"I guess most of you don't know that Flanders is a part of Belgium. "
We do. A very popular poem in the United States is "Flander's Field", written by a the Canadian Dr. John McCrae. Its probably the saddest poem I've ever read:
IN FLANDERS FIELDS the poppies blow Between the crosses row on row, That mark our place; and in the sky The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved, and now we lie In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe: To you from failing hands we throw The torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields.
"but just because people don't protect something technologically doesn't mean you should have the right to copy it willy nilly."
If I buy a game, I should have the right to make a backup so I don't worry about the original being scratched. I don't really have that option right now, so I watch in horror as my son just casually tosses around $50 game disks.
"And even on the desktop, Linux keeps getting stronger, while Mac OS X is commonly accepted as more reliable, secure, and user-oriented than Windows. So why do we keep saying Microsoft is a monopoly?"
I'm very old and when you pull my leg that hard, there's a good chance you'll dislocate my hip.
It still doesn't make sense though. You refered to Bluetooth in your post and I'm guessing you didn't ask Bluetooth for permission to do that.
I don't think that they have the right to stop people from using the term. This is simply a case where the BT doesn't like certain information and is throwing around their weight to stop it from being published.
...and in many cases you can resell the DVD's and recoup some of your cost.
I have a bunch of DVDs that I've purchased, so I'm running out of space. So right now, I'm just subscribing to a bunch of premium channels for entertainment and throw in the occasional purchase.
which says in part:
"An amount, as of goods, services, or money, considered to be a fair and suitable equivalent for something else; a fair price or return."
Microsoft Encarta defines it as:
"1. monetary worth: an amount expressed in money or another medium of exchange that is thought to be a fair exchange for something"
Now, typically, the value of property is done through a process called "assessment". I refer you to here http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=Assessmen t for an explanation of an assessment. Basically the government before taxing property will assess the market value. If you or your parents own a home, this will be done by someone whose job it is to determine the fair market value. In the case of homes, this is done by studying he sale of comparable homes in the area. A valuation is set by the assessor, and you as the owner are given notice of assessment. You can then challenge that assessment. In otherwords, there will have to be a legal rationale as to why the property was valued at a particular dollar amount.
The assessor will have to have an inventory of software (which will be difficult unless the owner keeps it on the books), and he/she will have to determine the value of that software through some mechanism that ties it to the current value or some other pricing mechanism. As I pointed out, some software cannot be resold, so making a valuation of this will be difficult and subject to much litigation. And the fact that software is licensed and not sold only makes it more difficult and will lead to even more lawyers getting rich over a long period of time.
Child: Daddy I want a pony Dad: You can't have a pony Child: But daddy, I want a pony Dad: Don't be silly. Ponies are expensive, I'll have to buy a stable, and the cost of feeding and boarding it will be huge. No. Child: DADDY, I WANT A PONY. WAAAAH! Dad: No, but don't cry. Here. Here's a doggie instead. Child: (sniff) Oh, well, I'll do my best with my new doggie instead.
Yes, you can sell certain software...buy MS Office and if you save the box and disk and license key, you can sell it.
If you lose all that, according to MS you can't sell it, so there is no value there.
On the other hand, there is a lot of software that you can't resell, particularly enterprise class software. I don't think you can resell your Oracle licenses, so again, arguably, the value is 0. Remember, the value of something is the price you could arguably get if you resell it.
I think the only way you could tax software is if the software was listed in a company's balance sheet as an asset. Most desktop software is expensed and not typically shown as an asset, particularly in small companies.
If they pass this law, I suspect they'll find very little to tax.
If a business buys a copy of MS Office, what exactly would you tax?
The $500 the business paid for it? Or the $139 the upgrade costs?
Or the current market value of a used MS Office license?
A lot of small businesses don't track software licenses as an asset, its expensed when its purchased same as a a thousand other things businesses buy. And if the state starts taxing it, it for sure won't be tracked.
