Josh in CharlotteNC 's Techdirt Comments

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  • On the post: Warner Bros. Sues A Ton Of Amazon Resellers For Selling 'Counterfeit' DVDs

    Josh in CharlotteNC ( profile ), 04 Aug, 2012 @ 10:13am

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Best guess

    I cannot imagine then going after some guy selling a few of his own used DVDs, can you?

    Oh, really? You can't imagine that?

    Warner has never threatened anyone that wishes to do something legal with DVDs that were legally purchased?

    http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120201/13421717628/redbox-wont-cave-to-warner-bros-demands-will-buy-wb-dvds-other-sources-rent-them.shtml

    And no one else has, either?

    http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111004/02480316193/supreme-court-wont-hear-case-saying-that-you-have-no-first-sale-rights-with-software.shtml
    http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120416/16434518517/supreme-court-to-review-if-its-legal-to-resell-book-you-bought-abroad.shtml
    http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120420/06310918579/video-game-developers-continue-to-ignorantly-attack-used-game-sales.shtml
    http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120224/03083617862/how-us-trade-rep-is-trying-to-wipe-out-used-goods-sales-with-secretive-tpp-agreement.shtml
    http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120224/01525417860/wapos-kaplan-scolded-demanding-300-student-trying-to-sell-one-its-books-ebay.shtml

    That was one 2 minute search only from stories in the last year. I think you suffer from an astonishing lack of imagination.

  • On the post: Justice Department IT Staff So Incompetent They Block All Webex Conferences

    Josh in CharlotteNC ( profile ), 03 Aug, 2012 @ 06:58am

    Re: Java Maybe?

    I'm thinking they have a problem with the high levels of security. Someone probably told them it uses that evil thing known as encryption.

  • On the post: The Stats Used To Support Cybercrime 'Threats' Just As Bogus As Hollywood's 'Loss' Claims

    Josh in CharlotteNC ( profile ), 03 Aug, 2012 @ 04:34am

    Re: Re: No smoke, no fire

    Clearly, if we'd had tougher cybersecurity legislation on the books, this sort of stuff would never have happened.

    How's that working for copyright? Or drugs?

  • On the post: What Would You Like To Hear In A Techdirt Podcast?

    Josh in CharlotteNC ( profile ), 03 Aug, 2012 @ 04:26am

    Re:

    Agree on the interview bit. I tend to skip or skim through the interview transcripts on the site - it just seems to be one thing that doesn't translate into text well.

    Personally, I'm on the site enough that I catch stories within a couple hours of when they're posted (at most), so a recap show wouldn't be useful to me - but don't let just me stop that idea if others want it.

  • On the post: The Indie Ebook Scene Is Growing: Here's Over 170 Authors Who've Sold More Than 50,000 Copies

    Josh in CharlotteNC ( profile ), 02 Aug, 2012 @ 01:40pm

    Math

    Since I'm sure the 'digital pennies' crowd will be commenting soon, I'm curious what an average "best seller" would do in sales in physical copies. Does anyone have the slightest idea?

    Sure, we've got the very high end such as a Stephen King or James Patterson novel or Harry Potter that sells millions, but what kind of numbers could we expect an average best seller to do? I'm a pretty well read person, and I don't recognize the names of about half of the authors for the top 40 books on Barnes and Noble right now.

    If those authors listed above are getting even 10 cents per sale after expenses, then they've got a good paying job by most accounts - and I suspect they're getting much more than that per sale.

  • On the post: The Stats Used To Support Cybercrime 'Threats' Just As Bogus As Hollywood's 'Loss' Claims

    Josh in CharlotteNC ( profile ), 02 Aug, 2012 @ 01:16pm

    No smoke, no fire

    You know the numbers are bogus because the shareholders of these companies haven't revolted and lynched the board and execs. There have been few, if any, lawsuits filed against these companies for the massive losses.

    JP Morgan loses $6 billion with poor trading practices and even though they can pretty easily absorb that loss, execs are fired and the whole company is looking to be re-org'ed.

