Damn, meant to hit preview. Anyway, just wanted to add that, sure it doesn't happen all the time or even most of the time, but cars do in fact catch fire after being crashed.
Explosions are probably taking the artistic license a bit far, but even that can happen in some circumstances.
Ah, here's the article I was actually looking for when I found the ones in my previous post:
The driver and three passengers escaped with minor injuries when their vehicle veered off Main Arm Road and rolled over an embankment near Mullumbimby on the far north NSW coast.
The driver then returned to his Holden Commodore, climbing into the backseat to recover some belongings when the vehicle caught alight, according to a police statement.
The man was trapped inside his burning car and died at the scene, at around 3am (AEST).
Nobody else has a guaranteed perpetual income EXCEPT these artists.
But they don't. They only receive income if people continue to buy their works. What you're saying is that the only people who receive a perpetual income are people who manage to produce something that is perpetually considered valuable by the rest of society. That's a very difficult thing to do, and I don't see why that would be considered a bad thing.
I would be in favour of making copyright something you have to pay to maintain, however. A scheme where you get a few years' protection for free, but then have to pay an increasing fee to maintain copyright protection would ensure that works which are no longer profitable will enter the public domain. There's a lot of overhead in tracking sales of older, unpopular works, and I don't think periodically sending the creator a cheque for a few dollars benefits society sufficiently to warrant all the overhead. But that's more a complaint about its efficiency, rather than about the general concept of paying people for their creations for as long as people are willing to pay for those creations.
No, I'm saying one doesn't have to quit his job to write, or to make a CD.
But it's certainly a lot easier to produce high quality material if you can focus your efforts on it, rather than just doing it in your spare time. It's not just the actual writing; a good author will also be doing research to ensure their story is plausible. Musicians will be playing live shows to see what kind of reaction their songs get, practice their skills, etc.
If all you can spare is a few hours a night, it's going to take a very, very long time to develop your skills to a high level, no matter what it is you're doing.
Where do you get the torrents from? So far as I can tell, most people use one (or several) "torrent sites" to download the torrents. These sites tend to be community-driven, but not peer-to-peer. There tends to be a centralised voting or reputation system that results in fake or malicious torrents being removed fairly quickly. That's harder to do in a pure P2P system.
Exactly. Why would anyone go into business for themselves rather than just work for someone else and let them take the risks? There are a few incentives, but the financial one is the topic of this discussion: if they're successful, they can potentially make a lot more money than they'd make working for someone else. That can make the proposition look worthwhile to someone who believes they have the ability to make a success out of their own business. Without that incentive, far fewer people would be willing to take that risk.
yet they have no guaranteed, perpetual income
And neither does anyone else. What's your point?
Roofers and other construction workers risk far more than any fucking writer or musician -- they risk their lives and health, and often wind up dead or in a wheelchair.
Physical risks are another matter, and I think they mostly affect income through decreasing the number of people willing to do the job (i.e. reducing the supply side of the equation). But rates of pay for physically dangerous occupations aren't generally all that high in comparison to safer occupations, so I guess a lot of people are willing to take those risks for whatever reason.
But the "risk" I was referring to was along the lines of financial security. Many people would prefer to receive a lower but guaranteed income than a variable income, even if the variable income has the potential to be higher. It's much easier to plan for the future and meet current obligations if you have a steady income.
It takes nothing to write a book; a couple of hours a night for a few months.
Sure you've written a book, but how comfortable would you be trying to earn a living from writing books? As you say, anyone can do it, so there's a huge risk that if you quit your job so you can work full time at honing your skills and writing the best material you can... that the book will flop and you'll never recoup your expenses. Much safer to work a normal job where your income is more predictable. But if you're really convinced of your talent, you might decide to take that risk, since it could pay off big time.
Maybe you'll say "we don't need no professional writers, all books should just be written in your spare time outside of a regular job". I won't try to argue the point, but I will again say that an author or musician or what have you doesn't have a guaranteed, perpetual income. They only get paid if people actually like what they produced. If people can spend their spare time writing books as good as someone who works full time on it, then the full time author is very unlikely to make enough from their efforts to be able to continue at it full time. If the full-time writer is able to produce significantly better material than 'hobbyists' can, then the market will reward them and they'll be able to continue doing that instead of getting a "real job".
3) How many jobs keep paying you money after you've died? Why do authors deserve this special privilege?
Increased risk.
I think authors work like musicians, in that either they accept a loan from the publisher to get them by (book deal) while they write the material with the expectation that sales of the work will pay back the loan, and provide some actual profit to the author (if it doesn't sell enough, the author is on the hook to repay the loan); or, they self-fund the creation of the work (through working another, more normal job) and then sell the book afterwards.
