Posts by Kyle Matthews
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Regarding the H2GO/photo thing, is there actually any right in NZ *not* to have one's photo taken in public and used for any purpose?
There is such a right. My memory of the discussion I had with someone is that you have rights over your image and its use for certain purposes. When it comes to commercial purposes, news media have some exemptions, but companies can't just take a photo of some hot woman drinking their product and then use it for advertising.
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You could easily develop a standalone no outputs playback device that does not have digital outputs on it. media is only playable on the one device.
The only way that'll be 'safe' is if that's the only way that you sell your music.
And given that people won't buy it if it has to be run through some expensive playback device and can't go through anything else (like the expensive, great-sounding stereo that everyone has already paid a bunch of money to own to play music) then I don't really see the point.
People will just go buy different music that comes on CD or digitally without having to use your device. Your competition will sell music, which will be on-distributed online, and you'll sell virtually nothing.
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Good post before Craig. Context does matter.
I quite like the movie Primary Colors. A good fun look at the mess that is running for US President. Very entertaining.
But I like my entertainment in this regard to be fiction, not, y'know, reality (yes I'm aware that the writers of the movie were inspired by real events). These people aren't running for Chief Seabed Tiddly-winker after all.
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how so? Barak has indeed been comparing himself to Reagan (both are apparently Great Transformers)- it's one of the things Krugman has been crtical of him for. It's not a lie.
Maybe he's comparing himself to Megatron. Y'know. In a "more than meets the eye" kinda way.
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Are we being made to feel responsible for the economy? Well, no more than we're all being made to feel responsible for global warming or other environmental concerns. And its similar in principle: you can do a little bit to help, perhaps: put out the recycling and when you need to replace your car try to get something a bit more fuel efficient. So with the economy: save a little bit more, if and when you can.
I think there's probably a similar level of personal involvement in the two things in your example. The comparisons though - running around burning gasoline is bad for the environment, there's no good in it. More is obviously worse, and less is better, but they're all along a scale of "not good for the environment".
The economy is a little different. More spending will have mixed effects for the economy. It will lead to inflation if everyone does it, but it'll also be good for retailers and importers and manufacturers. No spending, unlike no using gasoline, would obviously be a disaster economically.
I guess where I've come around to is - the current tax level is kinda arbitrary, and its not set for the purposes of stabilising inflation, it's set to get the government to a certain level of income.
The argument 'a tax cut would be bad because it would lead to inflation' would make more sense to me if the government took a firmer hand with the 2/3 (or so) of income that people actually took home already. If there was compulsory savings or something.
But our tax rate isn't a method we use to control inflation (EXCEPT when we've chosen a tax rate and then want to fend off the opposition who are arguing for a tax cut, all of a sudden changing the tax rate would lead to inflation).
We shouldn't cut taxes because debt of (graduating?) students jumped $10,000 in four years (I heard this morning). In the context of that, what's prices going up 1%, particularly when spending of taxes directly affects student debt, but it only has a partial and non-direct effect on price increases.
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I can think of a number of ways that might work. developing a delivery medium that is not easily stripable in a computer would be a start, yes you could do a real time a to d copy of it, but the bummer bout that is it takes time, its a hassle.
I think the problem that the music industry faces, is that as soon as they move their music to a new hardware, people will come up with a way to strip it out. It'll get hacked or replicated without the protection, it'll be like the multi-zone dvd players, or people will just find a way to output the music straight into their computer and record it.
The industry put a fair bit of investment (and not just financial investment) into protection on their CDs, and people got around them in a few hours. I got around the protection on my Shihad CD by the complicated procedure of putting it into my dvd drive rather than cd drive on my computer. Now we're ten years later and they're still floundering against the tide with a tennis racquet.
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Up to a point, Kyle. But a reality-based discussion might finally be in order -- because I'm not sure duelling talking heads playing pass the ticking parcel is really much help either. 'The economy' is not some super-terrestrial abstraction we can step aside from when its convenient to do so.
No, we can't step aside, and talking heads never particularly help.
But there's no hard link between x% of tax and y% of inflation. The tax rates we have at present aren't at this level because it's the level to maintain a certain level of inflation. It's the amount of money that a government wanted to get an amount of tax income to spend on what they wanted, relative to what the old tax rates were and the income groupings at that point in time etc etc. Inflation settled after the tax rate was set, and it'd settle again, prices won't keep going up to infinity.
Yes a change in tax levels will affect inflation. That doesn't mean we shouldn't ever cut taxes, or increase them. The media portrays inflation as all bad. Well sometimes inflation, particularly if it follows a tax cut means that people have more money to spend on various things, so economics 101 teaches us that the price goes up a little. Even with the higher price, they still got to buy a bit more stuff, and for some people, that's really big. I find it a little rude for economists on six figure salaries to tell me, and people less well off, that a tiny bit more money in our pockets will massively upset an economy. I'm not sure when the economy got ahead of actual people in the list of things that mattered.
The market is a mixture of: A) A big boy - it'll get past a little bit more money being spent, and B) a small player on a big international stage, and everyone having a little more change is going to make a lot less impact than the American economy going belly-up.
I'm not in favour of tax cuts, they're down my list of what I'd like the government to do. But to me the argument against them isn't "ooh, inflation! bogey man! run away!". It's 1. Education spending. 2. Health spending. etc.
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I did a 10 second search on the Turkey youtube thing, and yes I was right, people have found umpteen ways around it, including a couple I guessed at.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/03/howto_evade_tur.html
If they want to stop the internet, they should get a big pair of scissors and cut the line.
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and they're doing it at the bottle neck that you at present can't get past. which is your internet provider.
Well for starters, people will just start their own internet providers and hook straight into the main trunk line. You want to see underground ISPs start to flare up, you start directing mainstream providers to poke into what people are doing online.
And it's very difficult to disrupt P2P traffic. It can skip through the port ranges. It's not possible to control it by volume for music files, because the files actually aren't that large. Internet packets aren't necessarily identifiable by themselves, so you couldn't even set up a filter and sniff each packet as it went past. Even if they found a way to sniff it, some geek will just design a music format which will beat the sniffer, and it'll become the new standard.
If music companies thought they could win this battle by modifying the internet they would be. They'd be demanding the internet version 3 with routers with compulsory software at hubs and it would all just shut down illegal transfers. They'd be in front of parliament demanding laws to apply to ISPs and the major cables going between countries. They know that's not going to work, that's why they've been jumping through hoops trying to control the CDs, and the distribution networks that people use.
And I bet, if Turkey is filtering out youtube, people in Turkey are finding other ways to get the videos. Someone will be running a server that they can pass through with another address, or they'll be parsing the files into MP4s and torrenting them into the country and setting up a local server with copies of you tube files, or people will be adding other addresses to the youtube dns to keep one hop ahead of them.
The internet was specifically designed to withstand these sorts of things - primarily nuclear attack, by routing around things that prevent access and maintaining an open network. Once you add people that use the internet, and are going to help it work around it, the war's already over, people are just still fighting the battles.
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I personally think it will get to a stage where internet traffic will be monitored and controlled.
This is another technical solution, which won't work. The 'internet' as an entity is breaking these things, because it crosses national barriers, and our international laws are very weak in this regard. Music files will just be encrypted, broken down into smaller packets, delivered via torrents etc. The physical nature of the net makes this possible, and makes stopping it impossible.
Rightly or wrongly, the battle is lost, they're trying to win at an old world game in a new world.
If governments came together and dictated that the internet would be controlled in this matter, then someone would just write a new protocol and we'd all switch over. 'The internet' wouldn't accept it, it would adapt, and overcome.
Just like the borg really :)