The value of most pop music is in who makes it, not what it is.
In which case they have one of the few examples of a quite legitimate monopoly (I have a monopoly on being me), and they are not overpricing their product, they are pricing it at a fair market price. (directly controled by the demand, ie what an 8 year old can persuade their parents to pay fo r the latest whoeveritis single).
You might not think it is worth what it says on the ticket, but then you aren't buying it so it doesn't matter to you what it says on the ticket.
Other people can make music, but can they make studio quality recordings? Can they distribute that music effectively? Can they sell it or get people to buy merchandise or go to concerts?
Studio quality recordings can be made if you have the money. They is no monopoly on studio equipment, especially these days when technology has gotten (relatively) cheap. Distribution is surely what we are talking about, distribution is easy, so much so that any old 8 year old can distribute stuff they rip off so widely that the RIAA are worried. Merchendising is an alternative to selling music, not part of it.
But yes, labels provide important services to artists in the form of promotion, access to equipment, subsidising live performances etc. This is why artists sign with labels, and in turn is why stiffing the labels by illegal distribution is not an attack on the men in suits (who will be payed anyway), but on the artists.
Labels act as venture capital companies, management consultancies and marketing arms for artists.
The less profitable it becomes to sell the third Foobar album and associated tat to the fan base they have used used the label's money to build up, the less the label will be able to justifiably risk on the next act who turns up at their door. In turn that means they will concentrate more on churning out more of the same from an ever less interesting Foobar and manufacturing bad Foobar clones.
(There must be a band called Foobar out there, so appologies, I wasn't talking about you:-)).
True. What I ws saying was that anonymity is not a method of protecting free speech, rather a method of coping when free speech becomes difficult or impossible. To protect a right you need to excercise it and make sure everyone sees you doing so.
There is nothing to stop you sending me a copy of your document and me signing it to say `the author of this work has given permission for it to be distributed'. Or you could dump it on the network unsignedand rely on there being at least one person out there with a hacked client willing to act as signatory. Or just that those with such hacked clients would distribute your description of the evil Swedish plot to invade Norway by other means.
All my suggestion would do would be to ensure that for everything on your node, either you have explicitly taken responsibility (by signing, allowing in unsigned content or just putting up an unsigned file) or someone else identifiable has (by signing something you downloaded). That gets legitimate users out from under and argument with the RIAA etc.
Rosa Parks was a black woman who decided one day to sit at the front of the bus, in defiance of the local segregation rules. This created enough of a stink that it was one of the things which got the civil rights movement in the US south moving.
Don't forget the humanist thing. It seems like about every other episode, you encounter a race that has one or two religions for the entire race (unlike humans, who have all become athiests) and are insane about it.
While humans in the Star Trek universe don't seem to be explicitly theistic, they are clearly not non-religious. The whole thing is drenched in a sickly-sweet california-hippy-in-space spirituality. What is Troy if not a priestess, there to give mystical blessing to all the goings on. For explicit theism, consider Scotty playing Amazing Grace at Spock's funeral in WoK.
Maybe the lack of the major current religions in ST reflects a (quite justifiable judging by the current state of the world) assumption that if we don't lose them in the near future, the odds of there being any people in the 23rd century are minimal.
On the whole, I think B5 called this one correctly. After at least thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of years of religion, it is unlikely to dissapear in the next couple of centuries. Christianity looks more or less knackered and decaying, and I wouldn't be suprised if the big denominations collapse, but Islam is young (as religions go) and still growing, Judaism has survived so much it's hard to image what it would take to knock it out, Hinduism, Bhuddism and Daoism have strength through flexibility which has kept them going through huge changes over their histories.
I am death incarnate, and the last living thing that you will ever see. God sent me.
Would Unix even have been as widespread without the BSD approach in the early 80's? It's hard to say.
Steping forward a decade or so, without the two big BSD style licenced projects, XFreee86 and Apache, I think the free unixoids would have been struggling for a role.
you won't get any Linux user to use BSD by telling them "they don't understand it"
Well, since the article is explicitly aimed at people who don't understand FBSD and would like to, it wouldbe rather odd ifit didn'tmae the assumption that the reader doesn't understand.
