What's worse... the fact they used the technology for a seemingly petty crime....... or the fact that despite using the technology, the guy got away anyhow.
So do the credit card companies have grounds to take legal action against Sony? This breach is going to cost the credit card companies millions of dollars as they have to deal with increased customer call volumes, fraud investigations and time and effort to issue new credit cards and numbers. I'm sure Sont can't just get away with saying 'Sorry' to them. I supposed Sony could 'settle' with the CC companies and just pay them out, but still... stuff like this has a ripple effect and doesn't just cost Sony money. Who can say how many companies are taking a financial hit because of this. Harmonix is certainly taking a hit because they can't sell any Rock Band tracks while this is going on.
...entertainment never existed before the advent of the music and motion picture industries. Music is not new. Theatre is not new. People have been doing it for thousands of years. Only in the last century have corporations gotten involved. To listen to your statement you would think that the music and movie industries invented entertainment. Real artists will continue their art with our without the RIAA or MPAA or copyrights. Why? Because it's their passion... not their paycheck.
I think the attitude of "if it's cheaper and faster, grab it and kick out the other guy" is eventually turn around and bite America in the ass. Fifty years ago you saw people spending their entire working lives with one company. They were loyal to that company, and knew that they were a major part of it and felt like a part of that family and wanted to do the best they could to support that family. Those days are long gone. In today's business world, it's "I want it all and I want it now now now." The human factor no longer enters into it. It's all about the bottom line. People are bought and sold and traded just like any other commodity. That means employees AND customers. As long as a company is bringing in the bucks, they could care less about the people involved in bringing in those bucks. As long as the golden eggs keep coming, who cares if the goose that is laying them is starving to death. One day the goose will die and they will be running around wondering what happened. People are any companies most precious resource. Without people, there is no company, no business, no economy. People do their best work in an environment where they feel like they are important, where they feel they are contributing and where they feel like part of the family. Otherwise, they are just collecting a pay check and who gives a damn if the company gets screwed as long as they get their money every pay period. The individual loses and the company loses. It's kind of a Catch 22 if you think about it. Companies don't want to invest a lot of time and money into employees because they think they will just jump ship the second a better offer comes along. Employees don't invest in a company because they know that they are a commodity and that all the company cares about is the bottom line. As long as this mentality remains, companies will use up and dispose of employees at an ever increasing rate, and they quality of work will get worse and worse because no one feels motivated to do their best when they know there is no guarentee that doing your best will get you anywhere.
Once companies learn to invest in their employees, feeding and pampering the goose, as it were, this kind of behavior and attitude will continue until it destroys the economy. You will eventually work in a company for 2 weeks, and then get axed for the next best, cheaper thing. People cannot live like that. Industry may be changing, but people's fundamental drives do not change that quickly. There will be a backlash. There will come a day of reckoning when people just will not take it anymore.
Companies have to start thinking about long term investments instead of making as much money as they can now and who cares if the well dries up in a year as long as I'm making big bucks NOW!
I want it all, and I want it NOW NOW NOW! Future? Who cares about the future? It's NOW that we all have to worry about.
The fact of the matter is this. The big record companies are soiling themselves because finally, there is something threatening their huge cash cow. They put a system in place to make oodles of cash with very little effort on their parts. Do you know why the artists aren't up in arms about it as much as the record labels? Because from a $15-$20 CD, the artist usually sees less than $0.50. Last time I checked the stats, the Rolling Stones made the most money per CD out any other artist out there. You want to know how much they make a CD? A whopping $1.07 a unit. Out of $15. That's less than %10. Major artists make the big money by touring. Conclusion? It truly is the record companies driving this whole anti-Napster thing, and the RIAA are just patsies for them. Trust me, the RIAA is probably raking in big bucks from the record industry. The record industry has gotten so greedy on making money so easily, it will fight like hell to keep someone from undermining their profits. If you ask me, if they want to survive, they need to think of new and unique ways of marketing their music. The old paradigm isn't going to stand up in this digital reality. My solution? Why doesn't every record company set up high speed servers that offer every song they own the rights to. There are alot of stuff that isn't available on Napster or other search engines because it's not popular enough. Heck, I have a hard time finding Bob Dylan's Highway 51. If they had every song ever recorded available for download for a fee, I think they could start making some big bucks. They could go into their archives and remaster some of the old stuff that you can only find on vinyl and offer that over the internet. They could set up a credit system, where you can buy 100 credits for $10.00, and use those credits to buy songs. The credit system seems like a good idea, people can trade credits, have contests to win more credits, hell.....have credit slot machines for goodness sake. The possibilities are limited only by the imagination. Why doesn't the record industry have an imagination?
