Out of curiosity, how long do you think it will be until you switch to live DVD and say "like being able to keep the system images under 2 GB compressed." ?
For me, just about every computer I run into is at the point where that would work fine, but it sounds like you're working with some ultra-low budget stuff. What do you think?
It's more serious than simply copying your content, because the new site *replaces* yours in the ranking rather than competing with it. When I set up http://bad.site/1 through http://bad.site/100, all claiming to own the content at http://good.site/, Google displays only one of the 101 options in the listing -- and yours isn't too likely to get picked.
Actually, maybe that would happen anyway if I simply copied your site content perfectly 100 times. Not sure about that. Still, that aspect makes it much more of a concern.
Allowing medical marijuana in California, legalizing assisted suicide in Oregon, or voting not to enforce the Patriot Act in Utah would be good examples that fall on the other side of the political fence (though that last one was decided by a Republican state body, IIRC).
Interesting thing to note, though -- every one of those was under legal contention, last I heard, and it's not clear at least for the last two which way it will go. States rights is still a contender.
As far as how the parties support it, I think what it really comes down to is a consolation prize for the party that isn't in power in the legislative branch -- that's why it was a Republican issue for a long time and has recently tilted more towards the Democrats. That's probably also what has kept it significant long after most of us felt much more loyalty towards our country than our state -- there's always *someone* who has an interest in keeping states rights around.
Good point, well made. I've been a Mac user since the day, through the dark times, into the light, but I still run a desktop PC alongside my iBook -- the fact is that any OS available now is better than any OS available 5 years ago, they play along together pretty nicely, and two or three OSes are just more reliable and flexible than one.
Incidentally, I suspect that they've failed to release a $500 computer up until now because it wasn't cost effective, not because they didn't know we would want one. They've done some pretty stupid things in the past, though (RAM prices! argh!) so who knows...
I definitely like streams, for the reasons you say -- but once you learn about a great group, what do you do? If it's me, ten seconds later I have their first album queued up on Rhapsody...
Fair enough... I'm just saying that "when you buy a CD, you own it forever" isn't strictly accurate (in my house, at least) unless you add "as long as you rip it to your computer, only listen to copies, and are willing to (possibly illegally) download a backup if you have some kind of SNAFU." For all practical purposes, *my* CDs don't keep their value for more than about 5 years. If I was a different person, that wouldn't be true -- but these subscription services don't have to appeal to everyone to succeed, and I bet I'm not alone.
... that's the same comment that gets posted on here every time a subscription music service comes up.
The point could be equally well made about every other subscription service, though -- why rent city water that keeps getting more expensive and goes away when you stop paying, when, with a larger initial investment, you could dig your own well and have water forever?
The answer is, gee, they both make sense in different situations. It depends *how much* more expensive the initial investment is than the subscription, and whether the specific resource you are buying will always be sufficient, or it would be better to have a provider committed to keeping new sources available.
You acknowledged that it depends on your usage style, but I just wanted to drive this point home: pointing out that a subscription service stops when you stop paying for the subscription, and therefore is different from a one-time purchase, is no longer insightful. They're both different; they both make sense sometimes.
Personally, I pay $100 per year for Rhapsody. For me it makes sense -- there's no way I could purchase enough music for $100 to satisfy my needs, and downloading music for free would cost me literally thousands of dollars in terms of time spent. If it doesn't make sense for you, fair enough -- but don't act like it's a blinding insight to point out that I'm renting rather than buying.
I'm a happy Rhapsody user, for $25 every three months. The one important qualification, of course: I spend roughly 12 hours a day near a Windows computer. For me at least the article is totally right about the 'value proposition' -- Rhapsody saves me money if it saves even one hour a month trying to find music online, and it offers a variety of music that far outstrips the 8 CDs per year I could buy with the equivalent money. Admittedly I don't have those 8 CDs at the end of the year -- but having any music I want, instantly, for a year, is worth a hell of a lot more than having 8 CDs for, realistically speaking, about five years before they break or the format shifts again...
