or should I say Holiday gifts, is the word Christmas allowed anymore?
Are you a school administrator who's gotten in trouble for pressuring kids to celebrate the birth of another religion's deity? No? Then have you ever experienced a situation where someone told you not to use the word "Christmas" during the Christmas season? Seriously, I'm not just being snarky, I'm actually curious.
If not, please don't fuel the fake "war on Christmas" flamewar that only serves to demonize disestablishmentarians. We're not trying to steal Christmas from any of the Whos in Whoville. We promise.
My point is that the "intuition failures" are basically universal among english speaking programmers. Your example, "red is the color of my car" may technically be understandable but requires extra processing because of its nonstandard ordering.
So basically, you're saying putting constants on the left is a technique that only has an upside (ignoring the downside).
I agree with you, even inasfar as to say that I think putting constants on the left side is a good habit. However, there is a hit to readability when you do it that way. English speakers read left-to-right, and the subject nearly always precedes the object in a sentence. "if (5 == x)" may keep you from doing accidental assignments, but it also reads the same way "red is my car" would. For me, that means another second or two of parsing it in my head, which breaks the flow of my code review.
I wholeheartedly agree with you. HBO is fully within its rights to do this, and the only people harmed are the ones illegally infringing their copyrights.
The one caveat I'll make, though, is that the illegal infringement is not always unethical, specifically in this case. HBO has a number of serialized shows at the moment, where there's a progressive plotline that gets lost if you miss one episode. If I am an HBO subscriber, and I happen to miss one Sopranos episode and decide instead to download it, then what I've done has had virtually no negative impact on HBO's finances. The only possible loss of revenue is a reduced statistical chance that I'll buy their DVD release of the season in order to catch that one episode... but I'd venture to say that the statistics of that are not significant.
What's more, I've probably greatly increased my statistical chance of remaining an HBO subscriber. If I miss an episode, I may lose track of the plot. If I lose track of the plot, I may lose interest in the series. If I lose interest in the series, I have one less big reason to pay them money every month.
This, of course, only justifies people who are HBO subscribers. People who download the whole season without giving HBO a cent are way out of line. And I fully agree that, justified or no, the act is still illegal and shouldn't be done without HBO's permission (which I wouldn't hold my breath for).
I can't attest for the comic book shows, but Buffy incorporated Sci-Fi storylines. I don't know if you would count that as making it a "sci-fi show", but as you may have noticed they're not using your definition anyway.
***SPOILERS***
There was the season when human, demon, and robot components were being used to make a cyborg supersoldier who went Frankenstein-monster on the town. There was the lifelike android of Buffy that took her place after she died, to fool the demon world into thinking they were still threatened by a slayer. There was also a John Ritterbot that tried to put the moves on Buffy's mom. There was a team of nerds who tried to become supervillians using a combination of science and the occult throughout the sixth season.
Basically, seasons four and six were fantasy/sci-fi with about an equal emphasis, whereas all the other seasons were fantasy with an occasional garnish of sci-fi.
Interesting you should say that, because the final polls before the election put Kerry's lead in Maryland at 11-12% (source).
Obviously, the iconic "they" wouldn't have given Bush a 100% win in every state; they'd never have gotten away with it. Rather, subtle modifications across the board would be virtually undetectable and allegations of such could be easily deflected.
That was irrelevant to my point. I wasn't making a statement about the motivations of the 9/11 hijackers, I was making a statement about a highly suggestible public that will believe anything they're told.
The generic question is whether your survival depends more upon a rapid reaction free of committee-bog, or upon the carefully crafted wisdom of a consensus.
Do you meen the rapid reaction of the President after he was told that we were under attack on 9/11, or do you mean the carefully crafted wisdom of the consensus (plurality, fine) that believed that "most" or "some" of the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqi in 2003?
Well, of course I'd rather have a public that either takes the time to inform itself, or admits when it doesn't know. Who wouldn't?
Okay, let's ignore for the moment that he redirected to other sites' images of slaughterhouses, making him a ginormous hypocrite (and quite a dick too, by the way).
Your logic:
As long as his actions were technically legal, he is not guilty of anything.
Though Fuddrucker's actions were technically legal, they are morons who deserve what they get.
If you don't see the inconsistency there, there's little help for you. In other words, pick one moral compass and stick with it.
I think it is surprising how little people care about open formats.