    If American companies, even in aggregate, were losing a trillion dollars, there'd be no end to the news. And yet... we hear nothing of the sort. There's not even a wisp of smoke - so there isn't any fire here.

  • On the post: Defensive Posturing: E-Book Author Takes On The 'Old Guard' At Crime Writing Festival [UPDATED]

    Josh in CharlotteNC ( profile ), 02 Aug, 2012 @ 11:25am

    Re: Re: Re:

    When that market gets crowded, we get to where we are now, but instead of making dollars per book, they are netting pennies - and no lnoger able to afford promotion or marketing.

    The costs of promotion and marketing is coming down just like manufacturing and distribution. Besides, authors don't need to make dollars per book if they can sell many more ebooks.

    Hypothetical math question:
    Author makes $2 for selling a $20 hardcover. Makes 70 cents for selling a 99 cent ebook. How many ebooks does the author need to sell to make more from ebooks than hardcovers?
    Answer: 3 ebooks per each hardcover. And it is probably a lot easier to sell 3 ebooks @ 99 cents each than a single hardcover for $20.

  • On the post: Cybersecurity Act Rejected By The Senate

    Josh in CharlotteNC ( profile ), 02 Aug, 2012 @ 11:13am

    Banks killed it

    I'm reading that there was a bunch of resistance from financial companies (banks) against this.

    "In a letter Wednesday to Senate leaders, nine industry groups, including the American Bankers Association and
    the Financial Services Roundtable, argued that the bill would add a layer of inconsistent and potentially
    duplicative regulation for financial firms."
    American Banker
    "Industry Groups Oppose Senate Cyber-Security Bill"
    By Kevin Wack
    2 August 2012

    Sorry, I don't have a link. I get this from an internal company site.

  • On the post: Did You Know That Professional Writing Is Dying And Only Taxing The Public To Pay Writers Can Save It

    Josh in CharlotteNC ( profile ), 02 Aug, 2012 @ 10:52am

    Re: Price

    Why do people keep making the distinction that because the per book manufacturing costs are essentially $0, that said book should somehow be cheaper than it's physical counterpart.

    Wow. Are you actually saying that manufacturing and distribution costs should not factor into the price of a product? In any sane industry, lowering the costs to produce and transport a product to market lowers the price to the consumer. This is basic economics.

    When dealing with creative works, the price of the work usually has little to do with the way that work is consumed, and a lot more to do with the work itself.

    Since when? Want to talk about music? Is the price to the consumer the same to listen to a song on the radio as it is to buy a CD, or to go to a concert to hear it live? Movies - is the price of a ticket to the theater the same as it is to buy the DVD?

    Before eBooks, there were plenty of authors who went straight to paperback and did not have hardcover versions of their books. And it's not because the publishers thought their readers didn't want hardcover versions, but rather because they didn't think they'd want to pay hardcover prices.

    So even you are arguing against the first sentence you wrote. Yes, prices for hardcover and paperbacks are different. But what you are doing is confusing price with value. Personally, I much prefer paperbacks to hardcover, not for the difference in price, but because of the way I prefer to do most of my reading a paperback works better. To me, the value of a paperback is more than the value of a hardcover - of course, forcing me to wait 6 months or a year to get the paperback version significant reduces the value as well.

    And think about what you get with an eBook that you don't get with a physical one. You get a book that takes up no space. For people who read a lot, that's a godsend. There are probably people out there who would pay more for an eBook than a physical book. And often times this happens since you can almost always find used books that are cheaper and have the exact same content.

    Yes, value is different to different people. That's the way the market works - if the value of something is greater than the price of it, that's when people will buy. The huge advantage of having lower production/distribution costs is the ability to appeal to many different price points and increase sales.

  • On the post: Would US Education Be Better If We Replaced Algebra Requirements With Stats & Logic?

    Josh in CharlotteNC ( profile ), 01 Aug, 2012 @ 09:30am

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Real world skills

    The fossil record does not show any missing links. Every time a new fossil is found, it is deemed a new species. We do not have one species as it "evolved" over time. If we do, please cite it for me.