A more practical matter is enterprise class software. This software usually has a high purchase cost, but a big chunk of that money is in the customizations. How do you value customizations for tax purposes. Also, licenses for this type of software is usually very specific about your rights after the "sale". In many cases, the license states that you have no right to resell the software, so arguably, the value of the software is $0.
I can appreciate that, but buying DVD's even at Costco is about $14-16 a pop. That's still pretty expensive; that's about $60/month to watch 4 movies. It might be cheaper to pay for HBO/Max/Showtime and get a couple dozen movies for about $25/month.
"and in aggregate cause less content to be produced and at higher prices"
Is this really true?
Is there less software/music/movies/tv shows produced than ever?
As far as the price... isn't the price set by the market? I know everybody says that piracy makes prices higher, but is that the case? Have CD prices zoomed up in the last 5 years?
It seems to me the only content that has gone up in price is that content which is protected beyond any reasonable measure to copy. Video Games are a good example to me. Most video games seem to be hard to pirate. You've got to get your console chipped, you've got to use special programs to copy the disks (I think). All in all, it seems that for joe-average-consumer, video games are pretty close to uncopyable. Compare to CD's where even joe-average-consumer's mom can copy a CD.
Yet video games have gone up close to 50% in the last 5 years, whereas CD prices have remained the same or dipped slightly. So I would conclude that piracy has little effect on prices. And any effect would seem to be to drive the price down to the consumer. It makes sense when you think about it. But I guess the idea that piracy causes prices to rise plays to people who don't really think about it for very long.
If I ran the record companies, I'd put everything older than 7 years for sale at $6-8 per CD. And I'd offer significant discounts on brand-new music as part of package promotions. I'd probably pay the mega-acts less and pay promising new acts more. I'd probably try to encourage people to use legal distribution models by making subscription models available for $2-5/month (Yahoo seems to have hit a good price point). I'd sell low quality MP3's (128kb/s) for 25 cents per song. I'd sell high quality (.ape/.flac) for about twice that. I spend less on mega promotion and move that money towards cheaper promotion of small to mid-level acts. I'd split the risk-reward with musicians instead of viewing them as sheep to be shorn. I'd probably treat my customers better, too.
No matter how much he wants to spin this, it is pro-industry. Copyright holder for the most part *are* the RIAA and MPAA members.
So while he talks about balancing the rights of artists, this bill does *nothing* for those rights. Instead it takes away fair-use rights from the consumer in the name of the artist, all the while giving new power to the record and movie companies.
So in the end, he's just as bad as Sonny Bono when it comes to the "rights" of the artists, because it further puts the RIAA/MPAA into the position of gatekeeper for all media with both the artist and consumer paying a tax for access to each other.
There was no reason to put Americans in internment camps simply because they or their parents came from Japan.
The fact that the U.S. Supreme court went along with it should make everyone ashamed.
And the further fact that no American of Japanese internment every committed any act of sabotage or treason just shows how hysteria clouds good judgement in the name of "war".
If the article in question is to believed, and they are scanning 1% of all US calls, they probably aren't distinguishing between foreign and citizen conversations. They're simply eavedropping on everybody and then trying to figure out what's going on.
Ignoring civil liberties is almost never warranted, and every time we do it, it turns out that not only do we regret it, but most important *it was never necessary to do in the first case*.
Didn't we learn anything from the internment of Japanese citzens during WWII?
"For example, our CD/DVD Autorun was disabled - or more accurately, "broken" - by Corel Photo Downloader. [...] After we clicked on "no thanks," the computer wouldn't go through the normal autorun process - we installed the games by clicking on My Computer"
Yes, and Dell did you a favor, albeit by accident.
You don't want Autorun enabled. If the Sony incident taught you nothing else, it should have taught you "AUTORUN==BAD".
"Once you have a large enough music collection, an album has to be either substantially better, or substantially different to be worth buying, and both qualities seem to be lacking these days."
Yes and no.
Music, unlike movies, can be listened to repeatedly, but there is a limit to how much you'll listen to a group regardless of how much you like them.