What would you suggest as an alternative? Assuming the people already undrstand and launching into an in-depth discussion of the FBSD VM system or the detailed politics of OBSD development?
And after they rearanged their bland jingly title song into an even more bland muzak version for this series too.
I thought they were on a roll, managing to get two scenes with the female characters half undressed, and a tacticless space ship fight into almost every episode.
When I first heard the premise for this new series, I was actually quite interested. A primitive Entreprise, first real deep sapce ship from Earth, presumably out gunned by almost everyone they meet, and maybe having to do some interesting things to win through.
But no. They turn out to be able to beat crap out of almost everyone. The only way to get a plot is to have something blow up on board, or mysterious `gravimetric bullshiterons' hold them while the inferior aliens attack, so that 10 minutes later they can beat crap out of those same aliens without breaking sweat... scene of vulcan underwear giving engineer a hand job... end of episode.
You are talking about putting legal limitations in place [...]/i>
No I did not mention any new legal limitations at all. I was taking about someone providing an infrastructure which would alow people to exchange files safe from the possibility of violation of the legal limitations which already exist, and as a side effect would make the parasites easier to identify.
content can be untraceable.[...] Which in itself helps guarantee free speech.
No, maybe the reverse. In a situation where free speech exists, however under threat, people need to stand behind their speech to make sure attempts at supression are public and so resistable. samisdat publishing is a tool for when free speech has been lost. If you start acting as if you have already lost, defeat becomes inevitable.
If Rosa Parks had put on make-up to pretend to be white before taking her seat she wouldn't have had any effect.
To many people (myself included) capitalism=free markets.
Have you read 1984? If youlet them redefine your language you let them control the agenda. The current US government is definitely capitalist, but definitely not pro free market (consider the trade barriers they throw up when asked by their backers, and consider all the extra subsidy Shrub put into agriculture).
classical liberalism is now often called libertarianism in the US.
No, liberatarians are anti-government in a way that liberals aren't. One of the defining causes of liberalism at its height was universal sufferage (the other two legs in the UK were repeal of the corn laws, and home rule for Ireland, I don't know enough US political history to point up parallels).
Capitalism is supposed to be about a willing exchange between entities for the benefit of both.
No, that is a free market. Capitalism is about a person with resources being allowed to exploit those resources and gain the benefits. The two are often in conflict (eg free markets are damaged by monopolies, but a capitalist would often be best served by trying to create one, similarly for trade barriers and protectionism).
Traditional liberal economics basicly consists of trying to create the environment for capitalism to work, but forcing it to work within a free market.
(at which point I suppose I have to point out that liberal economics is not related to what US politicians and media have redefined the word to mean. I suspect the average/.er grew up with `liberal' meaning `illiberal')
So are we back to "you can do anything with your computer, as long as we say that it is OK"?
Nothing I described in any way limited what you could do with your computer. That was the whole point. What I described was a system where other people could refuse to listen when you decided to make your computer broadcast things you weren't prepared to claim you had a right to broadcast. The right to speak is not the right to have anyone listen to you.
It is interesting to see how many even here make the implicit assumption that "copyrighted" means "non-distributable".
Which, is precisely the opposite of what I was assuming. I was presuming that there was legitimate file sharing. If I were to presume otherwise I could propose a much simpler solution, that all file sharing could be made illegal with no need to do more than prove someone was running a P2P client to get a conviction.
most of what the labels are selling is crap and grotesquely overpriced at that. People swapping all of that music is more a response to that than anything else.
If the stuff is crap why are people swapping it? Clearly the labels are doing a good job at creating what lots of people want. And if it is over priced, it would be being undercut - the technologies which make swapping easy also make legitimate distribution easy.
IIRC, there was a 7% increase in album sales in the UK last year. Maybe the RIAA are just not doing it right...
[...]they must know that works were not copyrighted.