How can this be surprising? To 98% of the people in the world, the computer is, and shall remain, a black box. They don't care how it works inside. They don't care about LZW compression, or XML, or TCP/IP, or C++, or the difference between OR and XOR. They don't think of their files as being in a "format" unless poor user interfaces dictate that they must. To them, the file is a photograph they took, or a screenplay they've written, or a song they downloaded, and the internals of its definition are irrelevant.
And to take a small jab at the open source community, this is where we have problems reaching the desktop market. We design interfaces for ourselves, and we care about the internals. We want to know that PNG supports alpha transparency, or that our Windows XP installation is on/dev/hda1 while our Linux swap partition is on/dev/hdb2. We care whether the songs we listen to use VBR to save a few extra kilobytes on a 300 GB hard drive.
But when you provide these things as options to a user who doesn't know or care what they mean, you're asking them to commit to a choice when they don't want to. They'll feel helpless, and stupid, and if/when they complain, we too often reply "well it's not our fault you can't use it. RTFM."
Okay, I kinda veered off topic there... regarding open formats: in the end, there's relatively little difference between an open and a closed format on a twenty-year timeline, from the perspective of the 98% group. Either way, they're not going to be the ones designing the conversion tool. If it's an open format, they have to hope that enough geeky guys with free time find it an interesting or relevant enough problem to solve. If it's a closed format, they have to hope that the company's still in business and updating its tools, or that it released something before it went belly-up, or that it opened its file formats, or that its developers are good samaritans. And here's the kicker: the 98% group does not know which of these alternatives is more likely to be the case. They probably don't realize the problem exists. It's not because they're stupid or willfully ignorant, because once again they only see the computer as a tool. You might as well call them stupid or willfully ignorant for not knowing what machine screws are used to hold their washing machine together.
Poor analogy, because this situation is even worse. Stopping people from accessing desired materials is the POLAR OPPOSITE of a librarian's responsibility.
It would be more accurate to say we should fire any cop who fails to increase crime on his shift. Ludicrous, yeah?
Seriously, there have been like fifty stories about Hot Coffee on Slashdot, and yet each time the same comments get modded up: 1. Violence and crime are worse than consentual sex. 2. The sex minigame wasn't even accessible without modification/it's very difficult to access it. 3. Parents who bought a game called "Grand Theft Auto" for young kids shouldn't be able to yell at other people about irresponsibility. 4. It's much easier to get real porn than to get this mod. 5. All this is just politicians trying to gain support among the "think of the children" crowd. 6. (this one doesn't apply so much to Australia) The difference between its old rating and its new rating is only one year of age.
So moderators: I'm only half kidding when I say that these posts should be marked "Redundant", not insightful or interesting. Not anymore.
Disregarding the fact that this article didn't seem to incorporate any of the well-studied economic effects of monopolization, opting instead for gross assumption and generalization...
No matter how much we think we know about the effects, we can't compare with-monopoly to without-monopoly until Professor Farnsworth invents the Finglonger and What-if Machine.
And even if we could... historical examples of monopolies refer to fundamentally different markets than computer software. You may not have realized it, but you said it yourself: "there has been very little study of losses created by the large-scale copying of cheaply replicable goods". I can't think of a more accurate way to describe computer software.
Steel, transportation, energy service, all of these are O(n) markets; 500 units of steel costs something on the order of 500 times the price of one unit of steel. Moreover, all of them replaced and were replaced by other markets that served largely similar purposes.
Personal computing was new, it was unparalleled, and the software side of it was an O(1) market; the most significant cost of software was the initial development, and it was the same regardless of how many copies you'd sell. The same economic math simply doesn't apply.
Most of the more intelligent religious people that I have spoken with recognize the gaps in humans ability to understand the teachings correctly, including clergy
That would be a closer parallel to the scientific method if scientists today were simply trying to ascertain whether we understood them correctly when they said the Earth was flat.
Real progress in science comes from challenging assumptions. Real progress in religion comes from understanding the assumptions more closely... which is great, and an admirable goal. But it doesn't leave a lot of wiggle room for those who disagree with the assumptions in the first place.
I'm normally not one to point out examples of groupthink in this community. By and large, we have our biases same as every other discussion group that's ever existed.
But: every time there's a new study on how "piracy costs the music industry N dollars", where N is the estimated number of piracy incidents times the average suggested retail price of the pirated materials, there is universal outrage. "That's fallacious," we cry, "it assumes that every incident of piracy would have otherwise been a retail purchase at full price!". And we are right to make that claim.
