The library system in our state (CT) is about as current as what is available through Netflix, with a slightly longer waiting period for high demand stuff.
For the past 2 years, I've played a game where I put something in my Netflix DVD queue and request it from the library at the same time (there is a waiting list for requests in the library system). Quite often, the library delivers well before Netflix does, so I just cancel that request from my Netflix queue. As hard as it has been lately to get recent films in a timely fashion via DVD mailing from Netflix, donating a few more dollars to the state library system seems like a smart investment. The purchasing (and negotiating) power of an entire state is nothing to sneeze at.
Actually, the customers are (still) in complete control of pricing. Nothing (as of yet) forces me to pay for anything if I decide instead to take a walk and enjoy Nature, or read a book, or work in the garden, or play cards with friends, or give my sister a few dollars and watch a movie over at her house, or... do any other thing people used to do before ubiquitous mass media entertainment. They can control pricing all they want, but nothing is forcing me to buy, and I'll happily cancel subscriptions and walk away if the price is too high. These days, there is plenty of independent content on the internet produced by normal folks that is entertaining enough. My daughter spends a big part of each day watching YouTube videos created by ordinary folks with something interesting (or banal) to say. I could probably find something like that for myself to fill my "mindless entertainment" quota.
I happily await the long overdue "entertainment bubble".
Replying to myself, the fact that this story has only garnered 20 responses in several hours, whilst other stories posted later are in the 100's already, shows the level of apathy slashdotters feel for Mr. Andreessen and his proclamations. I should have know the proper response was no response at all. I guess I still have a little evolving to do.:-)
Apart from his involvement with Mosaic and Netscape, all his projects and proclamations about the web share several common traits: breathless articles on the part of the technical and popular press detailing the web pioneer/VC entrepeneur's AWESOME vision of the future, and rapid passage into obscurity as the proclaimed AWESOME future did not come to pass.
At this point, the word Andreesen does no more for me than trigger an involuntary yawn.
I wasn't alive to witness the first launch of the space shuttle
I was, and it was wonderful. There was a time when every launch of the shuttle was an event worth noting, and those of us who were interested would gather around the radio or TV to witness the event. That stopped when shuttle launches became commonplace. That was cool, because, well, launching a ship into space should be commonplace. Sadly, this meant noone cared any longer, because shuttle launches were unremarkable and uninteresting. Now no-one cares about space any longer, and the shuttle program is discontinued with no replacement in sight. Welcome to the new Dark Ages. This is a sad day.
I know an author who lost the entire first chapter of her book this way. She uploaded it to Facebook in order to share it with her publisher. Facebook then sued her (and won) when her book was published. She now owes Facebook ALL MONEY she ever made on that chapter (a portion of her portion of the sales) AND over $100,000 in attorney fees that Facebook spent to sue her out of her own hard word and creativity.
I have a hard time believing this anecdote - I suspect you just made this up.
If true, it should have been all over the news, given that stories about the 'dangers' of FaceBook are fairly popular. A story about how FaceBook wants you to upload your IP so they can sue away your rights for their own profit would be making the rounds in no time.
Provide some links to valid news articles describing this case or I'll have to call this a fictional fabrication.
I thought of that, but didn't mention it because I was feeling nice and I didn't want to write a book. On the other hand, "poorly written" was meant to encompass even your speculative scenario - artificially forcing version specificity to maximize revenue potential is still bad engineering.
Who are these 'customers' you speak of? Mozilla hasn't asked for a single cent from anyone that I'm aware of. A functional browser ecosystem might be important to whomever is providing Mozilla with a revenue-stream, but that sure as hell isn't the 'users', so don't call them customers.
there is a lot of *poorly written yet expensive* software that requires a specific web browser version. Cognos springs to mind. if you have a later browser it may not work and you have to buy a later version of the software which is very expensive. and companies use a lot of this type of software. cognos, web logic and lots of others.
