"Direct e-Mail marketing", as you eulogise it, now has such a low reputation that, by reflex, any normal person deletes it without a second look. I am in industry, an if I want widgets I Google for widgets and look at the web sites of widget makers. Then I exchange e-Mails with them for more information.
If you think the only form of advertising that a business should engage in is: Put up a website, and expect traffic to flow unto us on their own accord, I'll see you out of business.
Who said TV commercials are socially acceptable? They rile me for one. I only watch TV with commercials by viedo recording so I can skp the commercials. Your analogy is wrong anyway. TV commercials at least pay for the TV network, but Spam does not pay for the internet.
Manufacturers don't buy commercial time to support the entertainment industry. They do it to show off their product because they need to raise public awareness that it is available and that they should want it. Consumerism isn't driven by neccessity. It is driven by impulse, suggestion, subliminal, liminal, and superliminal advertising.
Ever known anyone that got cancer? Those bills run into the hundreds of thousands. Mind telling me how someone who is making middle class wages can afford to take a hit like that?
My brother had to have open heart surgery and he was without insurance. The operation was estimated at $250K without complications. What he did was go to the doctor and explain his situation. "I need this surgery, and if it bankrupts me, you get screwed and I get screwed. What are my options of how you can get paid, and I can keep my credit?" So he managed to find an insurance company that would pay for it, despite it being an existing condition, (through his university) and the surgery was scheduled for when the policy would come into effect. If you want to play the game, sometimes you have to learn the rules. It's often better to consult with the scorekeepers than the rulebooks.
Last I heard, Spore had 700,000 copies downloaded by those who openly refused to buy the game for its DRM. If that makes up only 1/500th of Spore's final distribution, then they must have sold 3,500,000,000 copies! That measures out to about $150 billion in sales. So what they are calling a "lukewarm reception" is only 17 times greater than the entire video game industry generated in 2007. I think their numbers are solid.
In the business world, direct email marketing is not considered "intrusive" or "invasive" by the hoards. It might be frustrating to entry-level programmer or minimum-wage Pete, or even Upstart-Business-Guy to get offers from other businesses, but for people who rely on knowing what's new and what's available to make proper decisions and get their jobs done, direct marketing is the first attempt at bridging the communication gap between two companies and starting a successful/profitable business relationship.
It's typically the undirected, consumer mailing and scamming that have given email marketing a bad name; i.e. 3nl4rg3 t3h pen-fifteen. Though, from an outside standpoint, even those are less time-intrusive than television commercials, but oddly not from a social acceptance standpoint.
However, direct email marketing businesses are like the used-car dealerships of today. Most of them are very shady folk selling nothing but rusted nuts and bolts. There are good ones out there that the Fortune 1000 companies rely on as their latest thousand-man rolodex, but you have to do your homework to find them.
The holy grail of course is to find something that humans can do easily, but is impossible (or very very unlikely statistically) for a program to be able to do.
What if computers will turn around and do it back to us!?
Robot #1: Administer the test.
Robot #2: Which of the following would you most prefer? A: a puppy, B: a pretty flower from your sweety, or C: a large properly formatted data file?
Robot #1: Choose!
Fry: Uh, is the puppy mechanical in any way?
Robot #2: No, it is the bad kind of puppy.
Leela: Then we'll go with that data file!
Robot #2: Correct!
Robot #1: The flower would also have been acceptable.
All those who have already spent the large amounts of money placed conveniently on their doorsteps from an "Anonymous DonoRIAA" last week, say "Aye" -- any opposed? The Ayes have it. Send it to the president!
It's easy to start a grassroots campaign to get a new bill instated that will have this one eclipsed or overturned. We just need everyone we know to write letters to their congressmen -- Letters written on hundred dollar bills.
Some cars have that. The brake light in the rear window will flash in patterns. The harder the press, the more lit bulbs vs dim bulbs in the pattern-- but when I was driving behind one of these cars for the first time, not knowing what it was, I thought it was some crazy sort of hazard light. I couldn't tell what the flashing meant at all. There would have to be some sort of standardization or public service announcement or people just won't understand what the hell is wrong with the car in front of them in the -5% of cases where cars would have this system incorporated.
studying the causes of the continuing decline of every ecosystem on earth
Perhaps you should do a little more research. The planet has more life today than it's had since we started recording vegetation density and biodiversity on a global scale using satellites instead of case-study surveys. The number of new species discovered every year vastly overwhelms the number of species that disappear. The change of ecosystems is not their decline. It's what ecosystems do. Animals appear and disappear with time, with or without human interference. You either need to accept that, or you can go ahead and tell me how many plastic 6-pack rings it took to kill the dinosaurs.
