Wait, how is America fucked up, precisely? Because high-profile, responsible, important jobs requiring experience and education command the highest salaries? Or Because jobs that require no thought or effort or education pay minimum wage?
Other alternatives EXIST. This isn't "steal to eat". This is stealing because it's easier to shit on your neighbour than to do some honest work.
There is an interesting paragraph in the article....
The real question, Mr. Rose said, is how does the record industry change its rights structure so it captures a fairer percent of the value it creates in funding, marketing and managing the launch of artists?
To paraphrase - we think the artists owe us more money
To be optimistic, perhaps they simply realized that they take too much, and now want to give more to the artists?? Okay, so this is slashdot... set mod to funny.
"It's not at all clear that digital economics can make up for the drop in physical."
Well, no shit. Their old business model of selling a $15 CD with 1 good song---aka ripping people off--doesn't fly anymore. If you just want that one song, you just buy that one song.
Digital sales aren't going to match physical sales because--plain and simple--there's a lot of complete crap out there that people don't have to buy, anymore.
I played World of Warcraft (heavily, until I got married). I played Diablo (I & II, pretty heavily). I played Counter Strike for hours on end, very competitively. Two-three years ago, I would classify myself as a hardcore gamer. That said...
I cannot deny the striking similarities between these games and slot machines. The addiction similarities between these games and gambling addition, particularly slot machines, is strong.
Some (admittedly anecdotal) evidence. Don't tell me you never did these things, too:
* "farmed" mobs/bosses/instances/etc in WoW for a random, rare drop.
* loaded and reloaded the barbarian highlands level in diablo II umpteen times to farm for random, rare, drops
* got feelings of joy at the sight of one color triggered at a particular point in the game
All these things seem like more "pulls" on the slot machine, waiting for the lights and sounds to let you know you won. Is there potential for gambiling-addition-like issues in videogames? Yes. Am I terribly concerned and am I going to stop gaming? No.
Except that the current generation consoles are always on. The console is listening for the remote on by the controller, and the Wii even goes on WiFi by itself with not on.
Are you suggesting that when somone select "Turn off System" from the PS3 menu, that the unit doesn't actually turn "off"? I'm able to wake the system from the appropriate button on the controller from this state, but I can't imagine that this would be the 150-watt consuming "Idle" state that was mentioned in the article (it only differentiates betweeen "Active", "Idle", and "Off" states, and the "off" state still draws power).
As for the XBOX360's wake-up setting, I can't speak to that as I don't own one.
FWIW, I'd consider "off" to be "consuming a couple watts or less, just from being plugged in."
I have a somewhat crude hypothetical question when considering these types of scenarios: "Are you really THAT important?"
Are you really important enough such that the government--or less likely, a cadre of independent people--would devote their lives to harassing every tiny bit of your life, with such things as periodically taking down the websites you visit? If you've invented something fabulous, then maybe just maybe... but if you're a janitor--I hate to be rude but--no one's going to waste their life with that.
It's important to distinguish between "time" and "life." Being harassed by someone you know, or even someone you don't, for their enjoyment for a few days or a couple weeks... that happens. But if you believe that someone's going to do this for years... yeah, you're not that important.
If you have a consulting or legal business, where your employees bill time by the tenth of an hour, then yes, this could be a much longer process than you estimate. You have to tabulate all the hours for each employee for the month, and then allocate each hour spent on each day to each client, each client's job, each phase of said job, and each task under that job. Spread that across 1000 active clients with 1-2 jobs each, many with multiple phases, and all with multiple task codes.
None of that has to do with processing a paycheck for me. The billing cycle isn't about getting a check from your employer, but getting a check from your client. The above may seem overly complex, but they ask for it and they pay the bills.
If it mentioned in the article how many turbines this would take, I must have missed it.
Placing wind turbines/towers anywhere and everywhere isn't necessarily safe. You're not going to put one in everyone's backyard, or along any heavily travelled area, simply due to risk. And you're talking about 5mw turbines. Jimminy christmas. Wind turbines that large are 500-600 feet tall with a blade diameter of 400 feet. One of my clients produces wind turbine blades, and I thought those were large...
The issue isn't reliability only, it's reliability plus numbers. Transmission loss is a very real issue that will limit the ability to transfer wind power from windy areas to non-windy areas, and as the article points out directly, not every area is ideal.
