Question: is there any way to gather real percentages here? (ie, is there any way to 'sniff' the extensions installed in Firefox?)
Not precisely, but FlashBlock has 15000+ downloads this week, and 350000+ total downloads listed at the bottom of the page. That's all since November 30. Now, since that is a new version for 1.5, I assume that many of those were previous users as well, so it's a decent estimate of the userbase, or at least that userbase which has installed FF 1.5.
To be perverse about it, what if I installed a GreaseMonkey script that blocked all images? A lot of sites would 'fail' for me too, without a graceful fallback.
Or what if you used a text only browser, like Lynx? Oh wait, that actually works properly if the site is designed correctly. This flash headline thing, however, does not work properly in my browser.
But I've never encountered such a situation.
Look at their demo page with FlashBlock installed. Voila, there's your situation. Every headline shows up as a blocked Flash app. Hideous.
this is a solution that works *today*
Regardless of the fact that a solution works, it's still wrong. Doing something the wrong way because it's faster doesn't make it right.
I'm saying that it would be better to wait years for your solution than to implement this Flash headline crap on your site, because in so doing, you will be alienating at least some percentage of your users. Me, for one. Even if the number is 2%, driving away 2% of your potential readers because you want to use some unusual font for your headlines seems, to be blunt, dumb as hell.
Yes, it's true that it fails for people using FlashBlock. As a practical matter, though, what percentage of mainstream (ie non-/.) web surfers use it?
While it's true that I know mostly geeks, all of them use FlashBlock, without exception.
But even then, I don't see how that's relevant. If it fails in such a major way for any real percentage of users, then it's flawed. It claims to have a graceful fallback (no flash = normal text), but it doesn't have such a fallback in a relatively common case.
As for me, I'd immediately leave any site that popped up half a dozen flash boxes on my screen as it seems like it's an ad-ridden hell hole. Not a good impression to give to the people who use the web the most and don't mind telling others about it.
There should be, but there isn't.
Yes, so one needs to be created. There have been several proposals. Pick one of the standards and get one of the browsers to implement it. Opera would probably be easiest, Firefox would follow soon enough. IE would wait until version 9 or something, but they'd get there eventually.
Well, you can already specify fonts in CSS, so why not simply do that? You can even specify multiple choices of fonts in priority order.
Yes, if the user doesn't have your font, he sees it with another font. So what it sounds like to me is that you need an easy way for a user to download and use your font. There's got to be a better way than using a Flash app.
I do know that sIFR's demo site totally and abjectly fails on my machine using FlashBlock, displaying every headline as a Flash app that I need to click on to make it display, so it doesn't seem to be a particularly perfect solution there.
I guess there's no point in anyone even suggesting an alternative.....
The GP post actually suggested an alternative, albeit kinda lamely. He seemed to be suggesting creating a new standard, although realistically just adding a few extensions to CSS makes a bit more sense to me.
I agree with the GP in that sIFR is more than a bit silly when it's entirely possible to simply addon some functionality to CSS and thus allow browsers to implement it in a much better way. Resorting to freakin' Flash in order to display a headline seems to be way overkill. It works, but it is pretty silly.
The guy at http://myrealsystem.dm/podcast/feed.rss changes that URL with some rewriting commands. If the host retrieving it is at evil.pirate's IP or IP block, then instead of sending him feed.rss, we send him GetOurListenersBack.rss.
GetOurListenersBack.rss contains text and a small MP3 file designed to tell the podcast listener that evil.pirate has cruely tricked the podcast listener, and details steps for the podcast listener to change his feed URL to the correct http://myrealsystem.dm/podcast/feed.rss, at which point the podcast listener will get his feed back.
For giggles, it also ask said podcast listener to assist the podcast producer in finding the owner of the evil.pirate website and punching him in the mouth. If myrealsystem.dm has a dedicated enough user base, then the evil.pirate will find himself being punched in the mouth repeatedly in no time.
My mistake. Like I said, I have never played the game. I must have misread those calls for Pre-CU servers to be made as a news item or other information saying they were being made at some point.
Sadly, I understood that and I've never played that game.
SWG = Star Wars Galaxies CU = Combat Upgrade, which changed SWG in large ways, making it incompatible with previous versions. This led to pre-CU servers being made for people who preferred the old way NGE = New Game Enchancements, which did much the same thing in terms of splitting the userbase.
But if they really expect me to convince Dad that he can't live without a season pass on those Seinfeld reruns he loves so much, then they should be giving me the 50 smackers. I'd probably have 10 people signed up under me right now if I got some sort of compensation for it. (By the way, click here [freeminimacs.com] to get a free Mini Mac!):-)
Gist of it is that they give you 5000 points for every referral, and you trade those in for swag. Good swag too, like iPods and DVD Recorders and such.
