It makes me smile in a sad way that sound exchange is nonprofit.

50% goes to the artists and 50% to the copyright holder (usually the record company), I read somewhere.

Sound exchange is run by an 18 member board, 1/2 represent artists and 1/2 industry.

This is very true, the actual source materials about this agreement are scarce right now, I'm holding out hope that there will be some exemptions for 501.c and educational institutions at least.

BTW in 2004, the minimum was $500. 2009 - $25,000.

I've spent a few hours reading up on this and everything I've seen says $25k minimum. However, the actual source information is extremely limited (sound exchange website is so bad) and the details are a bit confusing so I'm hoping something will come up (501.c orgs?) but right now every single piece of reliable info says $25k minimum which is the death of all small webcasters.

All the news articles saying this is a victory are a) representing the views of larger webcasters and b) contrasting it to what could have happened if the 2007 library of congress royalty rates held

No one mentioned this jewel yet, you also must keep 4 years of detailed server logs (who listened to what when, etc.) and provide them to the agency managing the royalty payments. If you don't want to keep and submit detailed logs, you can pay an additional fee to get out of most of this reporting requirement (a 'proxy fee' amount unspecified).

The $25,000 minimum fee completely closes webcasting to all but large professional players, which is bad for music. The claim to gross revenues of all activities related to the website makes it impossible for businesses to run webcasts b/c soundsafe will tap into the businesses' gross (bad for web developers). Even without the $25k minimum the royalty rates are outrageous (coming up on 1 cent per song per listener by 2015 - and 14 cents per song per listener for some types of stations (make your own playlists).

It used to be music, then it was the music business, now it's just business. Such a shame.

You're kidding/trolling, right? Or just skimming the comments.

OK let's say you have a passion for some music genre, gregorian chants, and wanted to make a webstation dedicated to playing them. You're willing to foot the cost of streaming, it's your passionate hobby. You're even willing to pay some performance fees. Like radio does (k that's not technically right but they do pay licensing fees) of say .0009 dollars per song per listener. Total per year - a few grand. This is where we were in 2004.

Now, you pay a MINIMUM of $25,000 OR 7% of your TOTAL expenses or up to 25% of your GROSS earnings. For everything. So if your gregorian chant radio station is in a little controller on your blog, you have to pay 25% of your blogs gross earnings too. If it's on your website that advertises your gregorian chant music store, 25% of your music store's earnings.

Radio pays squat because radio knew that they were good for the artists, who would then make their money touring and in record sales, etc. Webstations are the same, they're great for the artists, but the music industry saw a chance to force everyone who's not a big player out of the game and bleed the survivors and they freaking pounced.

The only reason this is seen as a victory is because the alternative (library of congress' rules under Bush) was even worse. It's like saying WOOT! Vietnam War! at least it's not WWII. True, but not meaningful.

Pandora is happy ($40 mil in rev last year) but the big get to play and the small are sent away. again.

fuckers.

you bike through devil's slide? you're insane! sure it's pretty and all but the grades and the tight corners...

I don't understand peeps who bike on highway 1 between sf and stinson beach either, but up mt. tam, at least that's kind of a multi-use road.

not that i'm saying you have no right to those roads, i'm just saying you're insane :)

(btw my greatest fear when I was a motorcyclist were bicyclists on those roads, I'm so glad nothing bad ever happened, scared the shit out of me that as I came into a corner at... some great rate of speed there's be a bike right past the apex a little too far into the road)

Want to hijack this trollfest and see if I can get some useful information - the thing city bikes REALLY need is regenerative breaking - compared to cars, bikes suck at acceleration, and trying to conserve precious momentum makes breaking traffic laws way too tempting - some regenerative breaking would solve both problems and more.

http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Regenerative_20Brake_20Bike here are some http://www.physicsforums.com/archive/index.php/t-206514.htmllinks but it seems while everyone agrees 'it's tricky but can be done' no one has actually done it.

Not sure why that is, any additional info/ideas would be welcome. I think it would really transform the urban environment if it could be worked out. And I have fantasies of keeping peddling at stoplights then shooting off @ proper street speeds.

Usually it's clear to me but this time I can't decide if I'm feeding the trolls or not.

I'm in SF, but this applies to DC and NYC as well, not sure about others.

Sidewalks are for pedestrians. Only*. Streets are for wheeled vehicles. Cars have as much and as little right to the streets as bikes do. legally, that's a fact, but I think it's right as well.

let's get this straight - first off 15 in a 45? wtf? city speed limits are 25 unless posted @ 30. I can do 20-25 on a flat, 30 with a little downhill, so let's not worry about the speeds. I *constantly* pass cars that are doing 15-20. Let's just say it sucks to be behind someone slow but it happens, deal with it.

8 feet from the curb? well, 4 of those are taken up by a parked car, another 2 or so by their opened door, so that leaves 2 feet. you're right, 7 feet from the curb is better. apologies for that extra foot someone took, they were wrong.

kamikazi nut jobs? i guarantee there are more of those in cars than on bikes. and they can do SO much more damage in a car, don't you agree? so be glad if a few have climbed on a bike, might save your life that they have, and you just worry about those in cars, or worse, SUVs. I'll take 10 kamikazi on bikes over 1 in an SUV any day.

Finally, can't beat'm? join'm. no worries about parking, work some fat off your ass, do a little tiny bit to save the environment and free the country from dependence on foreign oil (and all the benefits that entails).

K, I think I'm done, sorry for making the trolls fatter but this was just too... very.

*maybe skateboards, and of course, wheelchairs

I would love to see a thorough real-world user-level and tech-level review of linux -> vm -> windows it seems in theory like the answer to so many problems but I keep hearing it's still just. not. there. yet. Yes, I'm about to do another test install (been ... 2 or 3 years since I tried it, was so not ready for the general public back then).

- very very imho -
backups don't help your users who might be attacked by your compromised sites but the ability to wipe the bad and restart is great. requires multiple levels of backups, daily, weekly, monthly, all separate.

You can't restart immediately, presumably you'll get nailed by the same exploit when you recover, but at least you'll know there's a specific problem - finding something specific is nearly always easier than finding something general.

also, control your URLs. controlling what can be passed to your site controls a hell of a lot of security problems.

lastly - make sure your logs are good and safe and verbose. if you pay attention to making the logs right, when you have a problem, you can find someone to review the logs and find the issue. if you don't have the logs, well. you're more screwed.

Do those three things and some common sense when coding and you'll be better off than most. Security is always where you draw the line, personally I like it a bit ahead of the curve but no where near perfect.

Since a lot of the non-left-handed discussion revolves around passwords thought I'd share my method - I have to make a LOT of passwords for my job and keeping track of them is insane so for most things I use this -

take a keyword, say, the site name, the email address, or the login name you're using for a system. Take the numeric position of the first letter, add one on and that's where I start choosing 6 letters of a 'secret' 13 letter word I use. then add the square of the number of letters in the keyword at the end.

for example, if logging into ebay and the secret word was quellesuprise I'd start with the 6th character of the secret word, type 5 more letters of the word, then 16. so for ebay it's esupri16.

it works, but could be better. a) it not always obvious what the keyword should be and b) if someone say 4 or 5 of my passwords they could guess the system and crack many more.