The NEI (www.nei.org), granted a pro-nuclear body, estimates it'd take a wind farm the size of Wisconsin just to replace all of the (albeit not many) nuclear plants in the US. The US is expansive, but the footprint issue is very real, especially in the northeast, where land is pricey and scarce. Sure, they can be placed where people are not, but then again, transmission.
I'm very pro-diversication of energy, but providing 3.3twh of reliable electricity to the US, let alone the rest of the world, isn't going to happen without nuclear (or some other, new development).
It's just not enough, and it's so hard to convince people of this. Cover the world with solar panels and wind turbines and every other damn thing, and then we're still going to go back to power plants. At best, solar, wind, etc. are supplemental. I'm for them all, but it's not going to 100% eliminate nuclear, coal, natural gas, etc. power plants, and of the big three, nuclear is the cleanest, and is considerably more reliable than the weather-impacted renewable resources. It's such an unpopular truth, but I work with this stuff on a daily basis (I'm an environmental consultant).
A spankin' new LEED-platinum certified OFFICE building... and after everything they've done to cut their energy needs, they only produce 15% of the energy they need. And it's an OFFICE building--they don't make anything--it's not a manufacturer, or a smelter, or a factory of any sort, which would actually require non-trivial amounts of power.
"With Marlin, any device that runs Marlin can run content on the home domain," he adds. "It's a level playing field [for manufacturers] - they don't have to go up to Redmond with a begging bowl or suck up to Steve Jobs."
So, open source DRM that works well (only) with other hardware also running the same DRM? Don't we already have that? How is this new, or better? The only thing I can see is that, vis-a-vis it being open source, it could be circumvented easier.
Water is an excellent heat sink, but any company would likely run into serious environmental backlash if they wanted to use a lake or river as their heat sink. Just like on land, organisms in the water can be seriously disturbed by a change in temperature of even a few degrees.
If the waste heat is seriously that large a problem, I'd recommend a man-made water cooling solution like a cooling tower, not too dissimilar from what goes on a power plants. Of course, most industrial or utility cooling tower sizes and appearances don't give off that special "nuclear" feel.
You're expecting to ship ten media objects on average per player. The choice is you add $50 to the price of the devices reading the media and pay $5 (probably more, it took a while for DVD to get down to those prices) on media, or you spend $50 on media (probably less, $5 is what you pay now) and spend $1 on the readers.
Which is more cost effective? Not so obvious, is it?
I feel this could be the "give away the razor, sell the razor blades at a huge markup" scheme that's already affecting the ink/printer market. I'd rather make an large initial purchase and buy the "consumable" items cheaply, compared to the reverse.
I'm also saying this as a bluray player owner, and one who balks at spending $30 on a bluray movie. A flash drive movie would have the high costs of the medium plus the "high costs" of the movie... to result in an expensive "consumable" item. These things should be priced to be as cheap as possible to spur as many impulse purchases as possible.
Interesting point. Others are arguing that since stocks are so liquid anyhow, that borrowing is easy. But if they're that liquid, why not purchase, except because (a) you don't have the cash and/or (b) you want to manipulate the market. I agree: borrowing should be illegal.
Such a small group of people should not have such a big influence on what happens in a country.
What the hell is this... How can we, the people, claim "Yes, every single vote is important! Your voice matters! You, a single individual, can change politics!" and some can simultaneously claim (and others agree, as it's modded +5) that a few individuals shouldn't have that very power?
This is doubletalk. Either yes, 269 people, made up of single individuals casting their vote, can make a difference. Or no, a single individuals doesn't matter and you shouldn't bother wasting your time because your 1 vote doesn't matter.
If only people could afford TWO. I'd rather my social security retirement dollars went to my private retirement account, but no I pay for both. There's no chance I'll use both.
Are you willing to pay a subscription fee for all content? Some people will pay for some content, its just wont work for most people and most content. What else is there? I'd greatly prefer a micro-payment-per-view mechanism, if that mechanism also co-opted the broadcasters/studios decisions on the longevity (i.e. to cancel, or not to cancel) of the show/series.
I'm not going to pay $5 to watch a single show, but I can guarantee that I would have thought nothing of paying $0.25 to watch a new episode of Firefly, especially if my support had kept the series alive. If only one million people watch an episode, world-wide, then that's an income of $250,000, per episode. It's not enough to live like proverbial rock stars, but it'd be enough for a lean venture to survive.
