And, unlike the majority of the posts I've read so far, many many people actually do possess a shred of respect for the law, whether it's convenient to them or irritating. One of the hallmarks of sociopaths is they think they have an absolute right to pick and choose how they act in the world without regard for laws which annoy them or they think are silly or unfair.
That's a very dangerous point of view you have there. I have the unshakable belief that my government exists at my whim. If my government makes laws that I don't approve of, I will happily break them. I do it all the time. I also work where I can to change bad laws by communicating with my governmental representatives. That does not in any way make me a "sociopath." (It seems certain you don't know what sociopathy is.) This is, in point of fact, the long-established tradition of American behavior. If government starts acting in ways you don't approve of, and in addition starts to feel quite unrepresentative, our general solution is to stop following those laws.
I'm sure if Slashdot was around 40 years ago, you'd have been saying "coloreds" don't get it. All this "front of the bus" lawbreaking is positively sociopathic.
This is not insightful. This is evil, and demonstrably so. You are driving inefficiencies into the market, which ends up raising prices for everything for no reason. Everybody ends up with less. I shall endeavor to explain:
The function of the economy (pick a model, any model) is to distribute goods as efficiently as possible. Now suppose the natural equilibrium price for a good is 100 zorkmids, and you artificially constrict the market so that you can charge 300 zorkmids for it. What this does is cause 200 zorkmids worth of inefficiency in the marketplace. That 200 zorkmids more or less disappears. Instead of spending that 200 zorkmids on other things, the customer, well, can't. He no longer improves his house. He no longer buys new clothes.
So of course your answer is "Aha! But those zorkmids don't disappear! I have them in my pocket!" Quite. But because your customer buys fewer goods due to your unscrupulous overcharging, all those vendors have fewer zorkmids, and they buy fewer goods. And so it propagates across the entire economy, all the way back to you. Everyone ends up with less. This gets substantially worse when a lot of vendors start artificially constricting supply chains in order to (as they think) make more money. We all end up with much less then.
Conclusion: knock it off, you creep. You're hurting everyone.
I'm foregoing modding you (it would have been +1 Insightful) in order to reply.
I used to be a Mandrake "subscriber." I paid my yearly dollars, because Mandrake was really the best distro out there that I had tried. Even when Fedora came around, I gave that a whirl and it wasn't up to the Mandrake level in my opinion.
It is true that Mandrake pioneered most of the user-friendliness that Ubuntu now capitalizes upon. However, in my time with Mandrake there was always something that didn't work right. It changed from release to release, but it was always something. Like they had 98% of everything nailed down, but that one thing just bugged me to death, because it would be something like, oh, printing. I frequently built custom kernels under Mandrake in order to get things to work, and even then there were often a few things that were broken beyond my ability to repair. Now when Ubuntu came around, I installed on a test machine (I do this often with new releases of distros I'm not using just to see how they fare). I was so happy -- there was nothing that didn't work, straight out of the box. No fiddling, no custom kernels. They had closed that last 2% of functionality. It was almost zero configuration for printing and wireless networking, two things that historically have been a problem.
So yes, Mandrake was (and is) a leader in making an easy-to-use desktop distribution. But Ubuntu blew the doors off with its "it just works" quality. That's why people love it, and that's why it's on all my desktops to this day.
So there is no place for selling digital content to consumers anymore.
Almost. There is one final bit of value that people will be willing to pay for: finding what you want. Most people won't want to spend hours sifting through all the rubbish to find the one MP3 copy that doesn't sound like crud. Most people won't want to go through the work of discovering unknown musicians. They'll pay for someone else to filter the content and recommend certain musicians and certain digital recordings as being superior.
What the equilibrium price is for this service, I don't know. I suspect it is lower than the current price, in general, but potentially much higher for especially good "editors" whose for-you tailored recommendations are outstanding. As far as I can see, this is the only remaining way anyone can hope to charge money for digital copies of music.