That second option is more like standard entrepreneurship: invest some of your own capital into making something, with the potential of receiving a big payoff if you do it well (but also the risk of losing that investment if you do it poorly). However for that payoff to be feasible, you need to be the only one selling the product. Laws of physics protect entrepreneurs who are producing physical goods, but if you're investing time in creating something that can be represented digitally, only copyright provides that protection to your investment of time.
The first option is probably more common, especially for well-known authors. The difference between me and an author is that my employer doesn't pay me a year's salary upfront, and then expect me to pay it back through earnings from working for them. If they did, then I'd be quite hesitant to work for that employer: what happens if I get sick or injured and can't keep working, therefore can't repay the money? That's basically the situation an artist who gets a publishing deal is in - so they're taking on more risk than people with normal salaried jobs.
So with the current system, royalties makes sense. It provides the opportunity to make much more money than a regular job, thereby giving an incentive to take the increased risk.
Maybe the solution is for publishers to pay their creatives a salary like everyone else; an author would then just work 9-5 writing stuff, and be paid a regular salary for as long as they're working for that company. I would think the publishers would have the power to do this and it'd be fairly attractive for at least some writers, so I guess they (the publishers) feel the current system suits them better. Possibly just that most people can only produce good material for a limited time or in limited circumstances, and you don't want to be stuck paying a salary to someone who's producing rubbish. Safer for the publisher to offload the risk to the authors.
The action of violating a law or contract by itself does not do harm.
Violating social contracts does, generally. The simple test is this: what would happen if everyone did it?
If everyone just downloaded the media they wanted without paying for it, then... there'd be very few people creating media, and certainly not of the quality we enjoy today. Your claim that it's doing no harm can only withstand scrutiny if it's a minority of people doing it. But what gives you, or me, or anyone else, the right to be part of that minority that gets to enjoy the media without contributing to its creation?
Obviously, I am speaking of the digital media itself and not of people who produce it.
That makes about as much sense as saying that since it only costs a dealership a few hundred (thousand?) dollars to ship a car to their yard, you should be able to get it for about that price. The end product, be it digital media or an object in a shopfront, is a miniscule part of the production and supply chain. Pretending that should have any significant effect on the objects price or value is silly.
So, we should disallow people from choosing whether or not to buy a product or disallow people from telling others not to buy a product because it could hurt sales?
No, as that is an expected part of the "contract" between consumers and producers. Enjoying a product without paying for it is not part of that contract, and it's that erosion of trust that is harmful. Also note that spreading incorrect information about a competitor's products, or someone you dislike, etc. is actually illegal, so there are limits as to how much you can go around telling people not to buy a product, for example.
In this scenario, someone was promised a certain amount of money and used their time to work to get it. They didn't get it, and so they wasted their time.
Copyright laws and such provide a "promise" to people that, if they spend their time producing creative works (or really, producing anything), that they alone get to dictate the sale price. The success or failure of their endeavour is therefore largely in their own hands. By reneging on that promise, the framework that provides the very incentive to be creative is eroded. Or to put another way: you think that if someone labours to create something, and then sees it being pirated all over the place with comparatively few sales, the creator doesn't feel like they've wasted their time? I mean, they could've been doing many other things that couldn't be trivially copied and made more money; but just because the thing they've created happens to be able to be able to be represented by a binary stream, they should settle for whatever people deign to offer them?
Merely violating a social contract by itself doesn't hurt someone.
Of course it does. When a serial rapist starts stalking women who use the train system, then it's not just the women who are raped that are harmed. Everyone who uses the trains, or knows someone who does, is harmed, because they no longer feel safe doing something which society has put enormous amounts of effort into allowing them to do while feeling safe.
If looters start routinely looting shops down main street, those shops will sooner or later close, and everyone who benefited from those shops will no longer have access to them, and the economy as a whole suffers.
If consumers start ignoring the right of producers to set their own price, and decide that instead of just deciding whether or not to buy at that price they're going to exercise a third, un-agreed upon option of obtaining the item at zero price, then much of the incentive to produce in the first place is removed.
Let's say an item retails for $15. You know for a fact that the store selling it pays $1 wholesale cost to receive it, so they have a pretty big markup of pure profit on it. You want it but think it's only worth $5 to you. If the item is commonplace, you can probably get it elsewhere cheaper. If it's unique, you might tell the storekeeper that you'd buy it $5, but $15 is too much. They might say plenty of other people are willing to pay $15, so they're not going to reduce the price for you. Do you expect to be able to just take the item and leave them the $5 you think it's worth? After all, it's not harming them - they'd still profit from it.
just that piracy can't logically be equated to stealing
I don't think it's stealing either; I just don't think it's justifiable.