I'm betting on Fidel Castro for the first peaceful transition in power in Cuba in 40 years.
Not if previous years give us any indication on what they're looking for in a candidate. They gave it to Al Gore for his battle with Global Warming. This year, I think it's going to Michael Phelps for his battle against humans-not-being-able-to-breathe-underwater.
I do firmly believe that the RIAA (and, by extension, the MPAA) are FAR from out of tricks. They didn't get to the positions they are by being stupid, just greedy.
Indeed. If I had tagging powers, I'd probably put up "goodluckwiththat" -- the artists don't own the radiowaves and the music video networks like the RIAA does. I've helped one or two one-hit-wonders make it out of their garages and into Billboard's top 40 through word-of-mouth and spamming "request-a-song" radio shows when they were signed with no-name independent labels, but for the most part, a new band's exposure begins with the 4 capital letters of "RIAA" -- though once they have a flowing fanbase, they can keep them updated on their own with a "We're releasing a new album!"
RIAA may no longer be the alpha and omega of the music business, but they definitely have a firm grip on the alpha. Spreading your song to 130 people on music networking sites is not exposure. Broadcasting to +80 million listeners is.
While they should give out degrees to people who like to hold unscientific beliefs in their spare time, they should not hold them out as shining examples of "someone doing it right".
I'm going to have to disagree and say anyone who DOESN'T hold to an unscientific belief in their spare time is not "doing it right."
For starters, it's their spare time. If they don't have a hobby outside of established scientific doctrines, they need to find one and learn to live. Being a reclusive, obsessive-compulsive shut-in isn't a "shining example" of what growing scientists should yearn to be.
Also, if they only gave out nobel prizes in physics to the guys who can recite what we already know and have proven, then the prize won't mean anything at all. It's the guys who have to take the random stabs in the dark and then attempt, throughout the years, to quantify that with testing until they have sufficient evidence to call it "good enough for a theory." Bandwagon jumpers and those who only place safe bets have no place among the remembered.
Yes. Truly amazing. The RIAA lawyer tells the judge that the University will destroy the data if the motion is not granted. Leaving out the fact that the University told him that the data has been preserved. And the Judge "presumes" that that was an "honest mistake"?
RIAA: If you don't grant the motion, they'll destroy all the data!
Judge: What makes you come to that conclusion?
RIAA: Because that's what we would do!
It seems to hearken back to the evolutionist hypothesis that the eye is an evolved version of a light-sensitive cell (like, for example, melanin) that became more specialized through time. Skin cells don't seem to react to light in the visible or infrared spectrums -- rather just ultraviolet. It's definitely sensitive to reflected ultraviolet light which means the sense is there, the information simply isn't transferred quickly or coherently enough to the brain to register it. There's no lens to define where the light is coming from when it's reflected to hit the skin, so it seems even if the brain were wired to pick up when skin is exposed to UV light, it would read nothing but static that could be coming from any direction, possibly filtered by calculating the parallax signal from other patches of skin cells. The sense, in this case, would be less like seeing and more like hearing ultraviolet light to know where which direction reflecting surfaces are, and the skin sensitivity would have to be amped to become so severe that a slap on the wrist would probably be mentally crippling and physically incapacitating.
I am not a vision-rocket guy, but the basic biology and basic physics of it all seem to add up with an adaptive-enough brain to mix it together -- but since it's not what happens to blind people naturally, when the physics and biology don't prompt the automatic switch to a lesser, but also feasible method of interpreting light, it's unlikely the human body can register the sense well enough for it to be survivably effective. Not impossible, though. Neither measurable success or ultimate failure would surprise me.
Crackberries in the hands of actual congresscritters is like a five year old having it. You get nothing but fantasy and gibberish with the occasional regurgitation of things they heard the grown ups say.
You mean like when any suit gets ahold of a blackberry?
Might I add that yes, I do know there's a difference between outright "Copy Protection" and "DRM" and that some labels use one while other labels use the other. To which I say: "Calling it 'copy protection' in most circumstances is confusing, as it should be 'obfuscation' instead -- if that's what the desired result is. Copy protection should only be applied for making direct copies, rather than preventing the translation or transfer from one format to the other." Topically, in the case of Real, that seems to be what the MPAA is on about.
