It generally is not a good idea to "keep all your eggs in one basket". The small, admittedly expensive, forays we make into space today provide future generations the knowledge they need to create sustainable habitats away from Earth, necessary to preserve our species when another Extinction Level Event occurs. You are welcome to live in a tin can under the ocean and be crushed by the intense compression waves of a meteorite impact, I'll be safely watching the from one of our orbital habitats.
I downloaded the game for free, thanks Valve!, but I don't think the original poster is talking about the "hardness" of it all. While it was fairly challenging, particularly in the later levels, it didn't really start getting good until after the final level.
I think the OP is talking about how it was short, VERY short. I finished the game in two hours. Had I paid the full 60+ dollar purchase price I'd have been pretty pissed off too. I only hope that Portal 2 is going to be a much longer, with a more in-depth story that takes more time than a decent movie to play through. It is something I am definitely going to wait for the reviews on game length before I even think about putting my money down on it.
He was kind of mopey, overly serious, and lacked the quirks that make most of the previous and subsequent doctors interesting.
I think that was the point. McGann's Doctor was responsible for ending the Time War by utterly destroying the Daleks and Time Lords, separating their entire time streams with time-locks to prevent anyone from going into or out of the war. Being the last of his kind and mortally wounded in the process he regenerated into Eccleston's Doctor and went to Earth where he ran into Rose then went on some adventures with her.
Now I don't know about you, but if I was responsible for the mass genocide of two races, cut off from any family I'd had, and being the last of my kind; I'd be mopey, overly serious, and not as fun as my prior incarnations. By the time he'd elected to trade his life for Rose's by absorbing the energy of the time vortex, he had undergone a great deal of change and self reflection that allowed him to come to terms with what he'd done to save everything and begin again with a fresh slate.
That being said, I hope Smith sticks around for a while; or at least until they can do a remake of the "Three Doctors". I'd love to get Eccleston, Tennent, and Smith in the same room being all Doctory.;-)
Oddly enough I was dense until a friend dragged me to go and see The Corporation. The important part in regard to your comments is about 15 minutes in when they're talking about the corporation being a legal person and the obligations it has.
There is a lot of information in the film and out there on the web but in simplest terms a corporation is required, by law, to maximize shareholder value to the exclusion of any other consideration.
I thought it was a load of bunk myself, until I started really researching it and realized it was true. The law really does say corporations have to do everything they can to make their shareholders money. By lobbying to extend copyright, limiting the public domain with which they could use to create profitable products, they are actively working to limit their opportunities to generate profit for their shareholders and are, in effect, breaking the law.
The problem is that media companies have unimaginable resources and are able to buy politicians with little effort. Getting reduced copyright terms to allow for sane limits and the creation of a healthy public domain can't come from political will, there is simply too much money flowing to them to prevent that from happening.
What needs to happen is for someone wealthy enough to buy a significant number of shares in a single large media company, then throw the Corporation Act at them and prove that they are deliberately working against the interests of shareholders by limiting their ability to generate profits.
We have a philosophy and you're right that courts don't decide on those matters, but they do decide on matters of law. It can be argued, whether or not successfully I won't know since I don't have that kind of money, that all large media corporations are in wholesale violation of the Corporation Act. Now if corporations can use the law to enact changes they want, why can't we also try to find an altruistic rich person that will attempt to do the same?
(b) that the author should morally be "entitled" to be paid after the copyrights are up.
I never once said that. Once copyrights are up, they're up, you no longer have any entitlement to be paid for your past creation because it has passed into the public domain.
What I am saying is that to be properly compensated for your work the term length needs to be sufficiently long enough to allow you to work with those who can monetize it, while at the same time being short enough to allow for the creation of new ideas fostered by your work to flourish.
(a) If you hold the copyrights to a super kick as novel, you give the movie companies the choice between paying you UPFRONT for access now, or to wait until it expires, and they can fight with all the other movie companies to release first.
Which is all fine and dandy until you realize it usually takes 18 to 24 months to make a movie. So your mega popular book that's been flying off the shelves for six months could have XYZ Corp paying you upfront for the movie rights to your book and six months after the copyright has expired they'll release their movie. Of course so will their competitors, who didn't pay for the movie rights, because they kept the whole thing in house and released their derivative work after the copyright had expired.
Which of course means that, realistically, XYZ Corp wouldn't pay for it either.
2 years is too short, there is no incentive for the businesses who can monetize your work to work with you because all they have to do is wait it out.
Even publishers are going to be wary of working with you because it costs a large amount of money to produce a book, promote it, and generally "get it out there". Is two years going to be enough time to make back their investment and earn a profit, only if your work is so incredibly good that it become mega popular from the get go.