Don't you think it's a shortcoming with the system if artists have to introduce artificial scarcity for products that would otherwise be in an infinite supply just to make a profit so that they can continue participating in said system and continue doing what they love?
It's interesting to consider that concept: "infinite supply". So far as I can tell, there isn't an infinite supply of resources to provide to people in order for them to work on video games (or films, music, theatre, etc.). Since creating these things takes quite a lot of time (especially if you factor in time required to give people the skills and creativity needed to be able to produce them, in addition to time required to actually produce them) it seems pretty straightforward to prove that there isn't an infinite supply of anything creative.
You could merely get the media for free whilst not harming anyone.
How do you define harm? Producers of content feel harmed when they don't receive what they feel is just reward for their efforts. Just like you'd feel harmed if your employer decided to pay you less than you'd agreed to work for them for. When they decided to create their game, they did so with the understanding that society would allow them to be the only one to sell it, and to dictate the price that it would sell for. So when people pirate it, that "social contract" has been violated.
The fact that you can duplicate bytes at near-zero incremental cost doesn't really matter; that's only the very tail-end of a massive and complicated production process. The price is set by the producer; the consumer decides whether or not they're willing to pay that price. If they're not, the producer generally adjusts their expectations downward until they're selling enough to make themselves happy. This is the fundamental mechanism that decides the value of a product to society.
Ultimately, when the final price of an item is no longer under the control of the producer, but of the consumer, then society as a whole is harmed by disrupting one side of the scale that determines price. I don't think the argument that downloading something for free "doesn't do any harm" really holds water. It is a conscious and deliberate violation of a construct which forms the very fabric of our system.
And how would you propose fixing this system? What shortcomings are you talking about?
I like free stuff as much as anyone else, but really, what's so difficult about the concept of paying whatever arbitrary price someone asks for? If you think the price isn't worth it, then don't pay and don't play/watch/listen to whatever they created. It's hardly the end of the world.
Interesting question. I guess it's more about being "open to the public", i.e. you don't have to be on the payroll, or even a member of a special testing team. Possibly there's no NDA associated with it; that to me would be a strong indicator, but certainly not the only indicator.
Access to the DCS: A-10C Warthog 'open beta' is only open to those who pre-purchase the game. Does that qualify as an "open beta" or does it have to be open to everyone for free, since it excludes people who can't/won't buy things online or who can't download a few gigs?
If that is open, then is restricting it to people who pre-purchase it all that different to restricting it to those who win the lottery (i.e. are picked at random to receive an invite)? Arguably yes, but then; whether or not an individual happens to have been born into a life whereby they can afford to spend $60 on a video game is pretty much a lottery, too.
Re:Re-buyers already have it on CD, so why bother?
on
The Beatles On iTunes
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· Score: 1
People who wanted Beatles albums almost certainly already have them as you say... but there's probably a very big market for selling the more popular individual songs, and iTunes is perfect for that.
As one anecdote, my parents recently started getting into digital music and the whole Apple ecosystem because their new car has an iPod dock and internal storage for digital audio. Their original plan was to convert their old LPs to mp3 but the sound quality wasn't good enough, so they've started rebuying things. Since the Beatles weren't on iTunes, my dad just bought covers of the songs he liked. Not quite the same, but close enough.
Don't know if he'll buy the originals now they're available, but it wouldn't surprise me at all. I think with a massively popular band like the Beatles, there'd be a huge market for individual sales to people who like their well-known songs, but aren't interested in entire albums.
No, it's not. Having a certificate signed by a root which doesn't happen to be shipped in $POPULAR_BROWSER doesn't make it self-signed.
Calling every single.mil domain "the DOD" severely underestimates the scale of the US military. Joe Admin at somewhere.mil can't just generate a SSL certificate and have it magically be trusted by anyone who has the DOD's root cert installed. He has to follow a process to verify his identity to whoever it is that signs off on the issuing of certificates signed by the DOD - just like you would have to do if you were using a commercial CA.
What if the telephone company could re-order the words you speak, or perhaps substitute other words "as good as" your own, in order to make their voice-compression algorithms more efficient? Would you agree to that?
If my telephone company offered me a service where their automated systems would re-order my words to make me sound like I actually knew what I was talking about, and I paid them to provide that service, then I would expect them do that. If they were to do it without my consent, then that would be another thing. But I haven't seen any indication that Cotendo is doing anything without their customer's blessing.
I see nothing wrong with encouraging the sources of the content to use things like mod-pagespeed on their servers.
But the CDN is the source. Technically true if the Cloudlet(tm) service is in fact running the customer's code on Cotendo's servers; but even if it's not, as far as most of the world is concerned, it is.
