The author of this summary would respond that the store is so inconveniencing its patrons that it ought to be closed down.
there's a difference between "ought to" and "will be".
if you run a winery, and your real, paying customers are used to being able to get their own bottles off the shelves, hold a couple side by side, read the labels, put one back, and otherwise interact freely with that wine without having to get an employee to help them - once you lock up the cabinets, the only important question is "are these locks going to annoy my paying customers so much that they'll just stop shopping here?"
so far it seems that the prevailing opinion is "yes, they will."
if your security is cumbersome to the paying customers, they're going to just stop paying. and as we've seen, the hot stories these days have all been about just how onerous and annoying DRM schemes really are to legitimate customers.
and in the meantime, the thieves are still coming into your winery and picking the locks on your cabinets, so you've accomplished nothing.
Regarding "Chemist Tycoon": I think that title is much more odd as an American, where we don't refer to our pharmacists as "chemists". When I hear the word "chemist", I picture a chemical engineer, or some kind of research scientist mixing test tubes in a laboratory.
It's kind of ridiculous to imagine becoming a "tycoon" at that.
The kicker with mainstream ASP is it requires an IIS server and Windows server is not always cheap or the cheapest hosting solution for these same users. I know lots of people have problems with GoDaddy, but their ASP/IIS hosting is the same price as their LAMP hosting. For the basic cheapo package (which should be sufficient for the uses you mention), that's only $4 a month.
Something doesn't necessarily have to be difficult or unfair in order to be annoying. If you're winning an auction at a price that is well below your maximum bid (and naturally you'd prefer to pay the lowest price possible, regardless of what your maximum bid actually is) you may be pleased at the considerable discount you're poised to receive. Then if someone at the last second comes in and bids the item up, either eliminating your potential savings or causing you to lose the auction, that's going to sting a little.
It's even worse when shill bidders do it in order to guarantee that you don't get away with paying any less than your maximum bid.
David Sirlin's website is also full of great articles about game design and theory, if you're into that kind of thing it's definitely worth reading through.
Congestion charging won't stop people from driving into work so they can save a few bucks by climbing onto a cramped bus next to the homeless people If there's even a bus to climb onto. I live in the suburbs north of Tampa Bay and commute into Tampa for work. Public transit to take me from home to work simply does not exist. To top it off, the only viable north-south route from my town into Tampa is the Suncoast Parkway, which is a toll road. There aren't even any alternate north-south routes that wouldn't add an extra 45 minutes to my commute. I would LOVE the option of taking a bus or train to work, but that's just not possible here.
Leaving aside all the "you should have lived closer to work" or "you should have worked closer to home" arguments that always come up whenever these sorts of things are discussed, as it stands I am completely dependent on one toll road and I would be forced to pay whatever they want, just like I'm forced to pay whatever they charge for gas.
I think the Castlevania series and Metroid would certainly be worth the effort, and Blaster Master has always been a favorite of mine. Especially the themes to levels 1, 3, and 5.
Unfortunately, the possibility of contributing millions of dollars to an electoral opponent is a plenty big stick for a large corporation to use against a member of Congress. thank god we have a system where getting elected is a direct result of having the most money.
no one dies when artists don't get paid and decide they need day jobs and can't make music anymore
if drug companies didn't make money (and don't get me wrong, i agree that sometimes their pursuit of profit is egregious... i know it's not possible to always help everyone, but they can certainly stand to try a little harder to help more people) then the people who make those drugs would have to do something else in order to make a living.
net result = no drugs at all, even more dead people.
i've always been of the opinion that if copyright went away completely and as a result some musicians decided not to make music anymore, then we'd be better off.
but if the pharmaceutical companies went away, and people didn't make drugs anymore, we'd be back to using ground-up rhino horns and magical elixers made of antifreeze.
I'm not saying that it needs to be as meticulous or specific as a regulated industry like pharmaceuticals. I'm just pointing out that there's a similarity between the two situations: no one knows (or knew) exactly what is expected of them until the law comes to shut down your business.
I think the Best Practices guide is a good thing, and there's also no reason why it would need to be set in stone. continuing with my pharmaceutical industry analogy, the guidelines from the FDA and industry groups are always subject to change based upon new advances. They're not coded into law, but are agreed upon by all parties involved to keep things running smoothly without constant second-guessing.