There, fixed that for you. Given that the vast majority (ie. almost all of it) of web-based software, much of it quite sophisticated, does *not* require a specific browser, let alone a specific browser *version* and works just fine, this speaks volumes about the poor software engineering skills of the vendors in question. Not to mention the questionable judgment of the customers that pay for this expensive brittleware.
I realize your statement was intended to be sarcastic, but a responsible user has to take at least *some* responsibility for his/her software. That includes actually deciding for themselves whether or not to accept an upgrade after determining whether their favorite plugins are compatible with the new version. Given the fact that Mozilla users are the recipients of fruits of the hard work of many people and are asked for no compensation of any kind, complaining about a delay in plugin compatibility just comes across as entitled whining. Don't upgrade and wait until your plugins are compatible, or lend a hand and help get them ready. Otherwise STFU.
Agreed. I made a weak attempt to acknowledge this in my opening sentence, but in my haste to get to my main point, I was overly dismissive without meaning to be. Moving beyond simulations and into the real world is definitely a necessary and laudable achievement.
I understand that small steps (no pun intended) need to be taken to advance the state of the art, but this remains an academic novelty until these little guys can do something useful. Doesn't have to be terribly complicated. There are plenty of simple yet highly repetitious and tedious tasks that would be perfect for a cooperating swarm of little worker bots working in parallel. Like carrying the leaves off of the lawn and depositing them in the woods (or a recycling bag) in the fall or similar. Then I would be impressed (and would be the first in line to buy the kit).
Bullshit. "A degree" won't transform a non-geek to a geek, but a transforming life experience (which could include earning a degree) might. I don't place much stock in the "you have to be born with it" nonsense. Granted, change becomes harder over time, so geek transformation is less likely to happen later in life, but it's possible. Besides, using the definition very loosely, there are plenty of geeks who are probably not recognized as such because their geekery is more mainstream. Fashion, music, finance, needlepoint, gardening... the list could go on. "Traditional" geeks don't like to acknowledge this because it detracts from their particularly acute need for specialness. That's why a lot of geeks self-identify, I would guess. But it's really not that special, sorry to say. I'd go so far as to say that geekery is part of our DNA - geekery about things that enables oneself and family/tribe to stay alive seems like a good survival skill to have.
No, but Directories/Folders as low level storage (the files have to exist somewhere) and a layer on top of that which can provide metadata tagging, searching, views etc. is. KDE4 with Nepomuk (http://nepomuk.kde.org/) seems to provide much of what the OP asked for.
I like your idea of rights ownership being something you have to pay for to maintain
Pay to WHO exactly? The government? Which government? How would you enforce this if another country took the idea?
That's easy enough. Yes - the government. Which? The one that has jurisdiction over the region/population for which you desire exclusive rights. Small businesses register themselves to the local jurisdiction, larger corporations to the national government, multinationals - whatever they do. Enforcement as it occurs now - by agreements between nations. The infrastructure is already there - what changes is the degree to which the benefit of the work is one-sided. If you want national or world-wide protection for your IP, you can damn well register yourself and pay for the resources needed to ensure your exclusive rights are protected. If your work isn't valuable enough to actively develop and protect, then you just fall back on the defaults or release to the public domain.
What most people on slashdot really want is free stuff. They see that they can take it and get away with not paying and want to justify it. They then wrap it in a fiction that they are all about freedom.
Whoa there, good sir. You paint with an awfully broad brush. I suspect what most people really want is "fairly priced" stuff, not "free" stuff. That describes me pretty well.
Also, the conundrum faced by industries based on (as you say) high cost of production and nearly zero cost of duplication is that customers not purchasing the product due to lack of interest are indistinguishable from those not purchasing due to obtaining a duplicate copy. The challenge is how to convince potential customers to pay, regardless of whether they have access to a copy. Make the product better by offering something of value that can't easily be duplicated, convince people who haven't yet paid for something they have benefited from the value of doing so, make it dead easy to make a purchase and above all, make the asking price fair. Stricter laws and more draconian DRM doesn't really work as a way to cultivate a customer's willingness to purchase a product (it seems to be a good way to cause people to ignore it in favor of something else.)
