That article wasn't very informative or insightful. I'd give it a 2 if it were a comment on/., and that's only on the strength of mentioning the 40,000 hour plasma lifespan vs. 60,000 for LCD.
What I'd really want to know is, specifically, what's the verdict with respect to plasma burn-in? Sony says it's problematic. (And if that's true, why were they selling plasma screens for so long?) Panasonic says, "You get what you pay for." Is that supposed to mean burn-in's not a problem on high-end sets?
With respect to LCDs, okay, so ghosting's less of a problem. Can we be more specific? Just how much has the response time improved? And what about contrast ratio? Viewing angle? Sunlight? Jaggies?
Regarding both formats, what happens at end-of-life? Do they just get dimmer and dimmer? Is there some kind of hard failure in the mechanism that renders the set completely inoperable after a certain amount of time? (E.g.I had a desktop LCD monitor which started to balk at coming out of powersaver mode, until one day, it just refused to come back on at all.) Are product lifespans going up, and to what extent? Either lifespan is fairly impressive, we're talking about 4.5 to 7 years of continuous round the clock usage, and probably twice that given typical usage patterns.
And other than a brief mention in the sidebar, there's nothing about future display technologies that might eclipse both plasma and LCD.
Point being, this article might be helpful to a lay person who reads the Star, but it isn't really suited for a tech audience. Why is it on Slashdot?
for people who link to their own poorly written blog without stating such in the summary??
Anyway, FWIW, CNET wrote a real review of the Writely Beta a couple of months ago. Writely seems to be missing something very important, unless I didn't notice it in my perusal of the article. It's all very well and good that access to the documents is password protected. But what they also need is for the documents to be optionally autosaved in a strongly encrypted format, so that even if someone gets access to your online folder, they can't (easily) read what's there.
Google seems to think they are miraculously immune to privacy snafus. I know the company is run by some very smart guys, but everybody makes mistakes. This is not an area to which they should be giving short shrift.
I think that most people who are happy to freely duplicate copyrighted works have never been in the position of selling anything of their own.
Most people... have never been in a position of selling anything of their own, period, so what you're saying is correct in a trivial sense. In any significant sense, I think it is not the case. Most of the people I know who are musical artists have plenty of bootlegged tapes and CDs in their posession. Certainly they don't have any problem making photocopies of copyrighted materials.
When a jury judges the law as unjust or unconstitutional, there can be no violation of the law.
In New Hampshire, the jury is the judge of the facts, not of the law. So the jury isn't authorized to decide whether a law is unjust or not, it is told to apply the law as instructed by the presiding judge. And even if a jury out of conscience refused to apply a law in a particular case ("nullification"), it wouldn't set a precedent, i.e. it wouldn't be binding in future cases.
If it wasn't for Jobs...we'd all be renting our music by now.
That's total Apple fanboy BS. Most music players contain mostly CD rips, not iTMS purchases. People have always been able to buy music without purchasing tracks online, they continue to do so, and as you acknowledge they can still download music without purchasing it at all. It's the omnipresent fear of the latter that ultimately keeps the record companies in check, not Jobs's balls. I've got nothing against Jobs for being a savvy businessman, but DRM just stinks.
And his novels SUCK....and how DARE he blaspheme the Church of Jobs.
By shooting themselves in the foot with this stupid format competition, the studios have ensured that even the most brainless, gullible consumers won't be rushing out to buy either of these horrible DRM-laden formats. Hopefully they will continue to sabotage their own efforts to destroy fair use until some other format arises which is not so unmitigatedly evil.
No one will ever convince me that completely destroying the "signal to noise" ratio of a particular creative field is somehow a good thing. Why on earth is it "better" to have this gigantic, suffocating mass of mediocrity?
I see where you're coming from, but my feeling is that what's noise to me might be signal to others, and vice-versa. Beethoven took some of his great symphonic themes from "mediocre" musical ditties of his day. Cubism arose in part because European artists gained exposure to "mediocre" African art and took it in unforseen directions. Warhol made art from tin can logos. The important thing is being able to connect and have access to the ideas. From there, what you do with them is limited more by your own inner creative mojo than by overexposure to crap.
Insofar as noise is a problem on the internet, I find that it is due to advertising, not the fault of independent creative works, no matter how banal they may be. Of course YMMV, and I respect that.