Otherwise it will simply be easier to wait until someone else takes the risk and wait out the 2 years. Sure it'll still cost a ton of money to get the book out there, but I don't have to pay you for the rights to do it.
A short copyright defeats the whole purpose of copyright, to ensure that the creator is able to be compensated for their work during the term period.
Its hard to strike the balance because if you make the term periods too short no one gets paid, its just easier to wait out the term length. Likewise if you make the term periods too long you stifle ingenuity and innovation, its simply easier to collect royalties than create something new.
2 years, I'll forgo paying you and just wait out the term length. 25 years, I'll work with you because I don't want to want that long to earn money. 90 years plus life of author, create one good thing and rest on laurels while denying everyone else to create the next "big thing" that was inspired by your work.
Two years sounds good on paper until you write a super kick ass novel that XYZ Corp wants to turn into a movie. They'll write the scripts, shoot the film, create the special effects, print the reels, and at 12:01 AM exactly two years to the day the copyright was granted, ship the film out for a release date 2 Years + 5 days past the original copyright date. All perfectly legal since they did not, in any way, distribute your copyrighted work with anyone outside their company until after it had expired.
You, the author, will get absolutely nothing from this, XYZ Corp will rake in 60+ Million on opening weekend, over 150+ Million by summer's end, 200+ Million worldwide box office, and an additional 300+ Million after worldwide DVD sales are factored in.
A two year wait is nothing to an immortal legal entity with many of the same rights as an individual, two year copyrights are a joke. So are 90 years plus life of the author, anyone old enough to read this now will likely be dead before they can make any use of the ideas inspired by current copyrighted works. So much for progressing the useful sciences and arts!
A good compromise would be 25 years. Long enough to give an incentive for XYZ Corp to work with you, a popular novel being turned into a movie will be a money train for all involved and 25 years is a long time to gamble it will still be popular, while still being short enough that the inspiration to create new derivative works can be realized while you're still alive to do it; I've seen a few Star Wars fan-films that deserved the big-budget treatment and in a sane copyright world would have been allowed to.
[rant] If I had the money I'd buy stock in "XYZ Corp", any large media company would work here, then sue their asses off for failure to maximize shareholder value through deliberate lobbying to extend the copyright term length. For example: When 20th Century Fox releases a Star Wars movie they earn 100+ Million in the box office; the worldwide box office, DVD, and broadcast rights will garner many times that value. Had Star Wars been allowed to pass into the public domain, which wasn't possible due to active lobbying by XYZ Corp, XYZ Corp could have also made its own Star Wars film and earn a comparable sum of money.
Yet through their successful lobbying of governments to extend copyright terms they have artificially impeded their ability to generate profit, an action which goes against the interests of shareholders. Consider the primary role of a corporation as defined by law, to legally maximize shareholder value to the exclusion of all other considerations. Maximizing copyright terms prevents the creation of a rich public domain, preventing the use of popular works that otherwise would have entered it. Through their actions to impede this process it negates their ability to create competing products using popular public domain franchises, in this case the creation of a competing Star Wars film, and creates a lost opportunity to maximize shareholder value. [/rant]
I honestly think that all the recent attempts to reform copyright have been going about it the wrong way. Appealing to the loss of the public domain and the moral issues surrounding it, like the recent lawsuits to repeal the Micky Mouse Protection Act, wasn't going to work because the money side makes it look like we're trying to steal their stuff; even though they're ones who are stealing. You want to get copyright reduced to a sane time limit, you need to show that the actions of media companies to create ever longer copyrights impede the maximization of shareholder value.
All the flower power talk of morals and how it relates to the public domain will get you no where, show the courts that the actions of big media are hitting shareholders in the pocket book and we'll get the shorter terms we want!
It needed to be as popular as 24 to work, and it didn't.
Popular or not Fox is notorious for canceling shows with a massive game changing cliffhanger that never gets resolved.
Fox is also notorious for not letting the show runners know the show is being canceled until the final episode, usually said cliffhanger, has been filmed and in the bag. This makes it impossible for the show runner to plan out the back four - six episodes to clear any remaining plot holes and come to some kind of reasonable finale to the show.
I'm not saying that Fox should keep a show around that clearly isn't making them money. What I am saying is that they need to start respecting the people who have already given them money and allow the show runners a few extra episodes to end it right.
Fox has a pretty well established reputation for dooming shows via incompetent scheduling and unrealistic expectations.
