I like reading two publications regularly: The Economist and SEED Magazine. The articles are consistently well written and the perspectives are fresh.
This quote jumped out at me, from Noam Chomsky, interviewed in SEED this month.
One of the most important comments on deceit, I think, was made by Adam Smith. He pointed out that a major goal of business is to deceive and oppress the public. And one of the striking features of the modern period is the institutionalization of that process, so that now we have huge industries deceiving the public — and they’re very conscious about it, the public relations industry. Interestingly, this developed in the freest countries — in Britain and the US — rougly around the time of WWII, when it was recognized that enough freedom had been won that people could no longer be controlled by force. So modes of deception had to be developed in order to keep them under control.
Robert Trivers chimes in:
The other thing is these massive industries of persuasion and deception, which, one can conceptualize, are also inducing a form of either ignorance or self-deception in listeners, where they come to believe that they know the truth when in fact they’re just being manipulated…
I had just finished the latest SNIA paper on ILM when I shifted to this article in my reading room (the toilet). Couldn’t have summarized by thoughts about the previous read better.
I also can’t get off the July 8 issue of The Economist, despite the fact that a couple of new issues have come across the transom. There is a good piece there about the French legislature’s efforts to separate iPod from iTunes — considering it to be a monopolistic situation. Detractors say, iPod’s close coupling to iTunes is just like a laser printer requiring a specialized cartridge.
In the end, I’ll bet that Apple will just walk away from France with its wares.
The article pretends, however, that you can’t place your MP3s from other sources on the iPod (or the iTunes downloads on any other MP3 Player brand). This is not true of course. Just as you can buy refurb cartridges or off-brand knockoffs for your HP LaserJet (voiding your warranty, of course), you can also shovel non-iTunes music into your iPod.
The other article in that issue that I keep re-reading is on viral marketing — efforts of the media advertiser to avoid being Tivo’ed out of existence. The pressure is on to make ads entertaining and place them in the sequence of normal entertainment broadcasting rather than interrupting the flow. Good idea that.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Hmm, I agree that you can easily put non-DRM music from other sources on an Ipod, for example MP3s ripped from your own music collection, but if you buy DRM music from source other than Apple (i.e. DRM WMV files) you can’t play them back on the Ipod because it doesn’t understand the DRM and cant decode the content. Similarly, you can’t take iTunes music and put it on another player because Apple doesn’t license the Fairplay DRM code.
If you want to take iTunes downloads and put them on another player, you have to find a way of getting around the DRM and then converting them from the Apple AAC codec to something like MP3, so it’s a non-trivial task.
Nik, I showed the article to my son and he told me that numerous hacks exist that enable the free transfer of music to and from the iPod. I never caught the bug, so I wouldn’t know.
He had a bunch of iTune downloads but his iPod kept dying. He transferred it all to his Mac, then from there to his new player, which isn’t iPod.
Not sure what to make of this in any case. Only, that I am not prepared to take up the flag pro or con on this one.
I would go generic with MP3 players in any case. Just don’t see why I need a brand name anything. Heck, I could buy 3 or 4 NetGear Storage Centrals for what an iPod costs and I could use them to store everything from videos to ebooks to music to games. Even real work.
Sounds like he’s talking about the same thing, utilities (which are technically illegal under the DMCA) that strip of the DRM from an iTunes track.
My son, doing something illegal? Faggadaboutit.
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