These companies who profit wholly on the efforts of gift-economy programmers want to make deals that shaft those very same people. Either participate in the gift economy or don't. We don't care. But please don't try to poison our gift economy.
I have no taste for these sorts of games, I'd be happier if they got released and failed. But Sony and Nintendo are shielding themselves from lawsuits from BAD PARENTS, who will try to sue them when they buy Little Johnny "Evisceration 4"
I totally agree with this, and is what I was really aiming at. Nintendo and Sony are not the government. They don't even have anything close to a monopoly on the console market. What we're seeing is the marketplace refusing to carry the product. Tough luck, Rockstar.
This story is already tagged "censorship." It's filed under Your Rights Online. There are already a bunch of posts about how adults should be able to decide for themselves what they want to play, so Nintendo and Sony have no right to refuse to carry it.
To all this I say Give Me an F'ing Break. I suppose by this logic movie theatres should run gruesome scat-fetish porn because, hey, otherwise they're denying you your right to see what you want! Please. How about this: maybe Rockstar should try making a game that isn't so horrifyingly gory, brutal, and cruel that it can't be justified for sale into a market heavily populated by 15-year-olds? I mean, really, there are a lot of games that get the M rating that have gibs and spurting blood all over the place. You have go out of your way to make something exceptionally vicious and sadistic in order to get an AO.
Now, should people be allowed to make gruesome scat-porn if they want? Well, I guess so. Should people be allowed to make video games that are outrageously brutal? Sure, why not. But by the same turn, Rockstar has no right to expect that the marketplace will greet them with open arms. They made the decision to go for console licensing, and then they intentionally put content into the game that they knew would be too offensive to be widely released. That's their fault.
There's no censorship or foul play of any kind here. Just Rockstar making dumb decisions.
Um...yes? We have seen evolution in action quite a lot. There has been more than sufficient experimentation with drosophila melanogaster (a.k.a. fruit flies) to conclusively demonstrate that evolution by natural selection is a fact.
We've been through this before, but why would the user benefit from multiple graphics formats when they are essentially equivalent? The user does not interact with the image data on the disk. He interacts with a computer program.
Actually, the problem is worse. A patent troll can submit hundreds of software patents and have no implementation or even a plan for implementation for any of them. It wouldn't be so bad if you actually had to bring a product to market in order for your patents to be defensible.
According to Alexa, the top three websites in the world are, in order, 1) Yahoo, 2) msn and 3) Google.
I thought it was well understood that MSN isn't being "visited" with intentional clicks. It just happens to be the default home page of 100 million people who don't know they can change it. If someone wrote a virus that changed everyone's IE home page to something other than MSN, it would fall out of the top 10 easily, and maybe off the charts altogether. I have never seen anyone try to go to MSN for any reason, or even heard of anyone wanting to.
Google sure seems to be the search engine of choice among geeks, but what about Joe Random and Suzie Sixpack?
Ah, yes, Suzie Sixpack. I dated her in college, when she was known as Suzie Kegger. In any case, the point is that although many people will use whatever search box pops up on their screen (see point above; this is why MSN gets any search volume at all), Google has a shocking amount of mindshare among the general public. I am surprised frequently by people I perceive to be non-technical talking about "Googling" things.
The Internet is basically fair, because when it was designed no one knew how insanely profitable and important it would be. At the time, no one cared about the net except the people who designed it, so they could do it honestly.
I would go one better than that and say that the reason the Internet became widely adopted was because it was made in this fair, open way. Back in 2001, I was talking with a co-worker who was a keen capitalist. He was saying that the inventors of the Internet were a bunch of idiots, because they failed to design into the system a way for them to profit, e.g., server licenses, client licenses, patents, closed protocols -- all of the "benefits" of how Microsoft server stuff works, but built into the foundation of the Internet. I tried to convince him that the reason the Internet became widely adopted was because it was unencumbered by all these things, but he wouldn't hear any of it.
