beauty of encrypted connections.
ssh, vpn, ssl, you name it, all just look like encrypted connections on the wire.
so IF you can get a warrant based on my volume of encrypted traffic, good luck figuring out what the traffic actually is, since it's... wait for it... encrypted!
i guess you could kick down my front door and seize everything. that's definitely a sustainable practice for law enforcement to apply to millions of people. and again, you might catch the dumb ones, but thanks to free software like truecrypt and encryption being built into operating systems like vista and ubuntu, seizing computers won't get you any evidence either because the drives are, say it with me, encrypted!
I _really_ wish people would quit pretending this Hulu crap is due to the 'content industry'. It's not. The fact is that Hulu makes their money from advertising. And nobody in their right mind would pay for advertising to people who are _thousands of miles away from their business_.
and why can't they sell UK ads for UK viewers to see? because of contracts they have with... wait for it... the content industry.
No, next is that people quit working so hard to steal stuff and actually pay for it.
it's not hard, it's just inconvenient. in the end, that is the point: they can't stop piracy, just make it temporarily less convenient. it was inconvenient switching from napster to kazaa, then from kazaa to bit torrent, and switching trackers is inconvenient, but it never stops.
these things always end in blanket licenses (radio did, the vcr did, you get the picture) but the idiots in hollywood seem to think they can win this time for some strange reason.
so what will happen? at some point a voluntary license will come out: a pass to that we can buy to keep doing what we want to do legally. it's really the only way forward.
Re: Steal music and movies to keep the internet alive!!!
I want everyone of you to "illegally" download something worth watching tonight. Then burn it to DVD and share it with somebody you love. Because they lied to you.
your problem is that you think too small.
download 4.7 gigs of torrentpacks (a collection of related torrents), decompress them, and burn 10 DVDs. give 5 to your friends, and leave 5 in random public places.
you could also swap usb hard drives with your friends. i smile and evil smile every time i hand over my disney collection for a friend to copy.
On the post: Running The Clock Backwards To Judge Technological Progress
Re: Re: On Off High Medium Low
most technologies have a shelf life, er go the skills necessary to use and support those technologies have a shelf life as well.
in the dark days i could work all sorts of magic on systems using a dos boot disk. all of that stuff is now a lost art.
today, knowing how to set up services and apps on mobile phones is only slightly less important to my job than knowing how to set up a server or a PC. if you had told me in 1999 that a significant portion of my job would be supporting mobile phones, i would have told you that you were crazy.
things change, and you have to change along with them.
On the post: An 'Aha Moment' About Ridiculous Trademarks, As Oprah And Mutual Of Omaha Fight Over 'Aha Moment'
Re: Just wanted you to know...
interior crocodile alligator will remove any song that is stuck in your head, guaranteed, or your money back.
On the post: Glenn Beck Not Allowed To Rape And Murder An Internet Meme
Re: I can't stand by and let this happen
there was a march on washington. the morons in this country are organizing and taking to the streets:
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/nations_morons_march_on_washington
On the post: The Moral Argument In Favor Of File Sharing?
Re: Re: why bother?
and you think there isn't money to be made helping people find stuff they like? that's a salable scarcity called convenience.
that is just one of thousands of new scarcities that pop up from freely available content.
sure i can get anything i want whenever i want it right now, that shifts my focus from obtaining content to finding worthwhile content in an easy way.
now that i can snap my fingers and get any pop song i hear for free, my new music interests have shifted away from catchy, yet ultimately forgettable tunes, to things that interest me in a much more meaningful way. i would gladly pay for someone to find me "free" content that i had control over once it was mine.
this was supposed to be what the recording industry did: finding, investing in, and promoting talent, rather than demanding $20 a disc for auto-tuned excrement.
On the post: Comcast Exec: We Need To Change Customer Behavior, Not Our Business Model
comcast revenues are up
what exactly is this guy crying about?
On the post: Comcast Exec: We Need To Change Customer Behavior, Not Our Business Model
Re: Re: Re:
if they were transparent about what they were selling, sure. we all know the over subscription model is how internet access works, so why not just level with us?
Marketing says that you want MORE bandwidth, even if it isn't possible at the price they are selling it at.
sure it's possible and at a significantly lower price. all you have to do is introduce some competition into the internet access market.