The criticisms about the interface definitely apply to Rhapsody too, though -- playlists suck, OS integration sucks, locating music is mediocre, software is Windows only. Definitely can't hold a candle to iTunes. 90% of my music used to be illegal downloads. Now 90% of my music is paid for, via Rhapsody, and it saves me money. If iTunes offers a similar service for $10 a month, they'll be getting my money in a heartbeat.
All of that, of course, assumes I don't need this stuff to be portable. If iTunes to go has come out by the time I'm *not* spending 12 hours a day near a Windows box, they'll be getting another iPod sale and a subscription. If it hasn't, it'll be Napster...
... not shallower in a negative sense, but if I spend a buck on the paper New York Times, I'll read a good portion of it. If I'm reading it online, I'll read a couple of headline articles, and a couple of articles from the Washington Post, and a couple from Slashdot, and a couple from Google News, and a couple from Metafilter... since most of those are aggregators, I've probably just read one article each from a dozen different sources. All of that has the equivalent value to me as the dollar I spent on the Times -- less, because I can get the Times cheaper with a subscription, and it comes with all sorts of extra stuff I can use if I feel like it.
That makes transitioning business models hard, because your micro payments have to be really, really micro -- whatever article of yours I'm reading is worth a tenth, or a fiftieth, of the entire publication, and I probably don't have any particular attachment to you, so I'm not willing to maintain an ongoing account. In order to make it all work, you need a way to seamlessly charge me say two cents an article -- that means convincing a whole bunch of users to sign up for the same service, and a whole bunch of publications to sell their stuff for a low enough price to keep those users interested.
I don't know which is more improbable, but they're both pretty long shots. In the meantime, if putting well-researched breaking news online for free is too expensive, we'll be back to getting second-hand news online for free, and maybe keeping a subscription to a few particularly valuable publications.
2. Unemployment fell. A lot. It's still falling, to the point where Australia is seeing serious skills shortages.
Sorry to be off-topic, but does that mean that this would be a good time to visit Australia, for folks like myself who can't afford to not work for too long?
Americans often support themselves visiting Japan by being English teachers, but I can't see that working too well in Australia:
" 'piss-up'? Yes, we call that... 'sitting around and drinking a lot.' That'll be $20 please."
I don't understand why people assume the source's name is known in the first place. This will just spell the end of people giving their name to bloggers when they violate their contracts. Was a wakeup call really needed on that front?
Bittorrent has an interesting impact on that equation, because it makes the relationship between uploading and downloading explicit. If I start the client, get the file, have a share ratio of one, and sign off, then how many new copies of the file exist because of my actions? Well, if I hadn't joined, the people who got the file from me would have gotten it from the people I got it from instead. Thus, by my actions exactly one new copy of the file exists: mine.
I don't know if it stands up legally, but morally and practically, the only thing I did was to make a single copy. That's it. Makes it kind of hard to support those $5,000 damages figures for a single file, doesn't it?
You use words that are too strong to give me a hard time for making a comparison I never made, and should think more carefully before using your keyboard in the future. Have a nice day.
Fair point, moderation in all things... so when you're limiting their access, are they four, or fourteen? Are you not buying them cookies for snacktime, or not letting them put butter on their toast because you read somewhere that that's bad?
In the grandparent case, I'm making the call that given the current evidence on cell phones, teenagers are old enough to make their own decisions about the risks, and that castigating parents for letting them do that indicates too much desire for control. Given other health risks and other people, you're right that it won't always come down that way.
Therefore, a single knife can be used both legally and illegally, but downloading from a single torrent can only be legal or illegal. Therefore, your analogy does not work.
Incidentally, I'm pretty sure that's not true. Depending on the jurisdiction, there are knives that are legal to possess, and knives that are illegal to possess -- switchblades, pocket knives over a certain length, etc. The act of acquiring the knife, like the act of acquiring the file, is itself illegal.
I don't have the patience to figure out whether either of you is making sense otherwise. Please continue.
Parents who obsessively limit their children's freedom out of vague concerns for safety yield wimpy, dependent kids. Parents who consider the things that their kids care about to be worthless yield angry, alienated kids. Stick that up your sad statement for society and smoke it.
