What difference does it make? Even if people boycott them and stop watching their films, they'll still blame piracy and lobby for a law that makes everyone pay them a tax!
That's not a very good proof, I don't think. By reading the first and last couple of characters of each word and measuring their relative lengths, I seem to read that without any trouble at all. A better test would be to remove the whitespace:
Who said you can't make money from open hardware? Of course you can, just like with open source you need to focus on the scarcities. The article itself talks about Kickstarter -- which is money in the bank before you even have a proper product to sell! Think about that, financially it doesn't get any better than that for inventors (unless they are working for a company, in which case they still won't own the invention at the end).
And inventors can keep on making money off their open work. Perhaps they aren't selling the design, but they can still sell people the convenience of buying the appropriate parts to build the device. For example: http://buildyourcnc.com/default.aspx
Mad scientist Alan "Mhz" Turing invents an intelligent robot that transforms into a flying car, which he uses to embark on a great journey into space where he will find true love with an alien prince (cue for love scene on front of spaceship) and, of course, get the idea for the first desktop computer. When he returns to Earth, he builds a prototype for his new invention, which surprisingly turns out to be a modern Mac (because in Hollywood all computers are Macs), however his contemporaries find out about his love with the alien, which forces him to abandon the Mac and travel back into space where he lives happily ever after as the queen of an alien planet. THE END. If this does well at the box office, expect a sequel in a couple of years.
How did all those working middle-class people suddenly end up without money? Surely, there's more to the 9% unemployment than "people are lazy". Surely, the CDO fraud that made the bankers filthy rich may be connected to their homes being foreclosed (the same bankers who got bailed out once the shit hit the fan). Surely, they have a point about the government taking too much corporate money, causing them to make bad decisions on behalf of the people.
Don't dismiss their worries because you don't like their whining or because you don't like some guy on some forum on the internet.
I'm pretty sure OWS is specifically protesting government corruption, eg. things like both the mainstream parties taking unlimited campaign donations from corporations, which is what led us down this unregulated CDO trading path, the economic implosion and then had us use taxpayer money to bail out the people who were profiting off the CDO trading (and now the bank CEOs are taking multi-million bonuses instead of going to jail, when others are having their homes foreclosed). Other things I've heard are suggestions to audit the FED and find out where the secret bailouts have gone, and even suggestions to completely put an end to the FED and their printing presses.
As far as I've seen, corporate TV networks have been representing these people as "crazy, smelly hippies" who want to end capitalism and are "the Democrats' answer to the Tea Party", but from paying attention to YouTube and social media, those reports just aren't accurate -- the TV networks are choosing the craziest, least eloquent people around and presenting them like the true voice of the movement. In fact, it's the corporate media's lack of coverage and inaccurate reports that got me interested in the first place...
Throughout history, the middle class was meant to be a barrier of protection between the lower and upper classes. As long as the middle class was large and powerful, the lower and upper classes were smaller and apart from each other. Nowadays, the upper class have been growing exponentially in wealth and power, while the middle class is being pushed downwards into near-poverty. The 19% is what's left of the middle class and they are fading away as we speak, as their wealth is being transferred upwards to the "aristocracy" that has access to the legislators and is gaming the system. It's quite clear that the longer this goes on, the more wretched people's lives will become, and to be honest I don't think there's anyone here on/. who isn't already the "99%".
If "some" means looking at just the "1%" of the stories you being are spoon-fed by the media and ignoring the "99%", then I guess we're taking about the same "some".;)
Have you seen the tumblr blog that started all this? It's not just students on there, and if you watch anything but Faux news you'd know by now they are a VERY diverse group.
This. It appears these protesters realised that if they put forward specific goals, those goals can be easily misrepresented and the movement co-opted by their enemies -- just like what happened to the Tea Party. I think they are doing a great job, and I hope they manage to stay a grassroots movement against government corruption by corporate money.
Instead of pursuing money from just one rich person like in the past when wealth was mainly concentrated in the coffers of kings and the people they liked, today you can crowdfund using smaller donations from several people.
I haven't exactly been caring about what they've been up to, but afaik they been selling all sorts of assets and firing swathes of employees to stay profitable... and their brilliant CEO was taking $50 million salary a year... while completely eviscerating whatever was left of the company.