Once an attitude of entitlement becomes common among "fans," they'll wonder why people ever pay for stuff.
No, that's too easy of a way to think about it. Reality, as always, lies somewhere in the middle. What will happen is that the viable money making time span for creative material will shrink, as will the price.
Why would people buy it when they could get it for free? Well, for one thing, people, in general, don't mind paying for creative content, as long as they're getting something out of it that they cannot easily acquire for less. They'll pay for immediate access to new content, or for a high quality physical copy of said content, or ease of access.
Music, for example, is one of those things that they are not getting anything more out of by purchasing it. Downloading music gives pretty much the same thing as buying the CD. Sure you don't get album notes and a CD and such, but frankly, these have never really been a value add to most people anyway. Downloading the music gives them all they really want in the first place: the music. In the case of online music sales, they're paying a premium for ease of access. There is no music online that cannot be found on the P2P networks with only a slightly higher amount of effort. But going to the iTunes Music Store and paying a buck for a song is easier, enough to let them sell content that the same users could easily acquire for free. Enough to let them sell content in vast numbers, even. People who use the iTMS often buy hundreds and even thousands of dollars of music from there.
Similarly, buying a DVD is simpler than downloading and burning your own. DVD sales are huge, despite DVD quality material of virtually every movie being available on the net. Bandwidth is still low, there's a small technical barrier to entry, and quality is slightly reduced in most cases, but not enough so that you'd notice for movies already on DVD (since the DVD is often the source material in those cases). Paying $20 for a DVD is easier, so people do that instead when they want to own a show. People just like owning things. Even when we were using VCR's, prerecorded video tape sales were high. Most people didn't rent and copy the rented tapes, even when Macrovision was not an issue (bypassing AGC protection is trivial at best).
There will continue to be a market for creative content, it will not become a "hobbiest" activity. However, the amount of profit to be made will shrink slightly, and the viable marketability of new material will decrease dramatically. This will result in *MORE* creative content which will be released to the marketplace ever faster. In addition, the advent of simpler and cheaper content creation abilities (home video editing is damn near at the level of pro editing), along with online content distribution mechanisms will indeed create a new hobbiest market which will fill much of this new content void. But high budget production will not die, not by a long shot.
Re:slashdot user on fast track to hyperbole
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RIAA vs Linux and DVDs
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Oh, please. Even the people who don't think they should have to pay for their expensively produced entertainment will have to realize that actual destruction of the entertainment industry will leave them without anyone really professional to rip off. I mean, you don't have to sleep with a copy of Atlas Shrugged to see the basic truth of it. The rubber has to meet the road someplace, and at some point the Peter Jacksons of the world will not be able to raise the cash for a Really Swell Giant Ape Movie.
To an extent, you are correct, but I don't think you followed through on the thought far enough.
The fact of the matter is that it's actually impossible for them to protect their content from the people they're actually selling it to. At the moment, they're reduced to introducing memes into the populate with things like "copying music and movie piracy is theft" and so forth. I don't want to debate whether these are true or not, what I'm saying is that they're reduced to trying to convince their own customers not to infringe their material, because they can't protect it.
Now, assuming they achieve some modicum of success in that respect (and to a certain extent, they've already won on that score), the upshot is that they're in a never ending battle of suing their own customers and/or introducing easily broken protections that only inconvience people who are actually trying to use the product in seemingly legitimate ways. This behavior leads the populace into a well founded distrust of the new media that they're trying to introduce to prevent "piracy", and leads people into sticking with the old media. So they go to the government to attempt to force their new media into production, but only meet partial success there, since not all policitians can be stupid all the time.
The end result is that the big media companies are still at the mercy of their customer base. And since they're not catering to their desires, their customers abandon them. Might take a long time, but eventually these media companies must die, unless they reform and change their ways.
And that's where "the rubber hits the road", as you put it. Once they realize this (and they really have no long term choice but to realize this), and start giving their customers what they actually want, they'll make money again.
It's a natural selection process. Those companies putting out material with no DRM or lightweight/non-interfering DRM will get more sales. Yes, piracy will continue, but piracy would have continued *anyway*, and lack of DRM doesn't increase the amount of piracy (more to the point, inclusion of DRM doesn't decrease the amount of piracy).
And the Peter Jacksons of the world, wanting to make that Really Swell And Incredibly Expensive Ape Movie, will go to those people who have the cash to allow him to do it. Forget patronage than that new-age hippie crap. At some point, somebody's eventually going to realize that they can increase sales by actually releasing material in a way that doesn't piss off their customers. And it'll work too. And the companies that do that will be the ones that survive.
Because sharing pirated material is, and always will be, a pain in the ass for people who don't know how to do it and have no desire to learn. They expect to buy a disc and stick it in the disc playing machine. And if the disc fits into the slot then they expect it to play. And when it doesn't play because of some anti-piracy crap, they don't blame the pirates. They blame the people who made the crappy disc, because all the other discs they have work great.