Lets say you like Led Zeppelin; no, not just like, I mean love them. You even buy a t-shirt with their emblem. And so you listen to their albums...all 10-ish of them. After a while, you'll be sick of them. I don't care if you get royalties from them, you won't hate them, you just won't be interesed enough to listen after a while (sort of like dating, I suppose).
You really need two things to keep this from happening: 1) A big music collection 2) Artist must be given enough time to develop 3) Artist must be "encouraged" to make more music
1 - The music industry can help itself out here by lowering the price of CD's. You can't build a music collection at $20 a pop. 2 - The music industry can help itself by investing more in bands that help them in the creative process. I don't mean meddling, I mean hiring a lot more producers and artist to mentor bands. 3 - If the Rolling Stones started today, they would have ended their career with about 10 albums tops. That wouldn't be enough for the long term for either the artist or the music label. Get more music out there for the fans. A lot of "marginal" bands put out an album every 18-24 months. You can't build a following for a catalog that way.
Maybe the blockbuster mentality of Hollywood is now rampant in the music industry, but it seems to me that there is no patience with most bands these days.
I opened an account many years ago on ebay and I only used it when I had to find a special part or item in a hurry, so I logged in perhaps 2 or 3 times a year. So I attempted to log in to my account at one point and my password had been changed. I looked under my account, and apparently I was running an auction for expensive photography equipment!
Obviously a fraud, correct?
Well, I sent email to ebay's fraud department. I heard nothing after 2-3 days. I sent more email. Nothing. I was getting concerned now because items were selling for thousands of dollars and it looked like I was committing fraud.
I sent more emails, and I heard nothing for several weeks.
I finally tracked down a phone number (do you know how hard that is?) and left messages. I left a lot of messages.
Finally, someone called me back and told me "they needed more information".
Two weeks later, they shut down my account, gave me a new account and blamed me for the whole episode telling me that "I must have given out my password".
I was non-plussed by that suggestion.
Anyway, what I learned is: 1) Ebay was not very interested in investigation real fraud, even when people are telling them about the fraud 2) It's impossible to reach Ebay in an emergency 3) When they have security holes in their infrastructure (and that's how somebody got my password), they blame their customers.
Its too bad nobody has set up a successful competing auction site.
The reason he was discouraging you from buying the 20D is because he didn't stock them. He probably had XT's in stock.
The other thing to note is a 20D isn't a "professional" camera because of its 24mm sensor. Its a fantastic camera, but the new 5D is geared at the professional because of its sensor size.
I think he used close-ups during the fight scenes probably because none of the leads had extensive training in martial arts. A lot of close-ups with quick edits pretty much confirms that.
First of all, the movie is a fairly typical Hollywood special effects/sci-fi film. So its entertaining. But it suffers from the same problem as I, Robot, which is to say, it has nothing to do with the what it's named after.
The problem when you watch the original Aeon Flux animated series is that other than people having the same names, it has little in common. Aeon Flux is fairly, er, kinky in the animated series. This is almost a defining part of the role. In the series, the Trevor Goodchild is really a bad guy. In the movie, he's a nice guy who is just misunderstood. In the series, the plots were odd, bordering on bizarre. In the movie, its "good guy trying to save the world".
I'm saying all this as somebody who isn't a particular fan of the series. But the movie just misses the point. I would think they would have been better off making more of the animated series; it would cost less, and probably entertain people more.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought doing that required you to modify your console; not something that I'd like to do.
"I guess most of you don't know that Flanders is a part of Belgium. "
We do. A very popular poem in the United States is "Flander's Field", written by a the Canadian Dr. John McCrae. Its probably the saddest poem I've ever read:
IN FLANDERS FIELDS the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
"but just because people don't protect something technologically doesn't mean you should have the right to copy it willy nilly."
If I buy a game, I should have the right to make a backup so I don't worry about the original being scratched. I don't really have that option right now, so I watch in horror as my son just casually tosses around $50 game disks.