What you need to do is divorce the right to control a work from the right to profit from it.
Beware the law of unintended consequences. This is exactly the kind of thing that enables things like patent trolling. Buy the rights to control something, wait for someone else to do the hard work and extract payment. We want less of that kind of thing, not more. Rather figure out a way to ensure that the right to control a work comes with the obligation to exercise good stewardship and a mandate to develop the work, not just the right to profit.
Now, with that said: there is a future problem for content industries. Technology and content are becoming commoditized. Rendering technologies, places like Pixar, are becoming more and more realistic. And those technologies will eventually have Free implementations. Also, Free content, right now predominately in operating systems, is beginning to spread to other areas: props, character models, textures, sounds, music, and scripts: anything imaginable to make a story whether interactive or not. Eventually, using nothing more than creative commons material and lots of computer rendering power any individual or small group of individuals will be able to match the creative quality of today's Hollywood. There will be a collapse eventually for movies, fictional books, and music. It can only be held off.
1. That's why the next weapon in the IP arsenal after copyright to be rolled out in a big way will be patents, most likely. Recent lawsuits are a hint that this has already begun. Free/libre implementations of valuable technologies will likely be quashed by a flurry of patent suits, particularly if one tries to build a business of any kind using such tools (either selling or prominently using them). You don't have to eliminate free technology to gain an advantage, just suppress it by making everyone afraid of having to deal with patent suits.
2. Free content won't make commercial content creation industries collapse, though they might contract somewhat. Free/libre content will likely be labeled as crass/common/kitsch/whatever via prominent advertising campaigns and the like. Just as today people spend big money for jeans with a little red tag on the hip pocket or a cheap t-shirt with a the french word for 'airmail' on it rather than buying less expensive 'generic' versions, so people will likely spend big bucks to consume "brand name" content. Social networks will probably help tremendously in manipulating the weak-minded to shun free/libre content in favor of lucrative branded versions.
I like your idea of rights ownership being something you have to pay for to maintain. That would actually provide more of an incentive, it seems, to *actively* work at keeping your IP valuable, rather than just sitting back doing nothing while the terms get extended for work produced a life-time ago.
I would also add some form of property tax. I have to pay taxes on things I own that are considered valuable (my land, house, automobiles, boats etc.). If rights owners (and their apologists) want to insist that creative works and exclusive rights to them are valuable 'intellectual' property that warrants police-state-like measures to enforce (often at taxpayer expense), then this property should be taxed just like other highly valuable items. (I would love to watch the rights owners tie themselves up in knots as they simultaneously try to inflate the value of their IP to exaggerate the impact of unauthorized copying and deflate it to minimize the tax liability.) Shifting to a CC-license of some sort would reduce or eliminate the taxation, much as non-profits are tax-exempt.
Jean Grey and Wolverine and Rogue
on
X-Men: First Class
·
· Score: 5, Informative
to me *are* the X-Men
Silly movie fanboy! Jean Grey is the only one of those three that qualifies as an original X-person (along with Cyclops, Beast, Angel and Iceman). Wolverine was originally a throwaway character in an otherwise forgettable Incredible Hulk issue and Rogue was a third-rate villain in an Avenger's Annual (number 10). Wolverine at least has the distinction of being a member of the team that launched the title to fame (starting with Giant-Sized X-Men #1 and Uncanny X-Men 97), so he's got some credibility. But Rogue? Meh.
Slashdot Mirror
Good for you. It's nice that they can't arbitrarily change the price and terms of the service at any time. Or can they ....
The library system in our state (CT) is about as current as what is available through Netflix, with a slightly longer waiting period for high demand stuff.