Yes, it's long term. Yes, it sucks in the interim. But it's a self-solving problem, IMO.
It's to make people think about what they are buying. If domain names were free, then everyone would register everything and not think about it. -- get free domain names: http://www.ezyrewards.com/?id=23484
I really wish I had mod points to mark this as funny.
Yes, I'm aware of that thing. I dislike it. Part of the joy of lego is building on the fly. Building according to plans takes most of the fun out of it, IMO.
Why do we have to turn everything in to a time limited, disposable, keep repurchasing nightmare?
Because companies are in for the long haul.
Let's say they take your advice, and build a Mindstorms lineup with the cool electronics bricks on the cheap. Say, $40 for the RIS with just the electronics and mechanical parts. Maybe a couple of add-on sets for more electronics and mechanical gears. Then say they go back to selling the big boxes of bricks again, like they had when I was a kid. You use these to build the models themselves, and the RIS stuff for the movement and such. Mark it all at a reasonable price so that for $100-150, you can get one fantastic set of Legos that will let you build anything you can imagine, as a kid. Nothing huge, but all the joy of Lego plus the learning experience of the Mindstorms gear. Easily done, and they'd make a killer profit. Everybody would get one.
Then next year rolls around, and they go out of business. Those Lego bricks *last*. My sister's kids will be playing with the same bricks I had 30 years previously. As long as you don't lose them to the evils of the vaccum cleaner, they just freakin' last forever.
Lego just has an unusual business. They're into selling timeless toys, but the problem with timeless toys is that they are actually timeless. They sold the big boxes of bricks 30 years ago and it almost killed the company. It's all down to profit, really. They make more money selling those crappy models with all the custom pieces and selling *less* of them than they did by selling the generic bricks on the cheap at a still substantial profit.
Yes, we all want the big buckets of bricks and we all want the electronic coolness that is the Mindstorms line, but the fact is that selling those is not a way to achieve long term profitability. They're not trying to sell to you right now, they're trying to continue selling to you and your kids, and their kids, forever.
Okay, so that sucks, but it does make sense from their point of view.
One thing not seemingly mentioned anywhere is that Lego seems to have the notion building internally of starting up a different market for the older people into Lego. Us old people who still remember the big buckets of bricks can sign up for their catalog. I got one the other day, and yes, you can buy bricks in bulk. Not random sets, but sets of specific brick types, basically by the bag. It's kinda interesting, actually. For the Lego-philes, I recommend looking around their webpage and signing up for the catalog to see what's what there. Yes, the catalog is full of all the Harry Potter and Spiderman crap, but in the center is a nice foldout where you can just buy pieces in bulk. You could amass one hell of a large lego collection for a decent price by buying one bag of everything they have. Or if you have a specific idea, it would be great for making a large model of whatever type you like.
For this *particular* story, the story on digg only appeared after it appeared on slashdot.
However, being a long time reader of both digg and Slashdot, I find that links to stories which appear on Slashdot nowadays invariably have appeared on Digg's front page up to 2 days earlier. More, sometimes. Slashdot is not the place to go for up-to-the-minute articles.
My alternative theory is that the majority of Slashdot submissions are now coming from people who found the articles they're submitting from seeing them on digg.
There's only two real choices nowadays: WMA or AAC. Microsoft or Apple. That's pretty much it, really. Each has advantages and disadvantages...
With Microsoft, you have the whole enforced compatibility thing with their "Plays For Sure" initiative. -Pros: Yes, this stuff does actually work, and fairly well at that. There's a few minor functional problems, but they're really minor. The integration with Media Center PC's is nice, as is the complete XBox integration if you have one of those. As long as you stick to Microsoft products, and Plays For Sure compatible player devices, you won't have any problems. -Cons: You cannot use anything that isn't Plays For Sure compatible, not with the online stores or subscription services. Want to play those Napster downloaded songs on an iPod? No dice. Microsoft is very vocal about blaming Apple, but the fault is not Apple's, it's Microsoft's *incredibly* restrictive Janus DRM licensing. Not only would Apple have to implement WMA, but they'd have to implement a secure methodology such that the files cannot be copied back off the the player *at all*, and an expiration methodology such that if you failed to sync the player to the computer for a time period, the files would expire and/or delete themselves. Apple's not willing to go there, and frankly the hardware design of the iPod precludes some of that capability anyway. Oh, and Microsoft's DRM has yet to be cracked in a good way/
Or you can bite into the Apple for your music. They have the iTunes Music Store and the most popular music player devices. -Pros: High quality AAC music support (AAC is much better than WMA, anyway). A pretty lightweight DRM that's easy to work with and somewhat easy to work around if needed. MPEG 4 support becoming very standardized. Apple is (mostly) sticking to open standards, basically, which is always nice. -Cons: Drink the Apple cool-aid only. iTunes works with iPod's, but not with anything else. iPod's do have lots of other support though, from Real and many free and/or pay programs. Even the XBox 360 will support them, in a sense. You also pay the Apple tax, as everything Apple is a bit pricier than the competition. But this stuff is popular for a reason, you know.