It is for this reason that I absolutely refuse to watch anything on Fox anymore. Every time I hear about an interesting series and I find out its on Fox I don't watch it, why get invested in a show you know they're going to cancel few weeks later? I've been wanting to check out Fringe, the premise looks interesting and I think I might just like it, but I know with it being on Fox it'll get canceled right after a game changing cliffhanger that will never be resolved. Hell, its been 15 years and I'm *still* pissed off with how Space Above and Beyond ended. Not to mention Dark Angel, Firefly, Brisco County, Jr, North Shore, Point Pleasant, Fastlane, and don't even get me started on The Sarah Connor Chronicles!
I'm honestly surprised that Fox is still a viable network.
The same goes for the ipod interface. Thankfully my nano is rock box compatible and I was able to install something that was a bit easier to sync my music with.
When I bought my 30GB click wheel 5th Generation iPod (iPod Video) I was able to figure out how to navigate the menus and use the device within a quick 30 seconds. Pretty much anyone I've given the device to can figure out how to use it quickly and easily, iTunes wasn't any more difficult.
In fact the combination is so incredibly easy the only time I get asked for help with iTunes is from those family and friends who aren't very good with computers in general and they want to burn a CD / DVD. Otherwise how hard is it to insert a disk, click Import and wait a while, eject the disk, click on "Music" in the side menu and see the recently imported disk listed there with all track names, artist, album information, and album art already taken care of automatically. When you plug in the iPod the whole thing auto syncs to the device and when I browse it I can find my music by album title, artist's name, song title, even genre if I so choose. If I had to guess, it was perhaps less than ten minutes from the time I installed the software to when I had my first album imported into iTunes and on the device.
I've taken a look at the Rock Box iPod Video install guide and skimmed through all 224 pages of it. The install instructions would be incomprehensible to pretty much anyone I've given my 30GB iPod Video to. Then there is the needlessly complicated navigation of the device, the ultimate use of it, and the need for a separate piece of software that, hopefully, stores the files in a very specific \Artist\Album\Track file directory structure so you can get some semblance of order when browsing your music on it.
Are you really trying to tell us that you couldn't figure out the simple stock Apple iPod / iTunes interface, even my 80 year old non technical grandmother can use my iPod without any coaching, yet you somehow have the technical ability to successfully flash an iPod with a copy of Rock Box and use its needlessly complicated, at least based on what I read in the virtual novel linked above, user interface?
Could I use Rock Box? Sure, taking computers apart and putting them back together has been a hobby of mine for more than 25 years. Am I going to? Perhaps when I replace my current iPod with a Touch or a much larger Classic, my 30GB is full and I still have better than a third of my CD collection still left to import, I'll consider it just for something new and interesting to do. For now though its nice to have a product that's easy to use and just works, where I don't have to spend hours screwing with it just to get it to do its primary function: playing music.
Hey, just wanted to say thanks for linking to Clear Skies. I found myself enjoying the story and characters, the pacing was decent with animation and voice acting that was surprisingly good for a fan made video. My only real critique was there being a serious need to fix the audio levels when talking over explosions.
Actually what you have there is a bit too much for one film, but it would make a great trilogy:
Part One: Humans encounter Turians. Turians blow up Humans. Humans send a small fleet that blows up the Turians Part Two: Turians send a bigger fleet to capture Shanxi, thinking it is the Human homeworld. - Movie ends on a down note making it "dark", will probably become the fan favorite. Part Three: Humans send a bigger fleet, kick the Turians in the teeth, and take back Shanxi. Council realizes that the whole thing was a big misunderstanding and brokers a peace treaty.
Keep each one between 90 and 120 minutes, so the pacing is kept fast, and I would totally stand in line opening day to see that!
It's disgusting they can claim Star Wars never made a profit.
Which is why someone needs to haul their ass before a court and bring them up on charges.
According to the law, I can't seem to find the specific one right now, a corporation has the sole duty of legally providing increased profits for their shareholders. In fact, outside of illegal activities, they are legally obligated to maximize profits to exclusion of all other considerations. If Star Wars has never made a profit then it is a failed product. As they have continued to grossly mismanage the shareholder's investment by continuing to invest in a failed product over the past thrity some years, LucasFilm and 20th Century Fox are in violation of the law and they need to be taken to task for it.
Ultimately, I think the game publishers are playing a very dangerous game jacking up prices this way, because there are people like me who would have paid $50-60 for a new game, but will instead wait and buy the cheap copy a year later rather than be doubly screwed over by DLC.
I know I did this with Fallout 3 and Oblivion, haven't played them yet because I haven't had the time to finish Mass Effect One yet so I don't want to start a new game until I get that one done. But I've noticed they do this with movies too. Buy the disc now and feel ripped off because next year they're releasing the Much Macho Grande Delux edition, so now I just wait until the uber edition comes out or buy it for five bucks on the used wall at the Blockblister.