(Now you've got me wondering if even advertising is unmitigated noise. Perhaps penis enlargement ads will one day be viewed as primitive art by some future civilization. My only consolation is that I'll be long dead by then.)
Making it easy for idiots to make their own won't improve things.
Your comment was going well until that point. The Blade Engine is akin to blogging software for visual storytellers. Simplifying the process of creating AVGs will give an opportunity for people with good storytelling but poor programming skills to create interesting works. Sure, there will be a huge amount of crap, just like with blogs, but overall more is better. That's the whole raison d'etre of the internet.
Elitists are free to ignore self-published graphic novels, just as I'm sure there are plenty of people who read only "established" news sources on the web and don't bother with blogs of any kind, or in the real world plenty of people would never be caught dead reading a "zine,"which themselves multiplied after the advent of cheap photocopying and (later) DTP software.
This much should be blindingly obvious. However, for the benefit of the people on the 8-bit bus:
1) This is a trial balloon. If it sells well, it may convince some retailers to experiment with further DRM free tracks. If it sells poorly, it will serve as "proof" that DRM is needed.
2) There's at least somebody on the command chain who wants this to fail. Hence the $1.99 price.
3) The record company couldn't stomach the idea of a totally naked mp3 so they came up with this lame idea of embedding the purchaser's name in the file. If course this is easily worked around, but so's regular DRM. This is to deter the teeming masses. If John Q. Moron decides to fileshare, he'll soon be indicted by a thousand copies of "Jessica Loves John Q. Moron" floating around. You might add that they were being slightly clever by selling this crude copy protection measure as a value added feature.
I'd also speculate that might be meant to caution Microsoft ever so lightly. MS is openly scheming against its current music partners by introducing Urge and Zune. But it wants to keep them hooked on Plays For Sure while making sure their services are inferior to its own offerings. This is Yahoo's way of saying, "Look Microsoft, we might not need your crap DRM after all, so watch yourself."
Oh, now it's the politicians' fault MS is breaking the law.
Let's say you are an MS shareholder. A company you hold stock in breaks the law, but, unconcerned, you keep your shares. After years of open non-compliance they finally get fined, a decision which was seen coming from a mi- um, kilometre away. Yet you still don't see how you have any choice or responsibility for your losses? GMAFB.
1) Consumers can choose not to buy MS products. 2) Businesses can choose not to use them. 3) Powerful shareholders can influence the board to do the right thing 4) Powerless shareholders can divest their MS stock for a company that doesn't flaut the law.
And to top it off, MS stock hasn't been doing well anyway for the past few years. Probably because major funds have already discounted the value of the long-anticipated decision in their calculations.
It's probably not going to happen with EVE Online, but it will happen one day. Actually, it's already happened (in a sense) with Texas Hold-Em. One of its primary attractions is that, often, anyone from anywhere can join the tournament. If you join, you might not get far, But even so, if not you, then people you know or have interacted with will be playing at world-class levels. The illusion that only a bit of luck and practice separates you from the upper echelons is a large part of what keeps the fish biting in a competitive poker.
Further, there's a whole untapped market of people with asthma, with skeletal defects, with good fine-motor skills but poor gross-motor coordination who are excluded from participating in traditional sports at competitive levels. Logic will cause them to gravitate to these third millennium sporting activities.
Perhaps you've saved $20,000 but you also have to consider that most if you are the sort of person who is investing in the stock market, you're probably already saving a minimum of $100/wk. Which means, your loss of $20,000 is the difference between having $2million and having $2,020,000. Doesn't really seem to matter so much from that perspective. Or rather, the sort of person who would be terribly bothered by having one percent less net worth is also what most people would characterize as a miser. Someone who simply takes enjoyment at hording money and who wouldn't play the lottery to begin with.
Side point, from my own observation, it seems that older people are much more likely to play the lottery and for larger sums, than young people. Which could mean either that they've already saved all they need for the rest of their lives and a bit of gambling won't hurt them, or that they haven't accumulated any sort of wealth, and knowing they don't have 40 years to start from scratch, they've rationally concluded that their only remaining chance of getting rich is by playing the lottery.