The Nielsen system is outdated. I expect micropayments on a national or global scale to drive content production and television in the future.
If you trashed the CFLs, the amount of mercury released would be less than the mercury released by coal-fired plants to power the equivalent in incandescent lights. I figure about 5-6 mg Hg per CFL. Do you have a quote/article for your statement? I'd be interested in reading it.
The nationwide D Block licensee must provide signal coverage and offer service to (1) at least 75 percent of the population of the license area by the end of the fourth year, (2) at least 95 percent of the population by the end of the seventh year, and (3) at least 99.3 percent of the population by the end of the tenth year. These three construction benchmarks will take effect beginning on February 17, 2009. Moreover, the nationwide D Block licensee must meet the construction benchmarks based on the build-out schedule specified in the NSA. If the licensee fails to meet a construction benchmark, the Commission may cancel its license, depending on the circumstances. From http://wireless.fcc.gov/auctions/default.htm?job=auction_summary&id=73
75% coverage of the "license area" (for a Nationwide license) seems daunting after four years, let alone 99.3% after ten years. I'm not sure how the FCC would actually determine compliance with that provision, but that sounds like a massive undertaking to me. Other blocks have a requirement to provide something like 35%-70% coverage of their smaller, geographic area.
They may produce products that people want, but that doesn't mean working there is a good experience. I'm guessing that there's alot of voluntary Kool-Aid drinking done by the employees to coninve themselves that the hostile working environment is what it takes to succeed. Also, see "stockholm syndrome" for the workplace.
This is fear-mongering at its finest. No. For a scary-story-for-adults read, I encourage you to read Our Stolen Future. Parts-per-trillion levels of hormones can have very real affects on in-utero organisms. Some chemicals are persistent, and (bio) accumulate in the food chain. You may be ingesting/absorbing 1 part per billion/trillion from ten/one hundred/one thousand different sources, i.e. making it significantly concentrating the chemical.
And this is all considering the affects on macro-organisms...
It requires looking several cars ahead I don't know where you drive, but where I drive this is usually very difficult... or perhaps it's a factor of what I drive (a modest four-door automobile) and what almost everyone else drives (a large/r sedan, a truck, a van, or an SUV). When the vehicle in front of you is so much larger than your own, it becomes nigh impossible to see around it during any semi-straight stretch of road. When you have a lot of high-speed, two-lane-max highways (regrettably very common Minnesota) and you add in the large vehicles people own to tow boats, and then semis... some days I'm lucky to be able to read the roadsigns.
FTA:
The only way to make it work is to mandate the filters or have ISPs mandate that users install them to get on the Internet. The consumer backlash from such a plan would be like the force of a thousand supernovas, and it's hard to visualize this happening.
Actually, it's not hard to visualize this happening. Most people connect with what, one of four major ISPs in the US, and there are usually no more than three competing ISPs, except in big cities? That's only four companies, each headed by a relatively few number of individuals whose motives are driven by shareholder (not necessarily customer) demands. If the MAFIAA writes a solid-gold check to Comcast, Qwest, Verizon, and Time-Warner, you can bet that find ways to impose an end-user filter on your PC as a requirement to connect, and with a limited number of broadband ISPs in the area, you can bet that people will suck it up and deal with it.
From the article:
"There's a complaint with 'Tiger Woods' on the Wii, for example, in that some bloggers feel that it has actually harmed their ability to play golf," he says. "They've adjusted over the winter period to the Wii to play this game, and then when they actually pick up a club, they're not swinging the way they did the previous season." If the Motus can be marketed as such a realistic controller so that it helps, rather than harms, real-life game play, Riley says, it could find its niche. This is probably my chief complaint with the Wii Sports games: I match my motion to that on-screen, not vice-versa (which it should be). Chiefly, I'm thinking of Wii Bowling, where you press a button to "initiate" the swing, which then proceeds at its own rate irrelevant of your own arm speed and/or technique. I found it exceptionally hard to play the game, at first, because I had to change my bowling technique to match the game. Tennis, too, has problems, where any subtle flick of your wrist will send your character swinging. If the new controller can tell that you're dropping your hand (i.e. racquet) to your side, and not actually swinging it, then so much the better.