IMO, The point they SHOULD be attacking is that Real is asking to make money off these translated copies (which they have no right to do), but Real can counter that by saying they are only charging for the translation fee, not for the actual copy of the media. MPAA says "that's not what you're advertising" Then the fencing can begin!
Of course it doesn't violate copyright law, it violates the DMCA which does not allow you to remove or circumvent the copy protection.
Pffft, DRM isn't copy protection! It's rights management -- which, through their intentional ambiguity of what the name could mean, inadvertently leaves me free to interpret it as more akin to digital shrinkwrap. Just another peel to get through before I can watch my movie. It's not illegal for me to remove the plastic wrap, warning stickers, label sticker, plastic latches, and tiny metal security sticker that sets off the alarms in the store sometimes even after I've paid for it. How could DRM be construed as anything but a digital representation of the last to Joe K. Mediabuyer? I submit, under the current terminology, it is not.
I can shoot down your entire point with a simple equation. I hope you can think long and hard about what this means:
evolution != abiogenesis
evolution != mutation
evolution != adaptation
evolution != survival of the fittest
evolution != selective breeding
The theory is made up by the sum of its parts. If you want to try moving the target and saying "Evolutionists don't believe in abiogenesis" then I suggest you CONSULT with some evolutionists. Maybe you're comfortable with discarding the single greatest irreconcilable difference between evolutionism and intelligent design, but I'm not so sure your proported cohorts are.
Besides, this just goes back to what I said earlier: You ask 5 evolutionists how life began on the planet, and you'll get 2-3 answers. You didn't give your answer, but you do seem to claim it's different from the mainstream. If not, then we have nothing to discuss here.
Slashdot Mirror
"Direct e-Mail marketing", as you eulogise it, now has such a low reputation that, by reflex, any normal person deletes it without a second look. I am in industry, an if I want widgets I Google for widgets and look at the web sites of widget makers. Then I exchange e-Mails with them for more information.
If you think the only form of advertising that a business should engage in is: Put up a website, and expect traffic to flow unto us on their own accord, I'll see you out of business.
Who said TV commercials are socially acceptable? They rile me for one. I only watch TV with commercials by viedo recording so I can skp the commercials. Your analogy is wrong anyway. TV commercials at least pay for the TV network, but Spam does not pay for the internet.
Manufacturers don't buy commercial time to support the entertainment industry. They do it to show off their product because they need to raise public awareness that it is available and that they should want it. Consumerism isn't driven by neccessity. It is driven by impulse, suggestion, subliminal, liminal, and superliminal advertising.
Ever known anyone that got cancer? Those bills run into the hundreds of thousands. Mind telling me how someone who is making middle class wages can afford to take a hit like that?
My brother had to have open heart surgery and he was without insurance. The operation was estimated at $250K without complications. What he did was go to the doctor and explain his situation. "I need this surgery, and if it bankrupts me, you get screwed and I get screwed. What are my options of how you can get paid, and I can keep my credit?" So he managed to find an insurance company that would pay for it, despite it being an existing condition, (through his university) and the surgery was scheduled for when the policy would come into effect. If you want to play the game, sometimes you have to learn the rules. It's often better to consult with the scorekeepers than the rulebooks.
Last I heard, Spore had 700,000 copies downloaded by those who openly refused to buy the game for its DRM. If that makes up only 1/500th of Spore's final distribution, then they must have sold 3,500,000,000 copies! That measures out to about $150 billion in sales. So what they are calling a "lukewarm reception" is only 17 times greater than the entire video game industry generated in 2007. I think their numbers are solid.
I'm still trying to figure out how they know that I have a small penis...
When you entered a contest for a free H3 Hummer, they passed along your email to these guys.
If you think that's weird, all I get are spam mails for earplugs, horse-fitted condoms, and candy. I don't even wear earplugs!
In the business world, direct email marketing is not considered "intrusive" or "invasive" by the hoards. It might be frustrating to entry-level programmer or minimum-wage Pete, or even Upstart-Business-Guy to get offers from other businesses, but for people who rely on knowing what's new and what's available to make proper decisions and get their jobs done, direct marketing is the first attempt at bridging the communication gap between two companies and starting a successful/profitable business relationship.
It's typically the undirected, consumer mailing and scamming that have given email marketing a bad name; i.e. 3nl4rg3 t3h pen-fifteen. Though, from an outside standpoint, even those are less time-intrusive than television commercials, but oddly not from a social acceptance standpoint.