This seems to open a possibility. Note I'm not saying this is a good idea, just that it seems like it might be a more workable system than most proposals:
Set up a public/private key infrastructure. If the content producers are losing as much as they claim they should be more than willing to pay. Anyone can have a key if they verify who they are to a reasonable level (eg by supplying a credit card number).
Now, we can have a rule that a client must only distribute a file signed with a recognised key.
I'd bet there are far fewer people willing to jump through these hoops and nail their credit history to their assertions of what is theirs or pubic domain than there are songs and pornographic images in the world, so this should be a more tractable problem than the finger printing.
Any client recieving a non-signed file reports the sender to the men with the big sticks with nails in.
Since there are relatively few people with the skill and interest to create hacked clients, and since such hacked clients should be reported if they are ever seen by a single legitimate client, it shouldn't be impossible for the MwBSwNI to keep the population of evildoers down. Especially if the punishment for distribution of such a client is suitably dramatic and well publicised.
As far as I am concerned, theft is taking property from someone and depriving them of it.
If you owe someone money and don't give it to them that is depriving them of something which is rightfully theirs.
If a copyright owner says `you can have a copy of this if you pay me $10' and you take a copy, then you owe them $10.
So, if you take the copy and don't pay for it that is both copyright violation and theft by your definition.
You could say it was fraud rather than theft, based on the fact that you are depriving them of it before they have had it in their hands, but I think the we areinto word games.
But you cannot say 'all copyright violation is theft' because none of it is.
True, but perhaps not as you mean it. They are different types of concept, one legal, one ethical. However, as in the example above, some actions are both copyright violation and theft, ie they fall legally into the civil copyright violation category and ethically into the theft category (or fraud if you prefer).
Consider a more geeky parallel, refusal to share one's work is not copyright violation. However, if you show you some of your work, and use copyright to say that I can use it in my project if I agree to abide by the GPL, and I do use it, then I `owe' you compliance. If I then refuse to distribute source of my project with the binaries, my refusal to share `deprives you' of the compliance you have a right to demand, and you would be justifiably pissed off.
Copyright is a way for someone to make enforcable agreements without needing to get the legal profession involved each time they start singing/coding/whatever. Very useful all 'round, and something worth defending. Like freedom of speech, the price we pay is that sometimes arseholes will abuse it. Unlike freedom of speech,
such arseholes are basicly harmless, if annoying.
I'm talking about the difference between "copyright violation" and "theft" which, legally, are two entirely different crimes.
Theft isn't primarilly a legal concept, it is a moral one. If laws mention such things it is to (usually unjustifiably) apropriate the normal use of the word.
Surely, the point the article (or rather the politician being discussed) was supposed to be making is that laws such as copyright need to be adjusted to take into account the consensus of where theft ends and reasonable behaviour begins. To talk about that without mentioning the ethical categories seems to indicate that someone is assuming that the distinction is trivial, ie either all copyright violation is theft or none is. Neither would indicate a good article.
The most positive point of the whole article is that the word piracy
is not mentioned. Not once. That's a good start. It doesn't mention theft or stealing either. So there is a lot to be happy about!
So the fact that he avoids mentioning the major reason there is a problem is a good thing?
If P2P systems were not such wonderful tools for piracy and theft, there would be no (legitiomate) complaint and so people who used them for arguably justifiable activity (finding out about new stuff, access to no longer available material, distributing things they produce etc. etc.) would have a clear argument to make for changes to the relevent laws. It is the piracy and theft which provides the big record labels with the stick they use to beat everyone.
If piracy and theft is not eplicitly mentioned it is because the assumption is that everyone using a P2P system is using it for piracy and theft, and so it would be redundant to mention it.
I personally have never owned, and I have never known anyone who owned, a non-disposable Kodak camera.
That says more about your age and perhaps social background than photography. For a long time Kodac was cheap snapshot photography.
I have never owned, nor knew anyone who owned a Triumph motorcycle, but that doesn't mean that the end of the British motorcycle industry in the 70s didn't indicate the end point of a profound shift (in that case the rise of Japan).