So now they're talking about doing exactly what this co-worker was talking about, only in addition to a bunch of greedy CEOs they will add a bunch of paranoid DHS chiefs. What a recipe! Soon we can pay three times as much for one-tenth as much service, and have "guaranteed safety" because all bits are monitored and all new technologies are strictly forbidden. It will be a glorious new age.
Somehow I think they'll have trouble convincing people to switch.
I don't think know if nethack qualifies as an RPG, does it? I don't think Diablo does either, because Diablo is essentially graphical nethack (well, maybe not nethack, but rogue-alike anyway). Rogue and all its descendants are...something else.
That is a beautiful thought, but it is extremely unlikely to happen. The labels have already been widely accused and convicted of behavior that should have resulted in an injunction against their copyrights (e.g., collusion to fix prices). I doubt anything will come of it now, just as nothing came of it then.
The 'shy' bit, in my opinion, covers a multitude of feelings regarding having your online identity too-precisely connected to your meatspace identity. PJ doesn't have to be socially reluctant in order to not want everyone reading her web site to know real-life details about her, but if she is shy then that just makes these feelings more acute. For example, I am not shy, but I did once have a web site that became very popular for a time. It didn't feature a message board, per se, but I received massive amounts of email from readers, some of which I posted back to the site, etc. So there was a pretty large 'community,' and a certain fraction of that community wanted to know personal details about me. I always deflected these requests. As far as I am aware, none of the several hundred people trying to figure out who I was or what I was like in real life were successful.
Did I have a reason for keeping things 'secret' like that? Maybe not, but there is something unsettling about that kind of scrutiny, something you feel like you want to avoid. I don't blame PJ at all for keeping her real-life details mysterious. It makes a lot of sense to me.
I haven't used Vista at all yet, but for the sake of argument I will assume that this review is a good indication of Vista's quality: a bit less good than XP. Now I have used XP, extensively, and I have used Linux extensively, and in my judgment the quality of a distribution like Fedora or Ubuntu is about on par with the quality of XP. You get roughly the same number of annoyances, the same amount of flaky behavior, and the same number of breakages, some of which you can fix and some of which you can't.
With Vista, apparently I need to knock it down 10% or so from XP in terms of its quality. Plus (and this is a big one) it actively works against the user with intentional breakages. DVD burning tools that produce discs only readable on Vista? Come again? IE7 objects to downloads from Sourceforge? Nice. So I'll take off another 10% for these shenanigans. That means Vista is about 80% as good as Ubuntu.
Where did the billions of dollars and years of development go? Why can't Redmond put out an OS that is at least as good as the freebie alternative? They should be selling an OS that is dramatically better than anything else available. Why aren't they?
Spot on. The reason for downloading songs off P2P networks is (a) the lack of a viable alternative in the marketplace and (b) the inability to find certain tracks. The second one is still a problem, but the first is really getting there with this new move. What incentive do I have to upload one of these songs onto the filesharing networks? I've got mine, and you can get yours too, for a measly $1.29. I can understand if the track you want isn't available. For the ones that are available, you're really just being a cheap prick if you fileshare it at this point.
What if you have three HDs, where HD #1 is your main drive, HD #2 is a decoy with, say, some old photos on it, and HD #3 is the P2P drive. (I run Linux, so keep up here.) You don't have anything listed in/etc/fstab about the partitions on the P2P drive, you mount that manually when you want to do some filesharing. It includes all the applications and data, so that nothing about filesharing appears on HD #1.
Now if you are asked to provide your HD, you make an image of HD #1. No evidence of filesharing there, assuming they figure out what ext3 is. That might be the end of it. But wait, they bring in an expert who actually understands the filesystem and says whoah! the logs say you were mounting some other partitions that don't appear in fstab. Oh, that's right, I sometimes mount HD #2 to fetch old pictures off it, here's an image of that.
