Yeees, because clearly the population at large makes their media purchase decision based on the quality of the product. Clearly the best product is what sells the most.
C'mon now. Media is only partly about the actual product, be it music, a movie, whatever. Mostly it, like anything, is about branding and selling a lifestyle to the consumer. People buy things to show their "personality", or rather that they fit into a particular category of consumers dreamt up by marketers. That the chart-topping artists are there because the record co's put them there I don't doubt, but that is possible because consumers want such a system. They want to have clear categories of what is cool, so they can themselves become cool just by spending money on the right things. Then there's the people who are cool because they buy the wrong things, but that's just the flip side of the coin, and soon enough the wrong things become the right things...
Everyone chooses media based on the enjoyment they derive from it. There are some who derive that joy purely from experiencing media regardless of the images associated with the artists, but for most consumers that enjoyment comes from the "peripheral" values attached to the media. Completely free derivative use of media would probably yield some interesting works, but I don't think it would change the commercial landscape much.
What they have to lose is the work it takes to do that. They said there's proprietary IP involved in the specs for the newer cards that they'll have to find a way to not release along with the specs, probably there are similar issues with the old cards. And the older cards no longer generate revenue, so from ATI/AMD's point of view it's not really worth the trouble.
By the time a product is getting significant amounts of negative reviews from users, it's probably too late to improve it - even if you do, no-one's going to buy your product to see if it's better. You either find a way to suppress the bad word-of-mouth (good luck) or you go out of business.
More importantly, isn't it just a matter of time until laws requiring such filtering are passed? Governments want to control the Internet, and if it is technically feasible, they will do it sooner or later. The only option is to make government interference technically impossible. You can't count on legislation to keep your freedoms. Laws change.
For a while now I've been wondering what type of brain cancer the RIAA and their members suffer from. Finally I figured out the logic in their actions.
Big Music is no longer in the business of making music. That's not news, they've long been in the business of selling music, which just happens to require burning some trash onto CDs. But they're not in that business any more, either. They now intend to make suing people their primary business. At 5000 dollars a song, the profit margins are pretty damn high. This explains the pricing, their attitude towards their customers, in general the way they seem to be doing everything they can to discourage people from actually paying for music. They WANT people to download without permission as much as possible, since it increases the number of people they can sue.
Why I didn't see it sooner, I don't know. It's obvious.
From TFA:
"These governments told their users to use ToR, a software that sends all your traffic through not one but three other servers that you know absolutely nothing about"
Also the article says the compromised organizations were warned about the risks of using Tor without encryption, and the warnings were blown off. That doesn't sound to me like any hackers were behind the Tor usage.
Not to call your parents dumb, but how do you not tell the difference? Are the advertisements I get linked to google search results somehow drastically different, because for me they are clearly separated from actual results - either on the right side of the screen, or in a coloured box above the results - and as has been pointed out, clearly marked as sponsored links. I don't see how you can reasonably demand Google to do much else, surely they can assume users can read?
I'm sure there are plenty of kids willing to come play games on your PS3 for you. If you can convince them/their parents you're not a pedophile or serial killer, that is.
If you ask me, all those safety nets are exactly why depression is so commonplace. The individual human being is essentially pretty modern software running on mostly very archaic wetware - for all our fancy culture and consciousness, you can't discount the effects of millions of years of evolution on the mind. And evolution has equipped humans to act socially, but we've also adapted to constantly being in danger of death and constantly having to struggle to survive. The kind of life the "lucky" people today lead is a very new thing indeed - your decisions are made for you, you have to be particularly unlucky or try very hard before you'll starve to death, there are not that many things out there looking to kill you. Life is easier, to be sure, but our bodies have evolved to take a type of joy from overcoming hardships, and probably also to expect the occasional, fairly common, surge of adrenaline and other stress hormones in the body.
Almost all the things that used to make life meaningful - feed, fight, flee, fuck - now require so little effort to do, if they need doing at all, that the body is left wondering what it's supposed to do with itself. Some of us manage to find something to do with their time that makes sense to them, but I don't see a 9-to-5 job in a factory doing much for one's sense of purpose. And without at least the illusion that you're achieving something, what is there to live for?
Sweden is often portrayed as a very progressive (from the slashdot user's POV), permissive state with regard to P2P, copyright and internet issues, but will that last? Judging by what I read of the Pirate Bay's battles with the government there, it seems the current permissiveness is really just an accident, something the government really resents. And the government is the agent that can change laws, not the Pirate Bay or their supporters (unless they get some serious popular support that translates to votes at election
time). So even if currently the Swedish government seems powerless to prosecute copyright infringers or Bittorrent tracker hosts, give them a little time and they'll remove the obstacles that prevent them from doing so.
