If they priced the PS3 at a point where they'd make a profit they'd be selling even fewer of them.
To paraphrase another great strategist, "You don't enter a console war with the hardware you want. You enter a console war with the hardware you have."
If Sony had lowered their sights a little when designing the PS3, there's no reason why they shouldn't have been able to create a profitable console that could sell for $400 or less. But no, they decided they NEEDED a Cell processor, and they NEEDED a Blu-Ray drive, and thus they ended up with a console that they can't even sellout at a loss.
The goal of RIAA is to distribute music at a price to the consumer.
No, that's the goal of the RIAA-member record companies.
The RIAA's original goal was to establish and enforce technical interoperability standards that would ensure that an album released by any label would play back accurately on any make of record player. Ironically, the RIAA's current efforts are very much the opposite of that original charter.
But it seems like every attempt at improving the accuracy or consistency of ESRB ratings is met with derision and anger.
This is in part due to disagreement of whether there's anything currently WRONG with the accuracy or consistency of the ESRB ratings system. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" -- and no, the Hot Coffee Mod incident does not show anything is broken beyond some developers' processes for keeping unused code out of a production codebase.
- Allow ESRB raters to choose the spots of the game they will examine. No auditor comes in and says, "show me what you think I should see."
It's a nice idea, but I don't think it's very feasible. Publishers already have a strong motivator to show the raters the actual "worst" parts of the game when requested to, in the form of big fines if they try to keep the naughty parts a secret until the game is out the door.
Basically if someone looses money by an honest mistake there is a legal obligation to return the money.
Yes, but the wronged party does not have the right to take the money or goods from the other party without permission.
Amazon is legally in their right to ask their customers for voluntary restitution, to place holds on their Amazon accounts until the matter is resolved, or even to file suit against the customer. What they cannot do is place an unauthorized charge on the customer's credit card.
In your world, there is no honor system. You'd sneer and leave the resaurant without paying what you owe. You'd pat yourself on the back while the restaurant owner struggles to pay his workers and keep the doors open.
Also the restaurant is a place that cooks and serves babies. If you're going to paint a ridiculously dark scenario, you have to go All The Way, man.
If I'm at a restaurant and the check arrives with some of the items I ordered absent from that total, I am probably going to assume that the waiter comped them to me, and leave a generous tip. No sneering involved.
I put it to you that if a restaurant ever went out of business because of food that was served but never paid for, the restaurant shoulders at least part of the blame for employing a waitstaff that can't keep track of an order properly. But it would have to be quite an epidemic problem for that kind of thing to happen.
I have full HD over component. My system looks beautiful. Ergo, analog doesn't give you a poor image, there's nothing inherent in it that prevents a good picture.
Well, you sure told us with your lone anecdotal data point.
Computer display data starts out in the digital domain. An LCD panel requires digital signals to generate an image. There's NO GOOD REASON to convert that signal from digital to analog to digital in between -- there WILL be degradation, however slight.
The keys will be revoked (which really means that future discs will not include support for the compromised device keys
So that means that the list of acceptable device keys is stored somewhere on every movie disc. And that means to validate the media-device combination, the player needs to compare its own device key against those on disk.
All the crackers need to do is figure out which bit of code performs this comparison, hex-edit it to always give an 'OK' return value, and the protection is broken forever.
"Abstract" and "extract" are not interchangeable terms.
An abstract is a meta-description of a document, giving an overview of its content but usually not using any of the document content itself. An extract, on the other hand, is a literal subset of the document.
if the rightsholders doesn't want people/robots to access their "jewels" then maybe they shouldn't fucking publish them on a public net in the first place?
When they publish their work on a public net, that does not by any stretch mean they are relinquishing copyright to the work.
Worth downloading alone for the ingenious way they make you hold the keyboard as a makeshift Guitar Hero controller.
I'm looking down at my own keyboard right now, and HP has taken it upon themselves to add a tall row of "multimedia" keys above the Function keys. Attempting to play Frets of Fire on this thing would give me carpal tunnel.
I guess one could buy a $20 no-frills keyboard to use as a dedicated FoF controller, maybe even paint the keycaps the appropriate colors. But once you've gone that far, why not just spring for an authentic Red Octane controller and a PS2-USB adapter?
If Microsoft never made anything people wanted to buy, well... no one would have bought it.
What was the last boxed retail Microsoft software you bought? For me I think it was MS-DOS 6.22. Everything since has come pre-installed on a new computer when I purchased it. It's not so much that I chose to buy it, as I didn't choose not to buy it.
Not a bad distribution channel to have, if you can get it.