Not much point to this rant I guess, since I agree with you, but perhaps some marketing troll is reading this and will take this back to its corporate masters that people don't like to be cheated and are willing to wait for the finished product rather than the buggy pre release at full price betas.
I've seen beautiful people walking around the mall, on the bus, at work, in a movie, a music video, the local news and yes, even in porn.
It is often the case that any media with a visual component tends to draw attractive people, why would you think this is any less true of the porn industry? While true that there are some unattractive porn stars, you might find other aspects of a person unattractive but personally I'm not a big fan of implants and tattoos, I've seldom seen a porn star that wasn't pretty in at least some fashion, if not downright beautiful.
The name calling, while not the least bit pleasant, didn't bother me nearly as much as the physical torments I was subjected to. Now granted the school did have a strict "no violence" policy but for some reason it never really applied to bullies, though I was suspended a few times when I fought back. Talk about demoralizing the childhood experience, knowing that your tormentors will never be punished for their actions while every punitive rule will be applied to you should you try to make it stop.
I might have actually enjoyed my childhood school experience more if everyone spent their time calling me names in cyberspace rather tossing around my lunch, school books, or any other possession I had on me while mockingly saying "Come on guys, give it back." then knocking me to floor, blaming the bus driver for hitting bumps, over and over again.
If a substantial number of people are using it.... why should they discontinue support for it?
Because Microsoft doesn't want you to play multi-player games on your fully functional eight year old original X-Box. Instead they want you to go out and buy your fourth X-Box 360 and attempt to play multi-player games, assuming the thing doesn't get so hot it red rings again, or that the DVD drive will actually reads your disks.
I for one would hook it up to an Asgard replicator and ensure every single person on the planet had their food, clothing, material, and shelter needs met. Then I'd create a replicator for each home, hook the whole thing into replicated fusion plants, and allow the entire world to throw off the shackles of money and greed, living lives of leisure, learning, mutual co-operation, and self discovery.
They can't. They worked so hard to extend the copyright term to such a ridiculous time frame that no one is allowed to have an original idea anymore. They're stuck doing remakes and re-imaginings of previous properties, hoping that people won't remember its been done already.
If my removable media gets a scratch or starts to degrade, chances are I'll be able to recover the parts of the disc that aren't corrupted by myself. If my player fails and the standard is somewhat widespread, pretty much any player should be able to read the disk.
If my removable hard drive fails, I need a clean room (a spec of dust caught under the read head can scratch the platter all to shit), the exact same hard drive controller, and about $1,000.00 for the data recovery team to put the guts of the broken drive into one that might work but probably won't because your drive isn't made anymore and you had to buy this one on E-bay. And even if it does work getting the data off the thing in ideal conditions means you've also got to screw around with hard drive enclosures, cables, power supplies, and making sure no one drops it, or bangs it around too much, while transporting it.
But not only that, there is also the environmental aspect of it too. A blank disk is a bit of reflective material and some die held on a piece of polycarbonate. A hard drive is a complex piece of equipment filled with rare earth metals, magnets, power components, silicon, and plastic. I know its probably not much, but I like to save the environment when I can.
someone else will come along and will replace it, and there'll be a mass migration to the latest thing.
Yes, and then that new someone will have an overload of visitors and they'll need to buy more servers and bandwidth. The "customers" won't want to pay for it, just like they don't pay for it now. To keep the site from going under the new guy, who will by now have burned through most of their venture capital, will open up the floodgates on the massive data collected to advertisers. Then another new guy, who is pissed because the "site sold out", will create a new site and the whole thing starts over again.
Now personally I don't really understand the whole "social networking" thing. Message boards are just fine, though I really miss usenet, as I can share ideas with people I'd never meet in real life and learn something interesting. But if I want to tell you about my trips, or what I'm doing in my day, or show off some really embarrassing photos, I'll tell my actual real friends whom I've met face to face thank you very much! Though I will admit I've done the "twitter" thing a bunch of times and no, I've never figured out the point to it either.
Nope, I'm not some teeny bopper trying to be cool, nor am I a mid thirties person trying to relive a stylized nostalgic fantasy of my high-school days. I mean seriously people, are you really so deluded as to pretend the guy who shoved you into lockers between periods, while making you look like a dork in front of the cute girl from your fourth period English class you were crushing on since freshman year and never had the guts to talk to, is now your bestest awesomest friend?
But if Facebook is so important to people, they should be willing to pay a fee to cover the expense of those servers and the costs of having real security. But what? Pay!? For something on the internet?!?! No way!