It seems to me you'd really have to have your forensics hat on tight to figure out there was actually a third HD in the mix. Even if you did figure it out, think about how the legal proceedings would have gone: (1) We demand to see your HD, judge okays it, no evidence. (2) We "cracked" your scheme and demand to see HD #2, judge reluctantly okays it, no evidence. (3) This time we really cracked it and demand HD #3, judge says this is getting stupid, go screw yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a very dangerous point of view you have there. I have the unshakable belief that my government exists at my whim. If my government makes laws that I don't approve of, I will happily break them. I do it all the time. I also work where I can to change bad laws by communicating with my governmental representatives. That does not in any way make me a "sociopath." (It seems certain you don't know what sociopathy is.) This is, in point of fact, the long-established tradition of American behavior. If government starts acting in ways you don't approve of, and in addition starts to feel quite unrepresentative, our general solution is to stop following those laws.
I'm sure if Slashdot was around 40 years ago, you'd have been saying "coloreds" don't get it. All this "front of the bus" lawbreaking is positively sociopathic.
My head asplode.
This is not insightful. This is evil, and demonstrably so. You are driving inefficiencies into the market, which ends up raising prices for everything for no reason. Everybody ends up with less. I shall endeavor to explain:
The function of the economy (pick a model, any model) is to distribute goods as efficiently as possible. Now suppose the natural equilibrium price for a good is 100 zorkmids, and you artificially constrict the market so that you can charge 300 zorkmids for it. What this does is cause 200 zorkmids worth of inefficiency in the marketplace. That 200 zorkmids more or less disappears. Instead of spending that 200 zorkmids on other things, the customer, well, can't. He no longer improves his house. He no longer buys new clothes.
So of course your answer is "Aha! But those zorkmids don't disappear! I have them in my pocket!" Quite. But because your customer buys fewer goods due to your unscrupulous overcharging, all those vendors have fewer zorkmids, and they buy fewer goods. And so it propagates across the entire economy, all the way back to you. Everyone ends up with less. This gets substantially worse when a lot of vendors start artificially constricting supply chains in order to (as they think) make more money. We all end up with much less then.
Conclusion: knock it off, you creep. You're hurting everyone.
I'm foregoing modding you (it would have been +1 Insightful) in order to reply.
I used to be a Mandrake "subscriber." I paid my yearly dollars, because Mandrake was really the best distro out there that I had tried. Even when Fedora came around, I gave that a whirl and it wasn't up to the Mandrake level in my opinion.
It is true that Mandrake pioneered most of the user-friendliness that Ubuntu now capitalizes upon. However, in my time with Mandrake there was always something that didn't work right. It changed from release to release, but it was always something. Like they had 98% of everything nailed down, but that one thing just bugged me to death, because it would be something like, oh, printing. I frequently built custom kernels under Mandrake in order to get things to work, and even then there were often a few things that were broken beyond my ability to repair. Now when Ubuntu came around, I installed on a test machine (I do this often with new releases of distros I'm not using just to see how they fare). I was so happy -- there was nothing that didn't work, straight out of the box. No fiddling, no custom kernels. They had closed that last 2% of functionality. It was almost zero configuration for printing and wireless networking, two things that historically have been a problem.
So yes, Mandrake was (and is) a leader in making an easy-to-use desktop distribution. But Ubuntu blew the doors off with its "it just works" quality. That's why people love it, and that's why it's on all my desktops to this day.
Almost. There is one final bit of value that people will be willing to pay for: finding what you want. Most people won't want to spend hours sifting through all the rubbish to find the one MP3 copy that doesn't sound like crud. Most people won't want to go through the work of discovering unknown musicians. They'll pay for someone else to filter the content and recommend certain musicians and certain digital recordings as being superior.
What the equilibrium price is for this service, I don't know. I suspect it is lower than the current price, in general, but potentially much higher for especially good "editors" whose for-you tailored recommendations are outstanding. As far as I can see, this is the only remaining way anyone can hope to charge money for digital copies of music.
So very well put.
These companies who profit wholly on the efforts of gift-economy programmers want to make deals that shaft those very same people. Either participate in the gift economy or don't. We don't care. But please don't try to poison our gift economy.