Further anecdotal observation has convinced me that many people in wealthy countries are poor, not because they "waste" their money on innocent diversions like the lottery, but because they are bad at managing any sum of money whatsoever. Perhaps you've got starving relatives back home, or brothers who need to be bailed out of jail, or child support payments, drinking habits, plus an overly generous nature, and so it's basically impossible for you to save any amount of money. If you accumulate a thousand or two, you're bound by tradition and honor to "lend" it to the first sick aunt or evicted cousin who comes along. In that environment, it's pointless to try to save -- someone else in your extended family will wind up vacuuming out your savings account. Investing in the "lottery" seems a more realistic option than the fruitless attempt to save through discipline.
I think you're underestimating the amount of young people who come online, or who read gaming magazines, or who have friends who do either of the above.
Not at all. Only one person has the book at one time. Not so with bittorrenting.
You're giving a kneejerk strawman reply to a point not in contention. No-one said that used books were similar to duping data. My criticism was a reply to the specific principle that making money off of others' copyrighted material without their permission is bad.
If you want to give a different reason why you think TPB is bad --that it facilitates unlimited reproduction of copyrighted material -- well, whatever, but leave me out of that one.
As to 24 and such TV shows, there are more and more people stealing these shows daily. Those people are unlikely to watch it first run.
What's your basis for that evaluation? I could just as easily see the opposite taking place. Here's a hypothetical, made-up situation. A friend of mine keeps crowing about what a great show Veronica Mars is. But I always forget to come home in time to watch it. So one day I say, WTH, let me download it. Hey, turns out the show is pretty good. Next time, I want to see it first-run, so I make sure to stay home on Tuesday night. Had I not been able to check it out through, BT, I would never have watched it to begin with.
As to whether the companies could be smarter, that's not for you to decide. Why not walk into the GM headquarters and explain "you're not selling your stuff in the right way, I'm gonna start stealing cars off your assembly lines and selling them the ways I see fit".
GM's actually a good example of how slow-witted corporations can lose out by not listening to their customers. Thanks for pointing that out.;) Anyway, regardless of whether you or MPAA or Viacom or whomever personally approves of TPB, it is the case that filesharing is taking place. And will continue to take place, regardless of whether or not TPB stays up. Regardless of what is up to me to decide. So they can either react to reality, and thrive, as has Apple, e.g., or they can keep their heads in the sand and suffer, as the record labels did before iTunes.
If you don't think the company is doing a good job, then don't patronize them. But don't steal their stuff either. Just like you would with an object you cannot copy, like a car.
If you've never Xeroxed a page out of a book, or recorded a song off the radio, then you're not a hypocrite. "Oh, but that's legal. That's fair use." Perhaps it is, now. But over the objection of copyright holders. So, no, I don't buy into your idea that the MPAA and its cohorts get to solely decide what's permissible and what's impermissible, what's legal and what's illegal with respect to so-called IP. Particularly in countries, like Sweden, where BT sites are legal.
1) TPB sucks, because they're just leechers making money off of other people's copyrighted work, all the while disengenuously crowing about "freedom".
I suppose Used Booksellers are leeches in your eyes as well. Should we shut them down too?
incredibly expensive shows like 24 and Lost WON'T EXIST if they can't make money.
How does filesharing substantially hurt 24 and Lost? The shows have already aired and made their money by the time they get onto filesharing sites.
Honestly, if networks and cable companies would get together and allow rebroadcasting on demand of major shows, the vast majority of people would simply do that if they missed a broadcast. Or they could allow downloading of the show off their website, complete with commercials, in a time-limited "secure" format that would expire, say, a month after initial broadcast date, so as not to interfere with DVD sales. Most downloaders would probably go for something in pristine quality that would be easy to locate and download, over the dubious quality of an anonymous fileshare.
Anyway, the point is that this is not about making money. There are plenty of ways for them to make money off the internet with their shows, as they are beginning to discover. This is about control. The suits have shown over and over again that they resist any attempt to lessen their total control over the distribution of their product, even when it can make money for them. They have to be dragged kicking and screaming every step of the way.
Paramount's accountants and actuaries probably figure that the value of all this junk is only gonna go down. If they hold out 'til the 50th anniversary, the surviving hardcore Trekkies will be mostly drawing on their retirements and won't be spending on collectibles. So Paramount will reel 'em in now while their 401(k)'s are still fat.