I think some people are taking the view that a CDN is somehow akin to an ISP or a carrier. In reality, it's more akin to a paid web hosting company. Sure it's a little more complicated and flexible than a regular webhost, but it is essentially the same thing. A CDN offering this service is no different than a CDN such as Akamai offering to process Edge Side Includes for their customers. It's a feature that allows a customer to improve their sites' performance by simply spending a little bit of money. Come to think of it, that's pretty much the entire business model of CDNs...
Closing point: a CDN is not a neutral third-party carrier. It is an integral part of an organisation's hosting arrangements, and has the ability to provide many more benefits than simply mirroring a bunch of content around the world (not that that in itself isn't valuable). Altering content as directed by their customer is part of the service they provide.
What's the difference between me configuring my servers to optimize our sites on our front-end proxies, and having our CDN doing it on their front-end proxies?
I think you missed that this is a service Cotendo provides to its paying customers.
Now, if Cotendo was doing this without their customers' permission, then your objection might have some kind of relevance. I can't find anything to indicate that this is the case though, and it seems like a dumb and stupid business move if it is.
The new Page Speed service offered by Cotendo will be part of its proprietary new performance application platform Cloudlet(TM), which is able to execute both open source and any proprietary code. Cotendo's new platform is in production with select customers and partners, which will be announced soon.
This makes it sound like it may actually be optimising the output from applications running on their own servers, rather than as a proxy altering content sent from the customer's servers.
Costs for hosting have dramatically decreased, but also I think that 'myspace' bears no relation to the 'myspace' social networking site. I would say it's more a case that MySpace's founder came up with the name, discovered the domain was already registered, and offered to buy it from whoever was using it to sell business web hosting.
Quite fascinating to see, though. Thanks.
May 2000 seems to be when they started offering free web hosting with an eye to building a userbase. I get the impression ownership of the domain changed here, as now the copyright message is for YourZ.com.
May 2001 they put up a maintenance page, and then in June switch to a page where you can sign up to receive news of what's going on. Seems to stay that way until May 2002, at which point it starts showing a blank page, or an almost-blank page.
Something happened in August 2003, but without the images I can't tell what. Another change of ownership or focus?
October 2003 seems to be when the social networking site was launched. The Terms and Conditions refer to MySpace LLC as the company behind it, so potentially another change of ownership here.
Most plots are foiled by the stupidity of the plotters, not through the super-human vigilance of the Good Guys doing the protecting. Real life isn't a James Bond movie. If I was a high-profile public figure, I'd be terrified if someone as dismissive of Joe Redneck as you appear to be was responsible for my safety.
I don't think this particular technology would make any difference to those scenarios. What's needed there is accurate and immediate automated recognition of "undesirable objects". What's new in TFA is that it's removing the selected object by replacing it with a reasonable guess at what's behind it. That's not helpful for blurring out naughty bits. The examples are also removing an object that stands out pretty well from its surroundings, so it'd probably struggle with removing a part of a person but leaving the rest.
Here in.au my last bill was $114.90 for 384 kWh. AUD is roughly equivalent to USD at the moment: 113.21 USD.
That includes 10% GST ($10.44), a 75c fee for credit card payment of my last bill, and $21.27 for 'Natural Power Premium' where they allegedly source equivalent of my energy usage from renewable resources, and a $9.73 'supply charge' which I assume is a fixed price for being connected to the grid. That leaves $72.70 as being for the energy usage itself.
The problem with this is that low users of energy will be subsidising the heavy users of energy. That's not just "unfair", but it also would cause some messed up flow-on effects in terms of behaviour and economics, that we want to avoid due to the real cost of producing this energy. It removes any incentives for people to use more energy-efficient appliances, and removes the incentive from manufacturers to invest in creating more energy-efficient appliances.
You could alleviate some of those problems with more government interference, but these tend to be kind of hamfisted and ineffective when compared to economic incentives. Not to mention they cost more money to maintain/enforce.
Much better to use a "user pays" system and provide some kind of subsidy to those who need it.
Probably because they export them to other nations that buy Russian military hardware. Harder to sell things when nobody knows about them.
Plus, for their purpose, having everyone know you have very realistic decoys is actually a good thing. Making people assume the real hardware you're looking at is probably just another fake is just as good as having them think the fake you're looking at is real.
Slashdot Mirror
Damn, meant to hit preview. Anyway, just wanted to add that, sure it doesn't happen all the time or even most of the time, but cars do in fact catch fire after being crashed.
Explosions are probably taking the artistic license a bit far, but even that can happen in some circumstances.
Ah, here's the article I was actually looking for when I found the ones in my previous post:
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/national/8172130/man-dies-in-burning-car
The driver and three passengers escaped with minor injuries when their vehicle veered off Main Arm Road and rolled over an embankment near Mullumbimby on the far north NSW coast.