This is an interesting question to me, because I work with the pharmaceutical industry and they actually had a very similar problem.
Back in the day, the FDA wrote regulations that were somewhat vague, much like Fair Use guidelines. They said things like "Your drug-making machines must be clean and safe". Sounds good, right? But they never defined exactly how clean was clean, or what "safe" really meant. So factories could go about their business, thinking they were doing everything right, and then be shut down because the FDA decided a conveyer belt was moving too quickly or a few too many dust specks had gathered on a surface.
So they formed industry groups that sat down with the regulators and actually hammered out the details: what factors were the FDA inspectors taking into consideration, what tolerances should they be allowed, what margins of error were there... that sort of thing. That way they had something concrete they could rely on, and not just cross their fingers any time an inspector came to audit the facility.
Maybe this "Fair Use Best Practices" guide is a step in the same direction for people who want to use some portion of a copyrighted work but don't want to pray to the copyright gods that they're not falling afoul of some unexpected judgment.
These guidelines tell you what to consider, but they don't explicitly quantify or define anything, so in the end you really are just guessing and hoping you don't get sued anyway.
For instance, who judges what the "purpose and character" of the use is? I might think my usage of a copyrighted work is educational and with good purpose, but the owner of the work might disagree. There's nothing outlining specifically what is and isn't a good purpose or character; only a couple of suggestions of things that might qualify.
Or how much of the "amount and substantiality" used is acceptable? The law doesn't say "you can use 10% but no more", so it's still a guessing game.
And it's not always possible to judge what the effect on a potential market will be. Some people say sharing music increases the market for that music, while the industry claims huge losses from the same act.
So these are things to take into consideration, but they aren't really answers. The only thing you can do is try to think about these guidelines and hope for the best.
I think using the word "intervene" makes it sound like the DoJ is taking it upon themselves to step in, say "no, you can't countersue the RIAA", and that will be the end of the story.
If I'm understanding the scenario correctly, the counterclaim is saying to the RIAA "you have done something unconstitutional, and now I am going to seek damages from you because of it"; but the RIAA is replying "well, what we've done is federal law. If you say it's unconstitutional, we've got to get the Department of Justice involved".
Am I grossly misunderstanding this? It sounds more like the DoJ is "getting dragged into it" than "intervening" unless "intervene" is the proper legal term for this situation. I can see where there might be confusion caused by the use of that word.
The problem with profiling is that once it becomes clear that certain people are being profiled, those people will probably attempt to sneak their payload on board with someone who is obviously NOT being profiled.
I was watching that show "Airline" on A&E Network about Southwest airlines and the crazy hijinks that go on at the airport and I saw the following scenario:
An older lady was coming back from a Carribean vacation. She had 5 bottles of Vodka, but was only allowed to bring three on the plane. She asked a stranger to carry the other two bottles so she didn't have to abandon them at the airport. The man agreed.
Isn't one of the things they constantly drill into your head "DON'T CARRY ANYTHING ONTO THE PLANE FOR A STRANGER"? But here was this guy, accepting two bottles of clear liquid from a woman he didn't know; and what's more, THE AIRLINE REPRESENTATIVE ENCOURAGED IT.
To avoid things like this, you can tweak your settings. Go to your recommendations and it will show you the thing you purchased; you can then de-select "use this for recommendations" and it will forget that you ever purchased it, and not use that as a criteria for recommending things. I also make sure to do this when I buy a gift for someone, which is nothing I would ever want for myself.
As others have mentioned, the system isn't perfect. But if something similar were applied to TV ads, I think it would be better than being inundated with ads that I am completely not interested in. Both for me, because it wouldn't be wasting my time with products and services that I will never want or need; and for the advertiser, because I'm less likely to feel the need to skip every ad. They would get a targeted audience, which would be much more valuable to them.
1. Who says it's too late? Ideally, if something like this was set up a la Amazon.com, I should be able to adjust my preferences and opt back in to car ads anytime I want.
2. Well, that's a matter of opinion, I guess. Personally, I'm not going to lose any sleep over a commercial that I might have missed because I've opted out of a category. It won't be any worse than the current state of affairs, where I don't watch any commercials because I barely ever watch live TV. Everything is DVRed and all commercials are fast-forwarded through as quickly as possible.