It shouldn't be that way, but it is.
"And even on the desktop, Linux keeps getting stronger, while Mac OS X is commonly accepted as more reliable, secure, and user-oriented than Windows. So why do we keep saying Microsoft is a monopoly?"
I'm very old and when you pull my leg that hard, there's a good chance you'll dislocate my hip.
You had me there for a second though...
It still doesn't make sense though. You refered to Bluetooth in your post and I'm guessing you didn't ask Bluetooth for permission to do that.
I don't think that they have the right to stop people from using the term. This is simply a case where the BT doesn't like certain information and is throwing around their weight to stop it from being published.
...and in many cases you can resell the DVD's and recoup some of your cost.
I have a bunch of DVDs that I've purchased, so I'm running out of space. So right now, I'm just subscribing to a bunch of premium channels for entertainment and throw in the occasional purchase.
I said:
n t for an explanation of an assessment. Basically the government before taxing property will assess the market value. If you or your parents own a home, this will be done by someone whose job it is to determine the fair market value. In the case of homes, this is done by studying he sale of comparable homes in the area. A valuation is set by the assessor, and you as the owner are given notice of assessment. You can then challenge that assessment. In otherwords, there will have to be a legal rationale as to why the property was valued at a particular dollar amount.
"the value of something is the price you could arguably get if you resell it"
You questioned my definition, so I'll provide links:
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=Value
which says in part:
"An amount, as of goods, services, or money, considered to be a fair and suitable equivalent for something else; a fair price or return."
Microsoft Encarta defines it as:
"1. monetary worth: an amount expressed in money or another medium of exchange that is thought to be a fair exchange for something"
Now, typically, the value of property is done through a process called "assessment". I refer you to here http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=Assessme
The assessor will have to have an inventory of software (which will be difficult unless the owner keeps it on the books), and he/she will have to determine the value of that software through some mechanism that ties it to the current value or some other pricing mechanism. As I pointed out, some software cannot be resold, so making a valuation of this will be difficult and subject to much litigation. And the fact that software is licensed and not sold only makes it more difficult and will lead to even more lawyers getting rich over a long period of time.
Hope that makes it clearer.
This is called "daddy I want a pony".
It goes like this:
Child: Daddy I want a pony
Dad: You can't have a pony
Child: But daddy, I want a pony
Dad: Don't be silly. Ponies are expensive, I'll have to buy a stable, and the cost of feeding and boarding it will be huge. No.
Child: DADDY, I WANT A PONY. WAAAAH!
Dad: No, but don't cry. Here. Here's a doggie instead.
Child: (sniff) Oh, well, I'll do my best with my new doggie instead.
"First, you can sell software."
Like a lot of things in life "it depends".
Yes, you can sell certain software...buy MS Office and if you save the box and disk and license key, you can sell it.
If you lose all that, according to MS you can't sell it, so there is no value there.
On the other hand, there is a lot of software that you can't resell, particularly enterprise class software. I don't think you can resell your Oracle licenses, so again, arguably, the value is 0. Remember, the value of something is the price you could arguably get if you resell it.
I think the only way you could tax software is if the software was listed in a company's balance sheet as an asset. Most desktop software is expensed and not typically shown as an asset, particularly in small companies.
If they pass this law, I suspect they'll find very little to tax.
If a business buys a copy of MS Office, what exactly would you tax?
The $500 the business paid for it? Or the $139 the upgrade costs?
Or the current market value of a used MS Office license?
A lot of small businesses don't track software licenses as an asset, its expensed when its purchased same as a a thousand other things businesses buy. And if the state starts taxing it, it for sure won't be tracked.
A more practical matter is enterprise class software. This software usually has a high purchase cost, but a big chunk of that money is in the customizations. How do you value customizations for tax purposes. Also, licenses for this type of software is usually very specific about your rights after the "sale". In many cases, the license states that you have no right to resell the software, so arguably, the value of the software is $0.