It's a fair point that the two uses of the punctuation are confusing, and we may sometimes interepret them wrong. I prefer the [...] construction to differentiate, like "No, *your* brain is [...] neurotic."
Still, in the example that started this whole little digression, for the author to have used the ellipsis in order to remove words would have been downright unethical, on the same order as simply making up the quote in the first place. Without evidence, I won't assume that's what happened any more than I'll assume it was made up.
Once I can listen to 90% of recorded music anywhere, any time, for a flat $10 a month, I will never ever use any other musical product or service again. iPod? Radio? CD? iTunes? It'll all be replaced by a new addiction -- the world's music piped directly into my brain. Seriously, all you other distributors, that's the measure of your useful life, better get used to it.
And the next time I get stuck in a no-service zone, I will cry, cry, cry...
3) It's an indication of a pause to choose the appropriate word. Of course the speaker probably paused several times per sentence anyway -- this pause was left in to indicate the interviewer's impression that she paused because she has strong feelings on this subject and wished to be precise, which itself is useful information.
Getting worked up to the point of all caps and an exclamation point in your brain is... mildly neurotic. But I guess we all freak out over something or other. Carry on.
It's along the lines of when someone 'steals' a db full of personal data from the bank. The bank still has the original copy, so nothing has been 'stolen', right?
What happens in that case is, someone illegally 'accesses' a computer system, illegally 'copies' sensitive data, and then illegally 'steals' money using that data.
Saying that the data was stolen is convenient, but you're right when you point out that stealing isn't really the appropriate concept in that case.
Slashdot Mirror
Dammit, someone stole another one of my ideas. Now I wish I told someone about it. Don't you hate when that happens? :)
Out of curiosity, how long do you think it will be until you switch to live DVD and say "like being able to keep the system images under 2 GB compressed." ?
For me, just about every computer I run into is at the point where that would work fine, but it sounds like you're working with some ultra-low budget stuff. What do you think?
It's more serious than simply copying your content, because the new site *replaces* yours in the ranking rather than competing with it. When I set up http://bad.site/1 through http://bad.site/100, all claiming to own the content at http://good.site/, Google displays only one of the 101 options in the listing -- and yours isn't too likely to get picked.
Actually, maybe that would happen anyway if I simply copied your site content perfectly 100 times. Not sure about that. Still, that aspect makes it much more of a concern.
Allowing medical marijuana in California, legalizing assisted suicide in Oregon, or voting not to enforce the Patriot Act in Utah would be good examples that fall on the other side of the political fence (though that last one was decided by a Republican state body, IIRC).
Interesting thing to note, though -- every one of those was under legal contention, last I heard, and it's not clear at least for the last two which way it will go. States rights is still a contender.
As far as how the parties support it, I think what it really comes down to is a consolation prize for the party that isn't in power in the legislative branch -- that's why it was a Republican issue for a long time and has recently tilted more towards the Democrats. That's probably also what has kept it significant long after most of us felt much more loyalty towards our country than our state -- there's always *someone* who has an interest in keeping states rights around.
I try sticking to the bash prompt, but I keep seeing Safari through the translucent Terminal window and coming back to check Slashdot.
Maybe I'm doing it wrong.
Good point, well made. I've been a Mac user since the day, through the dark times, into the light, but I still run a desktop PC alongside my iBook -- the fact is that any OS available now is better than any OS available 5 years ago, they play along together pretty nicely, and two or three OSes are just more reliable and flexible than one.
...
Incidentally, I suspect that they've failed to release a $500 computer up until now because it wasn't cost effective, not because they didn't know we would want one. They've done some pretty stupid things in the past, though (RAM prices! argh!) so who knows
I definitely like streams, for the reasons you say -- but once you learn about a great group, what do you do? If it's me, ten seconds later I have their first album queued up on Rhapsody ...