So you end up with the issue that marketing and reality don't match. They could cut your bandwidth in half, but then you wouldn't want to pay, because it wouldn't be 12Mbps. It's a marketing chicken and egg problem.
the chicken and egg problem is one of competition:
there is no competition, so prices are high and quality is low. there is no way to build out competing infrastructure without municipal/government subsidy, which the incumbents actively resist in order to protect their high prices and low quality.
how do i know that bandwidth lowers in price with competition? price out hosting or co-location services. in a colo you pay not for bandwidth (which starts at 10mbit up and down and goes up from there), but for total transfer, where every bit is accounted for. the per gigabyte price for data center transfer is *SIGNIFICANTLY* less than the residential rate.
this article raises some interesting points about bandwidth and competition (emphasis mine):
I’ve paid for bandwidth and worked at ISPs in many countries and one constant I’ve found is that increased competition directly translates into cheap bandwidth. In too many countries there is still not enough competition among ISPs. In the United States the number of ISPs a consumer may select further dwindled in the past decade.
All over the world you can see the same pattern. Countries with lots of competition among ISPs enjoy the cheapest and best internet service. The countries that are the worst off are the countries where 1 company controls all internet access. That was the case when I lived in India in 1998. Since then India opened itself up to competition and internet usage skyrocketed while bandwidth costs plummeted. Now India is basically on par with the USA for bandwidth costs. Much of Africa is still suffering under government controlled ISPs. The relatively modern country of South Africa has overpriced bandwidth for exactly this reason.
On the post: Comcast Exec: We Need To Change Customer Behavior, Not Our Business Model
Re:
uhh, internet access is non-scarce good. it cannot be produced for free (though it can be made significantly cheaper witht he right infrastructure) and there will always be demand for it.
if the cable companies are in trouble from piracy (they are not) then could spin off their content delivery business into another company and ramp up their internet infrastructure. in corporate speak it would be called "focusing on core competencies". this is a process that should have begun in the mid 1990's when people demanded high speed internet access. they didn't do it then and they never will because they cannot figure out how to get a monopoly.
this would open the gates for pure-play content providers to compete based on the quantity and quality of their content, but since there would be no monopoly, no cable company will do that.
On the post: Comcast Exec: We Need To Change Customer Behavior, Not Our Business Model
Re:
yeah, no one is paying for cable. that's why comcast is reporting record income:
http://philadelphia.bizjournals.com/philadelphia/stories/2009/11/02/daily26.html
how'd they do it? by being a smart business:
“The strength and resilience of our businesses combined with our continued emphasis on expenses and prudent capital management helped us achieve healthy operating and financial results in the third quarter,” Brian Roberts, Comcast’s chairman and CEO, said.
here is the breakdown:
Comcast (NASDAQ:CMCSA,CMCSK) earned $944 million, or 33 cents per fully diluted share in the quarter, up from $771 million, or 26 cents per fully diluted share, in the third quarter of last year.
On the post: Why Kicking Fans Off The Internet Won't Make Them Buy
Re: Re: Re:
inconvenient, but not impossible.
that's the point of all of this: you cannot stop file sharing. you can only temporarily inconvenience it.
On the post: Attacks On File Sharing Simply Drive People Further Underground
Re: Attacks on File Sharing
it's not justification. it's pointing out that it is impossible to stop file sharing and it's therefore a waste of corporate and government resources to try to stop it.
Stealing is stealing whether its electronically or physically or whether you like or dislike the record industry.
wasting time and money trying to pass these ridiculous laws is just bad business. bad business is bad business whether it's governmental or corporate and whether you like or dislike the way the market has changed.
file sharing, right or wrong, cannot be stopped. every minute/dollar you spend fighting it is a minute/dollar wasted. it's time and money that corporations should be investing in their futures, and it's time and money that government should be using to protect, rather than erode, our civil liberties.
as this situation gets more and more out of hand, it won't just be time and money wasted, it will be time and money that corporations are investing in the ill will of a growing number of potential customers and that governments will be investing in the erosion of our civil liberties.
fighting file sharing is bad because file sharing cannot be stopped, it will go on long after content companies have bankrupted themselves out of existence, this is why we can't let important things, like privacy, be tossed out in a myopic attempt to protect failing businesses.
On the post: Attacks On File Sharing Simply Drive People Further Underground
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: history repeats itself
obvious is a strong word to use, but the point is valid, for now.
right now there is no need to disguise the pattern. if the need becomes apparent, then the tools will evolve. you can already rate limit most torrent clients as it is (the good ones anyway), and you can schedule times to seed and stop seeding automatically, plus tons of other stuff.
that's why this is a losing battle for the enforcement crowd. one side, those who would seek to stop file sharing, have only one weapon: money. file sharers have two weapons: time and talent. it's your basic war of attrition except the file sharers are using infinite resources.