"As such I no longer have a desire to rent DVDs"
I can appreciate that, but buying DVD's even at Costco is about $14-16 a pop. That's still pretty expensive; that's about $60/month to watch 4 movies. It might be cheaper to pay for HBO/Max/Showtime and get a couple dozen movies for about $25/month.
"and in aggregate cause less content to be produced and at higher prices"
Is this really true?
Is there less software/music/movies/tv shows produced than ever?
As far as the price... isn't the price set by the market? I know everybody says that piracy makes prices higher, but is that the case? Have CD prices zoomed up in the last 5 years?
It seems to me the only content that has gone up in price is that content which is protected beyond any reasonable measure to copy. Video Games are a good example to me. Most video games seem to be hard to pirate. You've got to get your console chipped, you've got to use special programs to copy the disks (I think). All in all, it seems that for joe-average-consumer, video games are pretty close to uncopyable. Compare to CD's where even joe-average-consumer's mom can copy a CD.
Yet video games have gone up close to 50% in the last 5 years, whereas CD prices have remained the same or dipped slightly. So I would conclude that piracy has little effect on prices. And any effect would seem to be to drive the price down to the consumer. It makes sense when you think about it. But I guess the idea that piracy causes prices to rise plays to people who don't really think about it for very long.
If I ran the record companies, I'd put everything older than 7 years for sale at $6-8 per CD. And I'd offer significant discounts on brand-new music as part of package promotions. I'd probably pay the mega-acts less and pay promising new acts more. I'd probably try to encourage people to use legal distribution models by making subscription models available for $2-5/month (Yahoo seems to have hit a good price point). I'd sell low quality MP3's (128kb/s) for 25 cents per song. I'd sell high quality (.ape/.flac) for about twice that. I spend less on mega promotion and move that money towards cheaper promotion of small to mid-level acts. I'd split the risk-reward with musicians instead of viewing them as sheep to be shorn. I'd probably treat my customers better, too.
...The lady doth protest too much, methinks...
No matter how much he wants to spin this, it is pro-industry. Copyright holder for the most part *are* the RIAA and MPAA members.
So while he talks about balancing the rights of artists, this bill does *nothing* for those rights. Instead it takes away fair-use rights from the consumer in the name of the artist, all the while giving new power to the record and movie companies.
So in the end, he's just as bad as Sonny Bono when it comes to the "rights" of the artists, because it further puts the RIAA/MPAA into the position of gatekeeper for all media with both the artist and consumer paying a tax for access to each other.
Yes, I put that badly.
There was no reason to put Americans in internment camps simply because they or their parents came from Japan.
The fact that the U.S. Supreme court went along with it should make everyone ashamed.
And the further fact that no American of Japanese internment every committed any act of sabotage or treason just shows how hysteria clouds good judgement in the name of "war".
If the article in question is to believed, and they are scanning 1% of all US calls, they probably aren't distinguishing between foreign and citizen conversations. They're simply eavedropping on everybody and then trying to figure out what's going on.
Ignoring civil liberties is almost never warranted, and every time we do it, it turns out that not only do we regret it, but most important *it was never necessary to do in the first case*.
Didn't we learn anything from the internment of Japanese citzens during WWII?
He says this to complain"
"For example, our CD/DVD Autorun was disabled - or more accurately, "broken" - by Corel Photo Downloader. [...] After we clicked on "no thanks," the computer wouldn't go through the normal autorun process - we installed the games by clicking on My Computer"
Yes, and Dell did you a favor, albeit by accident.
You don't want Autorun enabled. If the Sony incident taught you nothing else, it should have taught you "AUTORUN==BAD".
"Once you have a large enough music collection, an album has to be either substantially better, or substantially different to be worth buying, and both qualities seem to be lacking these days."
Yes and no.
Music, unlike movies, can be listened to repeatedly, but there is a limit to how much you'll listen to a group regardless of how much you like them.
