I'd consider experimentally pre-releasing several, if not all, films on bittorrent for free. With a minor twist: they'd all be 80% of the screened version, that is, without the happy ending:-)
I'd expect they'd reduce the number of graphic ads - lots of graphics also means lots of traffic to pay for. Just imagine one 50Kb picture ad downloaded by 1 million subscribers...
In fact, this must be a theorem of existence: Every country has at least one newspaper that allows one to learn what those in power want you to learn about, think about and talk about. These three define truth (always according to those in power).
Not that I wish to exhaustively pursue this fictional scenario, but still my point of view is that you lost only the xx cents corresponding to the cost of your "raw materials" (still talking about digital goods).
If your product was a physical object (e.g. a jewelry item) you lost just the cost of your raw materials, say $5 if you sell at 100% profit. And yes, that would be theft from my part. But we are not talking physical goods here.
In other news, I didn't win the lottery and suddenly have 1 million bucks less than I should... If I had won, I'd gladly pay you for the item!
I understand your feelings but not your argument. My "stealing" your product did not induce any substantial damage to you, because you can always recreate copies of it at manufacture cost (supposing we're talking about digital goods, it's some cents, isn't it?).
If I sold the product I "stole" from you to a third party and got $10, then you could rightfully claim you have been damaged, because these $10 should get in your pocket and not mine.
If, on the other hand, I made 5 copies of your product and gave them to my friend for free, you could also claim you have potentially been damaged, because I actively inhibited my friends considering buying the product from you.
This is why everything I "pirate", I get it from direct downloads (never torrents), I keep it myself and use it myself to make sure I don't acquire the status of an accessory or even start feeling like one when reading posts using your line of argumentation.
It's the guy who uploaded the stuff and made it available who damaged you and not me. I don't have the bucks to buy it from you, I don't profit financially or otherwise from your product, therefore to you I am non-existent.
I suppose the following joke exists in most countries and cultures and I think fits with your description.
Three friends were granted each one wish by a genie. The first one says "I was always very poor and now I want to become rich" and the genie produces a pit full of gold coins. The second one says "I have always been starving to death, all I want is a goat to provide me milk every day" and the genie gives him a goat. The third one says "I have enough money and enough food, all I want is his (pointing at the 2nd guy) goat to die"
The moral: Any and all free goats must die. Thou art allowed to drink only the industry's milk, from their cans, featuring their brand for everybody to see, even if (and most often especially when) it costs nothing. Because you are the milk, you are the can and your forehead should be marked by their brand.
I am not a lawyer and therefore I'm very afraid of making a comment to your post... Not because it may link to or have embedded copyrighted materials, but for the slight chance you might actually be right.
The argument that Google search results are not "curated" is silly. If you search for "$2011movie + DVDRIP" the TOP results you're going to get are torrent links. If this is not "curating", then what is?
I'm not a programmer, but my guess is that it would take Google just one line of code to remove from search results all links containing the term "DVDRIP". Isn't that omission obvious and therefore a conscious choice? In my humble opinion, yes and yes.
Can I add that "Facebook" and "stupidity", although almost never in the same sentence, are synonymous and therefore offer an opportunity for a legal case?
Flickr (or Twitter or Facebook or gmail or any web service) "isn't part of any government" until the moment it is considered to contain evidence that are being used against you.
What? Do you really mean that we are not qualified to be called human beings unless we are using Twitter, Facebook, and web services?
By the way, where I live it sure is illegal to live in caves. It sure raises more suspicions than boycotting services endorsed by Adjustment Teams (great film).
I ran 1-2 tests from the demos.mozilla.org site and they did not seem to work as intended (especially the Remixing Reality one). My guess was that maybe WebGL was not working properly on my system and I ran the webgl-conformance-tests suite found at https://cvs.khronos.org/svn/repos/registry/trunk/public/webgl/sdk/tests/webgl-conformance-tests.html. Results were 5389 of 5468 tests passed, 1 timed out. Same results with latest Minefield.