The driver then returned to his Holden Commodore, climbing into the backseat to recover some belongings when the vehicle caught alight, according to a police statement.
The man was trapped inside his burning car and died at the scene, at around 3am (AEST).
On a side note, I've been in the vehicle, or within a 100' of around 40 or 50 car wrecks, and not even once has one of them caught fire or exploded
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/12/03/3084071.htm
Inspector Barry Mann says the car carrying the woman and two children burst into flames.
A passing motorist stopped and rescued the five year-old girl and a ten year-old boy from the burning vehicle.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/08/14/2655533.htm
The car smashed into six shops on Centre Road shortly before 2:00am and burst into flames.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/09/28/3023588.htm
Police later found a car which had left the road, rolled and hit a tree before breaking into pieces and catching on fire.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/10/12/3036194.htm
Police say a fire started after two cars crashed near the Nicholson Road exit.
Nobody else has a guaranteed perpetual income EXCEPT these artists.
But they don't. They only receive income if people continue to buy their works. What you're saying is that the only people who receive a perpetual income are people who manage to produce something that is perpetually considered valuable by the rest of society. That's a very difficult thing to do, and I don't see why that would be considered a bad thing.
I would be in favour of making copyright something you have to pay to maintain, however. A scheme where you get a few years' protection for free, but then have to pay an increasing fee to maintain copyright protection would ensure that works which are no longer profitable will enter the public domain. There's a lot of overhead in tracking sales of older, unpopular works, and I don't think periodically sending the creator a cheque for a few dollars benefits society sufficiently to warrant all the overhead. But that's more a complaint about its efficiency, rather than about the general concept of paying people for their creations for as long as people are willing to pay for those creations.
No, I'm saying one doesn't have to quit his job to write, or to make a CD.
But it's certainly a lot easier to produce high quality material if you can focus your efforts on it, rather than just doing it in your spare time. It's not just the actual writing; a good author will also be doing research to ensure their story is plausible. Musicians will be playing live shows to see what kind of reaction their songs get, practice their skills, etc.
If all you can spare is a few hours a night, it's going to take a very, very long time to develop your skills to a high level, no matter what it is you're doing.
Where do you get the torrents from? So far as I can tell, most people use one (or several) "torrent sites" to download the torrents. These sites tend to be community-driven, but not peer-to-peer. There tends to be a centralised voting or reputation system that results in fake or malicious torrents being removed fairly quickly. That's harder to do in a pure P2P system.
Small businessmen take financial risks daily
Exactly. Why would anyone go into business for themselves rather than just work for someone else and let them take the risks? There are a few incentives, but the financial one is the topic of this discussion: if they're successful, they can potentially make a lot more money than they'd make working for someone else. That can make the proposition look worthwhile to someone who believes they have the ability to make a success out of their own business. Without that incentive, far fewer people would be willing to take that risk.
yet they have no guaranteed, perpetual income
And neither does anyone else. What's your point?
Roofers and other construction workers risk far more than any fucking writer or musician -- they risk their lives and health, and often wind up dead or in a wheelchair.
Physical risks are another matter, and I think they mostly affect income through decreasing the number of people willing to do the job (i.e. reducing the supply side of the equation). But rates of pay for physically dangerous occupations aren't generally all that high in comparison to safer occupations, so I guess a lot of people are willing to take those risks for whatever reason.
But the "risk" I was referring to was along the lines of financial security. Many people would prefer to receive a lower but guaranteed income than a variable income, even if the variable income has the potential to be higher. It's much easier to plan for the future and meet current obligations if you have a steady income.
It takes nothing to write a book; a couple of hours a night for a few months.
Sure you've written a book, but how comfortable would you be trying to earn a living from writing books? As you say, anyone can do it, so there's a huge risk that if you quit your job so you can work full time at honing your skills and writing the best material you can... that the book will flop and you'll never recoup your expenses. Much safer to work a normal job where your income is more predictable. But if you're really convinced of your talent, you might decide to take that risk, since it could pay off big time.
Maybe you'll say "we don't need no professional writers, all books should just be written in your spare time outside of a regular job". I won't try to argue the point, but I will again say that an author or musician or what have you doesn't have a guaranteed, perpetual income. They only get paid if people actually like what they produced. If people can spend their spare time writing books as good as someone who works full time on it, then the full time author is very unlikely to make enough from their efforts to be able to continue at it full time. If the full-time writer is able to produce significantly better material than 'hobbyists' can, then the market will reward them and they'll be able to continue doing that instead of getting a "real job".
3) How many jobs keep paying you money after you've died? Why do authors deserve this special privilege?
Increased risk.