Lets say you like Led Zeppelin; no, not just like, I mean love them. You even buy a t-shirt with their emblem. And so you listen to their albums...all 10-ish of them. After a while, you'll be sick of them. I don't care if you get royalties from them, you won't hate them, you just won't be interesed enough to listen after a while (sort of like dating, I suppose).
You really need two things to keep this from happening:
1) A big music collection
2) Artist must be given enough time to develop
3) Artist must be "encouraged" to make more music
1 - The music industry can help itself out here by lowering the price of CD's. You can't build a music collection at $20 a pop.
2 - The music industry can help itself by investing more in bands that help them in the creative process. I don't mean meddling, I mean hiring a lot more producers and artist to mentor bands.
3 - If the Rolling Stones started today, they would have ended their career with about 10 albums tops. That wouldn't be enough for the long term for either the artist or the music label. Get more music out there for the fans. A lot of "marginal" bands put out an album every 18-24 months. You can't build a following for a catalog that way.
Maybe the blockbuster mentality of Hollywood is now rampant in the music industry, but it seems to me that there is no patience with most bands these days.
For the past 2 months, Sony/BMG record club has been offering a *lot* of good deals to their members.
I opened an account many years ago on ebay and I only used it when I had to find a special part or item in a hurry, so I logged in perhaps 2 or 3 times a year. So I attempted to log in to my account at one point and my password had been changed. I looked under my account, and apparently I was running an auction for expensive photography equipment!
Obviously a fraud, correct?
Well, I sent email to ebay's fraud department. I heard nothing after 2-3 days. I sent more email. Nothing. I was getting concerned now because items were selling for thousands of dollars and it looked like I was committing fraud.
I sent more emails, and I heard nothing for several weeks.
I finally tracked down a phone number (do you know how hard that is?) and left messages. I left a lot of messages.
Finally, someone called me back and told me "they needed more information".
Two weeks later, they shut down my account, gave me a new account and blamed me for the whole episode telling me that "I must have given out my password".
I was non-plussed by that suggestion.
Anyway, what I learned is:
1) Ebay was not very interested in investigation real fraud, even when people are telling them about the fraud
2) It's impossible to reach Ebay in an emergency
3) When they have security holes in their infrastructure (and that's how somebody got my password), they blame their customers.
Its too bad nobody has set up a successful competing auction site.
The reason he was discouraging you from buying the 20D is because he didn't stock them. He probably had XT's in stock.
The other thing to note is a 20D isn't a "professional" camera because of its 24mm sensor. Its a fantastic camera, but the new 5D is geared at the professional because of its sensor size.
I think he used close-ups during the fight scenes probably because none of the leads had extensive training in martial arts. A lot of close-ups with quick edits pretty much confirms that.
First of all, the movie is a fairly typical Hollywood special effects/sci-fi film. So its entertaining. But it suffers from the same problem as I, Robot, which is to say, it has nothing to do with the what it's named after.
The problem when you watch the original Aeon Flux animated series is that other than people having the same names, it has little in common. Aeon Flux is fairly, er, kinky in the animated series. This is almost a defining part of the role. In the series, the Trevor Goodchild is really a bad guy. In the movie, he's a nice guy who is just misunderstood. In the series, the plots were odd, bordering on bizarre. In the movie, its "good guy trying to save the world".
I'm saying all this as somebody who isn't a particular fan of the series. But the movie just misses the point. I would think they would have been better off making more of the animated series; it would cost less, and probably entertain people more.
It means either:
a) The record companies didn't find this type of disruption cost-effective
or
b) Somebody else can do it better/cheaper
I think the doom and gloom may be overstating the dangers here.
My wife hadn't touched her laptop computer in 6 months. She fired it up, it was updated in 5 minutes and she was fine.
Two things helped:
a hardware firewall
It already had XP SP2
If that's your situation, just fire it up and go.
"unlike the space shuttle, it will actually be highly reusable."
Don't you think when the shuttle was just blueprints, NASA and their contractors made the same claim?
Nothing new under the sun here.