Consider the claw hammer: it can drive nails, and remove them (and act as a wrecking bar in a pinch). It does both of these things fairly well, even though it will never be a saw.
Consider on the other hand a Swiss Army Knife or Leatherman multitool. It's not going to be as good a knife/screwdriver/pliers/wire stripper as a tool dedicated to just a single purpose, but there's ENORMOUS value in only having to put one little thing in your pocket instead of carrying a whole toolchest around.
But the original 10 Gig ipod was around $700 and it didn't have much problem selling.
It also didn't have an earlier iPod version before it with more capacity and a lower cost.
Currently, an 80GB HDD-based iPod is $350. I can't possibly imagine a 64GB Flash-based iPod going for less than $500. Why should I pay more for the ability to store less content?
As long as you're asking questions like this, why don't you ask how targeting the 1% of people who can afford a Mercedes with a Mercedes benefits those who can't?
In the automobile market, if only 1% of consumers can afford a luxury car, then only 1% of the cars produced will be luxury models.
The situation we have right now in the console game industry is something like 5% of gamers are currently 1080p-capable, but 40% of the games being published targeting that tiny segment of the market (all numbers courtesy of My Ass, but I'd guess the margin of error is under 30%). It doesn't make economic sense.
the meteorologists all insisted that the hurricane would make a complete 180 degree turn and head back east and smack into Florida. I didn't believe them. I ate a lot of canned food that week.
And learned a valuable lesson about the relative merits of the consensus opinion of many scientists using multi-million dollar supercomputers, and one layperson's hunch.
The reason they weren't sure is that when the policy was written, Tor didn't exist yet.
Maybe not, but surely anon.penet.fi had existed by then. It's not as though the concept of an Internet anonymization service could not have been predicted.
In a better world than this one, copyright holders would have to pay a fee and register their works.
But that would mean we currently ARE in a better world than this one, which is a paradox. DOES NOT COMPUTE
While copyright is implicitly granted to the creator of a work immediately upon its creation, anyone who is going to have a need to actually enforce their copyright is going to register their creation with the Copyright Office.
The problem, obviously, is that the term of copyright automatically extends for far too long. And all because Disney has somehow convinced our representatives that society would crumble if "Steamboat Willie" fell into the public domain and anybody could throw it on a DVD and sell it for a dollar.
From another perspective, Gates is saying that current market rates are ~100k. This is about right for mid-level software engineers with 2-4 years of experience, in that area.
Only if he's putting in 70-80 hours per week!
I work in one of the highest-salaried markets in the US, and nobody I know in the tech sector is making six figures unless they're in management, have 10+ years of experience relevant to the position, or both. I doubt the situation is much different anywhere else.
It's more like hanging around on street corners intentionally taking something that looks like money for something that looks like drugs
Not really. Nobody has seen that one of the things being exchanged looks like money, or that the other looks like drugs, or even that any exchange has even taken place. All that's been observed is a guy hanging out on a street corner that has a reputation as a dealer hangout.
It would be more akin to walking around Washington Square Park asking "Smoke? Smoke?" and then if someone inquires about buying some drugs from you, you walk away silently.
But if you're connected to a torrent for movies, games, music etc...well, they can't tell how much you've uploaded or downloaded, can they?
Exactly right. They have no evidence to support the idea that you've actually violated copyright law by uploading a single byte of a copyrighted work. And for the copyright holder to allege that they know you have, in court or in a DMCA takedown request, is unacceptable.
I mean, if you're seen hanging around with drug dealers and talking to them in places where they tend to deal drugs, isn't it fairly safe to assume you're trying to buy drugs?
It's a reasonable assumption, and it may give the police cause to put you under surveillance and try and catch you in the act. But they can't handcuff you just for chatting with someone who is a drug dealer about the weather (not if they want to get a conviction).
Outside of this application, [...] how many other people connect to torrents only not to (attempt to) download/upload what's on them?
It looks like the woman is using some of the same techniques shady businesses use to make before/after photos look different, but in reverse.
I'm guessing just about every practicing plastic surgeon, including the one involved in this case, uses those same techniques to some extent in their advertising. Is turnabout fair play?
Slashdot Mirror
If they priced the PS3 at a point where they'd make a profit they'd be selling even fewer of them.
To paraphrase another great strategist, "You don't enter a console war with the hardware you want. You enter a console war with the hardware you have."
If Sony had lowered their sights a little when designing the PS3, there's no reason why they shouldn't have been able to create a profitable console that could sell for $400 or less. But no, they decided they NEEDED a Cell processor, and they NEEDED a Blu-Ray drive, and thus they ended up with a console that they can't even sellout at a loss.