I totally agree with this, and is what I was really aiming at. Nintendo and Sony are not the government. They don't even have anything close to a monopoly on the console market. What we're seeing is the marketplace refusing to carry the product. Tough luck, Rockstar.
This story is already tagged "censorship." It's filed under Your Rights Online. There are already a bunch of posts about how adults should be able to decide for themselves what they want to play, so Nintendo and Sony have no right to refuse to carry it.
To all this I say Give Me an F'ing Break. I suppose by this logic movie theatres should run gruesome scat-fetish porn because, hey, otherwise they're denying you your right to see what you want! Please. How about this: maybe Rockstar should try making a game that isn't so horrifyingly gory, brutal, and cruel that it can't be justified for sale into a market heavily populated by 15-year-olds? I mean, really, there are a lot of games that get the M rating that have gibs and spurting blood all over the place. You have go out of your way to make something exceptionally vicious and sadistic in order to get an AO.
Now, should people be allowed to make gruesome scat-porn if they want? Well, I guess so. Should people be allowed to make video games that are outrageously brutal? Sure, why not. But by the same turn, Rockstar has no right to expect that the marketplace will greet them with open arms. They made the decision to go for console licensing, and then they intentionally put content into the game that they knew would be too offensive to be widely released. That's their fault.
There's no censorship or foul play of any kind here. Just Rockstar making dumb decisions.
It gets much worse when he shows up and there are candles lit and Barry White on the stereo.
Um...yes? We have seen evolution in action quite a lot. There has been more than sufficient experimentation with drosophila melanogaster (a.k.a. fruit flies) to conclusively demonstrate that evolution by natural selection is a fact.
1999 called. They want their Linux criticisms back.
We've been through this before, but why would the user benefit from multiple graphics formats when they are essentially equivalent? The user does not interact with the image data on the disk. He interacts with a computer program.
Actually, the problem is worse. A patent troll can submit hundreds of software patents and have no implementation or even a plan for implementation for any of them. It wouldn't be so bad if you actually had to bring a product to market in order for your patents to be defensible.
So...thank God for PJ is what you're saying?
Flesh-based laptops, woohoo!
Oh...darn.
I thought it was well understood that MSN isn't being "visited" with intentional clicks. It just happens to be the default home page of 100 million people who don't know they can change it. If someone wrote a virus that changed everyone's IE home page to something other than MSN, it would fall out of the top 10 easily, and maybe off the charts altogether. I have never seen anyone try to go to MSN for any reason, or even heard of anyone wanting to.
Ah, yes, Suzie Sixpack. I dated her in college, when she was known as Suzie Kegger. In any case, the point is that although many people will use whatever search box pops up on their screen (see point above; this is why MSN gets any search volume at all), Google has a shocking amount of mindshare among the general public. I am surprised frequently by people I perceive to be non-technical talking about "Googling" things.
I would go one better than that and say that the reason the Internet became widely adopted was because it was made in this fair, open way. Back in 2001, I was talking with a co-worker who was a keen capitalist. He was saying that the inventors of the Internet were a bunch of idiots, because they failed to design into the system a way for them to profit, e.g., server licenses, client licenses, patents, closed protocols -- all of the "benefits" of how Microsoft server stuff works, but built into the foundation of the Internet. I tried to convince him that the reason the Internet became widely adopted was because it was unencumbered by all these things, but he wouldn't hear any of it.
So now they're talking about doing exactly what this co-worker was talking about, only in addition to a bunch of greedy CEOs they will add a bunch of paranoid DHS chiefs. What a recipe! Soon we can pay three times as much for one-tenth as much service, and have "guaranteed safety" because all bits are monitored and all new technologies are strictly forbidden. It will be a glorious new age.
Somehow I think they'll have trouble convincing people to switch.
I don't think know if nethack qualifies as an RPG, does it? I don't think Diablo does either, because Diablo is essentially graphical nethack (well, maybe not nethack, but rogue-alike anyway). Rogue and all its descendants are...something else.