And frankly, if we're not willing to provide the information necessary for advertisers to make informed choices, we're going to continue to be ignored, both on the web and on television. This is one reason that I actually like Amazon's recommendation system. I can provide information about what I like and don't like, and the site will then suggest items that I may be interested in based on that. If it suggests something that I'm not interested in, I can click "not interested" and it never presents that item to me again.
I would LOVE to have a similar scenario for other ad-driven media. Imagine if I could flag TV commercials with "not interested" and then never see that commercial again, or any commercial for a similar product. Once it got a good feel for what I really like and don't like, I probably wouldn't feel the need to skip commercials. The same could be said of web ads. If I could cherry-pick which ads I was interested in and which I wasn't I might not be so inclined to block ALL of them.
Ads are useful to me sometimes, but picking the signal out of the noise is usually such a hassle that I'd rather just skip the whole process. If everyone could make a very personal statement about what they want to see ads for and what they don't, I think the benefit for both parties would improve.
I'm usually not a fan of on-line things trying to faithfully mimic their real-world counterparts. Interface designers do it because they're convinced that their users will be able to seamlessly transfer their real-world skills into using their on-line application, but most of the time the artificial restrictions that are imposed in order to stay faithful to the metaphor limit the actual usefulness of the application.
That said, I kind of like this, page-turning animation and all.
Maybe it's because it's intended to display scans of actual books, and so having them mimic the actual books they're based on makes sense. Plus the addition of search capability is something that a real book doesn't have, but it uses the tools available as an on-line application. I also like the subtle things, like the thickness of the pages on either side changing, so you can judge your position in the book, and the little tabs that help you find your search terms.
It's making me re-think my stance on real-world metaphors in an on-line setting.
Well, that might be the original SUPER Mario Brothers strategy guide. The original Mario Brothers strategy guide would have to say "Don't touch the enemies coming out of those pipes. Hit them from below to flip them over. Kick them off the platform before Luigi does."
or the ADVANCED TIPS:
"Wait til Luigi tries to kick the enemy off the platform. Just before he does, hit it from below to flip it back over and kill Luigi!"
Also, according to a theory in Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, people are able to project themselves more easily into a cartoonish character. This allows them to imbue the character with more emotion, and allow them to sympathize with that character.
He was using that theory to explain why the protagonists in Japanese anime and manga tended to be very cartoony, while the villains were more detailed. The lack of detail in the main character's appearance more easily allows the viewer to put themselves in that character's place, while the detailed villains provide a stark contrast and a clear division of identity.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe that's another good reason to stop making pennies.
there's a difference between "ought to" and "will be".
if you run a winery, and your real, paying customers are used to being able to get their own bottles off the shelves, hold a couple side by side, read the labels, put one back, and otherwise interact freely with that wine without having to get an employee to help them - once you lock up the cabinets, the only important question is "are these locks going to annoy my paying customers so much that they'll just stop shopping here?"
so far it seems that the prevailing opinion is "yes, they will."
if your security is cumbersome to the paying customers, they're going to just stop paying. and as we've seen, the hot stories these days have all been about just how onerous and annoying DRM schemes really are to legitimate customers.
and in the meantime, the thieves are still coming into your winery and picking the locks on your cabinets, so you've accomplished nothing.
You could become a fan of the band This Bike is a Pipe Bomb, wrap one of their stickers around your bike, and have it destroyed by the authorities.
It also reminds me of the ZoomQuilt, which was done in Flash as a collaborative art project a couple years ago.
Regarding "Chemist Tycoon": I think that title is much more odd as an American, where we don't refer to our pharmacists as "chemists". When I hear the word "chemist", I picture a chemical engineer, or some kind of research scientist mixing test tubes in a laboratory.
It's kind of ridiculous to imagine becoming a "tycoon" at that.
Something doesn't necessarily have to be difficult or unfair in order to be annoying. If you're winning an auction at a price that is well below your maximum bid (and naturally you'd prefer to pay the lowest price possible, regardless of what your maximum bid actually is) you may be pleased at the considerable discount you're poised to receive. Then if someone at the last second comes in and bids the item up, either eliminating your potential savings or causing you to lose the auction, that's going to sting a little.
It's even worse when shill bidders do it in order to guarantee that you don't get away with paying any less than your maximum bid.
I think this was posted on Slashdot once, so you may have seen it before, but there is an excellent article by David Sirlin on Gamasutra that's about this very distinction.