    This statement makes it clear that you fundamentally misunderstand evolution.

    Of course the fossil record does not show "missing links" - which you still have not given a definition of. The fossil record shows individual snapshots at a certain time. Think of them as a single frame of a movie - one frame will not show movement, but put them all together and the movement is quite clear.

    You seem hung up on an arbitrary label of a species. It is exactly that, and arbitrary label. What we have are constant lines of descedents that branch out from a single organism. Hominids did not evolve from chimpanzees - both chimpanzees and hominids descended from a common ancestor (somewhere between 5 and 7 million years ago).

    We age rock layers by the fossils found in them and we age fossils by the rock layer they were found in. Pretty circular logic.

    Keep on showing your ignorance. Please look up radiometric dating (that is, dating using radioactive isotopes). This is well understood, verifiable physics. Here's a link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiometric_dating - Now, once you have identified fossils between layers that have been dated, you can make inferences as to the age of those fossils, and you may be able to use those same fossils elsewhere to confirm other rock layers. But there is no circular logic here.

    Now, you spent a lot of time arguing against fossil evidence. Would you care to try arguing against any of the other lines of evidence supporting evolution, which in and of themselves would be all the proof we needed even without fossils?

  • On the post: Would US Education Be Better If We Replaced Algebra Requirements With Stats & Logic?

    Josh in CharlotteNC ( profile ), 31 Jul, 2012 @ 11:03am

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Real world skills

    I'm well familiar with evolutionary biology and I have no idea what you mean by "missing link" - care to explain?

    Yes, evolution is proven. There are many completely separate lines of evidence. There's the fossil record. There's geographic distribution of species. And in the last 30 years, we have an entirely new line of evidence in genetics. There are experiments showing evolution in microscopic life - one clear example is antibiotic resistance in bacteria.

    Evolution is a theory in the scientific sense. So is gravity. Sure, there are some disagreements among scientists on some of the specific methods of how evolution works - but evolution has more lines of supporting evidence than many other things even you would take for granted.

  • On the post: Music Labels Have No Plans To Share Any Money They Get From The Pirate Bay With Artists

    Josh in CharlotteNC ( profile ), 31 Jul, 2012 @ 09:59am

    Re: Re: Re:

    Not to mention that lawyers don't know how to do those things, and all the companies involved are nothing but lawyers.

  • On the post: Would US Education Be Better If We Replaced Algebra Requirements With Stats & Logic?

    Josh in CharlotteNC ( profile ), 31 Jul, 2012 @ 09:55am

    Re: Re: Re: Real world skills

    they might see that much of what they are told in the science books has never been proven either.

    Really? Name for me one general scientific idea that is in science textbooks and taught to students prior to college that hasn't been proven?

  • On the post: Would US Education Be Better If We Replaced Algebra Requirements With Stats & Logic?

    Josh in CharlotteNC ( profile ), 31 Jul, 2012 @ 05:40am

    Real world skills

    While we're at it, we can also start teaching critical thinking in elementary school - and keep reinforcing it through high school. Financial literacy in middle or high school. These are real world skills necessary for modern life that are sorely lacking.

  • On the post: Not Wise: French T-Shirt Company Tries To Trademark Anonymous Logo

    Josh in CharlotteNC ( profile ), 30 Jul, 2012 @ 02:09pm

    Re: No it's brilliant

    and they are probably prepared to deal with the actual effects of the attack.

    I'm willing to bet they're not.

    Remember HBGary? You really think a t-shirt maker is better prepared than a professional security outfit?

  • On the post: Dear Permission Culture: This Is Why No One Wants To Ask For Your OK

    Josh in CharlotteNC ( profile ), 30 Jul, 2012 @ 11:19am

    Makes perfect sense

    This makes perfect sense if you assume one thing:

    The legacy music industry is not in the business of selling music.

    Music is not the product. What they are in the business of is selling promotional and related services to artists. And by selling, I mean doing a bait-and-switch and strongarming by whatever means necessary to get the artists to sign away their "rights" - and then doing a completely shitty job providing those services to 99% of those that signed.