I think taking legal action against Napster is like sueing gun companies for making the guns that were invovled in killing someone. The gun companies didn't fire the gun, the person who aqquired the weapon did. It was the individual's choice to pull the trigger. Same with smoking. They want to sue the tobacco companies for making people smoke. Now this is more of a grey area because smoking is addictive, BUT.....the individual had to at one point make the choice to start smoking in the first place. Napster has plenty of legal applications. Why sue Napster when it's the individuals out there that are making the CHOICE to distribute copy-righted materials. It's the individuals the record companies should be going after, not the organizations that provide the service. I mean what's next.....are they going to shut down the police services because some currupt cops make the choice to abuse their powers for illegal ends?
People make choices......they are the ones accountable. Quit trying to blame everyone else.
This must be a hoax, or someone making a futile attempt at a cash grab. If they had patented this thing, why is it they waited this long to gripe about it. I think it's a case of someone stretching their imagination a little beyond reality to make a quick buck.
I agree that this is a very good plan. But the problem I see with the end users is this. In my experience providing technical support on mostly PCs, a few Macs, I notice that alot of people don't recognize the bugs. A lot of them figure some of the screwy things an app will do are what it's SUPPOSED to do. Sure, they think it's dumb the fact it does that, but alot of them figure that just part of the program. A lot of people were genuinely shocked when I told them that the program was buggy and it's not SUPPOSED to do that. It's almost as if the idea of buggy software hadn't even occurred to them. And I think this will be a major barrier to the quick and efficient reporting of bugs. Alot of people will just work around it instead of reporting it.
I suppose this runs along the same viens as people not being able to program their VCR. They figure that they are what's wrong, not the VCR. I heard someplace that something is just as broken if you can't figure out how to use it as it would be if it came with a factory defect. People have to realize that they have a right to be able program their VCR without learning C! Ok....extreme example.....and I'm getting off topic too, so I'll shut up now.
Ok, it's not that I don't agree with the whole open source movement. In fact, I think it's pretty slick. BUT.....what are the chances I'm actually going to go in and support and rewrite the code in any of the programs I use? Slim to none. In fact, I can bet that 95+% of people can say the same thing. There are a lot of computer users out there that not only don't have the foggiest idea how to program to fix their own programs/drivers/etc, they don't care! As long as it works, that's all they care about. So in that environment, it wouldn't really matter if it's open source or not.
I can see that in the Linux community, open source is pretty much a neccessity because in most cases, there is no single organization behind and given program or driver. What this means is, if someone who had been writing a driver for an obscure brand of video card (for instance) upgraded his vid card, he would no longer have the need or desire to support the old driver. That's where open source comes in handy....someone else can pick it up and work on it.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is, even though a binary seems like a loss of freedom to you, to many MANY people it doesn't matter. Why? Because whether it's closed or open source, a majority of the people still don't understand it....so what does it matter as long as it works? I suppose if it really came down to it, those people not in the know can consult those that are in the know and get a third party to fix it.
But at last, I think in the big picture, most people would, whether they know anything about it or not, would prefer open source. Even though the majority doesn't know much if anything about it, the option is there for them to learn it and change their environment if they so choose. So I think open source is here to stay, and will continue to grow. Who knows, perhaps our children, or our children's children will live in a world where all software is open source. There will be a lot of opposition to it, I'm sure. There are a lot of people that stand to lose a lot of money if open source becomes wide spread. Greed is a powerful force. Perhaps one day we'll see a Shadowrun type of environment where people hack into corp computers to free code! Instead of releasing poor lab animals, they hack into corp computers and distribute the closed source code into the mainstream. An interesting concept, actually. Could that become reality? I guess only time will tell.
How do you know any of the things that were taught to you are true? You are just taking the word of somebody who took the word of someone else that took the word of someone else, etc. etc. How are we to know that any of this stuff is true and not fabricated by some oppressive force that seeks to keep us all in check by making us believe lies about the fundamental workings of the universe? How do we know! The sun might be shining, but maybe.....just MAYBE it's NIGHTTIME! OH GAAAWD!
If it is true that the majority of geeks can't get any, that means they cannot procreate. If they cannot procreate, eventually geeks will become extinct. Now I suppose there is an argument there saying that geeks didn't exist until recently and we had to come from someplace, but by not being able to procreate, is the world being robbed of a new class of supergeek? Or will mating rituals change to allow the progression of this gene pool?
Slashdot Mirror
What's worse ... the fact they used the technology for a seemingly petty crime .... ... or the fact that despite using the technology, the guy got away anyhow.
I wonder what they were REALLY looking for ....