David Sirlin's website is also full of great articles about game design and theory, if you're into that kind of thing it's definitely worth reading through.
Leaving aside all the "you should have lived closer to work" or "you should have worked closer to home" arguments that always come up whenever these sorts of things are discussed, as it stands I am completely dependent on one toll road and I would be forced to pay whatever they want, just like I'm forced to pay whatever they charge for gas.
I think the Castlevania series and Metroid would certainly be worth the effort, and Blaster Master has always been a favorite of mine. Especially the themes to levels 1, 3, and 5.
Everything I know about adventure games (and their death) I learned from Old Man Murray.
i see your point, but remember the flip side:
no one dies when artists don't get paid and decide they need day jobs and can't make music anymore
if drug companies didn't make money (and don't get me wrong, i agree that sometimes their pursuit of profit is egregious... i know it's not possible to always help everyone, but they can certainly stand to try a little harder to help more people) then the people who make those drugs would have to do something else in order to make a living.
net result = no drugs at all, even more dead people.
i've always been of the opinion that if copyright went away completely and as a result some musicians decided not to make music anymore, then we'd be better off.
but if the pharmaceutical companies went away, and people didn't make drugs anymore, we'd be back to using ground-up rhino horns and magical elixers made of antifreeze.
I'm not saying that it needs to be as meticulous or specific as a regulated industry like pharmaceuticals. I'm just pointing out that there's a similarity between the two situations: no one knows (or knew) exactly what is expected of them until the law comes to shut down your business.
I think the Best Practices guide is a good thing, and there's also no reason why it would need to be set in stone. continuing with my pharmaceutical industry analogy, the guidelines from the FDA and industry groups are always subject to change based upon new advances. They're not coded into law, but are agreed upon by all parties involved to keep things running smoothly without constant second-guessing.
This is an interesting question to me, because I work with the pharmaceutical industry and they actually had a very similar problem.
Back in the day, the FDA wrote regulations that were somewhat vague, much like Fair Use guidelines. They said things like "Your drug-making machines must be clean and safe". Sounds good, right? But they never defined exactly how clean was clean, or what "safe" really meant. So factories could go about their business, thinking they were doing everything right, and then be shut down because the FDA decided a conveyer belt was moving too quickly or a few too many dust specks had gathered on a surface.
So they formed industry groups that sat down with the regulators and actually hammered out the details: what factors were the FDA inspectors taking into consideration, what tolerances should they be allowed, what margins of error were there... that sort of thing. That way they had something concrete they could rely on, and not just cross their fingers any time an inspector came to audit the facility.
Maybe this "Fair Use Best Practices" guide is a step in the same direction for people who want to use some portion of a copyrighted work but don't want to pray to the copyright gods that they're not falling afoul of some unexpected judgment.
These guidelines tell you what to consider, but they don't explicitly quantify or define anything, so in the end you really are just guessing and hoping you don't get sued anyway.
For instance, who judges what the "purpose and character" of the use is? I might think my usage of a copyrighted work is educational and with good purpose, but the owner of the work might disagree. There's nothing outlining specifically what is and isn't a good purpose or character; only a couple of suggestions of things that might qualify.
Or how much of the "amount and substantiality" used is acceptable? The law doesn't say "you can use 10% but no more", so it's still a guessing game.
And it's not always possible to judge what the effect on a potential market will be. Some people say sharing music increases the market for that music, while the industry claims huge losses from the same act.
So these are things to take into consideration, but they aren't really answers. The only thing you can do is try to think about these guidelines and hope for the best.
MULDER: Look at this, Scully. There's been another MOD CHIP INSTALLATION in the heartland of America. We've got to get there right away.
SCULLY: Well, gee, Mulder. There's also this report of a shipment of drugs and illegal weapons coming into New Jersey tonight.
MULDER: I hardly think the FBI's concerned with matters like that.
I think using the word "intervene" makes it sound like the DoJ is taking it upon themselves to step in, say "no, you can't countersue the RIAA", and that will be the end of the story.
If I'm understanding the scenario correctly, the counterclaim is saying to the RIAA "you have done something unconstitutional, and now I am going to seek damages from you because of it"; but the RIAA is replying "well, what we've done is federal law. If you say it's unconstitutional, we've got to get the Department of Justice involved".