I don't know what we can do to get people to pay for stuff online, I know I would switch websites in a hurry if Slashdot went to subscriber only, but if a site has become such a big part of a person's life, like Facebook has for some people, they should pay for it. Otherwise, they shouldn't complain when they have to trade their time freeloading on the site for some lost privacy.
As for me, I am in my mid thirties and I have absolutely no illusions that High-School was some wonderful bed of roses whose absence leaves a gaping hole in my heart, it was a hell we all wanted to get the frak out of. Yet for those precious few that I cared about, that I could actually call "friends", I certainly still do have contact with them in real life. I don't need a Facebook or a MySpace or a Flickr or any other nonsense social networking crap. E-mail and my trusty old land line with an el cheapo GE answering machine work just fine...
Sadly I think you're right. I certainly loved X-Wing and Tie Fighter, but the one thing that could really get me to spend money on a PC was the Wing Commander franchise. I spent so much money upgrading my systems to play those games, Origin really liked to push the limits of what was possible back then.
Unfortunately they were bought out by EA, who promptly stopped making Space Combat Sims. Now that they haven't made a decent space combat sim in a long time, and no I don't count a sim that requires me to pay a monthly fee for game play likened to working two full time jobs, I've really had no incentive to upgrade my system.
Luckily DosBox works just fine on my early 2009 iMac, so I've been playing some Wing Privateer (that would be one hell of a great game if they made it into an MMO).;-)
It's just that a fear of flying isn't normally a problem when the checkpoint is at the railway station or a border crossing.;-)
You're still going to get a lot of false positives.
When I'm surrounded by a lot of people I start feeling claustrophobic and suffer panic attacks, the railway station with all those people milling about will get my heart rate up and I'll be sweating like a pig. While I have fairly decent coping mechanisms, I certainly do try to avoid large, tight, crowds like that. I'm sure I'm not the only one, so I can only imagine the false positives their little machine is going to give them.
I just want to get to my seat, close my eyes, breathe deeply for a few minutes, and calm down; they want to shackle me and lock me in a small cage because their little machine says I'm going to blow up the train.
Hell, they could have pulled a 'Six Day' twist and had the lead be a terminator who thought he was John Connor.
I remember reading, or hearing, somewhere that this is how Salvation was supposed to end.
Apparently John Connor was supposed to be a very minor part in T4 with the bulk of the film being about Marcus' salvation, hence the name of the film. In the end Connor, having setup the resistance, was supposed to die with a now redeemed Marcus taking up the mantle of John Connor.
From what I heard Christian Bale really wanted to play the part of John Connor, he was told the above and was supposedly okay with it. Then with the uber success of "The Dark Knight" he apparently asked for more screen time and stated he didn't want to die in the end. To accommodate his request they had to rewrite whole sections of the movie, and the ending, resulting in the disjointed suck-fest we were subjected to.
Of course its all rumors and speculation as I can't remember where I read and/or heard this, but considering Bale's infamous blow up on set I can almost believe that this might be true.
Slashdot Mirror
True, but then all it takes is one little asteroid to ruin your day.
It generally is not a good idea to "keep all your eggs in one basket". The small, admittedly expensive, forays we make into space today provide future generations the knowledge they need to create sustainable habitats away from Earth, necessary to preserve our species when another Extinction Level Event occurs. You are welcome to live in a tin can under the ocean and be crushed by the intense compression waves of a meteorite impact, I'll be safely watching the from one of our orbital habitats.
I downloaded the game for free, thanks Valve!, but I don't think the original poster is talking about the "hardness" of it all. While it was fairly challenging, particularly in the later levels, it didn't really start getting good until after the final level.
I think the OP is talking about how it was short, VERY short. I finished the game in two hours. Had I paid the full 60+ dollar purchase price I'd have been pretty pissed off too. I only hope that Portal 2 is going to be a much longer, with a more in-depth story that takes more time than a decent movie to play through. It is something I am definitely going to wait for the reviews on game length before I even think about putting my money down on it.
I think that was the point. McGann's Doctor was responsible for ending the Time War by utterly destroying the Daleks and Time Lords, separating their entire time streams with time-locks to prevent anyone from going into or out of the war. Being the last of his kind and mortally wounded in the process he regenerated into Eccleston's Doctor and went to Earth where he ran into Rose then went on some adventures with her.
Now I don't know about you, but if I was responsible for the mass genocide of two races, cut off from any family I'd had, and being the last of my kind; I'd be mopey, overly serious, and not as fun as my prior incarnations. By the time he'd elected to trade his life for Rose's by absorbing the energy of the time vortex, he had undergone a great deal of change and self reflection that allowed him to come to terms with what he'd done to save everything and begin again with a fresh slate.