What this announcement indicates is that film is dead (in the west) as a medium for day to day photography. Disposables have a niche, and people who have an interest in photography per-se (as opposed to just wanting pictures) will still use 35mm SLRs, but digital has more or less swallowed the `pictures of little Jonny's birthday party' market.
And I bet that market was also a major segment of their film market, and they are essentially confirming that those sales are dead. I'd bet they made lots of money on the weird cartridge format film to go into those cheap cameras. Same business model as used by printer manufacturers making their living from expensive ink cartriges.
Basicly this isn't an anouncement of something that is bout to happen, it is an acknowledgement of what has happened and a reassurance to the market that they have a future.
The spammers can't go too far with this stuff because they'd eventually start to stifle their sales.
What makes you think they have any sales (of the advertised product). I would guess that almost all spam (maybe excluding for pr0n sites) is either being sent by a MAKEMONEYFAST sucker or by a professional spammer who charges such suckers to send their spam out. The first set never make any sales, dissapear and are replaced by the next moron, the latter have their money sales or not.
But then again, Joe Sixpack and Jane Astrology aren't all that smart.
And you think Sam Slashdot is? How many pieces of dead end technology do you think you could find in the average/.ers home? `Early Adoption' is geek herbal viagra.
This could be a gigantic boon for the economy, in theory. Anybody who's interested in space has read about the resources and the possibilities in space[...]
That we have read about them does not mean they exist.
If you know of any, why have you not shown the evidence to the men in suits and got yourself a few billion in venture capital to go get them? These people were willing to fund.coms for KaTe's sake.
There may be payback from space exploration in a few generations, even Vinland turned out to be useful for something:-). However, the reason for going out there is because we can and because not doing so would be against basic human nature. Curiosity only killed the cat because the human who was curious had a nice sharp knife and an interest in how cats work.
If the US government wants to spend money on a keynsian economy support package they'd do better to pick things which need doing. Fixing the electricity distribution system would seem to be a prime candidate.
But why is someone with the username of gnu-sucks (the parent poster) modded up?
You think moderation should be based on the poster's choice of username? That would certainly simplify the moderation interface, people with mod points could just be given a list of today's sign ups to score.
Of course, since you chose to be `Anonymous Coward' you'd get -1000000 on every post.
I think you may have forgotten to engage brain before posting.
Slashdot Mirror
In which case they have one of the few examples of a quite legitimate monopoly (I have a monopoly on being me), and they are not overpricing their product, they are pricing it at a fair market price. (directly controled by the demand, ie what an 8 year old can persuade their parents to pay fo r the latest whoeveritis single).
You might not think it is worth what it says on the ticket, but then you aren't buying it so it doesn't matter to you what it says on the ticket.
Other people can make music, but can they make studio quality recordings? Can they distribute that music effectively? Can they sell it or get people to buy merchandise or go to concerts?
Studio quality recordings can be made if you have the money. They is no monopoly on studio equipment, especially these days when technology has gotten (relatively) cheap. Distribution is surely what we are talking about, distribution is easy, so much so that any old 8 year old can distribute stuff they rip off so widely that the RIAA are worried. Merchendising is an alternative to selling music, not part of it.
But yes, labels provide important services to artists in the form of promotion, access to equipment, subsidising live performances etc. This is why artists sign with labels, and in turn is why stiffing the labels by illegal distribution is not an attack on the men in suits (who will be payed anyway), but on the artists.
Labels act as venture capital companies, management consultancies and marketing arms for artists.
The less profitable it becomes to sell the third Foobar album and associated tat to the fan base they have used used the label's money to build up, the less the label will be able to justifiably risk on the next act who turns up at their door. In turn that means they will concentrate more on churning out more of the same from an ever less interesting Foobar and manufacturing bad Foobar clones.
(There must be a band called Foobar out there, so appologies, I wasn't talking about you:-)).