Let me convert this to Canadian for you:
"-20C = freezing, -10C = jacket weather / layers, 0C = light long sleeves, 10C = short sleeves, 20C = Turn on the AC"
So do the credit card companies have grounds to take legal action against Sony? This breach is going to cost the credit card companies millions of dollars as they have to deal with increased customer call volumes, fraud investigations and time and effort to issue new credit cards and numbers. I'm sure Sont can't just get away with saying 'Sorry' to them. I supposed Sony could 'settle' with the CC companies and just pay them out, but still ... stuff like this has a ripple effect and doesn't just cost Sony money. Who can say how many companies are taking a financial hit because of this. Harmonix is certainly taking a hit because they can't sell any Rock Band tracks while this is going on.
...entertainment never existed before the advent of the music and motion picture industries. Music is not new. Theatre is not new. People have been doing it for thousands of years. Only in the last century have corporations gotten involved. To listen to your statement you would think that the music and movie industries invented entertainment. Real artists will continue their art with our without the RIAA or MPAA or copyrights. Why? Because it's their passion ... not their paycheck.
So if someone decided to purge all records of your existence, does that mean you will never have existed?
Everyone talks about the weather. No one ever actually does anything about it.
'nuff said
Thank goodness we have the internet to blow hot air so we are not adding to the environmental problems out there.
I think the attitude of "if it's cheaper and faster, grab it and kick out the other guy" is eventually turn around and bite America in the ass. Fifty years ago you saw people spending their entire working lives with one company. They were loyal to that company, and knew that they were a major part of it and felt like a part of that family and wanted to do the best they could to support that family. Those days are long gone. In today's business world, it's "I want it all and I want it now now now." The human factor no longer enters into it. It's all about the bottom line. People are bought and sold and traded just like any other commodity. That means employees AND customers. As long as a company is bringing in the bucks, they could care less about the people involved in bringing in those bucks. As long as the golden eggs keep coming, who cares if the goose that is laying them is starving to death. One day the goose will die and they will be running around wondering what happened. People are any companies most precious resource. Without people, there is no company, no business, no economy. People do their best work in an environment where they feel like they are important, where they feel they are contributing and where they feel like part of the family. Otherwise, they are just collecting a pay check and who gives a damn if the company gets screwed as long as they get their money every pay period. The individual loses and the company loses. It's kind of a Catch 22 if you think about it. Companies don't want to invest a lot of time and money into employees because they think they will just jump ship the second a better offer comes along. Employees don't invest in a company because they know that they are a commodity and that all the company cares about is the bottom line. As long as this mentality remains, companies will use up and dispose of employees at an ever increasing rate, and they quality of work will get worse and worse because no one feels motivated to do their best when they know there is no guarentee that doing your best will get you anywhere. Once companies learn to invest in their employees, feeding and pampering the goose, as it were, this kind of behavior and attitude will continue until it destroys the economy. You will eventually work in a company for 2 weeks, and then get axed for the next best, cheaper thing. People cannot live like that. Industry may be changing, but people's fundamental drives do not change that quickly. There will be a backlash. There will come a day of reckoning when people just will not take it anymore. Companies have to start thinking about long term investments instead of making as much money as they can now and who cares if the well dries up in a year as long as I'm making big bucks NOW! I want it all, and I want it NOW NOW NOW! Future? Who cares about the future? It's NOW that we all have to worry about.
The fact of the matter is this. The big record companies are soiling themselves because finally, there is something threatening their huge cash cow. They put a system in place to make oodles of cash with very little effort on their parts. Do you know why the artists aren't up in arms about it as much as the record labels? Because from a $15-$20 CD, the artist usually sees less than $0.50. Last time I checked the stats, the Rolling Stones made the most money per CD out any other artist out there. You want to know how much they make a CD? A whopping $1.07 a unit. Out of $15. That's less than %10. Major artists make the big money by touring. Conclusion? It truly is the record companies driving this whole anti-Napster thing, and the RIAA are just patsies for them. Trust me, the RIAA is probably raking in big bucks from the record industry. The record industry has gotten so greedy on making money so easily, it will fight like hell to keep someone from undermining their profits. If you ask me, if they want to survive, they need to think of new and unique ways of marketing their music. The old paradigm isn't going to stand up in this digital reality. My solution? Why doesn't every record company set up high speed servers that offer every song they own the rights to. There are alot of stuff that isn't available on Napster or other search engines because it's not popular enough. Heck, I have a hard time finding Bob Dylan's Highway 51. If they had every song ever recorded available for download for a fee, I think they could start making some big bucks. They could go into their archives and remaster some of the old stuff that you can only find on vinyl and offer that over the internet. They could set up a credit system, where you can buy 100 credits for $10.00, and use those credits to buy songs. The credit system seems like a good idea, people can trade credits, have contests to win more credits, hell.....have credit slot machines for goodness sake. The possibilities are limited only by the imagination. Why doesn't the record industry have an imagination?