That being said, I hope Smith sticks around for a while; or at least until they can do a remake of the "Three Doctors". I'd love to get Eccleston, Tennent, and Smith in the same room being all Doctory. ;-)
Oddly enough I was dense until a friend dragged me to go and see The Corporation. The important part in regard to your comments is about 15 minutes in when they're talking about the corporation being a legal person and the obligations it has.
There is a lot of information in the film and out there on the web but in simplest terms a corporation is required, by law , to maximize shareholder value to the exclusion of any other consideration.
I thought it was a load of bunk myself, until I started really researching it and realized it was true. The law really does say corporations have to do everything they can to make their shareholders money. By lobbying to extend copyright, limiting the public domain with which they could use to create profitable products, they are actively working to limit their opportunities to generate profit for their shareholders and are, in effect, breaking the law.
The problem is that media companies have unimaginable resources and are able to buy politicians with little effort. Getting reduced copyright terms to allow for sane limits and the creation of a healthy public domain can't come from political will, there is simply too much money flowing to them to prevent that from happening.
What needs to happen is for someone wealthy enough to buy a significant number of shares in a single large media company, then throw the Corporation Act at them and prove that they are deliberately working against the interests of shareholders by limiting their ability to generate profits.
We have a philosophy and you're right that courts don't decide on those matters, but they do decide on matters of law. It can be argued, whether or not successfully I won't know since I don't have that kind of money, that all large media corporations are in wholesale violation of the Corporation Act. Now if corporations can use the law to enact changes they want, why can't we also try to find an altruistic rich person that will attempt to do the same?
I never once said that. Once copyrights are up, they're up, you no longer have any entitlement to be paid for your past creation because it has passed into the public domain.
What I am saying is that to be properly compensated for your work the term length needs to be sufficiently long enough to allow you to work with those who can monetize it, while at the same time being short enough to allow for the creation of new ideas fostered by your work to flourish.
Which is all fine and dandy until you realize it usually takes 18 to 24 months to make a movie. So your mega popular book that's been flying off the shelves for six months could have XYZ Corp paying you upfront for the movie rights to your book and six months after the copyright has expired they'll release their movie. Of course so will their competitors, who didn't pay for the movie rights, because they kept the whole thing in house and released their derivative work after the copyright had expired.
Which of course means that, realistically, XYZ Corp wouldn't pay for it either.
2 years is too short, there is no incentive for the businesses who can monetize your work to work with you because all they have to do is wait it out.
Even publishers are going to be wary of working with you because it costs a large amount of money to produce a book, promote it, and generally "get it out there". Is two years going to be enough time to make back their investment and earn a profit, only if your work is so incredibly good that it become mega popular from the get go.
Otherwise it will simply be easier to wait until someone else takes the risk and wait out the 2 years. Sure it'll still cost a ton of money to get the book out there, but I don't have to pay you for the rights to do it.
A short copyright defeats the whole purpose of copyright, to ensure that the creator is able to be compensated for their work during the term period.
Its hard to strike the balance because if you make the term periods too short no one gets paid, its just easier to wait out the term length. Likewise if you make the term periods too long you stifle ingenuity and innovation, its simply easier to collect royalties than create something new.
2 years, I'll forgo paying you and just wait out the term length.
25 years, I'll work with you because I don't want to want that long to earn money.
90 years plus life of author, create one good thing and rest on laurels while denying everyone else to create the next "big thing" that was inspired by your work.
Two years sounds good on paper until you write a super kick ass novel that XYZ Corp wants to turn into a movie. They'll write the scripts, shoot the film, create the special effects, print the reels, and at 12:01 AM exactly two years to the day the copyright was granted, ship the film out for a release date 2 Years + 5 days past the original copyright date. All perfectly legal since they did not, in any way, distribute your copyrighted work with anyone outside their company until after it had expired.
You, the author, will get absolutely nothing from this, XYZ Corp will rake in 60+ Million on opening weekend, over 150+ Million by summer's end, 200+ Million worldwide box office, and an additional 300+ Million after worldwide DVD sales are factored in.
A two year wait is nothing to an immortal legal entity with many of the same rights as an individual, two year copyrights are a joke. So are 90 years plus life of the author, anyone old enough to read this now will likely be dead before they can make any use of the ideas inspired by current copyrighted works. So much for progressing the useful sciences and arts!
A good compromise would be 25 years. Long enough to give an incentive for XYZ Corp to work with you, a popular novel being turned into a movie will be a money train for all involved and 25 years is a long time to gamble it will still be popular, while still being short enough that the inspiration to create new derivative works can be realized while you're still alive to do it; I've seen a few Star Wars fan-films that deserved the big-budget treatment and in a sane copyright world would have been allowed to.