True. What I ws saying was that anonymity is not a method of protecting free speech, rather a method of coping when free speech becomes difficult or impossible. To protect a right you need to excercise it and make sure everyone sees you doing so.
There is nothing to stop you sending me a copy of your document and me signing it to say `the author of this work has given permission for it to be distributed'. Or you could dump it on the network unsignedand rely on there being at least one person out there with a hacked client willing to act as signatory. Or just that those with such hacked clients would distribute your description of the evil Swedish plot to invade Norway by other means.
All my suggestion would do would be to ensure that for everything on your node, either you have explicitly taken responsibility (by signing, allowing in unsigned content or just putting up an unsigned file) or someone else identifiable has (by signing something you downloaded). That gets legitimate users out from under and argument with the RIAA etc.
Rosa Parks was a black woman who decided one day to sit at the front of the bus, in defiance of the local segregation rules. This created enough of a stink that it was one of the things which got the civil rights movement in the US south moving.
While humans in the Star Trek universe don't seem to be explicitly theistic, they are clearly not non-religious. The whole thing is drenched in a sickly-sweet california-hippy-in-space spirituality. What is Troy if not a priestess, there to give mystical blessing to all the goings on. For explicit theism, consider Scotty playing Amazing Grace at Spock's funeral in WoK.
Maybe the lack of the major current religions in ST reflects a (quite justifiable judging by the current state of the world) assumption that if we don't lose them in the near future, the odds of there being any people in the 23rd century are minimal.
On the whole, I think B5 called this one correctly. After at least thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of years of religion, it is unlikely to dissapear in the next couple of centuries. Christianity looks more or less knackered and decaying, and I wouldn't be suprised if the big denominations collapse, but Islam is young (as religions go) and still growing, Judaism has survived so much it's hard to image what it would take to knock it out, Hinduism, Bhuddism and Daoism have strength through flexibility which has kept them going through huge changes over their histories.
Steping forward a decade or so, without the two big BSD style licenced projects, XFreee86 and Apache, I think the free unixoids would have been struggling for a role.
Well, since the article is explicitly aimed at people who don't understand FBSD and would like to, it wouldbe rather odd ifit didn'tmae the assumption that the reader doesn't understand.
What would you suggest as an alternative? Assuming the people already undrstand and launching into an in-depth discussion of the FBSD VM system or the detailed politics of OBSD development?
ThinkGeek were foing to stock it, but the staff stole all of the first shipment and are too exhausted to put through a follow up order.
I thought they were on a roll, managing to get two scenes with the female characters half undressed, and a tacticless space ship fight into almost every episode.
When I first heard the premise for this new series, I was actually quite interested. A primitive Entreprise, first real deep sapce ship from Earth, presumably out gunned by almost everyone they meet, and maybe having to do some interesting things to win through.
But no. They turn out to be able to beat crap out of almost everyone. The only way to get a plot is to have something blow up on board, or mysterious `gravimetric bullshiterons' hold them while the inferior aliens attack, so that 10 minutes later they can beat crap out of those same aliens without breaking sweat... scene of vulcan underwear giving engineer a hand job... end of episode.
No I did not mention any new legal limitations at all. I was taking about someone providing an infrastructure which would alow people to exchange files safe from the possibility of violation of the legal limitations which already exist, and as a side effect would make the parasites easier to identify.
content can be untraceable.[...] Which in itself helps guarantee free speech.
No, maybe the reverse. In a situation where free speech exists, however under threat, people need to stand behind their speech to make sure attempts at supression are public and so resistable. samisdat publishing is a tool for when free speech has been lost. If you start acting as if you have already lost, defeat becomes inevitable.
If Rosa Parks had put on make-up to pretend to be white before taking her seat she wouldn't have had any effect.
Have you read 1984? If youlet them redefine your language you let them control the agenda. The current US government is definitely capitalist, but definitely not pro free market (consider the trade barriers they throw up when asked by their backers, and consider all the extra subsidy Shrub put into agriculture).
classical liberalism is now often called libertarianism in the US.