On second thought, forget the Prius.
But...but...it's a shortage. Of the Wii. Must...make...joke...
That is a beautiful thought, but it is extremely unlikely to happen. The labels have already been widely accused and convicted of behavior that should have resulted in an injunction against their copyrights (e.g., collusion to fix prices). I doubt anything will come of it now, just as nothing came of it then.
The 'shy' bit, in my opinion, covers a multitude of feelings regarding having your online identity too-precisely connected to your meatspace identity. PJ doesn't have to be socially reluctant in order to not want everyone reading her web site to know real-life details about her, but if she is shy then that just makes these feelings more acute. For example, I am not shy, but I did once have a web site that became very popular for a time. It didn't feature a message board, per se, but I received massive amounts of email from readers, some of which I posted back to the site, etc. So there was a pretty large 'community,' and a certain fraction of that community wanted to know personal details about me. I always deflected these requests. As far as I am aware, none of the several hundred people trying to figure out who I was or what I was like in real life were successful.
Did I have a reason for keeping things 'secret' like that? Maybe not, but there is something unsettling about that kind of scrutiny, something you feel like you want to avoid. I don't blame PJ at all for keeping her real-life details mysterious. It makes a lot of sense to me.
I haven't used Vista at all yet, but for the sake of argument I will assume that this review is a good indication of Vista's quality: a bit less good than XP. Now I have used XP, extensively, and I have used Linux extensively, and in my judgment the quality of a distribution like Fedora or Ubuntu is about on par with the quality of XP. You get roughly the same number of annoyances, the same amount of flaky behavior, and the same number of breakages, some of which you can fix and some of which you can't.
With Vista, apparently I need to knock it down 10% or so from XP in terms of its quality. Plus (and this is a big one) it actively works against the user with intentional breakages. DVD burning tools that produce discs only readable on Vista? Come again? IE7 objects to downloads from Sourceforge? Nice. So I'll take off another 10% for these shenanigans. That means Vista is about 80% as good as Ubuntu.
Where did the billions of dollars and years of development go? Why can't Redmond put out an OS that is at least as good as the freebie alternative? They should be selling an OS that is dramatically better than anything else available. Why aren't they?
Spot on. The reason for downloading songs off P2P networks is (a) the lack of a viable alternative in the marketplace and (b) the inability to find certain tracks. The second one is still a problem, but the first is really getting there with this new move. What incentive do I have to upload one of these songs onto the filesharing networks? I've got mine, and you can get yours too, for a measly $1.29. I can understand if the track you want isn't available. For the ones that are available, you're really just being a cheap prick if you fileshare it at this point.
iTunes does not run under Wine. I believe it barely functions under Crossover. You're pretty much out of luck (as am I).
What if you have three HDs, where HD #1 is your main drive, HD #2 is a decoy with, say, some old photos on it, and HD #3 is the P2P drive. (I run Linux, so keep up here.) You don't have anything listed in /etc/fstab about the partitions on the P2P drive, you mount that manually when you want to do some filesharing. It includes all the applications and data, so that nothing about filesharing appears on HD #1.
Now if you are asked to provide your HD, you make an image of HD #1. No evidence of filesharing there, assuming they figure out what ext3 is. That might be the end of it. But wait, they bring in an expert who actually understands the filesystem and says whoah! the logs say you were mounting some other partitions that don't appear in fstab. Oh, that's right, I sometimes mount HD #2 to fetch old pictures off it, here's an image of that.
It seems to me you'd really have to have your forensics hat on tight to figure out there was actually a third HD in the mix. Even if you did figure it out, think about how the legal proceedings would have gone: (1) We demand to see your HD, judge okays it, no evidence. (2) We "cracked" your scheme and demand to see HD #2, judge reluctantly okays it, no evidence. (3) This time we really cracked it and demand HD #3, judge says this is getting stupid, go screw yourself.