And, broadly speaking, there is no next generation to replace the old guard Trek fanatics. Sci-fi television was a nice Cold War/Space Age by-product, but today's public can barely be bothered with fiction, much less science. Nowadays, it's all about Idols and Models.
Too bad there's no way to mod a post as "potentially life changing." I've been putting off trying out Opera since before it went free. Your post made me decide to give it another try, and so far (admittedly only an hour or so of heavy surfing) I love it. I was able to get it to connect to my banking site. It does phpbb better than FF. My machine seems about 50% faster, and memory use is something like 200 megs lower than my FF installation.
Most importantly, I didn't have to install any extensions to get it to work acceptably.
If there's one functionality that should be built into FF 2.0, there should be a brainless way to export and import your extensions, forms, passwords and bookmarks in one "FF2go" zipped bundle so that when you reinstall it on another computer, you can get started right away with your old configuration.
Are you are trying to imply that ANPR is discriminating against blacks in some way? Unless licence plates are allocated according to a racial profile, I cannot see how this could happen.
It actually explains "how this could happen" in the article. The claims of the protestors is that the ANPR programme unfairly targets certain neighbourhoods where blacks are more prevalent.
Whether it truly is unfair or not, I don't have the information to venture an opinion.
But so long as there are different groups in society, the mainstream group can always target other groups by concentrating on illegal "behaviour" that is disproportionately conducted by those other groups. E.g. if blacks are in power they can target whites by making large landholdings illegal, or by focussing on certain white-collar crimes. If whites are in power they can target blacks by making black drugs of choice (marihuana) illegal whilst protecting white drugs of choice (alcohol and tobacco).
Anyway, back on topic. Seems to me that this is actually anti "big brother" and more "tyranny of the majority."
and for the videophile, waiting a little bit longer for the download of a top-notch 1080p encoding won't be a terrible inconvenience.
On hi-speed fibre, you won't have to wait even for an 8GB encode. The hour it takes to send is still faster than the movie itself, so your provider will stream it to your set-top box, and you'll just watch it as it arrives.
I think Microsoft deserves a lot of praise for their VS05EE initiative (especially in taking the step to permit commercial application creation) but to take it a step further, the VB edition ought to be included in Vista, along with kid friendly starter apps. The best thing Microsoft can do for Microsoft is to help grow the next generation of whiz-kid programmers by universally distributing this software.
The thing that makes this employee different is not specifically that he's a public employee, but that he is (undoubtedly) unionized, and as a result, his employer is bound by contractual rules determining under what circumstances he can and cannot be fired. Typically in strong unions, an employee is entitled to a hearing to determine the severity of his offense, and there are steps that must be taken before an employee is outright fired. As an example, the employee might be required to be "counseled" first. Then "reprimanded." Then there may be one or more hearings before the ax can fall. For certain offenses, direct insubordination, being convicted of a crime, etc., the steps may be circumvented to an extent. So the judge has to determine, is this one of those offenses which warrants an outright termination, or one which requires a longer chain of events before before being fired.
Just to follow up on my own point, Google being barred from doing a Miró-like logo is the same as if, not only were you not allowed to draw an unuathorized Charlie Brown, Linus or Snoopy, but you couldn't even sketch an anonymous character in a "Peanuts-esque" style. Taking that to an extreme, future sitcom writers could get sued for writing scripts that veered too close to "Seinfeldian" humor. Fast food joints could get hauled into court for having processed meat chunks that were too "McNuggetty." Future presidents could be impeached for aping an authoritarian swagger that was too "Bushist."
This shouldn't even need to be protected by fair use. They're not using or transforming Miró's work. They're just drawing a picture in a style reminiscent of his. The law may disagree but I don't see why he has any moral right or copyright over a general art style. If Google's tribute is illegal than 99% of the artists in the world would be breaking the law.
I'll have to disagree with this. The US buys by far more foreign goods than any other country and as a result runs an US$800 billion trade deficit, which by itself is larger than the aggregate deficit of all the other nations in the world which have a balance of trade deficit. So although there are certainly elements of xenophobia within the US, in balance it has very open markets, and really, it's quite rare to hear someone seriously say "Buy American" these days.
Slashdot Mirror
That article wasn't very informative or insightful. I'd give it a 2 if it were a comment on /., and that's only on the strength of mentioning the 40,000 hour plasma lifespan vs. 60,000 for LCD.