Besides, all ISPs need to do really put a dent in P2P is enact a rather steep per-byte surcharge on all upstrean traffic.
we'll have to see how that plays out. with the grassroots resistance to those sorts of practices, ISPs may not be in a position to implement those policies.
and even if they succeed, there is always the hard drive party via the "small-world network."
Run up your internet bill a couple of hundred dollars a month, and I suspect that most people will stop (or greatly reduce) funding the habits of others.
i am not so sure that the super-nodes (the really good seeders) are residential users. most private trackers offer free accounts for people with 10mbit up, so there must be a market for people with data center boxes.
plus, on your basic public tracker torrent there are thousands of seeds for really popular torrents, presumably the popular torrents are the ones the MPAA and the like are watching and sending complaints on.
so, how is it that there could be thousands (sometimes tens of thousands) of seeds such that i can get 600k downloads on really popular stuff?
i suppose the complaints departments might just be outnumbered, and i suppose some seeders are very well hidden, but i suspect that a non-trivial number of seeders are just virtual private servers in some data center somewhere, paying data center rates for transfer.
On the post: Attacks On File Sharing Simply Drive People Further Underground
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: history repeats itself
it's friendly enough, once a container is opened (i.e. decrypted) it's like any other drive with a drive letter and whatnot. once you close the container (unmount the volume or shut the machine down) then it's encrypted again. every time you boot the machine/mount the container you have to enter a password.
the trouble isn't ease of use, it that fact that strong crypto is not forgiving. if you forget your key there is no force on this earth that will help you recover your data.
it's one of murphy's laws of combat: building it so the enemy can't get in means building it so you can't escape.
On the post: Why Kicking Fans Off The Internet Won't Make Them Buy
Re: Oh, come on
a deterrent, by definition, stops something. an incentive, by definition, encourages something. even if it were possible to stop file sharing (it's not), this legislation, i.e. the deterrent, can only stop file sharing. it does nothing to *encourage* anything. that's the point.
On the post: Why Kicking Fans Off The Internet Won't Make Them Buy
Re:
no, they'll buy, you just have to set it up like this:
1) if you are accused of file sharing, you will be put to death.
2) anyone who does not buy $100 of digital media every month will be accused of file sharing
3) er go: pay the MAFIAA $100 a month or be killed.
4) hooray! music is saved.
On the post: Attacks On File Sharing Simply Drive People Further Underground
Re: Re: Re: history repeats itself
sorry, no. that's the beauty of encrypted connections.
ssh, vpn, ssl, you name it, all just look like encrypted connections on the wire.
so IF you can get a warrant based on my volume of encrypted traffic, good luck figuring out what the traffic actually is, since it's... wait for it... encrypted!
i guess you could kick down my front door and seize everything. that's definitely a sustainable practice for law enforcement to apply to millions of people. and again, you might catch the dumb ones, but thanks to free software like truecrypt and encryption being built into operating systems like vista and ubuntu, seizing computers won't get you any evidence either because the drives are, say it with me, encrypted!
On the post: Dear Hulu: Stop Treating Me Like A Criminal
Re: It's all about the ads
and why can't they sell UK ads for UK viewers to see? because of contracts they have with... wait for it... the content industry.
On the post: Attacks On File Sharing Simply Drive People Further Underground
Re: Re: history repeats itself
it's not hard, it's just inconvenient. in the end, that is the point: they can't stop piracy, just make it temporarily less convenient. it was inconvenient switching from napster to kazaa, then from kazaa to bit torrent, and switching trackers is inconvenient, but it never stops.
these things always end in blanket licenses (radio did, the vcr did, you get the picture) but the idiots in hollywood seem to think they can win this time for some strange reason.
so what will happen? at some point a voluntary license will come out: a pass to that we can buy to keep doing what we want to do legally. it's really the only way forward.
On the post: Attacks On File Sharing Simply Drive People Further Underground
Re: history repeats itself
Decentralized torrent trackers?
encrypted connections to foil deep packet inspections and tunnels to hide origination and termination points.
On the post: MPAA Tells The FCC: If We Don't Stop Piracy, The Internet Will Die
Re: Steal music and movies to keep the internet alive!!!
your problem is that you think too small.
download 4.7 gigs of torrentpacks (a collection of related torrents), decompress them, and burn 10 DVDs. give 5 to your friends, and leave 5 in random public places.
you could also swap usb hard drives with your friends. i smile and evil smile every time i hand over my disney collection for a friend to copy.
On the post: Is Google Going Better Than Free On Navigation? Will That Set Off Antitrust Alarms?
Re:
it's anti-competitive. competition is one of the cornerstones of a free market.
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