[rant]
If I had the money I'd buy stock in "XYZ Corp", any large media company would work here, then sue their asses off for failure to maximize shareholder value through deliberate lobbying to extend the copyright term length. For example: When 20th Century Fox releases a Star Wars movie they earn 100+ Million in the box office; the worldwide box office, DVD, and broadcast rights will garner many times that value. Had Star Wars been allowed to pass into the public domain, which wasn't possible due to active lobbying by XYZ Corp, XYZ Corp could have also made its own Star Wars film and earn a comparable sum of money.
Yet through their successful lobbying of governments to extend copyright terms they have artificially impeded their ability to generate profit, an action which goes against the interests of shareholders. Consider the primary role of a corporation as defined by law, to legally maximize shareholder value to the exclusion of all other considerations. Maximizing copyright terms prevents the creation of a rich public domain, preventing the use of popular works that otherwise would have entered it. Through their actions to impede this process it negates their ability to create competing products using popular public domain franchises, in this case the creation of a competing Star Wars film, and creates a lost opportunity to maximize shareholder value.
[/rant]
I honestly think that all the recent attempts to reform copyright have been going about it the wrong way. Appealing to the loss of the public domain and the moral issues surrounding it, like the recent lawsuits to repeal the Micky Mouse Protection Act, wasn't going to work because the money side makes it look like we're trying to steal their stuff; even though they're ones who are stealing. You want to get copyright reduced to a sane time limit, you need to show that the actions of media companies to create ever longer copyrights impede the maximization of shareholder value.
All the flower power talk of morals and how it relates to the public domain will get you no where, show the courts that the actions of big media are hitting shareholders in the pocket book and we'll get the shorter terms we want!
Popular or not Fox is notorious for canceling shows with a massive game changing cliffhanger that never gets resolved.
Fox is also notorious for not letting the show runners know the show is being canceled until the final episode, usually said cliffhanger, has been filmed and in the bag. This makes it impossible for the show runner to plan out the back four - six episodes to clear any remaining plot holes and come to some kind of reasonable finale to the show.
I'm not saying that Fox should keep a show around that clearly isn't making them money. What I am saying is that they need to start respecting the people who have already given them money and allow the show runners a few extra episodes to end it right.
It is for this reason that I absolutely refuse to watch anything on Fox anymore. Every time I hear about an interesting series and I find out its on Fox I don't watch it, why get invested in a show you know they're going to cancel few weeks later? I've been wanting to check out Fringe, the premise looks interesting and I think I might just like it, but I know with it being on Fox it'll get canceled right after a game changing cliffhanger that will never be resolved. Hell, its been 15 years and I'm *still* pissed off with how Space Above and Beyond ended. Not to mention Dark Angel, Firefly, Brisco County, Jr, North Shore, Point Pleasant, Fastlane, and don't even get me started on The Sarah Connor Chronicles!
I'm honestly surprised that Fox is still a viable network.
The same goes for the ipod interface. Thankfully my nano is rock box compatible and I was able to install something that was a bit easier to sync my music with.
When I bought my 30GB click wheel 5th Generation iPod (iPod Video) I was able to figure out how to navigate the menus and use the device within a quick 30 seconds. Pretty much anyone I've given the device to can figure out how to use it quickly and easily, iTunes wasn't any more difficult.
In fact the combination is so incredibly easy the only time I get asked for help with iTunes is from those family and friends who aren't very good with computers in general and they want to burn a CD / DVD. Otherwise how hard is it to insert a disk, click Import and wait a while, eject the disk, click on "Music" in the side menu and see the recently imported disk listed there with all track names, artist, album information, and album art already taken care of automatically. When you plug in the iPod the whole thing auto syncs to the device and when I browse it I can find my music by album title, artist's name, song title, even genre if I so choose. If I had to guess, it was perhaps less than ten minutes from the time I installed the software to when I had my first album imported into iTunes and on the device.
I've taken a look at the Rock Box iPod Video install guide and skimmed through all 224 pages of it. The install instructions would be incomprehensible to pretty much anyone I've given my 30GB iPod Video to. Then there is the needlessly complicated navigation of the device, the ultimate use of it, and the need for a separate piece of software that, hopefully, stores the files in a very specific \Artist\Album\Track file directory structure so you can get some semblance of order when browsing your music on it.
Are you really trying to tell us that you couldn't figure out the simple stock Apple iPod / iTunes interface, even my 80 year old non technical grandmother can use my iPod without any coaching, yet you somehow have the technical ability to successfully flash an iPod with a copy of Rock Box and use its needlessly complicated, at least based on what I read in the virtual novel linked above, user interface?