In the long run, it seems more likely to me that Apple will win this war. They've been awfully stingy with licensing their FairPlay DRM, making it difficult for vendors to add support for iTunes Purchased Music, but that hasn't stopped them from being the only music store to show a profit. The subscription model (ala Napster) doesn't seem to be picking up a lot of adherents in the long term. People bought CD's at stores and didn't much like CD clubs either. Same principle, really. Not to mention that the evilness of the Microsoft Janus DRM is readily appearant if you make the mistake of buying into it and using it for a while. And vendors seem to be falling all over themselves to add iPod and iTunes support to their gear, even if they can't play iTMS purchased music. MPEG 4 is also the wave of the future, as the standard becomes better defined. Divx and Xvid and other variants will eventually fall off the map, as Apple has a fairly solid base system going there, and everybody is going to be rushing to be compatible with it. I expect a device more dedicated to video than the iPod Video is to be introduced by Apple within a year. Maybe they'll partner with Sony for video support on the PSP. Dunno.
But WMA is dying a slow death, and with the death of Microsoft and Blu-Ray, they're being left behind, really. WMA might be the format used on the next new disc format somehow, or Microsoft might have a hand in it, but Apple is getting into the digital distribution business over the internet in a big way and ignoring the business of data on physical medium. Apple's moves seem smarter to me.
Oh yeah, there's also the Sony option, where you buy nothing but Sony equipment because all Sony's stuff *only* works with other Sony equipment, but frankly that option has no pros to speak of, so it's just best avoided.
Intelligent Design is the idea that God manipulated and brought upon evolution.
See, this is one of the major problems with Intelligent Design. Nobody seems to know just what the fuck it actually is.
For the record, the idea of intelligent design is that the design of biology is too complex to have evolved into that state. That some higher power designed it instead of evolution.
But ID doesn't say that this higher power guided evolution! No, Intelligent Design rejects evolution entirely, albeit not in so many words. Because if you have evolution but then take away natural selection (in favor of "intelligent") and random mutation (in favor of "design"), then you no longer really have evolution, do you?
I actually picked up a pair of these when I bought my latest machine's parts. I didn't buy it because the memory was any better, I bought it for the geek factor of having a couple of LED displays on which I could put whatever I liked. And I still like it. It's nice to be able to glance at the box to see the temperature the unit is running at. It's fun to watch it go from 95 to 130 when I'm playing some major 3d game. And it was only $30 more than the cheap stuff.
Yes, if you pay list price, you're paying too much. So don't pay list.:)
My point was that it's not a CD, but this is not because it "uses technical means of copy protection" but because it falls outside the spec.
A normal Blue Book CD with software on the data session that prevents ripping would be a CD and would also be using "technical means of copy protection".
Anything which uses technical means of copy protection is not a CD.
Not entirely true. While you're correct that this is "not a CD", it's not because it installs malware onto your computer. Previous copy protection schemes did that. Anything bypassed by disabling autorun or holding down the Shift key falls into that category.
But those *are* CD's. Why? Because Red Book isn't the only standard out there. Specifically, those can fall into the Blue Book standard, also known as "CD Extra" or "Enhanced CD". Basically it's normal Red Book audio on the first session, and a second data session that only computers see. What's on that data session is irrelevant to whether it's a CD or not.
Now, in the case of Sony's new licensed malware product, yes, the CD contains malware using rootkit like methodologies, however it is also know to contain a bad/malformed Table of Contents (TOC) in order to break ripping software even if you have prevented the software from installing. This can be bypassed with some software (like CDEx), and appearantly Mac's have no problem ignoring the bad TOC anyway, but this malformed TOC is what makes it "not a CD" in Philips eyes.
Agreed, but those laws that you point to are part of the US Code. And that is trumped by the US Constitution, which specifically protects free speech. Courts have long held that parody, and very specifically political satire, falls under free speech considerations.
So you can pass all the laws you like, but higher laws take precedence. To use a very similar example, Flag Burning is illegal too, under the very same chapter of code that you yourself pointed out. And yet flag burning as a political protest is currently considered protected speech.
Slashdot Mirror
You could put up a NRA flag. That's sure to give intruders pause.
Question: is there any way to gather real percentages here? (ie, is there any way to 'sniff' the extensions installed in Firefox?)