However, here's a study that exercises a similar fallacy, and yet the outrage goes in the other direction. (and yes, I know this doesn't apply to everyone... I'm generalizing).
We can't assume, if the major vendors decided to stop bundling Windows/Office tomorrow, that any significant number of people would happily explore alternative options and be just as satisfied.
We can't assume, had Microsoft gone belly-up nine years ago, that people would have been perfectly content to start figuring out monitor sync rates and which filesystems with which to partition and format their hard drives.
We can't assume that all the unwashed masses would've just gone to Apple; we can't assume they would've been able to afford it; we can't assume Apple's products would've advanced at the rate they have without the pressure of being the "underdog". And since the premise of this "study" (though I am loathe to call it that) is that of the cost of a monopoly, we can't assume Apple (or Linux, or whatever) "winning" the market would've been any better.
Like it or not, Microsoft's presence and market dominance is an inextricable part of computing history. There is no way of even remotely predicting how the last twenty years would have panned out without it. And despite its grandiose claims, the authors of this article don't even seem to have bothered trying.
A 4-point font can display more text on the screen, but that doesn't make it better than a 10-point font.
It's better by quite a bit if the ten-point font means that the document can't have as much text. For example, if you need to print a legal document on one page, and 4pt font is the only way it fits, then 10pt just won't do.
In other words, your analogy is broken because it assumes that the data will be the same for both cases.
I'm afraid I can no longer purchase movies or cds from Wal-mart, because for all I know they're just well done bootlegs. I've got to "err on the side of protecting copyrights", after all.
Same thing with other Wal-mart products, I'm afraid... I can't be sure that they're not violating the trademark protections of Coca-cola by packaging a knockoff as The Real Thing (tm).
Disregarding the comparative quality of the emulators on those systems (which has been covered by other respondants), there's also a significant plus for SNES emulation on the DS or PSP... the control layout is closely analogous to the original SNES controller. D-pad on the left, four buttons in a plus shape on the right, two shoulder buttons, and select and start.
I don't know how the SNES emulator for the GBA manages to shoehorn twelve available buttons into the nine or ten that are actually on the GBA itself, but no matter how creative and elegant their solution may be, it's still a kludge.
To all the people observing that porn is frequently the driving force for new media formats, someone explain to me... who is going to buy porn movies for a portable device? What is the compelling situation where one would want to watch porn on a small screen like the PSP's?
Really just genuinely curious.
It's not as clear a line as Ars-Fartsica implied, but the general premise is that mind-altering drugs make you incapable of recognizing your social responsibilities.
It's more clear with an example. PCP can cause auditory hallucinations, paranoia, and psychosis in certain people and in certain quantities. Let's say Sober Joe is a peaceable guy... never has a bone to pick with anyone, never been in a single fight. Joe takes some PCP, has the aforementioned reactions, and knocks out a cab driver because he assumed he was being kidnapped.
In this extremely contrived example, it's pretty obvious that PCP was the catalyst of the assault... Joe wouldn't have committed it unless he was high. It would be fair to say that PCP is to "blame" for the assault. But you can't put PCP on trial, it's just a chemical. So your options are to blame Joe, who remember is a good god-fearing guy who happened to submit to peer pressure, or to ban PCP because of its probability that it will cause people to disregard societal rules. In the U.S., we do both. But that's the argument that makes mind-altering substances "automatic liabilities" in most peoples' minds.
There's no question that there are flaws in that heuristic... many people would claim that marijuana doesn't have significant violent or hallucinogenic effects when compared to alcohol. Or even more controversially, that it is much more benign than many pharmaceuticals in its effects; yet alcohol is legal, and we give legal mind-altering substances with ill-defined long term effects to children, but Marijuana is a Schedule 1 Narcotic in the US. But there is a solid (if not irrefutable) argument that it's necessary to draw a line somewhere.
Heh, people may not be able to understand "a Bose-Einstein condensate, a high Tc superconductor or some bloody neutrino", but maybe the real secret of the Nobel Prize in Physics is that physical phenomena have such cool names.:)
I think the real reason the public doesn't know
about Fields or Abel is because it would be extraordinarily difficult to explain the achievements being awarded.
For example, take this Wikipedia exerpt from the entry on 1974 Fields winner Enrico Bombieri...
Bombieri's theorem is one of the major applications of the large sieve method. It improves Dirichlet's theorem on prime numbers in arithmetic progressions, by showing that by averaging over the modulus over a range, the mean error is much less than can be proved in a given case. This result can sometimes substitute for the still-unproved generalized Riemann hypothesis.