The goal of RIAA is to distribute music at a price to the consumer.
No, that's the goal of the RIAA-member record companies.
The RIAA's original goal was to establish and enforce technical interoperability standards that would ensure that an album released by any label would play back accurately on any make of record player. Ironically, the RIAA's current efforts are very much the opposite of that original charter.
But it seems like every attempt at improving the accuracy or consistency of ESRB ratings is met with derision and anger.
This is in part due to disagreement of whether there's anything currently WRONG with the accuracy or consistency of the ESRB ratings system. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" -- and no, the Hot Coffee Mod incident does not show anything is broken beyond some developers' processes for keeping unused code out of a production codebase.
- Allow ESRB raters to choose the spots of the game they will examine. No auditor comes in and says, "show me what you think I should see."
It's a nice idea, but I don't think it's very feasible. Publishers already have a strong motivator to show the raters the actual "worst" parts of the game when requested to, in the form of big fines if they try to keep the naughty parts a secret until the game is out the door.
Basically if someone looses money by an honest mistake there is a legal obligation to return the money.
Yes, but the wronged party does not have the right to take the money or goods from the other party without permission.
Amazon is legally in their right to ask their customers for voluntary restitution, to place holds on their Amazon accounts until the matter is resolved, or even to file suit against the customer. What they cannot do is place an unauthorized charge on the customer's credit card.
In your world, there is no honor system. You'd sneer and leave the resaurant without paying what you owe. You'd pat yourself on the back while the restaurant owner struggles to pay his workers and keep the doors open.
Also the restaurant is a place that cooks and serves babies. If you're going to paint a ridiculously dark scenario, you have to go All The Way, man.
If I'm at a restaurant and the check arrives with some of the items I ordered absent from that total, I am probably going to assume that the waiter comped them to me, and leave a generous tip. No sneering involved.
I put it to you that if a restaurant ever went out of business because of food that was served but never paid for, the restaurant shoulders at least part of the blame for employing a waitstaff that can't keep track of an order properly. But it would have to be quite an epidemic problem for that kind of thing to happen.
I have full HD over component. My system looks beautiful. Ergo, analog doesn't give you a poor image, there's nothing inherent in it that prevents a good picture.
Well, you sure told us with your lone anecdotal data point.
Computer display data starts out in the digital domain. An LCD panel requires digital signals to generate an image. There's NO GOOD REASON to convert that signal from digital to analog to digital in between -- there WILL be degradation, however slight.
The keys will be revoked (which really means that future discs will not include support for the compromised device keys
So that means that the list of acceptable device keys is stored somewhere on every movie disc. And that means to validate the media-device combination, the player needs to compare its own device key against those on disk.
All the crackers need to do is figure out which bit of code performs this comparison, hex-edit it to always give an 'OK' return value, and the protection is broken forever.
In five years, when I finally buy into HD television and content, there should be an assload of free content out there to download.
Surely you're running your desktop PC display at a resolution higher than 720x480? You can enjoy the benefits of "HD"-resolution video content today!
"Abstract" and "extract" are not interchangeable terms.
An abstract is a meta-description of a document, giving an overview of its content but usually not using any of the document content itself. An extract, on the other hand, is a literal subset of the document.
if the rightsholders doesn't want people/robots to access their "jewels" then maybe they shouldn't fucking publish them on a public net in the first place?
When they publish their work on a public net, that does not by any stretch mean they are relinquishing copyright to the work.
Worth downloading alone for the ingenious way they make you hold the keyboard as a makeshift Guitar Hero controller.
I'm looking down at my own keyboard right now, and HP has taken it upon themselves to add a tall row of "multimedia" keys above the Function keys. Attempting to play Frets of Fire on this thing would give me carpal tunnel.
I guess one could buy a $20 no-frills keyboard to use as a dedicated FoF controller, maybe even paint the keycaps the appropriate colors. But once you've gone that far, why not just spring for an authentic Red Octane controller and a PS2-USB adapter?
If Microsoft never made anything people wanted to buy, well... no one would have bought it.
What was the last boxed retail Microsoft software you bought? For me I think it was MS-DOS 6.22. Everything since has come pre-installed on a new computer when I purchased it. It's not so much that I chose to buy it, as I didn't choose not to buy it.
Not a bad distribution channel to have, if you can get it.
Consider the claw hammer: it can drive nails, and remove them (and act as a wrecking bar in a pinch). It does both of these things fairly well, even though it will never be a saw.