Not precisely, but FlashBlock has 15000+ downloads this week, and 350000+ total downloads listed at the bottom of the page. That's all since November 30. Now, since that is a new version for 1.5, I assume that many of those were previous users as well, so it's a decent estimate of the userbase, or at least that userbase which has installed FF 1.5.
To be perverse about it, what if I installed a GreaseMonkey script that blocked all images? A lot of sites would 'fail' for me too, without a graceful fallback.
Or what if you used a text only browser, like Lynx? Oh wait, that actually works properly if the site is designed correctly. This flash headline thing, however, does not work properly in my browser.
But I've never encountered such a situation.
Look at their demo page with FlashBlock installed. Voila, there's your situation. Every headline shows up as a blocked Flash app. Hideous.
this is a solution that works *today*
Regardless of the fact that a solution works, it's still wrong. Doing something the wrong way because it's faster doesn't make it right.
I'm saying that it would be better to wait years for your solution than to implement this Flash headline crap on your site, because in so doing, you will be alienating at least some percentage of your users. Me, for one. Even if the number is 2%, driving away 2% of your potential readers because you want to use some unusual font for your headlines seems, to be blunt, dumb as hell.
Yes, it's true that it fails for people using FlashBlock. As a practical matter, though, what percentage of mainstream (ie non-/.) web surfers use it?
While it's true that I know mostly geeks, all of them use FlashBlock, without exception.
But even then, I don't see how that's relevant. If it fails in such a major way for any real percentage of users, then it's flawed. It claims to have a graceful fallback (no flash = normal text), but it doesn't have such a fallback in a relatively common case.
As for me, I'd immediately leave any site that popped up half a dozen flash boxes on my screen as it seems like it's an ad-ridden hell hole. Not a good impression to give to the people who use the web the most and don't mind telling others about it.
There should be, but there isn't.
Yes, so one needs to be created. There have been several proposals. Pick one of the standards and get one of the browsers to implement it. Opera would probably be easiest, Firefox would follow soon enough. IE would wait until version 9 or something, but they'd get there eventually.
Well, you can already specify fonts in CSS, so why not simply do that? You can even specify multiple choices of fonts in priority order.
Yes, if the user doesn't have your font, he sees it with another font. So what it sounds like to me is that you need an easy way for a user to download and use your font. There's got to be a better way than using a Flash app.
I do know that sIFR's demo site totally and abjectly fails on my machine using FlashBlock, displaying every headline as a Flash app that I need to click on to make it display, so it doesn't seem to be a particularly perfect solution there.
I guess there's no point in anyone even suggesting an alternative.....
The GP post actually suggested an alternative, albeit kinda lamely. He seemed to be suggesting creating a new standard, although realistically just adding a few extensions to CSS makes a bit more sense to me.
I agree with the GP in that sIFR is more than a bit silly when it's entirely possible to simply addon some functionality to CSS and thus allow browsers to implement it in a much better way. Resorting to freakin' Flash in order to display a headline seems to be way overkill. It works, but it is pretty silly.
The technological solution to this:
The guy at http://myrealsystem.dm/podcast/feed.rss changes that URL with some rewriting commands. If the host retrieving it is at evil.pirate's IP or IP block, then instead of sending him feed.rss, we send him GetOurListenersBack.rss.
GetOurListenersBack.rss contains text and a small MP3 file designed to tell the podcast listener that evil.pirate has cruely tricked the podcast listener, and details steps for the podcast listener to change his feed URL to the correct http://myrealsystem.dm/podcast/feed.rss, at which point the podcast listener will get his feed back.
For giggles, it also ask said podcast listener to assist the podcast producer in finding the owner of the evil.pirate website and punching him in the mouth. If myrealsystem.dm has a dedicated enough user base, then the evil.pirate will find himself being punched in the mouth repeatedly in no time.
Problem solved.
My mistake. Like I said, I have never played the game. I must have misread those calls for Pre-CU servers to be made as a news item or other information saying they were being made at some point.
Sadly, I understood that and I've never played that game.
SWG = Star Wars Galaxies
CU = Combat Upgrade, which changed SWG in large ways, making it incompatible with previous versions. This led to pre-CU servers being made for people who preferred the old way
NGE = New Game Enchancements, which did much the same thing in terms of splitting the userbase.
I read too damn much gaming news.
But if they really expect me to convince Dad that he can't live without a season pass on those Seinfeld reruns he loves so much, then they should be giving me the 50 smackers. I'd probably have 10 people signed up under me right now if I got some sort of compensation for it. (By the way, click here [freeminimacs.com] to get a free Mini Mac!):-)
They've had that for quite some time now: http://www.tivo.com/rewards
Gist of it is that they give you 5000 points for every referral, and you trade those in for swag. Good swag too, like iPods and DVD Recorders and such.
Once an attitude of entitlement becomes common among "fans," they'll wonder why people ever pay for stuff.