What I'd really want to know is, specifically, what's the verdict with respect to plasma burn-in? Sony says it's problematic. (And if that's true, why were they selling plasma screens for so long?) Panasonic says, "You get what you pay for." Is that supposed to mean burn-in's not a problem on high-end sets?
With respect to LCDs, okay, so ghosting's less of a problem. Can we be more specific? Just how much has the response time improved? And what about contrast ratio? Viewing angle? Sunlight? Jaggies?
Regarding both formats, what happens at end-of-life? Do they just get dimmer and dimmer? Is there some kind of hard failure in the mechanism that renders the set completely inoperable after a certain amount of time? (E.g.I had a desktop LCD monitor which started to balk at coming out of powersaver mode, until one day, it just refused to come back on at all.) Are product lifespans going up, and to what extent? Either lifespan is fairly impressive, we're talking about 4.5 to 7 years of continuous round the clock usage, and probably twice that given typical usage patterns.
And other than a brief mention in the sidebar, there's nothing about future display technologies that might eclipse both plasma and LCD.
Point being, this article might be helpful to a lay person who reads the Star, but it isn't really suited for a tech audience. Why is it on Slashdot?
for people who link to their own poorly written blog without stating such in the summary??
Anyway, FWIW, CNET wrote a real review of the Writely Beta a couple of months ago. Writely seems to be missing something very important, unless I didn't notice it in my perusal of the article. It's all very well and good that access to the documents is password protected. But what they also need is for the documents to be optionally autosaved in a strongly encrypted format, so that even if someone gets access to your online folder, they can't (easily) read what's there.
Google seems to think they are miraculously immune to privacy snafus. I know the company is run by some very smart guys, but everybody makes mistakes. This is not an area to which they should be giving short shrift.
Let me stake out a position here:
1.
I think that most people who are happy to freely duplicate copyrighted works have never been in the position of selling anything of their own.
Most people... have never been in a position of selling anything of their own, period, so what you're saying is correct in a trivial sense. In any significant sense, I think it is not the case. Most of the people I know who are musical artists have plenty of bootlegged tapes and CDs in their posession. Certainly they don't have any problem making photocopies of copyrighted materials.
When a jury judges the law as unjust or unconstitutional, there can be no violation of the law.
In New Hampshire, the jury is the judge of the facts, not of the law. So the jury isn't authorized to decide whether a law is unjust or not, it is told to apply the law as instructed by the presiding judge. And even if a jury out of conscience refused to apply a law in a particular case ("nullification"), it wouldn't set a precedent, i.e. it wouldn't be binding in future cases.
If it wasn't for Jobs...we'd all be renting our music by now.
...and how DARE he blaspheme the Church of Jobs.
That's total Apple fanboy BS. Most music players contain mostly CD rips, not iTMS purchases. People have always been able to buy music without purchasing tracks online, they continue to do so, and as you acknowledge they can still download music without purchasing it at all. It's the omnipresent fear of the latter that ultimately keeps the record companies in check, not Jobs's balls. I've got nothing against Jobs for being a savvy businessman, but DRM just stinks.
And his novels SUCK.
The real winners: Consumers.
By shooting themselves in the foot with this stupid format competition, the studios have ensured that even the most brainless, gullible consumers won't be rushing out to buy either of these horrible DRM-laden formats. Hopefully they will continue to sabotage their own efforts to destroy fair use until some other format arises which is not so unmitigatedly evil.
No one will ever convince me that completely destroying the "signal to noise" ratio of a particular creative field is somehow a good thing. Why on earth is it "better" to have this gigantic, suffocating mass of mediocrity?
I see where you're coming from, but my feeling is that what's noise to me might be signal to others, and vice-versa. Beethoven took some of his great symphonic themes from "mediocre" musical ditties of his day. Cubism arose in part because European artists gained exposure to "mediocre" African art and took it in unforseen directions. Warhol made art from tin can logos. The important thing is being able to connect and have access to the ideas. From there, what you do with them is limited more by your own inner creative mojo than by overexposure to crap.
Insofar as noise is a problem on the internet, I find that it is due to advertising, not the fault of independent creative works, no matter how banal they may be. Of course YMMV, and I respect that.