I can't say I'm an expert on US law, but if your system is anything like sane, then no private operator has any right to search a persons belongings without their consent.
Sir, your common sense arguments are unwelcome here. This is an anti-MS thread on Slashdot. Take your rational approach elsewhere before we do it for you.
I'm moving house, and I think once I unpack my stuff, the music CDs are staying in the boxes. If there was a decent service out there that sold DRM-free music and had a good catalogue, I'd be all over it. As it stands, I've been using cdon.com, since they usually have what I'm looking for, but WHY do I have to be burdened with that plastic trash when all I want is the music? It's just another extra inconvenience I have to put up with for actually paying for music.
Oh well, maybe one day I'll be able to just send money to a performer and download the music however I please, whereever I please. Or maybe even just pay a flat monthly rate for a license to download anything I like, anywhere I like, without legal repercussions.
Anyone working at a large media company, at least in programming, will have the you-use-it-you-pay-for-it mantra drilled so deep into their skulls they don't even need to think about it. It's the default assumption. They're the kind of people who watch a clip from a documentary being made, hear someone's cell ringing in the background with a song for a ringtone, and thinks "uh-oh, we'll have to track down the copyright holder and get a license for that song..."
That's been my experience of the industry anyway.
The story goes that it failed because Philips refused to put porn on the cassettes, which is of course very bad marketing:) If that means Philips refused to license the tech to the porn industry, then it's no wonder the system failed. Who wants to give the developer of a medium any say on what kind of content can or can't be sold on that medium?
Plus I'm not an adolescent gangsta wannabe so overall volume and the ability to irritate others by playing my music at full volume simply isn't an issue. And frankly I couldn't care less about the type of music where that sort of thing is an objective, so if that sort of music is "ruined" by dynamic compression it just doesn't bother me in the least. Seems to me the type of person you describe would specifically want highly compressed music, since that is guaranteed to stay at a high volume all of the time. Compression doesn't control the overall perceived volume, the volume knob on your music player does that. Compression controls the amount of volume variance in the music.
I keep hearing the purpose of the second amendment is to provide citizens with the means to protect themselves against state oppression. If you ever have to go up against the military, you're going to want something heavy.
I think it's absurd that we can't build an informational network or communications infrastructure without having it jammed pack full of ads and scam-artists, but apparently that's the world we live in. It's not absurd at all. It's a logical extension of the world we live in. Everything is about marketing and money offline, and people take that with them online.
Of course, there is the question of how to create revenue on the internet, apart from actually selling something. If getting cash from ads becomes impossible, what kind of effect will that have on the kinds of sites you find on the net?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeees, because clearly the population at large makes their media purchase decision based on the quality of the product. Clearly the best product is what sells the most. C'mon now. Media is only partly about the actual product, be it music, a movie, whatever. Mostly it, like anything, is about branding and selling a lifestyle to the consumer. People buy things to show their "personality", or rather that they fit into a particular category of consumers dreamt up by marketers. That the chart-topping artists are there because the record co's put them there I don't doubt, but that is possible because consumers want such a system. They want to have clear categories of what is cool, so they can themselves become cool just by spending money on the right things. Then there's the people who are cool because they buy the wrong things, but that's just the flip side of the coin, and soon enough the wrong things become the right things... Everyone chooses media based on the enjoyment they derive from it. There are some who derive that joy purely from experiencing media regardless of the images associated with the artists, but for most consumers that enjoyment comes from the "peripheral" values attached to the media. Completely free derivative use of media would probably yield some interesting works, but I don't think it would change the commercial landscape much.
What they have to lose is the work it takes to do that. They said there's proprietary IP involved in the specs for the newer cards that they'll have to find a way to not release along with the specs, probably there are similar issues with the old cards. And the older cards no longer generate revenue, so from ATI/AMD's point of view it's not really worth the trouble.
By the time a product is getting significant amounts of negative reviews from users, it's probably too late to improve it - even if you do, no-one's going to buy your product to see if it's better. You either find a way to suppress the bad word-of-mouth (good luck) or you go out of business.
More importantly, isn't it just a matter of time until laws requiring such filtering are passed? Governments want to control the Internet, and if it is technically feasible, they will do it sooner or later. The only option is to make government interference technically impossible. You can't count on legislation to keep your freedoms. Laws change.
I can just see the grin on the editor's face as they noticed this one...
For a while now I've been wondering what type of brain cancer the RIAA and their members suffer from. Finally I figured out the logic in their actions.