Am I grossly misunderstanding this? It sounds more like the DoJ is "getting dragged into it" than "intervening" unless "intervene" is the proper legal term for this situation. I can see where there might be confusion caused by the use of that word.
The problem with profiling is that once it becomes clear that certain people are being profiled, those people will probably attempt to sneak their payload on board with someone who is obviously NOT being profiled.
I was watching that show "Airline" on A&E Network about Southwest airlines and the crazy hijinks that go on at the airport and I saw the following scenario:
An older lady was coming back from a Carribean vacation. She had 5 bottles of Vodka, but was only allowed to bring three on the plane. She asked a stranger to carry the other two bottles so she didn't have to abandon them at the airport. The man agreed.
Isn't one of the things they constantly drill into your head "DON'T CARRY ANYTHING ONTO THE PLANE FOR A STRANGER"? But here was this guy, accepting two bottles of clear liquid from a woman he didn't know; and what's more, THE AIRLINE REPRESENTATIVE ENCOURAGED IT.
I was amazed.
To avoid things like this, you can tweak your settings. Go to your recommendations and it will show you the thing you purchased; you can then de-select "use this for recommendations" and it will forget that you ever purchased it, and not use that as a criteria for recommending things. I also make sure to do this when I buy a gift for someone, which is nothing I would ever want for myself.
As others have mentioned, the system isn't perfect. But if something similar were applied to TV ads, I think it would be better than being inundated with ads that I am completely not interested in. Both for me, because it wouldn't be wasting my time with products and services that I will never want or need; and for the advertiser, because I'm less likely to feel the need to skip every ad. They would get a targeted audience, which would be much more valuable to them.
1. Who says it's too late? Ideally, if something like this was set up a la Amazon.com, I should be able to adjust my preferences and opt back in to car ads anytime I want.
2. Well, that's a matter of opinion, I guess. Personally, I'm not going to lose any sleep over a commercial that I might have missed because I've opted out of a category. It won't be any worse than the current state of affairs, where I don't watch any commercials because I barely ever watch live TV. Everything is DVRed and all commercials are fast-forwarded through as quickly as possible.
I would LOVE to have a similar scenario for other ad-driven media. Imagine if I could flag TV commercials with "not interested" and then never see that commercial again, or any commercial for a similar product. Once it got a good feel for what I really like and don't like, I probably wouldn't feel the need to skip commercials. The same could be said of web ads. If I could cherry-pick which ads I was interested in and which I wasn't I might not be so inclined to block ALL of them.
Ads are useful to me sometimes, but picking the signal out of the noise is usually such a hassle that I'd rather just skip the whole process. If everyone could make a very personal statement about what they want to see ads for and what they don't, I think the benefit for both parties would improve.
I'm usually not a fan of on-line things trying to faithfully mimic their real-world counterparts. Interface designers do it because they're convinced that their users will be able to seamlessly transfer their real-world skills into using their on-line application, but most of the time the artificial restrictions that are imposed in order to stay faithful to the metaphor limit the actual usefulness of the application.
That said, I kind of like this, page-turning animation and all.
Maybe it's because it's intended to display scans of actual books, and so having them mimic the actual books they're based on makes sense. Plus the addition of search capability is something that a real book doesn't have, but it uses the tools available as an on-line application. I also like the subtle things, like the thickness of the pages on either side changing, so you can judge your position in the book, and the little tabs that help you find your search terms.
It's making me re-think my stance on real-world metaphors in an on-line setting.
NITPICKING:
Well, that might be the original SUPER Mario Brothers strategy guide. The original Mario Brothers strategy guide would have to say "Don't touch the enemies coming out of those pipes. Hit them from below to flip them over. Kick them off the platform before Luigi does."
or the ADVANCED TIPS:
"Wait til Luigi tries to kick the enemy off the platform. Just before he does, hit it from below to flip it back over and kill Luigi!"
Also, according to a theory in Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, people are able to project themselves more easily into a cartoonish character. This allows them to imbue the character with more emotion, and allow them to sympathize with that character.
He was using that theory to explain why the protagonists in Japanese anime and manga tended to be very cartoony, while the villains were more detailed. The lack of detail in the main character's appearance more easily allows the viewer to put themselves in that character's place, while the detailed villains provide a stark contrast and a clear division of identity.