(Now you've got me wondering if even advertising is unmitigated noise. Perhaps penis enlargement ads will one day be viewed as primitive art by some future civilization. My only consolation is that I'll be long dead by then.)
Making it easy for idiots to make their own won't improve things.
Your comment was going well until that point. The Blade Engine is akin to blogging software for visual storytellers. Simplifying the process of creating AVGs will give an opportunity for people with good storytelling but poor programming skills to create interesting works. Sure, there will be a huge amount of crap, just like with blogs, but overall more is better. That's the whole raison d'etre of the internet.
Elitists are free to ignore self-published graphic novels, just as I'm sure there are plenty of people who read only "established" news sources on the web and don't bother with blogs of any kind, or in the real world plenty of people would never be caught dead reading a "zine,"which themselves multiplied after the advent of cheap photocopying and (later) DTP software.
This much should be blindingly obvious. However, for the benefit of the people on the 8-bit bus:
1) This is a trial balloon. If it sells well, it may convince some retailers to experiment with further DRM free tracks. If it sells poorly, it will serve as "proof" that DRM is needed.
2) There's at least somebody on the command chain who wants this to fail. Hence the $1.99 price.
3) The record company couldn't stomach the idea of a totally naked mp3 so they came up with this lame idea of embedding the purchaser's name in the file. If course this is easily worked around, but so's regular DRM. This is to deter the teeming masses. If John Q. Moron decides to fileshare, he'll soon be indicted by a thousand copies of "Jessica Loves John Q. Moron" floating around. You might add that they were being slightly clever by selling this crude copy protection measure as a value added feature.
I'd also speculate that might be meant to caution Microsoft ever so lightly. MS is openly scheming against its current music partners by introducing Urge and Zune. But it wants to keep them hooked on Plays For Sure while making sure their services are inferior to its own offerings. This is Yahoo's way of saying, "Look Microsoft, we might not need your crap DRM after all, so watch yourself."
Oh, now it's the politicians' fault MS is breaking the law.
Let's say you are an MS shareholder. A company you hold stock in breaks the law, but, unconcerned, you keep your shares. After years of open non-compliance they finally get fined, a decision which was seen coming from a mi- um, kilometre away. Yet you still don't see how you have any choice or responsibility for your losses? GMAFB.
1) Consumers can choose not to buy MS products.
2) Businesses can choose not to use them.
3) Powerful shareholders can influence the board to do the right thing
4) Powerless shareholders can divest their MS stock for a company that doesn't flaut the law.
And to top it off, MS stock hasn't been doing well anyway for the past few years. Probably because major funds have already discounted the value of the long-anticipated decision in their calculations.
So bottom line, you get no sympathy.
It's probably not going to happen with EVE Online, but it will happen one day. Actually, it's already happened (in a sense) with Texas Hold-Em. One of its primary attractions is that, often, anyone from anywhere can join the tournament. If you join, you might not get far, But even so, if not you, then people you know or have interacted with will be playing at world-class levels. The illusion that only a bit of luck and practice separates you from the upper echelons is a large part of what keeps the fish biting in a competitive poker.
Further, there's a whole untapped market of people with asthma, with skeletal defects, with good fine-motor skills but poor gross-motor coordination who are excluded from participating in traditional sports at competitive levels. Logic will cause them to gravitate to these third millennium sporting activities.
Perhaps you've saved $20,000 but you also have to consider that most if you are the sort of person who is investing in the stock market, you're probably already saving a minimum of $100/wk. Which means, your loss of $20,000 is the difference between having $2million and having $2,020,000. Doesn't really seem to matter so much from that perspective. Or rather, the sort of person who would be terribly bothered by having one percent less net worth is also what most people would characterize as a miser. Someone who simply takes enjoyment at hording money and who wouldn't play the lottery to begin with.
Side point, from my own observation, it seems that older people are much more likely to play the lottery and for larger sums, than young people. Which could mean either that they've already saved all they need for the rest of their lives and a bit of gambling won't hurt them, or that they haven't accumulated any sort of wealth, and knowing they don't have 40 years to start from scratch, they've rationally concluded that their only remaining chance of getting rich is by playing the lottery.