I think taking legal action against Napster is like sueing gun companies for making the guns that were invovled in killing someone. The gun companies didn't fire the gun, the person who aqquired the weapon did. It was the individual's choice to pull the trigger. Same with smoking. They want to sue the tobacco companies for making people smoke. Now this is more of a grey area because smoking is addictive, BUT.....the individual had to at one point make the choice to start smoking in the first place. Napster has plenty of legal applications. Why sue Napster when it's the individuals out there that are making the CHOICE to distribute copy-righted materials. It's the individuals the record companies should be going after, not the organizations that provide the service. I mean what's next.....are they going to shut down the police services because some currupt cops make the choice to abuse their powers for illegal ends? People make choices......they are the ones accountable. Quit trying to blame everyone else.
This must be a hoax, or someone making a futile attempt at a cash grab. If they had patented this thing, why is it they waited this long to gripe about it. I think it's a case of someone stretching their imagination a little beyond reality to make a quick buck.
The easy solution to this is: Locker rooms. That's right, shower and change at work. A suit is a uniform just like anything else.
I agree that this is a very good plan. But the problem I see with the end users is this. In my experience providing technical support on mostly PCs, a few Macs, I notice that alot of people don't recognize the bugs. A lot of them figure some of the screwy things an app will do are what it's SUPPOSED to do. Sure, they think it's dumb the fact it does that, but alot of them figure that just part of the program. A lot of people were genuinely shocked when I told them that the program was buggy and it's not SUPPOSED to do that. It's almost as if the idea of buggy software hadn't even occurred to them. And I think this will be a major barrier to the quick and efficient reporting of bugs. Alot of people will just work around it instead of reporting it.
I suppose this runs along the same viens as people not being able to program their VCR. They figure that they are what's wrong, not the VCR. I heard someplace that something is just as broken if you can't figure out how to use it as it would be if it came with a factory defect. People have to realize that they have a right to be able program their VCR without learning C! Ok....extreme example.....and I'm getting off topic too, so I'll shut up now.
Ok, it's not that I don't agree with the whole open source movement. In fact, I think it's pretty slick. BUT.....what are the chances I'm actually going to go in and support and rewrite the code in any of the programs I use? Slim to none. In fact, I can bet that 95+% of people can say the same thing. There are a lot of computer users out there that not only don't have the foggiest idea how to program to fix their own programs/drivers/etc, they don't care! As long as it works, that's all they care about. So in that environment, it wouldn't really matter if it's open source or not.
I can see that in the Linux community, open source is pretty much a neccessity because in most cases, there is no single organization behind and given program or driver. What this means is, if someone who had been writing a driver for an obscure brand of video card (for instance) upgraded his vid card, he would no longer have the need or desire to support the old driver. That's where open source comes in handy....someone else can pick it up and work on it.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is, even though a binary seems like a loss of freedom to you, to many MANY people it doesn't matter. Why? Because whether it's closed or open source, a majority of the people still don't understand it....so what does it matter as long as it works? I suppose if it really came down to it, those people not in the know can consult those that are in the know and get a third party to fix it.
But at last, I think in the big picture, most people would, whether they know anything about it or not, would prefer open source. Even though the majority doesn't know much if anything about it, the option is there for them to learn it and change their environment if they so choose. So I think open source is here to stay, and will continue to grow. Who knows, perhaps our children, or our children's children will live in a world where all software is open source. There will be a lot of opposition to it, I'm sure. There are a lot of people that stand to lose a lot of money if open source becomes wide spread. Greed is a powerful force. Perhaps one day we'll see a Shadowrun type of environment where people hack into corp computers to free code! Instead of releasing poor lab animals, they hack into corp computers and distribute the closed source code into the mainstream. An interesting concept, actually. Could that become reality? I guess only time will tell.
How do you know any of the things that were taught to you are true? You are just taking the word of somebody who took the word of someone else that took the word of someone else, etc. etc. How are we to know that any of this stuff is true and not fabricated by some oppressive force that seeks to keep us all in check by making us believe lies about the fundamental workings of the universe? How do we know! The sun might be shining, but maybe.....just MAYBE it's NIGHTTIME! OH GAAAWD!
If it is true that the majority of geeks can't get any, that means they cannot procreate. If they cannot procreate, eventually geeks will become extinct. Now I suppose there is an argument there saying that geeks didn't exist until recently and we had to come from someplace, but by not being able to procreate, is the world being robbed of a new class of supergeek? Or will mating rituals change to allow the progression of this gene pool?