However, direct email marketing businesses are like the used-car dealerships of today. Most of them are very shady folk selling nothing but rusted nuts and bolts. There are good ones out there that the Fortune 1000 companies rely on as their latest thousand-man rolodex, but you have to do your homework to find them.
The holy grail of course is to find something that humans can do easily, but is impossible (or very very unlikely statistically) for a program to be able to do.
What if computers will turn around and do it back to us!?
Robot #1: Administer the test.
Robot #2: Which of the following would you most prefer? A: a puppy, B: a pretty flower from your sweety, or C: a large properly formatted data file?
Robot #1: Choose!
Fry: Uh, is the puppy mechanical in any way?
Robot #2: No, it is the bad kind of puppy.
Leela: Then we'll go with that data file!
Robot #2: Correct!
Robot #1: The flower would also have been acceptable.
All those who have already spent the large amounts of money placed conveniently on their doorsteps from an "Anonymous DonoRIAA" last week, say "Aye" -- any opposed? The Ayes have it. Send it to the president!
It's easy to start a grassroots campaign to get a new bill instated that will have this one eclipsed or overturned. We just need everyone we know to write letters to their congressmen -- Letters written on hundred dollar bills.
Please. Lovable isn't going to make Americans want to do math.
We gotta make it fuckable
Society and the internet are trying their best. 69 and 34 have broken the ice... who knows what number will be the next pornographic integer!
You mean Verizon is hosting a conference on security and data theft prevention? SIGN ME UP!
Some cars have that. The brake light in the rear window will flash in patterns. The harder the press, the more lit bulbs vs dim bulbs in the pattern-- but when I was driving behind one of these cars for the first time, not knowing what it was, I thought it was some crazy sort of hazard light. I couldn't tell what the flashing meant at all. There would have to be some sort of standardization or public service announcement or people just won't understand what the hell is wrong with the car in front of them in the -5% of cases where cars would have this system incorporated.
Their most powerful weapon can be dismissed as nothing but a fireworks show.
I, for one, welcome our claim as overlords over these asteroid-flinging insects.
studying the causes of the continuing decline of every ecosystem on earth
Perhaps you should do a little more research. The planet has more life today than it's had since we started recording vegetation density and biodiversity on a global scale using satellites instead of case-study surveys. The number of new species discovered every year vastly overwhelms the number of species that disappear. The change of ecosystems is not their decline. It's what ecosystems do. Animals appear and disappear with time, with or without human interference. You either need to accept that, or you can go ahead and tell me how many plastic 6-pack rings it took to kill the dinosaurs.
No worries,
2 hours gives CERN plenty of time to aim the LHC at the asteroid and obliterate it with a black hole.
I'm betting on Fidel Castro for the first peaceful transition in power in Cuba in 40 years.
Not if previous years give us any indication on what they're looking for in a candidate. They gave it to Al Gore for his battle with Global Warming. This year, I think it's going to Michael Phelps for his battle against humans-not-being-able-to-breathe-underwater.
I do firmly believe that the RIAA (and, by extension, the MPAA) are FAR from out of tricks. They didn't get to the positions they are by being stupid, just greedy.
Indeed. If I had tagging powers, I'd probably put up "goodluckwiththat" -- the artists don't own the radiowaves and the music video networks like the RIAA does. I've helped one or two one-hit-wonders make it out of their garages and into Billboard's top 40 through word-of-mouth and spamming "request-a-song" radio shows when they were signed with no-name independent labels, but for the most part, a new band's exposure begins with the 4 capital letters of "RIAA" -- though once they have a flowing fanbase, they can keep them updated on their own with a "We're releasing a new album!"
RIAA may no longer be the alpha and omega of the music business, but they definitely have a firm grip on the alpha. Spreading your song to 130 people on music networking sites is not exposure. Broadcasting to +80 million listeners is.
While they should give out degrees to people who like to hold unscientific beliefs in their spare time, they should not hold them out as shining examples of "someone doing it right".
I'm going to have to disagree and say anyone who DOESN'T hold to an unscientific belief in their spare time is not "doing it right."
For starters, it's their spare time. If they don't have a hobby outside of established scientific doctrines, they need to find one and learn to live. Being a reclusive, obsessive-compulsive shut-in isn't a "shining example" of what growing scientists should yearn to be.