No, liberatarians are anti-government in a way that liberals aren't. One of the defining causes of liberalism at its height was universal sufferage (the other two legs in the UK were repeal of the corn laws, and home rule for Ireland, I don't know enough US political history to point up parallels).
No, that is a free market. Capitalism is about a person with resources being allowed to exploit those resources and gain the benefits. The two are often in conflict (eg free markets are damaged by monopolies, but a capitalist would often be best served by trying to create one, similarly for trade barriers and protectionism).
Traditional liberal economics basicly consists of trying to create the environment for capitalism to work, but forcing it to work within a free market.
(at which point I suppose I have to point out that liberal economics is not related to what US politicians and media have redefined the word to mean. I suspect the average /.er grew up with `liberal' meaning `illiberal')
Nothing I described in any way limited what you could do with your computer. That was the whole point. What I described was a system where other people could refuse to listen when you decided to make your computer broadcast things you weren't prepared to claim you had a right to broadcast. The right to speak is not the right to have anyone listen to you.
It is interesting to see how many even here make the implicit assumption that "copyrighted" means "non-distributable".
Which, is precisely the opposite of what I was assuming. I was presuming that there was legitimate file sharing. If I were to presume otherwise I could propose a much simpler solution, that all file sharing could be made illegal with no need to do more than prove someone was running a P2P client to get a conviction.
If the stuff is crap why are people swapping it? Clearly the labels are doing a good job at creating what lots of people want. And if it is over priced, it would be being undercut - the technologies which make swapping easy also make legitimate distribution easy.
IIRC, there was a 7% increase in album sales in the UK last year. Maybe the RIAA are just not doing it right...
Shutting down napster was very effective. It was effctive in turning in a hard to control problem into an uncontrolable one...
This seems to open a possibility. Note I'm not saying this is a good idea, just that it seems like it might be a more workable system than most proposals:
Set up a public/private key infrastructure. If the content producers are losing as much as they claim they should be more than willing to pay. Anyone can have a key if they verify who they are to a reasonable level (eg by supplying a credit card number).
Now, we can have a rule that a client must only distribute a file signed with a recognised key.
I'd bet there are far fewer people willing to jump through these hoops and nail their credit history to their assertions of what is theirs or pubic domain than there are songs and pornographic images in the world, so this should be a more tractable problem than the finger printing.
Any client recieving a non-signed file reports the sender to the men with the big sticks with nails in.
Since there are relatively few people with the skill and interest to create hacked clients, and since such hacked clients should be reported if they are ever seen by a single legitimate client, it shouldn't be impossible for the MwBSwNI to keep the population of evildoers down. Especially if the punishment for distribution of such a client is suitably dramatic and well publicised.
If you owe someone money and don't give it to them that is depriving them of something which is rightfully theirs.
If a copyright owner says `you can have a copy of this if you pay me $10' and you take a copy, then you owe them $10.
So, if you take the copy and don't pay for it that is both copyright violation and theft by your definition.
You could say it was fraud rather than theft, based on the fact that you are depriving them of it before they have had it in their hands, but I think the we areinto word games.
But you cannot say 'all copyright violation is theft' because none of it is.
True, but perhaps not as you mean it. They are different types of concept, one legal, one ethical. However, as in the example above, some actions are both copyright violation and theft, ie they fall legally into the civil copyright violation category and ethically into the theft category (or fraud if you prefer).
Consider a more geeky parallel, refusal to share one's work is not copyright violation. However, if you show you some of your work, and use copyright to say that I can use it in my project if I agree to abide by the GPL, and I do use it, then I `owe' you compliance. If I then refuse to distribute source of my project with the binaries, my refusal to share `deprives you' of the compliance you have a right to demand, and you would be justifiably pissed off.
Copyright is a way for someone to make enforcable agreements without needing to get the legal profession involved each time they start singing/coding/whatever. Very useful all 'round, and something worth defending. Like freedom of speech, the price we pay is that sometimes arseholes will abuse it. Unlike freedom of speech, such arseholes are basicly harmless, if annoying.