Did you get all that? No? Part of the problem is that 99.9% of people would have no clue what any of that meant, but mostly it's that there's no apparent or easily explainable relevance to things people care about.
Contrast the discovery of X-rays, or the obvious world effects of Peace Prize winners, or the Chemistry awards that let us understand and control the real world better, or the Physiology awards that help us know how the human body works. Obviously, most of the awards suffer a similar problem of being too technical for most people to understand, but you can still get their attention by explaining the practical consequences in a simple way.
With such specific terms, I don't see how they could refuse...
"Quality", which you seem to define as "music I like".
"Reasonable", which you seem to define as "what I'm willing to pay".
"Fair", which for you seems to transcend the legal definition from the copyright act of 1976 (since you describe a situation that could be viewed as a replacement for your coughgirlfriend buying those albums for herself).
I mean, I think the record industry needs to get its act together too and adjust their business model to meet today's reality. I also think these ISP "agreements" are idiotic. But what you have there is not a plan for change, it's a wish list.
Not that I agree with you, but it's worth noting that this was also the episode after he broke the 2.5 million dollar mark. "Over a quarter of ten million dollars" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, but it may be round enough.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you a school administrator who's gotten in trouble for pressuring kids to celebrate the birth of another religion's deity? No? Then have you ever experienced a situation where someone told you not to use the word "Christmas" during the Christmas season? Seriously, I'm not just being snarky, I'm actually curious.
If not, please don't fuel the fake "war on Christmas" flamewar that only serves to demonize disestablishmentarians. We're not trying to steal Christmas from any of the Whos in Whoville. We promise.
Watches his karma go up in smoke...
So basically, you're saying putting constants on the left is a technique that only has an upside (ignoring the downside).
I agree with you, even inasfar as to say that I think putting constants on the left side is a good habit. However, there is a hit to readability when you do it that way. English speakers read left-to-right, and the subject nearly always precedes the object in a sentence. "if (5 == x)" may keep you from doing accidental assignments, but it also reads the same way "red is my car" would. For me, that means another second or two of parsing it in my head, which breaks the flow of my code review.
The one caveat I'll make, though, is that the illegal infringement is not always unethical, specifically in this case. HBO has a number of serialized shows at the moment, where there's a progressive plotline that gets lost if you miss one episode. If I am an HBO subscriber, and I happen to miss one Sopranos episode and decide instead to download it, then what I've done has had virtually no negative impact on HBO's finances. The only possible loss of revenue is a reduced statistical chance that I'll buy their DVD release of the season in order to catch that one episode... but I'd venture to say that the statistics of that are not significant.
What's more, I've probably greatly increased my statistical chance of remaining an HBO subscriber. If I miss an episode, I may lose track of the plot. If I lose track of the plot, I may lose interest in the series. If I lose interest in the series, I have one less big reason to pay them money every month.
This, of course, only justifies people who are HBO subscribers. People who download the whole season without giving HBO a cent are way out of line. And I fully agree that, justified or no, the act is still illegal and shouldn't be done without HBO's permission (which I wouldn't hold my breath for).
***SPOILERS***
There was the season when human, demon, and robot components were being used to make a cyborg supersoldier who went Frankenstein-monster on the town. There was the lifelike android of Buffy that took her place after she died, to fool the demon world into thinking they were still threatened by a slayer. There was also a John Ritterbot that tried to put the moves on Buffy's mom. There was a team of nerds who tried to become supervillians using a combination of science and the occult throughout the sixth season.
Basically, seasons four and six were fantasy/sci-fi with about an equal emphasis, whereas all the other seasons were fantasy with an occasional garnish of sci-fi.
Obviously, the iconic "they" wouldn't have given Bush a 100% win in every state; they'd never have gotten away with it. Rather, subtle modifications across the board would be virtually undetectable and allegations of such could be easily deflected.
That was irrelevant to my point. I wasn't making a statement about the motivations of the 9/11 hijackers, I was making a statement about a highly suggestible public that will believe anything they're told.
Well, of course I'd rather have a public that either takes the time to inform itself, or admits when it doesn't know. Who wouldn't?
Your logic:
- As long as his actions were technically legal, he is not guilty of anything.
- Though Fuddrucker's actions were technically legal, they are morons who deserve what they get.