Further anecdotal observation has convinced me that many people in wealthy countries are poor, not because they "waste" their money on innocent diversions like the lottery, but because they are bad at managing any sum of money whatsoever. Perhaps you've got starving relatives back home, or brothers who need to be bailed out of jail, or child support payments, drinking habits, plus an overly generous nature, and so it's basically impossible for you to save any amount of money. If you accumulate a thousand or two, you're bound by tradition and honor to "lend" it to the first sick aunt or evicted cousin who comes along. In that environment, it's pointless to try to save -- someone else in your extended family will wind up vacuuming out your savings account. Investing in the "lottery" seems a more realistic option than the fruitless attempt to save through discipline.
I think you're underestimating the amount of young people who come online, or who read gaming magazines, or who have friends who do either of the above.
Used books is similar to duping data?
;) Anyway, regardless of whether you or MPAA or Viacom or whomever personally approves of TPB, it is the case that filesharing is taking place. And will continue to take place, regardless of whether or not TPB stays up. Regardless of what is up to me to decide. So they can either react to reality, and thrive, as has Apple, e.g., or they can keep their heads in the sand and suffer, as the record labels did before iTunes.
Not at all. Only one person has the book at one time. Not so with bittorrenting.
You're giving a kneejerk strawman reply to a point not in contention. No-one said that used books were similar to duping data. My criticism was a reply to the specific principle that making money off of others' copyrighted material without their permission is bad.
If you want to give a different reason why you think TPB is bad --that it facilitates unlimited reproduction of copyrighted material -- well, whatever, but leave me out of that one.
As to 24 and such TV shows, there are more and more people stealing these shows daily. Those people are unlikely to watch it first run.
What's your basis for that evaluation? I could just as easily see the opposite taking place. Here's a hypothetical, made-up situation. A friend of mine keeps crowing about what a great show Veronica Mars is. But I always forget to come home in time to watch it. So one day I say, WTH, let me download it. Hey, turns out the show is pretty good. Next time, I want to see it first-run, so I make sure to stay home on Tuesday night. Had I not been able to check it out through, BT, I would never have watched it to begin with.
As to whether the companies could be smarter, that's not for you to decide. Why not walk into the GM headquarters and explain "you're not selling your stuff in the right way, I'm gonna start stealing cars off your assembly lines and selling them the ways I see fit".
GM's actually a good example of how slow-witted corporations can lose out by not listening to their customers. Thanks for pointing that out.
If you don't think the company is doing a good job, then don't patronize them. But don't steal their stuff either. Just like you would with an object you cannot copy, like a car.
If you've never Xeroxed a page out of a book, or recorded a song off the radio, then you're not a hypocrite. "Oh, but that's legal. That's fair use." Perhaps it is, now. But over the objection of copyright holders. So, no, I don't buy into your idea that the MPAA and its cohorts get to solely decide what's permissible and what's impermissible, what's legal and what's illegal with respect to so-called IP. Particularly in countries, like Sweden, where BT sites are legal.
1) TPB sucks, because they're just leechers making money off of other people's copyrighted work, all the while disengenuously crowing about "freedom".
I suppose Used Booksellers are leeches in your eyes as well. Should we shut them down too?
incredibly expensive shows like 24 and Lost WON'T EXIST if they can't make money.
How does filesharing substantially hurt 24 and Lost? The shows have already aired and made their money by the time they get onto filesharing sites.
Honestly, if networks and cable companies would get together and allow rebroadcasting on demand of major shows, the vast majority of people would simply do that if they missed a broadcast. Or they could allow downloading of the show off their website, complete with commercials, in a time-limited "secure" format that would expire, say, a month after initial broadcast date, so as not to interfere with DVD sales. Most downloaders would probably go for something in pristine quality that would be easy to locate and download, over the dubious quality of an anonymous fileshare.
Anyway, the point is that this is not about making money. There are plenty of ways for them to make money off the internet with their shows, as they are beginning to discover. This is about control. The suits have shown over and over again that they resist any attempt to lessen their total control over the distribution of their product, even when it can make money for them. They have to be dragged kicking and screaming every step of the way.
Paramount's accountants and actuaries probably figure that the value of all this junk is only gonna go down. If they hold out 'til the 50th anniversary, the surviving hardcore Trekkies will be mostly drawing on their retirements and won't be spending on collectibles. So Paramount will reel 'em in now while their 401(k)'s are still fat.