Now I'm a bit at loss: the above tests (the failure of which may or may not be related to the demo pages) may fail because of several reasons:
1. The WebGL implementation by FF4 2. The Javascript and Java implementation on my system 3. The OpenGL implementation (latest AMD Catalyst on HD4670) 4. The specific tests, or FF4, or WebGL, or OpenGL may be not fully amd64 compatible (running Win7 Pro x64) 5. Other OS and non-OS related issues. 6. A combination of the above
I'm not a 3D guru, but my guess is that a lot of people eager to experience the latest and greatest HTML5 bling won't know where to start troubleshooting. I wish Mozilla realises the problem and posts in that demo page:
a. specific prerequisites list (hardware, OS, programs, drivers, accessories etc) for properly running the demos b. testing procedures to check if the above prerequisites are met c. troubleshooting instructions (which may be based on a. & b. above).
I hope some of the above are implemented as soon as (or better, before) FF4 final is released. Otherwise I expect vicious browser/platform wars that won't do HTML5 development any good.
This kind of publicity is all that was needed to provoke a new series of commercials in the "I'm an iPhone" and "I'm an Android" line.
The challenge is now how to isolate these incidents and how to preemptively plan the prevention of the same happening to the (future) linux apps market.
According to Wikipedia, Hollywood's highest grossing films are Avatar ($2.8B) and Titanic ($1.8B). Have you ever wondered why?
My theory is that these films address deeply embedded human archetypes and needs, namely living in a better world (Avatar) and becoming immortal (Titanic).
Facebook effectively addresses both needs and gradually works its way towards replacing Real Life for good.
It doesn't always have to do with money, the real 21st century currencies are going to be defined by the new Attention Economies.
Unless a third wold war emerges, Facebook is safe.
Advertising cannot become a bubble because it addresses people's Avatars living in a socialist Second Life dream.
The advertisement business will never die, whether the people has money to buy or starves to death. It's all about perceptions and imaginations of reality, already a meta-bubble if you wish.
Your argument does not take into account that the concepts of "waste" and "garbage" are defined via the concept of "value" (and not vice versa).
For example, if the iPad was "continually made and sold" and "sold constantly, in large amounts, consuming work/jobs, material, transport", so that everybody could afford it at, say, $50, it would automatically acquire the status of "waste" and "garbage". This is the reason why the concept of $100 OLPC has been and still is fought mercilessly by capitalism.
"Waste" and "garbage" are byproducts of capitalism and not prerequisites for it. But sometimes our anger at the fact that western "garbage" is in fact third-world bread or gold (not to mention the millions of tonnes of "expired" packaged food that gets destroyed instead of saving lives there) blurs our judgment (without necessarily bringing tears on our eyes).
Dear Sir, I award you the SICOTM (Slashdot Insightful Comment of the Month) award (and I really think/. should do some work towards such a monthly/yearly award). It's one of those (lately rather scarce) moments when the concept of/. discussions is glorified.
Especially after googling "supply must never meet demand" in the hope of finding a citation and seeing it's a googlewhack.
If you are aware of any book(s) that might discuss this theorem, I'd be pleased to hear about it.
If what he did is was to totally get rid of paper and pencil, he might actually have lost everything for good. His case is a great lesson for the layman: the ultimate backup still is paper and pencil - you use them with your own 'TOS' with the additional benefit that information on paper disappears only if lost, burnt or washed in a wash-machine. In the same sense, I don't trust my hard disks or memory sticks to preserve what I consider vital info and I am very reluctant to use any cloud-based or remote storage service.
The irony of it is that while FB implicitly or explicitly does not provide any guarantees that my information will be safe and accessible to me as long as my account is active (and this is what they'll claim at the trial), at the same time they surely regularly back it up ad nauseam to make sure it is accessible and remains accessible to their 'partners', even after they have received my certificate of death or even beyond that.
