All that together, I can assure you that the EU will never have a great military power.
I suspect different EU nations have different views on this. I imagine (e.g.) the Baltic States might love to be represented in the EU army that we all know will exist within 15 years.
This is nothing but a marketing ploy and it goes against the conventional wisdom that if a consumer is paying for something, he or she should not have to endure commercials on top of it.
Um.
I pay for cable TV and it has adverts on it.
I pay for newspapers, and they have adverts in them.
I pay to travel on the tube, and there are adverts down there.
I pay to go to the cinema, and there are adverts on the walls, and before the film.
If I were to buy some breakfast ceral it would most likely carry advertising for a current film.
If I were to buy a new synth it'd probably have its manufacturer's name on the back, advertising its manufacturer to everyone who could see me playing it.
... and so forth.
I don't think you can really say that what you cite is conventional wisdom. It sounds rather more like a personal value judgment. Which is fair enough, but in America it seems the only value judgment that matters is whether the consumer judges a product to be worth, on balance, the asking price.
Well, did you expect Lindows Inc. to say "well, we could try to sell our product, but Debian's better and free, so let's try to get people to use that instead"?
If you had an Amiga, they only shrunk to 1.76Mb. Assuming of course your Amiga had an HD drive, which more or less none of them did. Otherwise your 2Mb floppy formatted down to 880Kb. Well hurrah.
Maybe, but that doesn't mean the net must inevitably become a corporate playground. Look at Google, or Y! Mail, or The Onion, or Slashdot itself. I don't pay a penny for any of these sites, yet I find them all perfectly accessible, and their revenue-raising methods don't intrude on my user experience at all. And that's what people like; so, ceteris paribus, that's the way things are headed.
It does look very interesting. For those with poor eyesight, there's a great quote even on the sample screenshot on that page. It says:
"The goal is not to win the customer over with Microsoft's TCO benefits, but to neutralize the cost issue and move the discussion to other areas such as platform capabilities and business problems Microsoft can solve."
In other words, if the customer brings up TCO, well, MS doesn't want them to think about that.
They ought to figure out that 1000 times the sales at one tenth of the price is still 100 times the revenue, or something in that order.
Isn't it more like a tenth of the sales at 100x the profit margin? Selling over the Internet isn't guaranteed to increase sales, but (as you yourself point out) it is guaranteed to slash distribution costs.
I assume in this case it also requires licensees to ensure that no material is being shared that is subject to copyright control.
I think the licence in question is precisely a licence to distribute copyrighted works. If it were just a licence to participate in a P2P network then this would have a severe impact on legitimate networking, without making it any easier to prevent copyright violation (which is already illegal).
I can't find the text of this law online, and if I could I doubt I could penetrate it, since it's 342 pages long.
But if the people who put it together have any sense at all, I imagine they'll have put in a clause saying something like "without a government licence" or "without a legitimate and verifiable business interest."
If they didn't then it seems to me that all that's needed is for one good police chief (there must be one in the US, nu?) to arrest the CEO of Texaco. I imagine matters would be clarified pretty sharply.
Of course, sadly this still doesn't fix the wider problem, which is that GWB is turning the US into a belligerent, imperialist police state.
Just as an aside, do you know why the British prisoners, held at Guantanamo Bay without charge or representation for more than 18 months, haven't been brought back to the UK to stand trial? It's because there's no admissible evidence against them. And, to quote No. 10: "it could be embarrassing if they were released on their return after the US had branded them as major players in a terrorist network." Sample source: Yahoo! News
Anybody spot anything scary about that? Because I sure as hell do.
Sadly not true. They've configured FormMail (sensibly enough) to reject recipients outside of their company. You can still use the form to spam ATA Connect, but that's not a particularly surprising discovery given that it is, after all, a contact form...:)
J'ai bien cherche en francais; mais, sans savoir comment cela se traduisait en francais, je n'ai pas eu aucune succes. Maintenant je l'ai trouve (mais pas au site SNCF). Merci.:)
If given an honest chance, it would likely have grabbed a sustainable niche, like the MacOS.
In fact, given that it came out several years before Mac OS X and ran on cheap commodity hardware that could also boot into Windows for games etc., it could have supplanted the Mac entirely. *sigh*
Well, you know what the canonical answer to that is - once you've paid they should let you download the MP3s straight from a central server. Then you can burn them onto your own CD, or upload them straight to your MP3 player, or whatever.
It's not as if no one's ever thought of this before.
Let not thy marketing department send out press releases in order to make thy people think thou art a generous individual when instead thou art trying to maximise thine user base and profits for such actions render thee no better than the rulers of Sco who long ago wedged thine heads up thine arses and tried to rob the righteous penguinistas and thine own shareholders.
Captain Nitpick writes:
Nicely done, except that "thine" means "yours" (or it can mean "your" before a vowel, as in "thine user base"); so I'm guessing that in the bit about SCO you probably want to be using "their" instead of "thine" throughout.
That would be fantastic! - but not only are CD-RWs many times as expensive as normal CDs (and it would additionally cost more to get them duplicated in bulk, since you couldn't use an ordinary CD pressing plant), they're also about a billionth as sturdy as a professionally pressed CD, so there'd be a vastly increased risk of them being ruined in distribution.
Slashdot Mirror
All that together, I can assure you that the EU will never have a great military power.
I suspect different EU nations have different views on this. I imagine (e.g.) the Baltic States might love to be represented in the EU army that we all know will exist within 15 years.
Um.