No, that's too easy of a way to think about it. Reality, as always, lies somewhere in the middle. What will happen is that the viable money making time span for creative material will shrink, as will the price.
Why would people buy it when they could get it for free? Well, for one thing, people, in general, don't mind paying for creative content, as long as they're getting something out of it that they cannot easily acquire for less. They'll pay for immediate access to new content, or for a high quality physical copy of said content, or ease of access.
Music, for example, is one of those things that they are not getting anything more out of by purchasing it. Downloading music gives pretty much the same thing as buying the CD. Sure you don't get album notes and a CD and such, but frankly, these have never really been a value add to most people anyway. Downloading the music gives them all they really want in the first place: the music. In the case of online music sales, they're paying a premium for ease of access. There is no music online that cannot be found on the P2P networks with only a slightly higher amount of effort. But going to the iTunes Music Store and paying a buck for a song is easier, enough to let them sell content that the same users could easily acquire for free. Enough to let them sell content in vast numbers, even. People who use the iTMS often buy hundreds and even thousands of dollars of music from there.
Similarly, buying a DVD is simpler than downloading and burning your own. DVD sales are huge, despite DVD quality material of virtually every movie being available on the net. Bandwidth is still low, there's a small technical barrier to entry, and quality is slightly reduced in most cases, but not enough so that you'd notice for movies already on DVD (since the DVD is often the source material in those cases). Paying $20 for a DVD is easier, so people do that instead when they want to own a show. People just like owning things. Even when we were using VCR's, prerecorded video tape sales were high. Most people didn't rent and copy the rented tapes, even when Macrovision was not an issue (bypassing AGC protection is trivial at best).
There will continue to be a market for creative content, it will not become a "hobbiest" activity. However, the amount of profit to be made will shrink slightly, and the viable marketability of new material will decrease dramatically. This will result in *MORE* creative content which will be released to the marketplace ever faster. In addition, the advent of simpler and cheaper content creation abilities (home video editing is damn near at the level of pro editing), along with online content distribution mechanisms will indeed create a new hobbiest market which will fill much of this new content void. But high budget production will not die, not by a long shot.
Oh, please. Even the people who don't think they should have to pay for their expensively produced entertainment will have to realize that actual destruction of the entertainment industry will leave them without anyone really professional to rip off. I mean, you don't have to sleep with a copy of Atlas Shrugged to see the basic truth of it. The rubber has to meet the road someplace, and at some point the Peter Jacksons of the world will not be able to raise the cash for a Really Swell Giant Ape Movie.
To an extent, you are correct, but I don't think you followed through on the thought far enough.
The fact of the matter is that it's actually impossible for them to protect their content from the people they're actually selling it to. At the moment, they're reduced to introducing memes into the populate with things like "copying music and movie piracy is theft" and so forth. I don't want to debate whether these are true or not, what I'm saying is that they're reduced to trying to convince their own customers not to infringe their material, because they can't protect it.
Now, assuming they achieve some modicum of success in that respect (and to a certain extent, they've already won on that score), the upshot is that they're in a never ending battle of suing their own customers and/or introducing easily broken protections that only inconvience people who are actually trying to use the product in seemingly legitimate ways. This behavior leads the populace into a well founded distrust of the new media that they're trying to introduce to prevent "piracy", and leads people into sticking with the old media. So they go to the government to attempt to force their new media into production, but only meet partial success there, since not all policitians can be stupid all the time.
The end result is that the big media companies are still at the mercy of their customer base. And since they're not catering to their desires, their customers abandon them. Might take a long time, but eventually these media companies must die, unless they reform and change their ways.
And that's where "the rubber hits the road", as you put it. Once they realize this (and they really have no long term choice but to realize this), and start giving their customers what they actually want, they'll make money again.
It's a natural selection process. Those companies putting out material with no DRM or lightweight/non-interfering DRM will get more sales. Yes, piracy will continue, but piracy would have continued *anyway*, and lack of DRM doesn't increase the amount of piracy (more to the point, inclusion of DRM doesn't decrease the amount of piracy).
And the Peter Jacksons of the world, wanting to make that Really Swell And Incredibly Expensive Ape Movie, will go to those people who have the cash to allow him to do it. Forget patronage than that new-age hippie crap. At some point, somebody's eventually going to realize that they can increase sales by actually releasing material in a way that doesn't piss off their customers. And it'll work too. And the companies that do that will be the ones that survive.
Because sharing pirated material is, and always will be, a pain in the ass for people who don't know how to do it and have no desire to learn. They expect to buy a disc and stick it in the disc playing machine. And if the disc fits into the slot then they expect it to play. And when it doesn't play because of some anti-piracy crap, they don't blame the pirates. They blame the people who made the crappy disc, because all the other discs they have work great.
Yes, it's long term. Yes, it sucks in the interim. But it's a self-solving problem, IMO.