My troll: Companies like Intel/Microsoft need viruses just the like food industry needs pests and countries need 'enemies' - it's one hand washing the other in a State of Fear. For fear of viruses the PC needs AV vaccination that will slow down hardware/software, so that hardware makers are pressed to produce even more powerful hardware to compensate for the AV-caused drag and thus provide the illusion of progress. In the meantime, attacks get more evolved and sophisticated, so AVs get more bloated and intrusive, slowing down the host etc. etc. ad nauseam. If this isn't a vicious circle, I don't know what is.
My evidence: I really miss the Windows 98 SE era or even before that. Currently our undergraduate physics lab is still using eight win98 machines (because the software can't run on anything else, it's doing online measurement). They are P-III machines with 32MB of RAM and they boot faster than the Quad Core 2.6GHz I am typing on. For your enjoyment, just install a clean copy of your OS on a virtual machine (no additives, no AV, no nothing) and benchmark it. If you wish to really get scared, install windows 98 on a VM and benchmark that.
PS. I just watched Zeitgeist III and I just can't escape the crazy idea that money is it's own antivirus.
Simply scrolling this very comments page requires ~80% of 1 core of my Core2Quad. Never seen that in/. before. This also may be the cause of the serious screen jerks during scrolling, although I use the YetAnotherScrolling FF plugin. Certainly this new version strains my eyes during reading the comments.
It looks like a preemptive cleanup scheme to me, as follows:
FB users starting to get worried by the increasing invasion of their privacy or intimidated by the media warning them they'd better leave or frightened by the stories they hear from their friends will eventually close their accounts. Such users are useless to FB and currently represent a waste of storage space and FB resources. So why not force them out as soon as possible with little bumps of scare tactics and just do business with the rest hundreds of millions who will sheepishly share their every dirty little secret online?
Sounds like a plausible strategy to me - cheap, effective and certainly increasing the percentage of marketable private information per Terabyte of storage.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd consider experimentally pre-releasing several, if not all, films on bittorrent for free. With a minor twist: they'd all be 80% of the screened version, that is, without the happy ending :-)
I'd expect they'd reduce the number of graphic ads - lots of graphics also means lots of traffic to pay for. Just imagine one 50Kb picture ad downloaded by 1 million subscribers...
+1 Insightful
In fact, this must be a theorem of existence: Every country has at least one newspaper that allows one to learn what those in power want you to learn about, think about and talk about. These three define truth (always according to those in power).
Will this will allow us too run apps faster in a browser than natively? Or is this just an Apple thing?
Not that I wish to exhaustively pursue this fictional scenario, but still my point of view is that you lost only the xx cents corresponding to the cost of your "raw materials" (still talking about digital goods).
If your product was a physical object (e.g. a jewelry item) you lost just the cost of your raw materials, say $5 if you sell at 100% profit. And yes, that would be theft from my part. But we are not talking physical goods here.
In other news, I didn't win the lottery and suddenly have 1 million bucks less than I should... If I had won, I'd gladly pay you for the item!
I understand your feelings but not your argument. My "stealing" your product did not induce any substantial damage to you, because you can always recreate copies of it at manufacture cost (supposing we're talking about digital goods, it's some cents, isn't it?).
If I sold the product I "stole" from you to a third party and got $10, then you could rightfully claim you have been damaged, because these $10 should get in your pocket and not mine.
If, on the other hand, I made 5 copies of your product and gave them to my friend for free, you could also claim you have potentially been damaged, because I actively inhibited my friends considering buying the product from you.
This is why everything I "pirate", I get it from direct downloads (never torrents), I keep it myself and use it myself to make sure I don't acquire the status of an accessory or even start feeling like one when reading posts using your line of argumentation.
It's the guy who uploaded the stuff and made it available who damaged you and not me. I don't have the bucks to buy it from you, I don't profit financially or otherwise from your product, therefore to you I am non-existent.
No harm meant, no harm done. Friends?
I suppose the following joke exists in most countries and cultures and I think fits with your description.
Three friends were granted each one wish by a genie.
The first one says "I was always very poor and now I want to become rich" and the genie produces a pit full of gold coins.
The second one says "I have always been starving to death, all I want is a goat to provide me milk every day" and the genie gives him a goat.