I think authors work like musicians, in that either they accept a loan from the publisher to get them by (book deal) while they write the material with the expectation that sales of the work will pay back the loan, and provide some actual profit to the author (if it doesn't sell enough, the author is on the hook to repay the loan); or, they self-fund the creation of the work (through working another, more normal job) and then sell the book afterwards.
That second option is more like standard entrepreneurship: invest some of your own capital into making something, with the potential of receiving a big payoff if you do it well (but also the risk of losing that investment if you do it poorly). However for that payoff to be feasible, you need to be the only one selling the product. Laws of physics protect entrepreneurs who are producing physical goods, but if you're investing time in creating something that can be represented digitally, only copyright provides that protection to your investment of time.
The first option is probably more common, especially for well-known authors. The difference between me and an author is that my employer doesn't pay me a year's salary upfront, and then expect me to pay it back through earnings from working for them. If they did, then I'd be quite hesitant to work for that employer: what happens if I get sick or injured and can't keep working, therefore can't repay the money? That's basically the situation an artist who gets a publishing deal is in - so they're taking on more risk than people with normal salaried jobs.
So with the current system, royalties makes sense. It provides the opportunity to make much more money than a regular job, thereby giving an incentive to take the increased risk.
Maybe the solution is for publishers to pay their creatives a salary like everyone else; an author would then just work 9-5 writing stuff, and be paid a regular salary for as long as they're working for that company. I would think the publishers would have the power to do this and it'd be fairly attractive for at least some writers, so I guess they (the publishers) feel the current system suits them better. Possibly just that most people can only produce good material for a limited time or in limited circumstances, and you don't want to be stuck paying a salary to someone who's producing rubbish. Safer for the publisher to offload the risk to the authors.
Wow, is this the mother of all whooshes or what???
The action of violating a law or contract by itself does not do harm.
Violating social contracts does, generally. The simple test is this: what would happen if everyone did it?
If everyone just downloaded the media they wanted without paying for it, then ... there'd be very few people creating media, and certainly not of the quality we enjoy today. Your claim that it's doing no harm can only withstand scrutiny if it's a minority of people doing it. But what gives you, or me, or anyone else, the right to be part of that minority that gets to enjoy the media without contributing to its creation?
Obviously, I am speaking of the digital media itself and not of people who produce it.
That makes about as much sense as saying that since it only costs a dealership a few hundred (thousand?) dollars to ship a car to their yard, you should be able to get it for about that price. The end product, be it digital media or an object in a shopfront, is a miniscule part of the production and supply chain. Pretending that should have any significant effect on the objects price or value is silly.
So, we should disallow people from choosing whether or not to buy a product or disallow people from telling others not to buy a product because it could hurt sales?
No, as that is an expected part of the "contract" between consumers and producers. Enjoying a product without paying for it is not part of that contract, and it's that erosion of trust that is harmful. Also note that spreading incorrect information about a competitor's products, or someone you dislike, etc. is actually illegal, so there are limits as to how much you can go around telling people not to buy a product, for example.
In this scenario, someone was promised a certain amount of money and used their time to work to get it. They didn't get it, and so they wasted their time.
Copyright laws and such provide a "promise" to people that, if they spend their time producing creative works (or really, producing anything), that they alone get to dictate the sale price. The success or failure of their endeavour is therefore largely in their own hands. By reneging on that promise, the framework that provides the very incentive to be creative is eroded. Or to put another way: you think that if someone labours to create something, and then sees it being pirated all over the place with comparatively few sales, the creator doesn't feel like they've wasted their time? I mean, they could've been doing many other things that couldn't be trivially copied and made more money; but just because the thing they've created happens to be able to be able to be represented by a binary stream, they should settle for whatever people deign to offer them?
Merely violating a social contract by itself doesn't hurt someone.
Of course it does. When a serial rapist starts stalking women who use the train system, then it's not just the women who are raped that are harmed. Everyone who uses the trains, or knows someone who does, is harmed, because they no longer feel safe doing something which society has put enormous amounts of effort into allowing them to do while feeling safe.
If looters start routinely looting shops down main street, those shops will sooner or later close, and everyone who benefited from those shops will no longer have access to them, and the economy as a whole suffers.
If consumers start ignoring the right of producers to set their own price, and decide that instead of just deciding whether or not to buy at that price they're going to exercise a third, un-agreed upon option of obtaining the item at zero price, then much of the incentive to produce in the first place is removed.