However, this brings me to the point: I don't feel it's as much a controller issue as it is a complex programming issue. Perhaps a precision controller would allow for functionality, but it still has to be programmed. Wii Sports isn't exactly a precision sports game...
Slashdot Mirror
Other alternatives EXIST. This isn't "steal to eat". This is stealing because it's easier to shit on your neighbour than to do some honest work.
There is an interesting paragraph in the article....
To paraphrase - we think the artists owe us more money
To be optimistic, perhaps they simply realized that they take too much, and now want to give more to the artists?? Okay, so this is slashdot... set mod to funny.
"It's not at all clear that digital economics can make up for the drop in physical."
Well, no shit. Their old business model of selling a $15 CD with 1 good song---aka ripping people off--doesn't fly anymore. If you just want that one song, you just buy that one song.
Digital sales aren't going to match physical sales because--plain and simple--there's a lot of complete crap out there that people don't have to buy, anymore.
Some (admittedly anecdotal) evidence. Don't tell me you never did these things, too:
* "farmed" mobs/bosses/instances/etc in WoW for a random, rare drop.
* loaded and reloaded the barbarian highlands level in diablo II umpteen times to farm for random, rare, drops
* got feelings of joy at the sight of one color triggered at a particular point in the game
All these things seem like more "pulls" on the slot machine, waiting for the lights and sounds to let you know you won. Is there potential for gambiling-addition-like issues in videogames? Yes. Am I terribly concerned and am I going to stop gaming? No.
Except that the current generation consoles are always on. The console is listening for the remote on by the controller, and the Wii even goes on WiFi by itself with not on.
Are you suggesting that when somone select "Turn off System" from the PS3 menu, that the unit doesn't actually turn "off"? I'm able to wake the system from the appropriate button on the controller from this state, but I can't imagine that this would be the 150-watt consuming "Idle" state that was mentioned in the article (it only differentiates betweeen "Active", "Idle", and "Off" states, and the "off" state still draws power). As for the XBOX360's wake-up setting, I can't speak to that as I don't own one. FWIW, I'd consider "off" to be "consuming a couple watts or less, just from being plugged in."
Are you really important enough such that the government--or less likely, a cadre of independent people--would devote their lives to harassing every tiny bit of your life, with such things as periodically taking down the websites you visit? If you've invented something fabulous, then maybe just maybe... but if you're a janitor--I hate to be rude but--no one's going to waste their life with that.
It's important to distinguish between "time" and "life." Being harassed by someone you know, or even someone you don't, for their enjoyment for a few days or a couple weeks... that happens. But if you believe that someone's going to do this for years... yeah, you're not that important.
If you have a consulting or legal business, where your employees bill time by the tenth of an hour, then yes, this could be a much longer process than you estimate. You have to tabulate all the hours for each employee for the month, and then allocate each hour spent on each day to each client, each client's job, each phase of said job, and each task under that job. Spread that across 1000 active clients with 1-2 jobs each, many with multiple phases, and all with multiple task codes. None of that has to do with processing a paycheck for me. The billing cycle isn't about getting a check from your employer, but getting a check from your client. The above may seem overly complex, but they ask for it and they pay the bills.
The issue isn't reliability only, it's reliability plus numbers. Transmission loss is a very real issue that will limit the ability to transfer wind power from windy areas to non-windy areas, and as the article points out directly, not every area is ideal.
The NEI (www.nei.org), granted a pro-nuclear body, estimates it'd take a wind farm the size of Wisconsin just to replace all of the (albeit not many) nuclear plants in the US. The US is expansive, but the footprint issue is very real, especially in the northeast, where land is pricey and scarce. Sure, they can be placed where people are not, but then again, transmission.
I'm very pro-diversication of energy, but providing 3.3twh of reliable electricity to the US, let alone the rest of the world, isn't going to happen without nuclear (or some other, new development).
Look at Great River Energy.
A spankin' new LEED-platinum certified OFFICE building... and after everything they've done to cut their energy needs, they only produce 15% of the energy they need. And it's an OFFICE building--they don't make anything--it's not a manufacturer, or a smelter, or a factory of any sort, which would actually require non-trivial amounts of power.
"With Marlin, any device that runs Marlin can run content on the home domain," he adds. "It's a level playing field [for manufacturers] - they don't have to go up to Redmond with a begging bowl or suck up to Steve Jobs."