The third one says "I have enough money and enough food, all I want is his (pointing at the 2nd guy) goat to die"
The moral: Any and all free goats must die. Thou art allowed to drink only the industry's milk, from their cans, featuring their brand for everybody to see, even if (and most often especially when) it costs nothing. Because you are the milk, you are the can and your forehead should be marked by their brand.
I am not a lawyer and therefore I'm very afraid of making a comment to your post... Not because it may link to or have embedded copyrighted materials, but for the slight chance you might actually be right.
The argument that Google search results are not "curated" is silly. If you search for "$2011movie + DVDRIP" the TOP results you're going to get are torrent links. If this is not "curating", then what is?
I'm not a programmer, but my guess is that it would take Google just one line of code to remove from search results all links containing the term "DVDRIP". Isn't that omission obvious and therefore a conscious choice? In my humble opinion, yes and yes.
Well said, sir.
Can I add that "Facebook" and "stupidity", although almost never in the same sentence, are synonymous and therefore offer an opportunity for a legal case?
Hasn't he read "Twitter grammar for dummies", chapter 2, "Watch your commas!" pp. 32-24 (2008)?
Assignment 1: Tick the correct answer and then post it on Twitter:
1. The Mayor said, Talbot is an ass.
2. The Mayor, said Talbot, is an ass.
Flickr (or Twitter or Facebook or gmail or any web service) "isn't part of any government" until the moment it is considered to contain evidence that are being used against you.
What? Do you really mean that we are not qualified to be called human beings unless we are using Twitter, Facebook, and web services?
By the way, where I live it sure is illegal to live in caves. It sure raises more suspicions than boycotting services endorsed by Adjustment Teams (great film).
I ran 1-2 tests from the demos.mozilla.org site and they did not seem to work as intended (especially the Remixing Reality one). My guess was that maybe WebGL was not working properly on my system and I ran the webgl-conformance-tests suite found at https://cvs.khronos.org/svn/repos/registry/trunk/public/webgl/sdk/tests/webgl-conformance-tests.html. Results were 5389 of 5468 tests passed, 1 timed out. Same results with latest Minefield.
Now I'm a bit at loss: the above tests (the failure of which may or may not be related to the demo pages) may fail because of several reasons:
1. The WebGL implementation by FF4
2. The Javascript and Java implementation on my system
3. The OpenGL implementation (latest AMD Catalyst on HD4670)
4. The specific tests, or FF4, or WebGL, or OpenGL may be not fully amd64 compatible (running Win7 Pro x64)
5. Other OS and non-OS related issues.
6. A combination of the above
I'm not a 3D guru, but my guess is that a lot of people eager to experience the latest and greatest HTML5 bling won't know where to start troubleshooting. I wish Mozilla realises the problem and posts in that demo page:
a. specific prerequisites list (hardware, OS, programs, drivers, accessories etc) for properly running the demos
b. testing procedures to check if the above prerequisites are met
c. troubleshooting instructions (which may be based on a. & b. above).
I hope some of the above are implemented as soon as (or better, before) FF4 final is released. Otherwise I expect vicious browser/platform wars that won't do HTML5 development any good.
This kind of publicity is all that was needed to provoke a new series of commercials in the "I'm an iPhone" and "I'm an Android" line.
The challenge is now how to isolate these incidents and how to preemptively plan the prevention of the same happening to the (future) linux apps market.
According to Wikipedia, Hollywood's highest grossing films are Avatar ($2.8B) and Titanic ($1.8B). Have you ever wondered why?
My theory is that these films address deeply embedded human archetypes and needs, namely living in a better world (Avatar) and becoming immortal (Titanic).
Facebook effectively addresses both needs and gradually works its way towards replacing Real Life for good.
It doesn't always have to do with money, the real 21st century currencies are going to be defined by the new Attention Economies.
Unless a third wold war emerges, Facebook is safe.
Advertising cannot become a bubble because it addresses people's Avatars living in a socialist Second Life dream.
The advertisement business will never die, whether the people has money to buy or starves to death. It's all about perceptions and imaginations of reality, already a meta-bubble if you wish.