Fair enough ... I'm just saying that "when you buy a CD, you own it forever" isn't strictly accurate (in my house, at least) unless you add "as long as you rip it to your computer, only listen to copies, and are willing to (possibly illegally) download a backup if you have some kind of SNAFU." For all practical purposes, *my* CDs don't keep their value for more than about 5 years. If I was a different person, that wouldn't be true -- but these subscription services don't have to appeal to everyone to succeed, and I bet I'm not alone.
... that's the same comment that gets posted on here every time a subscription music service comes up.
The point could be equally well made about every other subscription service, though -- why rent city water that keeps getting more expensive and goes away when you stop paying, when, with a larger initial investment, you could dig your own well and have water forever?
The answer is, gee, they both make sense in different situations. It depends *how much* more expensive the initial investment is than the subscription, and whether the specific resource you are buying will always be sufficient, or it would be better to have a provider committed to keeping new sources available.
You acknowledged that it depends on your usage style, but I just wanted to drive this point home: pointing out that a subscription service stops when you stop paying for the subscription, and therefore is different from a one-time purchase, is no longer insightful. They're both different; they both make sense sometimes.
Personally, I pay $100 per year for Rhapsody. For me it makes sense -- there's no way I could purchase enough music for $100 to satisfy my needs, and downloading music for free would cost me literally thousands of dollars in terms of time spent. If it doesn't make sense for you, fair enough -- but don't act like it's a blinding insight to point out that I'm renting rather than buying.
I'm a happy Rhapsody user, for $25 every three months. The one important qualification, of course: I spend roughly 12 hours a day near a Windows computer. For me at least the article is totally right about the 'value proposition' -- Rhapsody saves me money if it saves even one hour a month trying to find music online, and it offers a variety of music that far outstrips the 8 CDs per year I could buy with the equivalent money. Admittedly I don't have those 8 CDs at the end of the year -- but having any music I want, instantly, for a year, is worth a hell of a lot more than having 8 CDs for, realistically speaking, about five years before they break or the format shifts again ...
...
The criticisms about the interface definitely apply to Rhapsody too, though -- playlists suck, OS integration sucks, locating music is mediocre, software is Windows only. Definitely can't hold a candle to iTunes. 90% of my music used to be illegal downloads. Now 90% of my music is paid for, via Rhapsody, and it saves me money. If iTunes offers a similar service for $10 a month, they'll be getting my money in a heartbeat.
All of that, of course, assumes I don't need this stuff to be portable. If iTunes to go has come out by the time I'm *not* spending 12 hours a day near a Windows box, they'll be getting another iPod sale and a subscription. If it hasn't, it'll be Napster
Now you know.
... not shallower in a negative sense, but if I spend a buck on the paper New York Times, I'll read a good portion of it. If I'm reading it online, I'll read a couple of headline articles, and a couple of articles from the Washington Post, and a couple from Slashdot, and a couple from Google News, and a couple from Metafilter ... since most of those are aggregators, I've probably just read one article each from a dozen different sources. All of that has the equivalent value to me as the dollar I spent on the Times -- less, because I can get the Times cheaper with a subscription, and it comes with all sorts of extra stuff I can use if I feel like it.
That makes transitioning business models hard, because your micro payments have to be really, really micro -- whatever article of yours I'm reading is worth a tenth, or a fiftieth, of the entire publication, and I probably don't have any particular attachment to you, so I'm not willing to maintain an ongoing account. In order to make it all work, you need a way to seamlessly charge me say two cents an article -- that means convincing a whole bunch of users to sign up for the same service, and a whole bunch of publications to sell their stuff for a low enough price to keep those users interested.
I don't know which is more improbable, but they're both pretty long shots. In the meantime, if putting well-researched breaking news online for free is too expensive, we'll be back to getting second-hand news online for free, and maybe keeping a subscription to a few particularly valuable publications.
Oh, the humanity.
...
If you signed an NDA with them, and then discuss stuff covered by the NDA, I'm gonna go with 'yes.'
Just a thought.
2. Unemployment fell. A lot. It's still falling, to the point where Australia is seeing serious skills shortages.
... 'sitting around and drinking a lot.' That'll be $20 please."
Sorry to be off-topic, but does that mean that this would be a good time to visit Australia, for folks like myself who can't afford to not work for too long?