Let's say an item retails for $15. You know for a fact that the store selling it pays $1 wholesale cost to receive it, so they have a pretty big markup of pure profit on it. You want it but think it's only worth $5 to you. If the item is commonplace, you can probably get it elsewhere cheaper. If it's unique, you might tell the storekeeper that you'd buy it $5, but $15 is too much. They might say plenty of other people are willing to pay $15, so they're not going to reduce the price for you. Do you expect to be able to just take the item and leave them the $5 you think it's worth? After all, it's not harming them - they'd still profit from it.
just that piracy can't logically be equated to stealing
I don't think it's stealing either; I just don't think it's justifiable.
Don't you think it's a shortcoming with the system if artists have to introduce artificial scarcity for products that would otherwise be in an infinite supply just to make a profit so that they can continue participating in said system and continue doing what they love?
It's interesting to consider that concept: "infinite supply". So far as I can tell, there isn't an infinite supply of resources to provide to people in order for them to work on video games (or films, music, theatre, etc.). Since creating these things takes quite a lot of time (especially if you factor in time required to give people the skills and creativity needed to be able to produce them, in addition to time required to actually produce them) it seems pretty straightforward to prove that there isn't an infinite supply of anything creative.
You could merely get the media for free whilst not harming anyone.
How do you define harm? Producers of content feel harmed when they don't receive what they feel is just reward for their efforts. Just like you'd feel harmed if your employer decided to pay you less than you'd agreed to work for them for. When they decided to create their game, they did so with the understanding that society would allow them to be the only one to sell it, and to dictate the price that it would sell for. So when people pirate it, that "social contract" has been violated.
The fact that you can duplicate bytes at near-zero incremental cost doesn't really matter; that's only the very tail-end of a massive and complicated production process. The price is set by the producer; the consumer decides whether or not they're willing to pay that price. If they're not, the producer generally adjusts their expectations downward until they're selling enough to make themselves happy. This is the fundamental mechanism that decides the value of a product to society.
Ultimately, when the final price of an item is no longer under the control of the producer, but of the consumer, then society as a whole is harmed by disrupting one side of the scale that determines price. I don't think the argument that downloading something for free "doesn't do any harm" really holds water. It is a conscious and deliberate violation of a construct which forms the very fabric of our system.
And how would you propose fixing this system? What shortcomings are you talking about?
I like free stuff as much as anyone else, but really, what's so difficult about the concept of paying whatever arbitrary price someone asks for? If you think the price isn't worth it, then don't pay and don't play/watch/listen to whatever they created. It's hardly the end of the world.
Interesting question. I guess it's more about being "open to the public", i.e. you don't have to be on the payroll, or even a member of a special testing team. Possibly there's no NDA associated with it; that to me would be a strong indicator, but certainly not the only indicator.
Access to the DCS: A-10C Warthog 'open beta' is only open to those who pre-purchase the game. Does that qualify as an "open beta" or does it have to be open to everyone for free, since it excludes people who can't/won't buy things online or who can't download a few gigs?
If that is open, then is restricting it to people who pre-purchase it all that different to restricting it to those who win the lottery (i.e. are picked at random to receive an invite)? Arguably yes, but then; whether or not an individual happens to have been born into a life whereby they can afford to spend $60 on a video game is pretty much a lottery, too.
People who wanted Beatles albums almost certainly already have them as you say... but there's probably a very big market for selling the more popular individual songs, and iTunes is perfect for that.
As one anecdote, my parents recently started getting into digital music and the whole Apple ecosystem because their new car has an iPod dock and internal storage for digital audio. Their original plan was to convert their old LPs to mp3 but the sound quality wasn't good enough, so they've started rebuying things. Since the Beatles weren't on iTunes, my dad just bought covers of the songs he liked. Not quite the same, but close enough.
Don't know if he'll buy the originals now they're available, but it wouldn't surprise me at all. I think with a massively popular band like the Beatles, there'd be a huge market for individual sales to people who like their well-known songs, but aren't interested in entire albums.
No, it's not. Having a certificate signed by a root which doesn't happen to be shipped in $POPULAR_BROWSER doesn't make it self-signed.
Calling every single .mil domain "the DOD" severely underestimates the scale of the US military. Joe Admin at somewhere.mil can't just generate a SSL certificate and have it magically be trusted by anyone who has the DOD's root cert installed. He has to follow a process to verify his identity to whoever it is that signs off on the issuing of certificates signed by the DOD - just like you would have to do if you were using a commercial CA.
Isn't the Lamebook site itself a commentary on Facebook?
What if the telephone company could re-order the words you speak, or perhaps substitute other words "as good as" your own, in order to make their voice-compression algorithms more efficient? Would you agree to that?
If my telephone company offered me a service where their automated systems would re-order my words to make me sound like I actually knew what I was talking about, and I paid them to provide that service, then I would expect them do that. If they were to do it without my consent, then that would be another thing. But I haven't seen any indication that Cotendo is doing anything without their customer's blessing.