Consider on the other hand a Swiss Army Knife or Leatherman multitool. It's not going to be as good a knife/screwdriver/pliers/wire stripper as a tool dedicated to just a single purpose, but there's ENORMOUS value in only having to put one little thing in your pocket instead of carrying a whole toolchest around.
Given the rate that flash is growing, a $149 32 GB iPod Nano will be possible in six years. At that point, why bother with hard drives?
In six years, $149 might buy you an HDD-based iPod with 400GB of storage. You see, 400 is clearly a larger number than 32.
But the original 10 Gig ipod was around $700 and it didn't have much problem selling.
It also didn't have an earlier iPod version before it with more capacity and a lower cost.
Currently, an 80GB HDD-based iPod is $350. I can't possibly imagine a 64GB Flash-based iPod going for less than $500. Why should I pay more for the ability to store less content?
I have a 61" 1080p television, and yes, I will look more closely at games and consoles that have the ability to use 1080p technology.
"I bought a box of nails, and yes, I will look more closely at tools if they are hammers."
As long as you're asking questions like this, why don't you ask how targeting the 1% of people who can afford a Mercedes with a Mercedes benefits those who can't?
In the automobile market, if only 1% of consumers can afford a luxury car, then only 1% of the cars produced will be luxury models.
The situation we have right now in the console game industry is something like 5% of gamers are currently 1080p-capable, but 40% of the games being published targeting that tiny segment of the market (all numbers courtesy of My Ass, but I'd guess the margin of error is under 30%). It doesn't make economic sense.
the meteorologists all insisted that the hurricane would make a complete 180 degree turn and head back east and smack into Florida. I didn't believe them.
I ate a lot of canned food that week.
And learned a valuable lesson about the relative merits of the consensus opinion of many scientists using multi-million dollar supercomputers, and one layperson's hunch.
The reason they weren't sure is that when the policy was written, Tor didn't exist yet.
Maybe not, but surely anon.penet.fi had existed by then. It's not as though the concept of an Internet anonymization service could not have been predicted.
In a better world than this one, copyright holders would have to pay a fee and register their works.
But that would mean we currently ARE in a better world than this one, which is a paradox. DOES NOT COMPUTE
While copyright is implicitly granted to the creator of a work immediately upon its creation, anyone who is going to have a need to actually enforce their copyright is going to register their creation with the Copyright Office.
The problem, obviously, is that the term of copyright automatically extends for far too long. And all because Disney has somehow convinced our representatives that society would crumble if "Steamboat Willie" fell into the public domain and anybody could throw it on a DVD and sell it for a dollar.
From another perspective, Gates is saying that current market rates are ~100k. This is about right for mid-level software engineers with 2-4 years of experience, in that area.
Only if he's putting in 70-80 hours per week!
I work in one of the highest-salaried markets in the US, and nobody I know in the tech sector is making six figures unless they're in management, have 10+ years of experience relevant to the position, or both. I doubt the situation is much different anywhere else.
It's more like hanging around on street corners intentionally taking something that looks like money for something that looks like drugs
Not really. Nobody has seen that one of the things being exchanged looks like money, or that the other looks like drugs, or even that any exchange has even taken place. All that's been observed is a guy hanging out on a street corner that has a reputation as a dealer hangout.
It would be more akin to walking around Washington Square Park asking "Smoke? Smoke?" and then if someone inquires about buying some drugs from you, you walk away silently.
it's a pretty reasonable assumption that if you're connected to a bittorrent swarm, you're participating in the data flow.
Assumptions aren't proof.
Assumptions aren't even EVIDENCE.
But if you're connected to a torrent for movies, games, music etc...well, they can't tell how much you've uploaded or downloaded, can they?
Exactly right. They have no evidence to support the idea that you've actually violated copyright law by uploading a single byte of a copyrighted work. And for the copyright holder to allege that they know you have, in court or in a DMCA takedown request, is unacceptable.
I mean, if you're seen hanging around with drug dealers and talking to them in places where they tend to deal drugs, isn't it fairly safe to assume you're trying to buy drugs?
It's a reasonable assumption, and it may give the police cause to put you under surveillance and try and catch you in the act. But they can't handcuff you just for chatting with someone who is a drug dealer about the weather (not if they want to get a conviction).
Outside of this application, [...] how many other people connect to torrents only not to (attempt to) download/upload what's on them?
Five? Seventeen hundred? What does it matter?
It looks like the woman is using some of the same techniques shady businesses use to make before/after photos look different, but in reverse.
I'm guessing just about every practicing plastic surgeon, including the one involved in this case, uses those same techniques to some extent in their advertising. Is turnabout fair play?