If you don't see the inconsistency there, there's little help for you. In other words, pick one moral compass and stick with it.How can this be surprising? To 98% of the people in the world, the computer is, and shall remain, a black box. They don't care how it works inside. They don't care about LZW compression, or XML, or TCP/IP, or C++, or the difference between OR and XOR. They don't think of their files as being in a "format" unless poor user interfaces dictate that they must. To them, the file is a photograph they took, or a screenplay they've written, or a song they downloaded, and the internals of its definition are irrelevant.
And to take a small jab at the open source community, this is where we have problems reaching the desktop market. We design interfaces for ourselves, and we care about the internals. We want to know that PNG supports alpha transparency, or that our Windows XP installation is on /dev/hda1 while our Linux swap partition is on /dev/hdb2. We care whether the songs we listen to use VBR to save a few extra kilobytes on a 300 GB hard drive.
But when you provide these things as options to a user who doesn't know or care what they mean, you're asking them to commit to a choice when they don't want to. They'll feel helpless, and stupid, and if/when they complain, we too often reply "well it's not our fault you can't use it. RTFM."
Okay, I kinda veered off topic there... regarding open formats: in the end, there's relatively little difference between an open and a closed format on a twenty-year timeline, from the perspective of the 98% group. Either way, they're not going to be the ones designing the conversion tool. If it's an open format, they have to hope that enough geeky guys with free time find it an interesting or relevant enough problem to solve. If it's a closed format, they have to hope that the company's still in business and updating its tools, or that it released something before it went belly-up, or that it opened its file formats, or that its developers are good samaritans. And here's the kicker: the 98% group does not know which of these alternatives is more likely to be the case. They probably don't realize the problem exists. It's not because they're stupid or willfully ignorant, because once again they only see the computer as a tool. You might as well call them stupid or willfully ignorant for not knowing what machine screws are used to hold their washing machine together.
It would be more accurate to say we should fire any cop who fails to increase crime on his shift. Ludicrous, yeah?
Seriously, there have been like fifty stories about Hot Coffee on Slashdot, and yet each time the same comments get modded up:
1. Violence and crime are worse than consentual sex.
2. The sex minigame wasn't even accessible without modification/it's very difficult to access it.
3. Parents who bought a game called "Grand Theft Auto" for young kids shouldn't be able to yell at other people about irresponsibility.
4. It's much easier to get real porn than to get this mod.
5. All this is just politicians trying to gain support among the "think of the children" crowd.
6. (this one doesn't apply so much to Australia) The difference between its old rating and its new rating is only one year of age.
So moderators: I'm only half kidding when I say that these posts should be marked "Redundant", not insightful or interesting. Not anymore.
No matter how much we think we know about the effects, we can't compare with-monopoly to without-monopoly until Professor Farnsworth invents the Finglonger and What-if Machine.
And even if we could... historical examples of monopolies refer to fundamentally different markets than computer software. You may not have realized it, but you said it yourself: "there has been very little study of losses created by the large-scale copying of cheaply replicable goods". I can't think of a more accurate way to describe computer software.
Steel, transportation, energy service, all of these are O(n) markets; 500 units of steel costs something on the order of 500 times the price of one unit of steel. Moreover, all of them replaced and were replaced by other markets that served largely similar purposes.
Personal computing was new, it was unparalleled, and the software side of it was an O(1) market; the most significant cost of software was the initial development, and it was the same regardless of how many copies you'd sell. The same economic math simply doesn't apply.
That would be a closer parallel to the scientific method if scientists today were simply trying to ascertain whether we understood them correctly when they said the Earth was flat.
Real progress in science comes from challenging assumptions. Real progress in religion comes from understanding the assumptions more closely... which is great, and an admirable goal. But it doesn't leave a lot of wiggle room for those who disagree with the assumptions in the first place.
Not with a straight face.
And given the social trends of the last few years, definitely not with a gay face.
But: every time there's a new study on how "piracy costs the music industry N dollars", where N is the estimated number of piracy incidents times the average suggested retail price of the pirated materials, there is universal outrage. "That's fallacious," we cry, "it assumes that every incident of piracy would have otherwise been a retail purchase at full price!". And we are right to make that claim.
However, here's a study that exercises a similar fallacy, and yet the outrage goes in the other direction. (and yes, I know this doesn't apply to everyone... I'm generalizing).
We can't assume, if the major vendors decided to stop bundling Windows/Office tomorrow, that any significant number of people would happily explore alternative options and be just as satisfied.
We can't assume, had Microsoft gone belly-up nine years ago, that people would have been perfectly content to start figuring out monitor sync rates and which filesystems with which to partition and format their hard drives.