I don't think you can really say that what you cite is conventional wisdom. It sounds rather more like a personal value judgment. Which is fair enough, but in America it seems the only value judgment that matters is whether the consumer judges a product to be worth, on balance, the asking price.
It's Lindows for god sakes.
Well, did you expect Lindows Inc. to say "well, we could try to sell our product, but Debian's better and free, so let's try to get people to use that instead"?
And it's a great defence against any attempt by MS (or similar) to claim that these guys are encouraging the use of pirate copies of Windows.
If you had an Amiga, they only shrunk to 1.76Mb. Assuming of course your Amiga had an HD drive, which more or less none of them did. Otherwise your 2Mb floppy formatted down to 880Kb. Well hurrah.
all people does not include citizens of the United States
God, everyone's[*] getting in on the action now!
[*] Everyone means yanestra. Actual formatted capacity will be less.
The days of free Internet goodies are OVER.
Maybe, but that doesn't mean the net must inevitably become a corporate playground. Look at Google, or Y! Mail, or The Onion, or Slashdot itself. I don't pay a penny for any of these sites, yet I find them all perfectly accessible, and their revenue-raising methods don't intrude on my user experience at all. And that's what people like; so, ceteris paribus, that's the way things are headed.
Stupid troll.
I don't want to see Kim Jong-Il nuke Washington DC, but I can absolutely promise you I'm not pro-Bush.
It does look very interesting. For those with poor eyesight, there's a great quote even on the sample screenshot on that page. It says:
"The goal is not to win the customer over with Microsoft's TCO benefits, but to neutralize the cost issue and move the discussion to other areas such as platform capabilities and business problems Microsoft can solve."
In other words, if the customer brings up TCO, well, MS doesn't want them to think about that.
I use P2P so I can print to Kere's LaserJet 6L.
They ought to figure out that 1000 times the sales at one tenth of the price is still 100 times the revenue, or something in that order.
Isn't it more like a tenth of the sales at 100x the profit margin? Selling over the Internet isn't guaranteed to increase sales, but (as you yourself point out) it is guaranteed to slash distribution costs.
I assume in this case it also requires licensees to ensure that no material is being shared that is subject to copyright control.
I think the licence in question is precisely a licence to distribute copyrighted works. If it were just a licence to participate in a P2P network then this would have a severe impact on legitimate networking, without making it any easier to prevent copyright violation (which is already illegal).
I can't find the text of this law online, and if I could I doubt I could penetrate it, since it's 342 pages long.
But if the people who put it together have any sense at all, I imagine they'll have put in a clause saying something like "without a government licence" or "without a legitimate and verifiable business interest."
If they didn't then it seems to me that all that's needed is for one good police chief (there must be one in the US, nu?) to arrest the CEO of Texaco. I imagine matters would be clarified pretty sharply.
Of course, sadly this still doesn't fix the wider problem, which is that GWB is turning the US into a belligerent, imperialist police state.
Just as an aside, do you know why the British prisoners, held at Guantanamo Bay without charge or representation for more than 18 months, haven't been brought back to the UK to stand trial? It's because there's no admissible evidence against them. And, to quote No. 10: "it could be embarrassing if they were released on their return after the US had branded them as major players in a terrorist network." Sample source: Yahoo! News
Anybody spot anything scary about that? Because I sure as hell do.
Sadly not true. They've configured FormMail (sensibly enough) to reject recipients outside of their company. You can still use the form to spam ATA Connect, but that's not a particularly surprising discovery given that it is, after all, a contact form... :)
J'ai bien cherche en francais; mais, sans savoir comment cela se traduisait en francais, je n'ai pas eu aucune succes. Maintenant je l'ai trouve (mais pas au site SNCF). Merci. :)
I like the sig, but I couldn't find a reference to it anywhere?
BTW, "ESR" is a slashdot invention -- he never calls himself ESR
What, never?
Jeez!
I thought C-pound was roughtly equivalant to Java, not J2EE.
Just FYI, C# is pronounced "see sharp".
As an aside, why do some people say "pound" to refer to "#"? It doesn't look much like a pound sign to me.
"Other countries"!?? Shyeah, right!
... although it'll be interesting to see who polices that.
If given an honest chance, it would likely have grabbed a sustainable niche, like the MacOS.
In fact, given that it came out several years before Mac OS X and ran on cheap commodity hardware that could also boot into Windows for games etc., it could have supplanted the Mac entirely. *sigh*
Well, you know what the canonical answer to that is - once you've paid they should let you download the MP3s straight from a central server. Then you can burn them onto your own CD, or upload them straight to your MP3 player, or whatever.
It's not as if no one's ever thought of this before.
Let not thy marketing department send out press releases in order to make thy people think thou art a generous individual when instead thou art trying to maximise thine user base and profits for such actions render thee no better than the rulers of Sco who long ago wedged thine heads up thine arses and tried to rob the righteous penguinistas and thine own shareholders.
Captain Nitpick writes:
Nicely done, except that "thine" means "yours" (or it can mean "your" before a vowel, as in "thine user base"); so I'm guessing that in the bit about SCO you probably want to be using "their" instead of "thine" throughout.
And they said an English degree was useless.
That would be fantastic! - but not only are CD-RWs many times as expensive as normal CDs (and it would additionally cost more to get them duplicated in bulk, since you couldn't use an ordinary CD pressing plant), they're also about a billionth as sturdy as a professionally pressed CD, so there'd be a vastly increased risk of them being ruined in distribution.
So in all, I'm afraid I don't see it happening.