And, broadly speaking, there is no next generation to replace the old guard Trek fanatics. Sci-fi television was a nice Cold War/Space Age by-product, but today's public can barely be bothered with fiction, much less science. Nowadays, it's all about Idols and Models.
Too bad there's no way to mod a post as "potentially life changing." I've been putting off trying out Opera since before it went free. Your post made me decide to give it another try, and so far (admittedly only an hour or so of heavy surfing) I love it. I was able to get it to connect to my banking site. It does phpbb better than FF. My machine seems about 50% faster, and memory use is something like 200 megs lower than my FF installation.
Most importantly, I didn't have to install any extensions to get it to work acceptably.
If there's one functionality that should be built into FF 2.0, there should be a brainless way to export and import your extensions, forms, passwords and bookmarks in one "FF2go" zipped bundle so that when you reinstall it on another computer, you can get started right away with your old configuration.
Are you are trying to imply that ANPR is discriminating against blacks in some way? Unless licence plates are allocated according to a racial profile, I cannot see how this could happen.
It actually explains "how this could happen" in the article. The claims of the protestors is that the ANPR programme unfairly targets certain neighbourhoods where blacks are more prevalent.
Whether it truly is unfair or not, I don't have the information to venture an opinion.
But so long as there are different groups in society, the mainstream group can always target other groups by concentrating on illegal "behaviour" that is disproportionately conducted by those other groups. E.g. if blacks are in power they can target whites by making large landholdings illegal, or by focussing on certain white-collar crimes. If whites are in power they can target blacks by making black drugs of choice (marihuana) illegal whilst protecting white drugs of choice (alcohol and tobacco).
Anyway, back on topic. Seems to me that this is actually anti "big brother" and more "tyranny of the majority."
and for the videophile, waiting a little bit longer for the download of a top-notch 1080p encoding won't be a terrible inconvenience.
On hi-speed fibre, you won't have to wait even for an 8GB encode. The hour it takes to send is still faster than the movie itself, so your provider will stream it to your set-top box, and you'll just watch it as it arrives.
I think Microsoft deserves a lot of praise for their VS05EE initiative (especially in taking the step to permit commercial application creation) but to take it a step further, the VB edition ought to be included in Vista, along with kid friendly starter apps. The best thing Microsoft can do for Microsoft is to help grow the next generation of whiz-kid programmers by universally distributing this software.
The thing that makes this employee different is not specifically that he's a public employee, but that he is (undoubtedly) unionized, and as a result, his employer is bound by contractual rules determining under what circumstances he can and cannot be fired. Typically in strong unions, an employee is entitled to a hearing to determine the severity of his offense, and there are steps that must be taken before an employee is outright fired. As an example, the employee might be required to be "counseled" first. Then "reprimanded." Then there may be one or more hearings before the ax can fall. For certain offenses, direct insubordination, being convicted of a crime, etc., the steps may be circumvented to an extent. So the judge has to determine, is this one of those offenses which warrants an outright termination, or one which requires a longer chain of events before before being fired.
Just to follow up on my own point, Google being barred from doing a Miró-like logo is the same as if, not only were you not allowed to draw an unuathorized Charlie Brown, Linus or Snoopy, but you couldn't even sketch an anonymous character in a "Peanuts-esque" style. Taking that to an extreme, future sitcom writers could get sued for writing scripts that veered too close to "Seinfeldian" humor. Fast food joints could get hauled into court for having processed meat chunks that were too "McNuggetty." Future presidents could be impeached for aping an authoritarian swagger that was too "Bushist."
Hmm, objection withdrawn, Your Honor.
This shouldn't even need to be protected by fair use. They're not using or transforming Miró's work. They're just drawing a picture in a style reminiscent of his. The law may disagree but I don't see why he has any moral right or copyright over a general art style. If Google's tribute is illegal than 99% of the artists in the world would be breaking the law.
I'll have to disagree with this. The US buys by far more foreign goods than any other country and as a result runs an US$800 billion trade deficit, which by itself is larger than the aggregate deficit of all the other nations in the world which have a balance of trade deficit. So although there are certainly elements of xenophobia within the US, in balance it has very open markets, and really, it's quite rare to hear someone seriously say "Buy American" these days.
Just don't. You will want your five minutes back. You were warned.