We can't assume that all the unwashed masses would've just gone to Apple; we can't assume they would've been able to afford it; we can't assume Apple's products would've advanced at the rate they have without the pressure of being the "underdog". And since the premise of this "study" (though I am loathe to call it that) is that of the cost of a monopoly, we can't assume Apple (or Linux, or whatever) "winning" the market would've been any better.
Like it or not, Microsoft's presence and market dominance is an inextricable part of computing history. There is no way of even remotely predicting how the last twenty years would have panned out without it. And despite its grandiose claims, the authors of this article don't even seem to have bothered trying.
It's better by quite a bit if the ten-point font means that the document can't have as much text. For example, if you need to print a legal document on one page, and 4pt font is the only way it fits, then 10pt just won't do.
In other words, your analogy is broken because it assumes that the data will be the same for both cases.
Same thing with other Wal-mart products, I'm afraid... I can't be sure that they're not violating the trademark protections of Coca-cola by packaging a knockoff as The Real Thing (tm).
Disregarding the comparative quality of the emulators on those systems (which has been covered by other respondants), there's also a significant plus for SNES emulation on the DS or PSP... the control layout is closely analogous to the original SNES controller. D-pad on the left, four buttons in a plus shape on the right, two shoulder buttons, and select and start.
I don't know how the SNES emulator for the GBA manages to shoehorn twelve available buttons into the nine or ten that are actually on the GBA itself, but no matter how creative and elegant their solution may be, it's still a kludge.
To all the people observing that porn is frequently the driving force for new media formats, someone explain to me... who is going to buy porn movies for a portable device? What is the compelling situation where one would want to watch porn on a small screen like the PSP's? Really just genuinely curious.
It's more clear with an example. PCP can cause auditory hallucinations, paranoia, and psychosis in certain people and in certain quantities. Let's say Sober Joe is a peaceable guy... never has a bone to pick with anyone, never been in a single fight. Joe takes some PCP, has the aforementioned reactions, and knocks out a cab driver because he assumed he was being kidnapped.
In this extremely contrived example, it's pretty obvious that PCP was the catalyst of the assault... Joe wouldn't have committed it unless he was high. It would be fair to say that PCP is to "blame" for the assault. But you can't put PCP on trial, it's just a chemical. So your options are to blame Joe, who remember is a good god-fearing guy who happened to submit to peer pressure, or to ban PCP because of its probability that it will cause people to disregard societal rules. In the U.S., we do both. But that's the argument that makes mind-altering substances "automatic liabilities" in most peoples' minds.
There's no question that there are flaws in that heuristic... many people would claim that marijuana doesn't have significant violent or hallucinogenic effects when compared to alcohol. Or even more controversially, that it is much more benign than many pharmaceuticals in its effects; yet alcohol is legal, and we give legal mind-altering substances with ill-defined long term effects to children, but Marijuana is a Schedule 1 Narcotic in the US. But there is a solid (if not irrefutable) argument that it's necessary to draw a line somewhere.
Heh, people may not be able to understand "a Bose-Einstein condensate, a high Tc superconductor or some bloody neutrino", but maybe the real secret of the Nobel Prize in Physics is that physical phenomena have such cool names. :)
For example, take this Wikipedia exerpt from the entry on 1974 Fields winner Enrico Bombieri...
Did you get all that? No? Part of the problem is that 99.9% of people would have no clue what any of that meant, but mostly it's that there's no apparent or easily explainable relevance to things people care about.
Contrast the discovery of X-rays, or the obvious world effects of Peace Prize winners, or the Chemistry awards that let us understand and control the real world better, or the Physiology awards that help us know how the human body works. Obviously, most of the awards suffer a similar problem of being too technical for most people to understand, but you can still get their attention by explaining the practical consequences in a simple way.
- "Quality", which you seem to define as "music I like".
- "Reasonable", which you seem to define as "what I'm willing to pay".
- "Fair", which for you seems to transcend the legal definition from the copyright act of 1976 (since you describe a situation that could be viewed as a replacement for your coughgirlfriend buying those albums for herself).
I mean, I think the record industry needs to get its act together too and adjust their business model to meet today's reality. I also think these ISP "agreements" are idiotic. But what you have there is not a plan for change, it's a wish list.Not that I agree with you, but it's worth noting that this was also the episode after he broke the 2.5 million dollar mark. "Over a quarter of ten million dollars" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, but it may be round enough.