As analog is getting replaced by digital the absolute sizes of the profit margins on copies get smaller, and for good reasons. Clever purveyors of Bits are starting to go for volume over price, while the stubborn ones whine about piracy as they go down the drain. Historians call that "progress", economists call it "the free market", the stubborn ones call it "piracy is killing us, make laws to protect us!!!!".
If what you say were true the industries in question wouldn't be having record breaking profits every year for the past several years. Netflix, Hulu, Spotify and similar services would never have gotten off the ground. iTunes wouldn't be selling mp3s if people weren't willing to "throw a buck at the creator" -- where "creator" is used very loosely in this particular context -- and movie studio bosses wouldn't be complaining about how BIG iTunes has gotten if people didn't want to pay for its services. You wouldn't have studies showing that pirates spend more on entertainment than the average person (which makes sense, because they are the ones who actually spend more time on entertainment). The "piracy is killing X" line has been repeated enough times in the past century and every time it turned out to be a big lie, please stop repeating it already.
How nice, you posted a few select bits and pieces where they SAY the 1st Amendment is important, but didn't post the bits and pieces where they say the 1st Amendment sucks and should only be applied half of the time. Did you miss these parts:
[Freedom of speech] should be treated not as a right but as a privilege -- a special
entitlement granted by the state on a conditional basis that can be revoked
if it is ever abused or maltreated.
In the case of cyberbullying, the perceived protections of free speech are
exactly what enable harmful speech and cruel behavior on the internet. it is
the notion that people can post anything they want, regardless of the harm
it might cause another person that has perpetuated, if not created, this
cyberbullying culture. but "hate speech" that causes material harm to
children should have consequences.
In summary, although speech is generally protected under the first
amendment, there are instances in which restrictions are warranted.
Quick! Save the children from the hate speech!! Freedom of Speech will not be abridged except when it will be.
Slashdot Mirror
What difference does it make? Even if people boycott them and stop watching their films, they'll still blame piracy and lobby for a law that makes everyone pay them a tax!
What about DRM?
That's not a very good proof, I don't think. By reading the first and last couple of characters of each word and measuring their relative lengths, I seem to read that without any trouble at all. A better test would be to remove the whitespace:
oRthISSeConDseNTeNcEwHiChyOUPrObaBLydoNTreCOgNiZethEShaPeoF?
Or even to insert wrong spacing:
oRth ISSe ConDseNTeNc Ew HiChy OUP rObaBL ydoNTreCO gNiZe thEShaP eoF?
Who said you can't make money from open hardware? Of course you can, just like with open source you need to focus on the scarcities. The article itself talks about Kickstarter -- which is money in the bank before you even have a proper product to sell! Think about that, financially it doesn't get any better than that for inventors (unless they are working for a company, in which case they still won't own the invention at the end).
And inventors can keep on making money off their open work. Perhaps they aren't selling the design, but they can still sell people the convenience of buying the appropriate parts to build the device. For example: http://buildyourcnc.com/default.aspx
Mad scientist Alan "Mhz" Turing invents an intelligent robot that transforms into a flying car, which he uses to embark on a great journey into space where he will find true love with an alien prince (cue for love scene on front of spaceship) and, of course, get the idea for the first desktop computer. When he returns to Earth, he builds a prototype for his new invention, which surprisingly turns out to be a modern Mac (because in Hollywood all computers are Macs), however his contemporaries find out about his love with the alien, which forces him to abandon the Mac and travel back into space where he lives happily ever after as the queen of an alien planet. THE END. If this does well at the box office, expect a sequel in a couple of years.
Eh, no. IBM has discontinued Symphony and handed all the assets to Apache.
How did all those working middle-class people suddenly end up without money? Surely, there's more to the 9% unemployment than "people are lazy". Surely, the CDO fraud that made the bankers filthy rich may be connected to their homes being foreclosed (the same bankers who got bailed out once the shit hit the fan). Surely, they have a point about the government taking too much corporate money, causing them to make bad decisions on behalf of the people.
Don't dismiss their worries because you don't like their whining or because you don't like some guy on some forum on the internet.
I'm pretty sure OWS is specifically protesting government corruption, eg. things like both the mainstream parties taking unlimited campaign donations from corporations, which is what led us down this unregulated CDO trading path, the economic implosion and then had us use taxpayer money to bail out the people who were profiting off the CDO trading (and now the bank CEOs are taking multi-million bonuses instead of going to jail, when others are having their homes foreclosed). Other things I've heard are suggestions to audit the FED and find out where the secret bailouts have gone, and even suggestions to completely put an end to the FED and their printing presses.