Americans often support themselves visiting Japan by being English teachers, but I can't see that working too well in Australia:
" 'piss-up'? Yes, we call that
I don't understand why people assume the source's name is known in the first place. This will just spell the end of people giving their name to bloggers when they violate their contracts. Was a wakeup call really needed on that front?
Bittorrent has an interesting impact on that equation, because it makes the relationship between uploading and downloading explicit. If I start the client, get the file, have a share ratio of one, and sign off, then how many new copies of the file exist because of my actions? Well, if I hadn't joined, the people who got the file from me would have gotten it from the people I got it from instead. Thus, by my actions exactly one new copy of the file exists: mine.
I don't know if it stands up legally, but morally and practically, the only thing I did was to make a single copy. That's it. Makes it kind of hard to support those $5,000 damages figures for a single file, doesn't it?
You use words that are too strong to give me a hard time for making a comparison I never made, and should think more carefully before using your keyboard in the future. Have a nice day.
serving the sole purpose of allowing the senator to say "LOOK I WAS AGAINST EBAY SCAMMING!!!!111"
A+++++!!!! Would vote for again!!! Prompt porkbarrels, curteous pandering!!!!
Three is like, totally three times as good as one. Duh.
Beyond that, it appears I can't be bothered to go back and check. Sorry about that.
Fair point, moderation in all things ... so when you're limiting their access, are they four, or fourteen? Are you not buying them cookies for snacktime, or not letting them put butter on their toast because you read somewhere that that's bad?
In the grandparent case, I'm making the call that given the current evidence on cell phones, teenagers are old enough to make their own decisions about the risks, and that castigating parents for letting them do that indicates too much desire for control. Given other health risks and other people, you're right that it won't always come down that way.
Therefore, a single knife can be used both legally and illegally, but downloading from a single torrent can only be legal or illegal. Therefore, your analogy does not work.
Incidentally, I'm pretty sure that's not true. Depending on the jurisdiction, there are knives that are legal to possess, and knives that are illegal to possess -- switchblades, pocket knives over a certain length, etc. The act of acquiring the knife, like the act of acquiring the file, is itself illegal.
I don't have the patience to figure out whether either of you is making sense otherwise. Please continue.
Parents who obsessively limit their children's freedom out of vague concerns for safety yield wimpy, dependent kids. Parents who consider the things that their kids care about to be worthless yield angry, alienated kids. Stick that up your sad statement for society and smoke it.
I'm *glad* you don't have a kid.
It's a fair point that the two uses of the punctuation are confusing, and we may sometimes interepret them wrong. I prefer the [...] construction to differentiate, like "No, *your* brain is [...] neurotic."
Still, in the example that started this whole little digression, for the author to have used the ellipsis in order to remove words would have been downright unethical, on the same order as simply making up the quote in the first place. Without evidence, I won't assume that's what happened any more than I'll assume it was made up.
Once I can listen to 90% of recorded music anywhere, any time, for a flat $10 a month, I will never ever use any other musical product or service again. iPod? Radio? CD? iTunes? It'll all be replaced by a new addiction -- the world's music piped directly into my brain. Seriously, all you other distributors, that's the measure of your useful life, better get used to it.
...
And the next time I get stuck in a no-service zone, I will cry, cry, cry
3) It's an indication of a pause to choose the appropriate word. Of course the speaker probably paused several times per sentence anyway -- this pause was left in to indicate the interviewer's impression that she paused because she has strong feelings on this subject and wished to be precise, which itself is useful information.
... mildly neurotic. But I guess we all freak out over something or other. Carry on.
Getting worked up to the point of all caps and an exclamation point in your brain is
It's along the lines of when someone 'steals' a db full of personal data from the bank. The bank still has the original copy, so nothing has been 'stolen', right?
What happens in that case is, someone illegally 'accesses' a computer system, illegally 'copies' sensitive data, and then illegally 'steals' money using that data.
Saying that the data was stolen is convenient, but you're right when you point out that stealing isn't really the appropriate concept in that case.