Geez... All that work to save less than $10 on a domain name? Sounds like a pain in the ass.
I spent a grand total of $2 for my domain. Works great.
If domain names were free...
get free domain names...
Seriously, do you not see the humor inherent between your post and your sig and the contrasts therein?
It's to make people think about what they are buying. If domain names were free, then everyone would register everything and not think about it.
--
get free domain names: http://www.ezyrewards.com/?id=23484
I really wish I had mod points to mark this as funny.
Yes, I'm aware of that thing. I dislike it. Part of the joy of lego is building on the fly. Building according to plans takes most of the fun out of it, IMO.
Why do we have to turn everything in to a time limited, disposable, keep repurchasing nightmare?
Because companies are in for the long haul.
Let's say they take your advice, and build a Mindstorms lineup with the cool electronics bricks on the cheap. Say, $40 for the RIS with just the electronics and mechanical parts. Maybe a couple of add-on sets for more electronics and mechanical gears. Then say they go back to selling the big boxes of bricks again, like they had when I was a kid. You use these to build the models themselves, and the RIS stuff for the movement and such. Mark it all at a reasonable price so that for $100-150, you can get one fantastic set of Legos that will let you build anything you can imagine, as a kid. Nothing huge, but all the joy of Lego plus the learning experience of the Mindstorms gear. Easily done, and they'd make a killer profit. Everybody would get one.
Then next year rolls around, and they go out of business. Those Lego bricks *last*. My sister's kids will be playing with the same bricks I had 30 years previously. As long as you don't lose them to the evils of the vaccum cleaner, they just freakin' last forever.
Lego just has an unusual business. They're into selling timeless toys, but the problem with timeless toys is that they are actually timeless. They sold the big boxes of bricks 30 years ago and it almost killed the company. It's all down to profit, really. They make more money selling those crappy models with all the custom pieces and selling *less* of them than they did by selling the generic bricks on the cheap at a still substantial profit.
Yes, we all want the big buckets of bricks and we all want the electronic coolness that is the Mindstorms line, but the fact is that selling those is not a way to achieve long term profitability. They're not trying to sell to you right now, they're trying to continue selling to you and your kids, and their kids, forever.
Okay, so that sucks, but it does make sense from their point of view.
One thing not seemingly mentioned anywhere is that Lego seems to have the notion building internally of starting up a different market for the older people into Lego. Us old people who still remember the big buckets of bricks can sign up for their catalog. I got one the other day, and yes, you can buy bricks in bulk. Not random sets, but sets of specific brick types, basically by the bag. It's kinda interesting, actually. For the Lego-philes, I recommend looking around their webpage and signing up for the catalog to see what's what there. Yes, the catalog is full of all the Harry Potter and Spiderman crap, but in the center is a nice foldout where you can just buy pieces in bulk. You could amass one hell of a large lego collection for a decent price by buying one bag of everything they have. Or if you have a specific idea, it would be great for making a large model of whatever type you like.
Actually, 4 of those 5 minutes are indeed just staring at 7 of 9's rack.
And when you find an online music store selling MP3's of popular music instead of nothing but indie stuff, you be sure to let us all know, yeah?
For this *particular* story, the story on digg only appeared after it appeared on slashdot.
However, being a long time reader of both digg and Slashdot, I find that links to stories which appear on Slashdot nowadays invariably have appeared on Digg's front page up to 2 days earlier. More, sometimes. Slashdot is not the place to go for up-to-the-minute articles.
My alternative theory is that the majority of Slashdot submissions are now coming from people who found the articles they're submitting from seeing them on digg.
There's only two real choices nowadays: WMA or AAC. Microsoft or Apple. That's pretty much it, really. Each has advantages and disadvantages...
With Microsoft, you have the whole enforced compatibility thing with their "Plays For Sure" initiative.
-Pros: Yes, this stuff does actually work, and fairly well at that. There's a few minor functional problems, but they're really minor. The integration with Media Center PC's is nice, as is the complete XBox integration if you have one of those. As long as you stick to Microsoft products, and Plays For Sure compatible player devices, you won't have any problems.
-Cons: You cannot use anything that isn't Plays For Sure compatible, not with the online stores or subscription services. Want to play those Napster downloaded songs on an iPod? No dice. Microsoft is very vocal about blaming Apple, but the fault is not Apple's, it's Microsoft's *incredibly* restrictive Janus DRM licensing. Not only would Apple have to implement WMA, but they'd have to implement a secure methodology such that the files cannot be copied back off the the player *at all*, and an expiration methodology such that if you failed to sync the player to the computer for a time period, the files would expire and/or delete themselves. Apple's not willing to go there, and frankly the hardware design of the iPod precludes some of that capability anyway. Oh, and Microsoft's DRM has yet to be cracked in a good way/
Or you can bite into the Apple for your music. They have the iTunes Music Store and the most popular music player devices.