I see nothing wrong with encouraging the sources of the content to use things like mod-pagespeed on their servers.
But the CDN is the source. Technically true if the Cloudlet(tm) service is in fact running the customer's code on Cotendo's servers; but even if it's not, as far as most of the world is concerned, it is.
I think some people are taking the view that a CDN is somehow akin to an ISP or a carrier. In reality, it's more akin to a paid web hosting company. Sure it's a little more complicated and flexible than a regular webhost, but it is essentially the same thing. A CDN offering this service is no different than a CDN such as Akamai offering to process Edge Side Includes for their customers. It's a feature that allows a customer to improve their sites' performance by simply spending a little bit of money. Come to think of it, that's pretty much the entire business model of CDNs...
Closing point: a CDN is not a neutral third-party carrier. It is an integral part of an organisation's hosting arrangements, and has the ability to provide many more benefits than simply mirroring a bunch of content around the world (not that that in itself isn't valuable). Altering content as directed by their customer is part of the service they provide.
What's the difference between me configuring my servers to optimize our sites on our front-end proxies, and having our CDN doing it on their front-end proxies?
I think you missed that this is a service Cotendo provides to its paying customers.
Now, if Cotendo was doing this without their customers' permission, then your objection might have some kind of relevance. I can't find anything to indicate that this is the case though, and it seems like a dumb and stupid business move if it is.
The new Page Speed service offered by Cotendo will be part of its proprietary new performance application platform Cloudlet(TM), which is able to execute both open source and any proprietary code. Cotendo's new platform is in production with select customers and partners, which will be announced soon.
This makes it sound like it may actually be optimising the output from applications running on their own servers, rather than as a proxy altering content sent from the customer's servers.
"Web-services" is now a term that is only used by people actually doing useful things with them.
Nope, we use the term "web-services" as well.
Well yes, they were found. How else would we be reading an article about them having been found if they hadn't been found?
Costs for hosting have dramatically decreased, but also I think that 'myspace' bears no relation to the 'myspace' social networking site. I would say it's more a case that MySpace's founder came up with the name, discovered the domain was already registered, and offered to buy it from whoever was using it to sell business web hosting.
Quite fascinating to see, though. Thanks.
May 2000 seems to be when they started offering free web hosting with an eye to building a userbase. I get the impression ownership of the domain changed here, as now the copyright message is for YourZ.com.
May 2001 they put up a maintenance page, and then in June switch to a page where you can sign up to receive news of what's going on. Seems to stay that way until May 2002, at which point it starts showing a blank page, or an almost-blank page.
Something happened in August 2003, but without the images I can't tell what. Another change of ownership or focus?
October 2003 seems to be when the social networking site was launched. The Terms and Conditions refer to MySpace LLC as the company behind it, so potentially another change of ownership here.
Most plots are foiled by the stupidity of the plotters, not through the super-human vigilance of the Good Guys doing the protecting. Real life isn't a James Bond movie. If I was a high-profile public figure, I'd be terrified if someone as dismissive of Joe Redneck as you appear to be was responsible for my safety.
I don't think this particular technology would make any difference to those scenarios. What's needed there is accurate and immediate automated recognition of "undesirable objects". What's new in TFA is that it's removing the selected object by replacing it with a reasonable guess at what's behind it. That's not helpful for blurring out naughty bits. The examples are also removing an object that stands out pretty well from its surroundings, so it'd probably struggle with removing a part of a person but leaving the rest.
Here in .au my last bill was $114.90 for 384 kWh. AUD is roughly equivalent to USD at the moment: 113.21 USD.
That includes 10% GST ($10.44), a 75c fee for credit card payment of my last bill, and $21.27 for 'Natural Power Premium' where they allegedly source equivalent of my energy usage from renewable resources, and a $9.73 'supply charge' which I assume is a fixed price for being connected to the grid. That leaves $72.70 as being for the energy usage itself.
The problem with this is that low users of energy will be subsidising the heavy users of energy. That's not just "unfair", but it also would cause some messed up flow-on effects in terms of behaviour and economics, that we want to avoid due to the real cost of producing this energy. It removes any incentives for people to use more energy-efficient appliances, and removes the incentive from manufacturers to invest in creating more energy-efficient appliances.
You could alleviate some of those problems with more government interference, but these tend to be kind of hamfisted and ineffective when compared to economic incentives. Not to mention they cost more money to maintain/enforce.
Much better to use a "user pays" system and provide some kind of subsidy to those who need it.
Probably because they export them to other nations that buy Russian military hardware. Harder to sell things when nobody knows about them.
Plus, for their purpose, having everyone know you have very realistic decoys is actually a good thing. Making people assume the real hardware you're looking at is probably just another fake is just as good as having them think the fake you're looking at is real.