As far as I've seen, corporate TV networks have been representing these people as "crazy, smelly hippies" who want to end capitalism and are "the Democrats' answer to the Tea Party", but from paying attention to YouTube and social media, those reports just aren't accurate -- the TV networks are choosing the craziest, least eloquent people around and presenting them like the true voice of the movement. In fact, it's the corporate media's lack of coverage and inaccurate reports that got me interested in the first place...
Throughout history, the middle class was meant to be a barrier of protection between the lower and upper classes. As long as the middle class was large and powerful, the lower and upper classes were smaller and apart from each other. Nowadays, the upper class have been growing exponentially in wealth and power, while the middle class is being pushed downwards into near-poverty. The 19% is what's left of the middle class and they are fading away as we speak, as their wealth is being transferred upwards to the "aristocracy" that has access to the legislators and is gaming the system. It's quite clear that the longer this goes on, the more wretched people's lives will become, and to be honest I don't think there's anyone here on /. who isn't already the "99%".
Watch this rant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQow0Fhua1A
If "some" means looking at just the "1%" of the stories you being are spoon-fed by the media and ignoring the "99%", then I guess we're taking about the same "some". ;)
Maybe... The kind of regulation I'm talking about "doesn't exist". Ask Wikileaks.
Have you seen the tumblr blog that started all this? It's not just students on there, and if you watch anything but Faux news you'd know by now they are a VERY diverse group.
This. It appears these protesters realised that if they put forward specific goals, those goals can be easily misrepresented and the movement co-opted by their enemies -- just like what happened to the Tea Party. I think they are doing a great job, and I hope they manage to stay a grassroots movement against government corruption by corporate money.
More like "I'm done paying for your BMWs, I can't even afford food anymore!".
In other words... the problem is that industry regulates the government.
Instead of pursuing money from just one rich person like in the past when wealth was mainly concentrated in the coffers of kings and the people they liked, today you can crowdfund using smaller donations from several people.
I haven't exactly been caring about what they've been up to, but afaik they been selling all sorts of assets and firing swathes of employees to stay profitable... and their brilliant CEO was taking $50 million salary a year... while completely eviscerating whatever was left of the company.
Of course, but that's just the point that NOTHING would justify 1B/movie production cost.
As analog is getting replaced by digital the absolute sizes of the profit margins on copies get smaller, and for good reasons. Clever purveyors of Bits are starting to go for volume over price, while the stubborn ones whine about piracy as they go down the drain. Historians call that "progress", economists call it "the free market", the stubborn ones call it "piracy is killing us, make laws to protect us!!!!".
If what you say were true the industries in question wouldn't be having record breaking profits every year for the past several years. Netflix, Hulu, Spotify and similar services would never have gotten off the ground. iTunes wouldn't be selling mp3s if people weren't willing to "throw a buck at the creator" -- where "creator" is used very loosely in this particular context -- and movie studio bosses wouldn't be complaining about how BIG iTunes has gotten if people didn't want to pay for its services. You wouldn't have studies showing that pirates spend more on entertainment than the average person (which makes sense, because they are the ones who actually spend more time on entertainment). The "piracy is killing X" line has been repeated enough times in the past century and every time it turned out to be a big lie, please stop repeating it already.
Don't be sad everybody! Mr Jobs is not dead, he's just moved on to a higher plane of existence. Now he can be downloaded as an app.
I don't even want to speculate.
(and if he floats, he's a witch)
[Freedom of speech] should be treated not as a right but as a privilege -- a special entitlement granted by the state on a conditional basis that can be revoked if it is ever abused or maltreated.
In the case of cyberbullying, the perceived protections of free speech are exactly what enable harmful speech and cruel behavior on the internet. it is the notion that people can post anything they want, regardless of the harm it might cause another person that has perpetuated, if not created, this cyberbullying culture. but "hate speech" that causes material harm to children should have consequences.
In summary, although speech is generally protected under the first amendment, there are instances in which restrictions are warranted.
Quick! Save the children from the hate speech!! Freedom of Speech will not be abridged except when it will be.