Also, if they only gave out nobel prizes in physics to the guys who can recite what we already know and have proven, then the prize won't mean anything at all. It's the guys who have to take the random stabs in the dark and then attempt, throughout the years, to quantify that with testing until they have sufficient evidence to call it "good enough for a theory." Bandwagon jumpers and those who only place safe bets have no place among the remembered.
I claim this Ocean for Spain!
Yes. Truly amazing. The RIAA lawyer tells the judge that the University will destroy the data if the motion is not granted. Leaving out the fact that the University told him that the data has been preserved. And the Judge "presumes" that that was an "honest mistake"?
RIAA: If you don't grant the motion, they'll destroy all the data!
Judge: What makes you come to that conclusion?
RIAA: Because that's what we would do!
It seems to hearken back to the evolutionist hypothesis that the eye is an evolved version of a light-sensitive cell (like, for example, melanin) that became more specialized through time. Skin cells don't seem to react to light in the visible or infrared spectrums -- rather just ultraviolet. It's definitely sensitive to reflected ultraviolet light which means the sense is there, the information simply isn't transferred quickly or coherently enough to the brain to register it. There's no lens to define where the light is coming from when it's reflected to hit the skin, so it seems even if the brain were wired to pick up when skin is exposed to UV light, it would read nothing but static that could be coming from any direction, possibly filtered by calculating the parallax signal from other patches of skin cells. The sense, in this case, would be less like seeing and more like hearing ultraviolet light to know where which direction reflecting surfaces are, and the skin sensitivity would have to be amped to become so severe that a slap on the wrist would probably be mentally crippling and physically incapacitating.
I am not a vision-rocket guy, but the basic biology and basic physics of it all seem to add up with an adaptive-enough brain to mix it together -- but since it's not what happens to blind people naturally, when the physics and biology don't prompt the automatic switch to a lesser, but also feasible method of interpreting light, it's unlikely the human body can register the sense well enough for it to be survivably effective. Not impossible, though. Neither measurable success or ultimate failure would surprise me.
Crackberries in the hands of actual congresscritters is like a five year old having it. You get nothing but fantasy and gibberish with the occasional regurgitation of things they heard the grown ups say.
You mean like when any suit gets ahold of a blackberry?
Might I add that yes, I do know there's a difference between outright "Copy Protection" and "DRM" and that some labels use one while other labels use the other. To which I say: "Calling it 'copy protection' in most circumstances is confusing, as it should be 'obfuscation' instead -- if that's what the desired result is. Copy protection should only be applied for making direct copies, rather than preventing the translation or transfer from one format to the other." Topically, in the case of Real, that seems to be what the MPAA is on about.
IMO, The point they SHOULD be attacking is that Real is asking to make money off these translated copies (which they have no right to do), but Real can counter that by saying they are only charging for the translation fee, not for the actual copy of the media. MPAA says "that's not what you're advertising" Then the fencing can begin!
Of course it doesn't violate copyright law, it violates the DMCA which does not allow you to remove or circumvent the copy protection.
Pffft, DRM isn't copy protection! It's rights management -- which, through their intentional ambiguity of what the name could mean, inadvertently leaves me free to interpret it as more akin to digital shrinkwrap. Just another peel to get through before I can watch my movie. It's not illegal for me to remove the plastic wrap, warning stickers, label sticker, plastic latches, and tiny metal security sticker that sets off the alarms in the store sometimes even after I've paid for it. How could DRM be construed as anything but a digital representation of the last to Joe K. Mediabuyer? I submit, under the current terminology, it is not.
Q: What's funnier than running the world's largest particle collider while the janitor is inside, cleaning the pipes?
A: Nothing
Haven't we been over the sexist arguments to death by now
Because mentioning sexism, drm, or evolution automatically gets your article 800+ comments.
I can shoot down your entire point with a simple equation. I hope you can think long and hard about what this means: evolution != abiogenesis
evolution != mutation
evolution != adaptation
evolution != survival of the fittest
evolution != selective breeding
The theory is made up by the sum of its parts. If you want to try moving the target and saying "Evolutionists don't believe in abiogenesis" then I suggest you CONSULT with some evolutionists. Maybe you're comfortable with discarding the single greatest irreconcilable difference between evolutionism and intelligent design, but I'm not so sure your proported cohorts are.
Besides, this just goes back to what I said earlier: You ask 5 evolutionists how life began on the planet, and you'll get 2-3 answers. You didn't give your answer, but you do seem to claim it's different from the mainstream. If not, then we have nothing to discuss here.