So, open source DRM that works well (only) with other hardware also running the same DRM? Don't we already have that? How is this new, or better? The only thing I can see is that, vis-a-vis it being open source, it could be circumvented easier.
Water is an excellent heat sink, but any company would likely run into serious environmental backlash if they wanted to use a lake or river as their heat sink. Just like on land, organisms in the water can be seriously disturbed by a change in temperature of even a few degrees. If the waste heat is seriously that large a problem, I'd recommend a man-made water cooling solution like a cooling tower, not too dissimilar from what goes on a power plants. Of course, most industrial or utility cooling tower sizes and appearances don't give off that special "nuclear" feel.
You're expecting to ship ten media objects on average per player. The choice is you add $50 to the price of the devices reading the media and pay $5 (probably more, it took a while for DVD to get down to those prices) on media, or you spend $50 on media (probably less, $5 is what you pay now) and spend $1 on the readers. Which is more cost effective? Not so obvious, is it?
I feel this could be the "give away the razor, sell the razor blades at a huge markup" scheme that's already affecting the ink/printer market. I'd rather make an large initial purchase and buy the "consumable" items cheaply, compared to the reverse.
I'm also saying this as a bluray player owner, and one who balks at spending $30 on a bluray movie. A flash drive movie would have the high costs of the medium plus the "high costs" of the movie... to result in an expensive "consumable" item. These things should be priced to be as cheap as possible to spur as many impulse purchases as possible.
Interesting point. Others are arguing that since stocks are so liquid anyhow, that borrowing is easy. But if they're that liquid, why not purchase, except because (a) you don't have the cash and/or (b) you want to manipulate the market. I agree: borrowing should be illegal.
Such a small group of people should not have such a big influence on what happens in a country.
What the hell is this... How can we, the people, claim "Yes, every single vote is important! Your voice matters! You, a single individual, can change politics!" and some can simultaneously claim (and others agree, as it's modded +5) that a few individuals shouldn't have that very power?
This is doubletalk. Either yes, 269 people, made up of single individuals casting their vote, can make a difference. Or no, a single individuals doesn't matter and you shouldn't bother wasting your time because your 1 vote doesn't matter.
If only people could afford TWO. I'd rather my social security retirement dollars went to my private retirement account, but no I pay for both. There's no chance I'll use both.
10 seconds of searching in google turned up multiple results for this item. I'd try either Ars Technica or Shacknews
I'm not going to pay $5 to watch a single show, but I can guarantee that I would have thought nothing of paying $0.25 to watch a new episode of Firefly, especially if my support had kept the series alive. If only one million people watch an episode, world-wide, then that's an income of $250,000, per episode. It's not enough to live like proverbial rock stars, but it'd be enough for a lean venture to survive.
The Nielsen system is outdated. I expect micropayments on a national or global scale to drive content production and television in the future.
Mod parent up. Extra caution in a public place is warranted. Know your surroundings.
75% coverage of the "license area" (for a Nationwide license) seems daunting after four years, let alone 99.3% after ten years. I'm not sure how the FCC would actually determine compliance with that provision, but that sounds like a massive undertaking to me. Other blocks have a requirement to provide something like 35%-70% coverage of their smaller, geographic area.
They may produce products that people want, but that doesn't mean working there is a good experience. I'm guessing that there's alot of voluntary Kool-Aid drinking done by the employees to coninve themselves that the hostile working environment is what it takes to succeed. Also, see "stockholm syndrome" for the workplace.
And this is all considering the affects on macro-organisms...
Actually, it's not hard to visualize this happening. Most people connect with what, one of four major ISPs in the US, and there are usually no more than three competing ISPs, except in big cities? That's only four companies, each headed by a relatively few number of individuals whose motives are driven by shareholder (not necessarily customer) demands. If the MAFIAA writes a solid-gold check to Comcast, Qwest, Verizon, and Time-Warner, you can bet that find ways to impose an end-user filter on your PC as a requirement to connect, and with a limited number of broadband ISPs in the area, you can bet that people will suck it up and deal with it.
~SK
However, this brings me to the point: I don't feel it's as much a controller issue as it is a complex programming issue. Perhaps a precision controller would allow for functionality, but it still has to be programmed. Wii Sports isn't exactly a precision sports game...