For the past 2 years, I've played a game where I put something in my Netflix DVD queue and request it from the library at the same time (there is a waiting list for requests in the library system). Quite often, the library delivers well before Netflix does, so I just cancel that request from my Netflix queue. As hard as it has been lately to get recent films in a timely fashion via DVD mailing from Netflix, donating a few more dollars to the state library system seems like a smart investment. The purchasing (and negotiating) power of an entire state is nothing to sneeze at.
Actually, the customers are (still) in complete control of pricing. Nothing (as of yet) forces me to pay for anything if I decide instead to take a walk and enjoy Nature, or read a book, or work in the garden, or play cards with friends, or give my sister a few dollars and watch a movie over at her house, or ... do any other thing people used to do before ubiquitous mass media entertainment. They can control pricing all they want, but nothing is forcing me to buy, and I'll happily cancel subscriptions and walk away if the price is too high. These days, there is plenty of independent content on the internet produced by normal folks that is entertaining enough. My daughter spends a big part of each day watching YouTube videos created by ordinary folks with something interesting (or banal) to say. I could probably find something like that for myself to fill my "mindless entertainment" quota.
I happily await the long overdue "entertainment bubble".
LOL.
Replying to myself, the fact that this story has only garnered 20 responses in several hours, whilst other stories posted later are in the 100's already, shows the level of apathy slashdotters feel for Mr. Andreessen and his proclamations. I should have know the proper response was no response at all. I guess I still have a little evolving to do. :-)
Apart from his involvement with Mosaic and Netscape, all his projects and proclamations about the web share several common traits: breathless articles on the part of the technical and popular press detailing the web pioneer/VC entrepeneur's AWESOME vision of the future, and rapid passage into obscurity as the proclaimed AWESOME future did not come to pass.
At this point, the word Andreesen does no more for me than trigger an involuntary yawn.
I wasn't alive to witness the first launch of the space shuttle
I was, and it was wonderful. There was a time when every launch of the shuttle was an event worth noting, and those of us who were interested would gather around the radio or TV to witness the event. That stopped when shuttle launches became commonplace. That was cool, because, well, launching a ship into space should be commonplace. Sadly, this meant noone cared any longer, because shuttle launches were unremarkable and uninteresting. Now no-one cares about space any longer, and the shuttle program is discontinued with no replacement in sight. Welcome to the new Dark Ages. This is a sad day.
I am so disappointed my mod points from a few days ago have disappeared. I would have used (one of) them for this post. Sing on, brother, sing on.
I know an author who lost the entire first chapter of her book this way. She uploaded it to Facebook in order to share it with her publisher. Facebook then sued her (and won) when her book was published. She now owes Facebook ALL MONEY she ever made on that chapter (a portion of her portion of the sales) AND over $100,000 in attorney fees that Facebook spent to sue her out of her own hard word and creativity.
I have a hard time believing this anecdote - I suspect you just made this up.
If true, it should have been all over the news, given that stories about the 'dangers' of FaceBook are fairly popular. A story about how FaceBook wants you to upload your IP so they can sue away your rights for their own profit would be making the rounds in no time.
Provide some links to valid news articles describing this case or I'll have to call this a fictional fabrication.
I thought of that, but didn't mention it because I was feeling nice and I didn't want to write a book. On the other hand, "poorly written" was meant to encompass even your speculative scenario - artificially forcing version specificity to maximize revenue potential is still bad engineering.
Who are these 'customers' you speak of? Mozilla hasn't asked for a single cent from anyone that I'm aware of. A functional browser ecosystem might be important to whomever is providing Mozilla with a revenue-stream, but that sure as hell isn't the 'users', so don't call them customers.
there is a lot of *poorly written yet expensive* software that requires a specific web browser version. Cognos springs to mind. if you have a later browser it may not work and you have to buy a later version of the software which is very expensive. and companies use a lot of this type of software. cognos, web logic and lots of others.