Your argument does not take into account that the concepts of "waste" and "garbage" are defined via the concept of "value" (and not vice versa).
For example, if the iPad was "continually made and sold" and "sold constantly, in large amounts, consuming work/jobs, material, transport", so that everybody could afford it at, say, $50, it would automatically acquire the status of "waste" and "garbage". This is the reason why the concept of $100 OLPC has been and still is fought mercilessly by capitalism.
"Waste" and "garbage" are byproducts of capitalism and not prerequisites for it. But sometimes our anger at the fact that western "garbage" is in fact third-world bread or gold (not to mention the millions of tonnes of "expired" packaged food that gets destroyed instead of saving lives there) blurs our judgment (without necessarily bringing tears on our eyes).
Dear Sir, I award you the SICOTM (Slashdot Insightful Comment of the Month) award (and I really think /. should do some work towards such a monthly/yearly award). It's one of those (lately rather scarce) moments when the concept of /. discussions is glorified.
Especially after googling "supply must never meet demand" in the hope of finding a citation and seeing it's a googlewhack.
If you are aware of any book(s) that might discuss this theorem, I'd be pleased to hear about it.
If what he did is was to totally get rid of paper and pencil, he might actually have lost everything for good. His case is a great lesson for the layman: the ultimate backup still is paper and pencil - you use them with your own 'TOS' with the additional benefit that information on paper disappears only if lost, burnt or washed in a wash-machine. In the same sense, I don't trust my hard disks or memory sticks to preserve what I consider vital info and I am very reluctant to use any cloud-based or remote storage service.
The irony of it is that while FB implicitly or explicitly does not provide any guarantees that my information will be safe and accessible to me as long as my account is active (and this is what they'll claim at the trial), at the same time they surely regularly back it up ad nauseam to make sure it is accessible and remains accessible to their 'partners', even after they have received my certificate of death or even beyond that.
Monetary fines never proved to be disincentives for crime. $360M is still MUCH cheaper than the death penalty, of even cutting off his pinkie.
When MS buys Intel these minor glitches will be addressed for good.
+1 Insightful
My troll: Companies like Intel/Microsoft need viruses just the like food industry needs pests and countries need 'enemies' - it's one hand washing the other in a State of Fear. For fear of viruses the PC needs AV vaccination that will slow down hardware/software, so that hardware makers are pressed to produce even more powerful hardware to compensate for the AV-caused drag and thus provide the illusion of progress. In the meantime, attacks get more evolved and sophisticated, so AVs get more bloated and intrusive, slowing down the host etc. etc. ad nauseam. If this isn't a vicious circle, I don't know what is.
My evidence: I really miss the Windows 98 SE era or even before that. Currently our undergraduate physics lab is still using eight win98 machines (because the software can't run on anything else, it's doing online measurement). They are P-III machines with 32MB of RAM and they boot faster than the Quad Core 2.6GHz I am typing on. For your enjoyment, just install a clean copy of your OS on a virtual machine (no additives, no AV, no nothing) and benchmark it. If you wish to really get scared, install windows 98 on a VM and benchmark that.
PS. I just watched Zeitgeist III and I just can't escape the crazy idea that money is it's own antivirus.
Simply scrolling this very comments page requires ~80% of 1 core of my Core2Quad. Never seen that in /. before. This also may be the cause of the serious screen jerks during scrolling, although I use the YetAnotherScrolling FF plugin. Certainly this new version strains my eyes during reading the comments.
It looks like a preemptive cleanup scheme to me, as follows:
FB users starting to get worried by the increasing invasion of their privacy or intimidated by the media warning them they'd better leave or frightened by the stories they hear from their friends will eventually close their accounts. Such users are useless to FB and currently represent a waste of storage space and FB resources. So why not force them out as soon as possible with little bumps of scare tactics and just do business with the rest hundreds of millions who will sheepishly share their every dirty little secret online?
Sounds like a plausible strategy to me - cheap, effective and certainly increasing the percentage of marketable private information per Terabyte of storage.