Big Music is no longer in the business of making music. That's not news, they've long been in the business of selling music, which just happens to require burning some trash onto CDs. But they're not in that business any more, either. They now intend to make suing people their primary business. At 5000 dollars a song, the profit margins are pretty damn high. This explains the pricing, their attitude towards their customers, in general the way they seem to be doing everything they can to discourage people from actually paying for music. They WANT people to download without permission as much as possible, since it increases the number of people they can sue.
Why I didn't see it sooner, I don't know. It's obvious.
From TFA:
"These governments told their users to use ToR, a software that sends all your traffic through not one but three other servers that you know absolutely nothing about"
Also the article says the compromised organizations were warned about the risks of using Tor without encryption, and the warnings were blown off. That doesn't sound to me like any hackers were behind the Tor usage.
Not to call your parents dumb, but how do you not tell the difference? Are the advertisements I get linked to google search results somehow drastically different, because for me they are clearly separated from actual results - either on the right side of the screen, or in a coloured box above the results - and as has been pointed out, clearly marked as sponsored links. I don't see how you can reasonably demand Google to do much else, surely they can assume users can read?
I was just thinking the same, and also wondering how likely that is to even be possible over EDGE or GPRS or whatever that thing uses...
So by your logic, all NDAs are invalid since they restrict a person's right to free speech? Get real here.
I'm sure there are plenty of kids willing to come play games on your PS3 for you. If you can convince them/their parents you're not a pedophile or serial killer, that is.
Where's the damn 'bury' button?!
If you ask me, all those safety nets are exactly why depression is so commonplace. The individual human being is essentially pretty modern software running on mostly very archaic wetware - for all our fancy culture and consciousness, you can't discount the effects of millions of years of evolution on the mind. And evolution has equipped humans to act socially, but we've also adapted to constantly being in danger of death and constantly having to struggle to survive. The kind of life the "lucky" people today lead is a very new thing indeed - your decisions are made for you, you have to be particularly unlucky or try very hard before you'll starve to death, there are not that many things out there looking to kill you. Life is easier, to be sure, but our bodies have evolved to take a type of joy from overcoming hardships, and probably also to expect the occasional, fairly common, surge of adrenaline and other stress hormones in the body.
Almost all the things that used to make life meaningful - feed, fight, flee, fuck - now require so little effort to do, if they need doing at all, that the body is left wondering what it's supposed to do with itself. Some of us manage to find something to do with their time that makes sense to them, but I don't see a 9-to-5 job in a factory doing much for one's sense of purpose. And without at least the illusion that you're achieving something, what is there to live for?
Sweden is often portrayed as a very progressive (from the slashdot user's POV), permissive state with regard to P2P, copyright and internet issues, but will that last? Judging by what I read of the Pirate Bay's battles with the government there, it seems the current permissiveness is really just an accident, something the government really resents. And the government is the agent that can change laws, not the Pirate Bay or their supporters (unless they get some serious popular support that translates to votes at election time). So even if currently the Swedish government seems powerless to prosecute copyright infringers or Bittorrent tracker hosts, give them a little time and they'll remove the obstacles that prevent them from doing so.
What are those exceptions?
I can't say I'm an expert on US law, but if your system is anything like sane, then no private operator has any right to search a persons belongings without their consent.
Sir, your common sense arguments are unwelcome here. This is an anti-MS thread on Slashdot. Take your rational approach elsewhere before we do it for you.
I'm moving house, and I think once I unpack my stuff, the music CDs are staying in the boxes. If there was a decent service out there that sold DRM-free music and had a good catalogue, I'd be all over it. As it stands, I've been using cdon.com, since they usually have what I'm looking for, but WHY do I have to be burdened with that plastic trash when all I want is the music? It's just another extra inconvenience I have to put up with for actually paying for music. Oh well, maybe one day I'll be able to just send money to a performer and download the music however I please, whereever I please. Or maybe even just pay a flat monthly rate for a license to download anything I like, anywhere I like, without legal repercussions.
Anyone working at a large media company, at least in programming, will have the you-use-it-you-pay-for-it mantra drilled so deep into their skulls they don't even need to think about it. It's the default assumption. They're the kind of people who watch a clip from a documentary being made, hear someone's cell ringing in the background with a song for a ringtone, and thinks "uh-oh, we'll have to track down the copyright holder and get a license for that song..." That's been my experience of the industry anyway.
Hard to have sex while you've locked yourself into some basement with your friends to play D&D...
I keep hearing the purpose of the second amendment is to provide citizens with the means to protect themselves against state oppression. If you ever have to go up against the military, you're going to want something heavy.
Of course, there is the question of how to create revenue on the internet, apart from actually selling something. If getting cash from ads becomes impossible, what kind of effect will that have on the kinds of sites you find on the net?