-Pros: High quality AAC music support (AAC is much better than WMA, anyway). A pretty lightweight DRM that's easy to work with and somewhat easy to work around if needed. MPEG 4 support becoming very standardized. Apple is (mostly) sticking to open standards, basically, which is always nice.
-Cons: Drink the Apple cool-aid only. iTunes works with iPod's, but not with anything else. iPod's do have lots of other support though, from Real and many free and/or pay programs. Even the XBox 360 will support them, in a sense. You also pay the Apple tax, as everything Apple is a bit pricier than the competition. But this stuff is popular for a reason, you know.
In the long run, it seems more likely to me that Apple will win this war. They've been awfully stingy with licensing their FairPlay DRM, making it difficult for vendors to add support for iTunes Purchased Music, but that hasn't stopped them from being the only music store to show a profit. The subscription model (ala Napster) doesn't seem to be picking up a lot of adherents in the long term. People bought CD's at stores and didn't much like CD clubs either. Same principle, really. Not to mention that the evilness of the Microsoft Janus DRM is readily appearant if you make the mistake of buying into it and using it for a while. And vendors seem to be falling all over themselves to add iPod and iTunes support to their gear, even if they can't play iTMS purchased music. MPEG 4 is also the wave of the future, as the standard becomes better defined. Divx and Xvid and other variants will eventually fall off the map, as Apple has a fairly solid base system going there, and everybody is going to be rushing to be compatible with it. I expect a device more dedicated to video than the iPod Video is to be introduced by Apple within a year. Maybe they'll partner with Sony for video support on the PSP. Dunno.
But WMA is dying a slow death, and with the death of Microsoft and Blu-Ray, they're being left behind, really. WMA might be the format used on the next new disc format somehow, or Microsoft might have a hand in it, but Apple is getting into the digital distribution business over the internet in a big way and ignoring the business of data on physical medium. Apple's moves seem smarter to me.
Oh yeah, there's also the Sony option, where you buy nothing but Sony equipment because all Sony's stuff *only* works with other Sony equipment, but frankly that option has no pros to speak of, so it's just best avoided.
Intelligent Design is the idea that God manipulated and brought upon evolution.
See, this is one of the major problems with Intelligent Design. Nobody seems to know just what the fuck it actually is.
For the record, the idea of intelligent design is that the design of biology is too complex to have evolved into that state. That some higher power designed it instead of evolution.
But ID doesn't say that this higher power guided evolution! No, Intelligent Design rejects evolution entirely, albeit not in so many words. Because if you have evolution but then take away natural selection (in favor of "intelligent") and random mutation (in favor of "design"), then you no longer really have evolution, do you?
the memory equipped with LCDs
:)
I actually picked up a pair of these when I bought my latest machine's parts. I didn't buy it because the memory was any better, I bought it for the geek factor of having a couple of LED displays on which I could put whatever I liked. And I still like it. It's nice to be able to glance at the box to see the temperature the unit is running at. It's fun to watch it go from 95 to 130 when I'm playing some major 3d game. And it was only $30 more than the cheap stuff.
Yes, if you pay list price, you're paying too much. So don't pay list.
There's no confusion.
My point was that it's not a CD, but this is not because it "uses technical means of copy protection" but because it falls outside the spec.
A normal Blue Book CD with software on the data session that prevents ripping would be a CD and would also be using "technical means of copy protection".
Anything which uses technical means of copy protection is not a CD.
Not entirely true. While you're correct that this is "not a CD", it's not because it installs malware onto your computer. Previous copy protection schemes did that. Anything bypassed by disabling autorun or holding down the Shift key falls into that category.
But those *are* CD's. Why? Because Red Book isn't the only standard out there. Specifically, those can fall into the Blue Book standard, also known as "CD Extra" or "Enhanced CD". Basically it's normal Red Book audio on the first session, and a second data session that only computers see. What's on that data session is irrelevant to whether it's a CD or not.
Now, in the case of Sony's new licensed malware product, yes, the CD contains malware using rootkit like methodologies, however it is also know to contain a bad/malformed Table of Contents (TOC) in order to break ripping software even if you have prevented the software from installing. This can be bypassed with some software (like CDEx), and appearantly Mac's have no problem ignoring the bad TOC anyway, but this malformed TOC is what makes it "not a CD" in Philips eyes.
Agreed, but those laws that you point to are part of the US Code. And that is trumped by the US Constitution, which specifically protects free speech. Courts have long held that parody, and very specifically political satire, falls under free speech considerations.
So you can pass all the laws you like, but higher laws take precedence. To use a very similar example, Flag Burning is illegal too, under the very same chapter of code that you yourself pointed out. And yet flag burning as a political protest is currently considered protected speech.