Theft isn't primarilly a legal concept, it is a moral one. If laws mention such things it is to (usually unjustifiably) apropriate the normal use of the word.
Surely, the point the article (or rather the politician being discussed) was supposed to be making is that laws such as copyright need to be adjusted to take into account the consensus of where theft ends and reasonable behaviour begins. To talk about that without mentioning the ethical categories seems to indicate that someone is assuming that the distinction is trivial, ie either all copyright violation is theft or none is. Neither would indicate a good article.
So the fact that he avoids mentioning the major reason there is a problem is a good thing?
If P2P systems were not such wonderful tools for piracy and theft, there would be no (legitiomate) complaint and so people who used them for arguably justifiable activity (finding out about new stuff, access to no longer available material, distributing things they produce etc. etc.) would have a clear argument to make for changes to the relevent laws. It is the piracy and theft which provides the big record labels with the stick they use to beat everyone.
If piracy and theft is not eplicitly mentioned it is because the assumption is that everyone using a P2P system is using it for piracy and theft, and so it would be redundant to mention it.
Leia: Aren't you a little small for a stormtrooper?
Luke: (pained expression) The force is strong with this one.
I hope the originator patented the convention of attaching this joke to every patent story.
Perhaps there should be a prize for the most obvious IT patent. I think this one edges out the Amazon one-click bogosity.
(Damn, I just checked and I only set this form of domain up for my family in early 2000).
DNS records are public, so does the fact that anyone anywhere did this mean they have published it?
Only if you can find some ferromagnetic poultry and you turn the current up very high to boost the field.
(Am I the only one who thiks this thing is UGLY. Not goging to tempt me away from my leather jacket with half a shell suit)
That says more about your age and perhaps social background than photography. For a long time Kodac was cheap snapshot photography.
I have never owned, nor knew anyone who owned a Triumph motorcycle, but that doesn't mean that the end of the British motorcycle industry in the 70s didn't indicate the end point of a profound shift (in that case the rise of Japan).
What this announcement indicates is that film is dead (in the west) as a medium for day to day photography. Disposables have a niche, and people who have an interest in photography per-se (as opposed to just wanting pictures) will still use 35mm SLRs, but digital has more or less swallowed the `pictures of little Jonny's birthday party' market.
And I bet that market was also a major segment of their film market, and they are essentially confirming that those sales are dead. I'd bet they made lots of money on the weird cartridge format film to go into those cheap cameras. Same business model as used by printer manufacturers making their living from expensive ink cartriges.
Basicly this isn't an anouncement of something that is bout to happen, it is an acknowledgement of what has happened and a reassurance to the market that they have a future.
What makes you think they have any sales (of the advertised product). I would guess that almost all spam (maybe excluding for pr0n sites) is either being sent by a MAKEMONEYFAST sucker or by a professional spammer who charges such suckers to send their spam out. The first set never make any sales, dissapear and are replaced by the next moron, the latter have their money sales or not.
But then again, Joe Sixpack and Jane Astrology aren't all that smart.
And you think Sam Slashdot is? How many pieces of dead end technology do you think you could find in the average /.ers home? `Early Adoption' is geek herbal viagra.
That we have read about them does not mean they exist.
If you know of any, why have you not shown the evidence to the men in suits and got yourself a few billion in venture capital to go get them? These people were willing to fund .coms for KaTe's sake.
There may be payback from space exploration in a few generations, even Vinland turned out to be useful for something:-). However, the reason for going out there is because we can and because not doing so would be against basic human nature. Curiosity only killed the cat because the human who was curious had a nice sharp knife and an interest in how cats work.
If the US government wants to spend money on a keynsian economy support package they'd do better to pick things which need doing. Fixing the electricity distribution system would seem to be a prime candidate.
You think moderation should be based on the poster's choice of username? That would certainly simplify the moderation interface, people with mod points could just be given a list of today's sign ups to score.
Of course, since you chose to be `Anonymous Coward' you'd get -1000000 on every post.
I think you may have forgotten to engage brain before posting.