There, fixed that for you. Given that the vast majority (ie. almost all of it) of web-based software, much of it quite sophisticated, does *not* require a specific browser, let alone a specific browser *version* and works just fine, this speaks volumes about the poor software engineering skills of the vendors in question. Not to mention the questionable judgment of the customers that pay for this expensive brittleware.
I realize your statement was intended to be sarcastic, but a responsible user has to take at least *some* responsibility for his/her software. That includes actually deciding for themselves whether or not to accept an upgrade after determining whether their favorite plugins are compatible with the new version. Given the fact that Mozilla users are the recipients of fruits of the hard work of many people and are asked for no compensation of any kind, complaining about a delay in plugin compatibility just comes across as entitled whining. Don't upgrade and wait until your plugins are compatible, or lend a hand and help get them ready. Otherwise STFU.
Are you sure about this? Citation needed.
Well, why not?
Will Apple make more money selling music at $0.99/track, or $hundreds_or_thousands_or_millions selling infringers to the lawyers?
My money is on the lawyers.
Agreed. I made a weak attempt to acknowledge this in my opening sentence, but in my haste to get to my main point, I was overly dismissive without meaning to be. Moving beyond simulations and into the real world is definitely a necessary and laudable achievement.
I understand that small steps (no pun intended) need to be taken to advance the state of the art, but this remains an academic novelty until these little guys can do something useful. Doesn't have to be terribly complicated. There are plenty of simple yet highly repetitious and tedious tasks that would be perfect for a cooperating swarm of little worker bots working in parallel. Like carrying the leaves off of the lawn and depositing them in the woods (or a recycling bag) in the fall or similar. Then I would be impressed (and would be the first in line to buy the kit).
Bullshit. "A degree" won't transform a non-geek to a geek, but a transforming life experience (which could include earning a degree) might. I don't place much stock in the "you have to be born with it" nonsense. Granted, change becomes harder over time, so geek transformation is less likely to happen later in life, but it's possible. Besides, using the definition very loosely, there are plenty of geeks who are probably not recognized as such because their geekery is more mainstream. Fashion, music, finance, needlepoint, gardening ... the list could go on. "Traditional" geeks don't like to acknowledge this because it detracts from their particularly acute need for specialness. That's why a lot of geeks self-identify, I would guess. But it's really not that special, sorry to say. I'd go so far as to say that geekery is part of our DNA - geekery about things that enables oneself and family/tribe to stay alive seems like a good survival skill to have.
No, but Directories/Folders as low level storage (the files have to exist somewhere) and a layer on top of that which can provide metadata tagging, searching, views etc. is. KDE4 with Nepomuk (http://nepomuk.kde.org/) seems to provide much of what the OP asked for.
I like your idea of rights ownership being something you have to pay for to maintain
Pay to WHO exactly? The government? Which government? How would you enforce this if another country took the idea?
That's easy enough. Yes - the government. Which? The one that has jurisdiction over the region/population for which you desire exclusive rights. Small businesses register themselves to the local jurisdiction, larger corporations to the national government, multinationals - whatever they do. Enforcement as it occurs now - by agreements between nations. The infrastructure is already there - what changes is the degree to which the benefit of the work is one-sided. If you want national or world-wide protection for your IP, you can damn well register yourself and pay for the resources needed to ensure your exclusive rights are protected. If your work isn't valuable enough to actively develop and protect, then you just fall back on the defaults or release to the public domain.
What most people on slashdot really want is free stuff. They see that they can take it and get away with not paying and want to justify it. They then wrap it in a fiction that they are all about freedom.
Whoa there, good sir. You paint with an awfully broad brush. I suspect what most people really want is "fairly priced" stuff, not "free" stuff. That describes me pretty well.