    They only care about sales and licensing in as much as it is how their artists pay them - but that is money they can funnel into their own coffers without much work since they've got their whole infrastructure of lawyers, accountants, affiliated businesses and industry contacts already built to do it.

    Hugh is not their customer. At best, he is a potential small scale revenue source, but they'd have to do a bunch of extra work for it.

  • On the post: Clearing The Air On Skype: Most Of What You Read Was Not Accurate, But There Are Still Reasons To Worry

    Josh in CharlotteNC ( profile ), 27 Jul, 2012 @ 01:58pm

    Re:

    I would need a tool that makes my calls go directly from my computer to my contact's computer (no third-party serve in-between), which encrypts the data transferred,

    Easy.

    and which let's me have an always up-to-date list of contacts to easily call people (basically, I can't have a tool that won't work if my contact changes IP address overnight and hasn't told me the new address yet).

    Harder.

    Either there's a central (or distributed) point to go to to locate a person on the network, or locations must be updated to everyone in the network when they change.

    There's going to be a trade-off between security and convenience in any communication system. How much convenience are you willing to give up for paranoia?

    Let's assume we have a Skype-like system. There's a central database of IP addresses to contacts. Clients update their address whenever they are signed in (effectively constant). You can query this database and get the location of an individual anytime you need it. But you don't know who controls the database - which means someone else can see who you're querying for. There's also the added bit that whoever controls the database knows where everyone on the network is at all times.

    Ok, so we don't fully trust whoever controls the database. We decide instead to switch to another system that has similar features, but in this case, the database is not real time - clients only update it once every 24 hours. But we have the benefit that we can download the entire database and query it ourself, so that whoever controls the database doesn't know who we're actually contacting - but there's the downside that the data may be stale and thus our contact unreachable until the next update.

    Either you always know where your contacts are, or you need someone else to keep track of them. There are downsides both ways. Also, this is very elementary level paranoia musing - there's plenty of places to go for really epic level paranoia discussions about crypto.

  • On the post: Clearing The Air On Skype: Most Of What You Read Was Not Accurate, But There Are Still Reasons To Worry

    Josh in CharlotteNC ( profile ), 27 Jul, 2012 @ 01:31pm

    Re: Encryption keys

    However, if skype is smart, they would include your password (or hash of) in their signing procedure, and that would make it VERY difficult for anyone to decrypt your communications without first having your password (which Skype would not turn over).

    I don't see how that would change anything. Skype already has the encryption key. Adding a password into the mix that Skype still controls does not change the level of security. If law enforcement can demand the keys, Skype still has to turn them over.

    Basically, we're talking key escrow here. There's a reason that went nowhere in the 90s among security professionals and crypto geeks. If you don't have control of your own key, you must trust the security of whoever is holding that key.

  • On the post: NZ Copyright Industry Claims New 'Three Strikes' Law Halved Movie Infringements After One Month: So What?

    Josh in CharlotteNC ( profile ), 27 Jul, 2012 @ 06:45am

    Re: Re: Re:

    Nobody is trying to STOP piracy, that would be foolish. The idea isn't to stop it, the idea is to make it unpalatable to those people who might take the risk instead of buying or obtaining the product through legal means.

    If the idea is only to make piracy unpalatable, then offer quality content in a convenient manner for a reasonable price. You know, like we've been saying for years.

    If you don't offer services the customers want, even if you manage to decrease piracy, you will have a relapse because there are no alternatives.

  • On the post: SOPA/PIPA Wakes Up Internet Giants To Realize They Need To Be More Engaged In DC

    Josh in CharlotteNC ( profile ), 25 Jul, 2012 @ 05:52pm

    Re:

    I agree.

    I fear this will only increase the lobbying and perpetuate the corruption.

    But I guess this is just a sign of the times we live in.

    I'll borrow a quote from a movie that I didn't think was a bad as everyone else thought it was:

    "In normal times, evil would be fought by good. But in times like these, well, it should be fought by another kind of evil."

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