Also, the conundrum faced by industries based on (as you say) high cost of production and nearly zero cost of duplication is that customers not purchasing the product due to lack of interest are indistinguishable from those not purchasing due to obtaining a duplicate copy. The challenge is how to convince potential customers to pay, regardless of whether they have access to a copy. Make the product better by offering something of value that can't easily be duplicated, convince people who haven't yet paid for something they have benefited from the value of doing so, make it dead easy to make a purchase and above all, make the asking price fair. Stricter laws and more draconian DRM doesn't really work as a way to cultivate a customer's willingness to purchase a product (it seems to be a good way to cause people to ignore it in favor of something else.)
What you need to do is divorce the right to control a work from the right to profit from it.
Beware the law of unintended consequences. This is exactly the kind of thing that enables things like patent trolling. Buy the rights to control something, wait for someone else to do the hard work and extract payment. We want less of that kind of thing, not more. Rather figure out a way to ensure that the right to control a work comes with the obligation to exercise good stewardship and a mandate to develop the work, not just the right to profit.
Now, with that said: there is a future problem for content industries. Technology and content are becoming commoditized. Rendering technologies, places like Pixar, are becoming more and more realistic. And those technologies will eventually have Free implementations. Also, Free content, right now predominately in operating systems, is beginning to spread to other areas: props, character models, textures, sounds, music, and scripts: anything imaginable to make a story whether interactive or not. Eventually, using nothing more than creative commons material and lots of computer rendering power any individual or small group of individuals will be able to match the creative quality of today's Hollywood. There will be a collapse eventually for movies, fictional books, and music. It can only be held off.
1. That's why the next weapon in the IP arsenal after copyright to be rolled out in a big way will be patents, most likely. Recent lawsuits are a hint that this has already begun. Free/libre implementations of valuable technologies will likely be quashed by a flurry of patent suits, particularly if one tries to build a business of any kind using such tools (either selling or prominently using them). You don't have to eliminate free technology to gain an advantage, just suppress it by making everyone afraid of having to deal with patent suits.
2. Free content won't make commercial content creation industries collapse, though they might contract somewhat. Free/libre content will likely be labeled as crass/common/kitsch/whatever via prominent advertising campaigns and the like. Just as today people spend big money for jeans with a little red tag on the hip pocket or a cheap t-shirt with a the french word for 'airmail' on it rather than buying less expensive 'generic' versions, so people will likely spend big bucks to consume "brand name" content. Social networks will probably help tremendously in manipulating the weak-minded to shun free/libre content in favor of lucrative branded versions.
I like your idea of rights ownership being something you have to pay for to maintain. That would actually provide more of an incentive, it seems, to *actively* work at keeping your IP valuable, rather than just sitting back doing nothing while the terms get extended for work produced a life-time ago.
I would also add some form of property tax. I have to pay taxes on things I own that are considered valuable (my land, house, automobiles, boats etc.). If rights owners (and their apologists) want to insist that creative works and exclusive rights to them are valuable 'intellectual' property that warrants police-state-like measures to enforce (often at taxpayer expense), then this property should be taxed just like other highly valuable items. (I would love to watch the rights owners tie themselves up in knots as they simultaneously try to inflate the value of their IP to exaggerate the impact of unauthorized copying and deflate it to minimize the tax liability.) Shifting to a CC-license of some sort would reduce or eliminate the taxation, much as non-profits are tax-exempt.
to me *are* the X-Men
Silly movie fanboy! Jean Grey is the only one of those three that qualifies as an original X-person (along with Cyclops, Beast, Angel and Iceman). Wolverine was originally a throwaway character in an otherwise forgettable Incredible Hulk issue and Rogue was a third-rate villain in an Avenger's Annual (number 10). Wolverine at least has the distinction of being a member of the team that launched the title to fame (starting with Giant-Sized X-Men #1 and Uncanny X-Men 97), so he's got some credibility. But Rogue? Meh.
Kids these days! No appreciation for history.
Bad advice. 10 x 0 = 0
Even ROT-13 would be better than what Sony was using.