Could I use Rock Box? Sure, taking computers apart and putting them back together has been a hobby of mine for more than 25 years. Am I going to? Perhaps when I replace my current iPod with a Touch or a much larger Classic, my 30GB is full and I still have better than a third of my CD collection still left to import, I'll consider it just for something new and interesting to do. For now though its nice to have a product that's easy to use and just works, where I don't have to spend hours screwing with it just to get it to do its primary function: playing music.
Hey, just wanted to say thanks for linking to Clear Skies. I found myself enjoying the story and characters, the pacing was decent with animation and voice acting that was surprisingly good for a fan made video. My only real critique was there being a serious need to fix the audio levels when talking over explosions.
Actually what you have there is a bit too much for one film, but it would make a great trilogy:
Part One: Humans encounter Turians. Turians blow up Humans. Humans send a small fleet that blows up the Turians
Part Two: Turians send a bigger fleet to capture Shanxi, thinking it is the Human homeworld. - Movie ends on a down note making it "dark", will probably become the fan favorite.
Part Three: Humans send a bigger fleet, kick the Turians in the teeth, and take back Shanxi. Council realizes that the whole thing was a big misunderstanding and brokers a peace treaty.
Keep each one between 90 and 120 minutes, so the pacing is kept fast, and I would totally stand in line opening day to see that!
It's disgusting they can claim Star Wars never made a profit.
Which is why someone needs to haul their ass before a court and bring them up on charges.
According to the law, I can't seem to find the specific one right now, a corporation has the sole duty of legally providing increased profits for their shareholders. In fact, outside of illegal activities, they are legally obligated to maximize profits to exclusion of all other considerations. If Star Wars has never made a profit then it is a failed product. As they have continued to grossly mismanage the shareholder's investment by continuing to invest in a failed product over the past thrity some years, LucasFilm and 20th Century Fox are in violation of the law and they need to be taken to task for it.
Ultimately, I think the game publishers are playing a very dangerous game jacking up prices this way, because there are people like me who would have paid $50-60 for a new game, but will instead wait and buy the cheap copy a year later rather than be doubly screwed over by DLC.
I know I did this with Fallout 3 and Oblivion, haven't played them yet because I haven't had the time to finish Mass Effect One yet so I don't want to start a new game until I get that one done. But I've noticed they do this with movies too. Buy the disc now and feel ripped off because next year they're releasing the Much Macho Grande Delux edition, so now I just wait until the uber edition comes out or buy it for five bucks on the used wall at the Blockblister.
Not much point to this rant I guess, since I agree with you, but perhaps some marketing troll is reading this and will take this back to its corporate masters that people don't like to be cheated and are willing to wait for the finished product rather than the buggy pre release at full price betas.
you think porn stars in general are beautiful?
I've seen beautiful people walking around the mall, on the bus, at work, in a movie, a music video, the local news and yes, even in porn.
It is often the case that any media with a visual component tends to draw attractive people, why would you think this is any less true of the porn industry? While true that there are some unattractive porn stars, you might find other aspects of a person unattractive but personally I'm not a big fan of implants and tattoos, I've seldom seen a porn star that wasn't pretty in at least some fashion, if not downright beautiful.
All in their virtual worlds bullying each other.
The name calling, while not the least bit pleasant, didn't bother me nearly as much as the physical torments I was subjected to. Now granted the school did have a strict "no violence" policy but for some reason it never really applied to bullies, though I was suspended a few times when I fought back. Talk about demoralizing the childhood experience, knowing that your tormentors will never be punished for their actions while every punitive rule will be applied to you should you try to make it stop.
I might have actually enjoyed my childhood school experience more if everyone spent their time calling me names in cyberspace rather tossing around my lunch, school books, or any other possession I had on me while mockingly saying "Come on guys, give it back." then knocking me to floor, blaming the bus driver for hitting bumps, over and over again.
If a substantial number of people are using it.... why should they discontinue support for it?
Because Microsoft doesn't want you to play multi-player games on your fully functional eight year old original X-Box. Instead they want you to go out and buy your fourth X-Box 360 and attempt to play multi-player games, assuming the thing doesn't get so hot it red rings again, or that the DVD drive will actually reads your disks.
I for one would take over Earth with it.
I for one would hook it up to an Asgard replicator and ensure every single person on the planet had their food, clothing, material, and shelter needs met. Then I'd create a replicator for each home, hook the whole thing into replicated fusion plants, and allow the entire world to throw off the shackles of money and greed, living lives of leisure, learning, mutual co-operation, and self discovery.
Get some new ideas for a change.
They can't. They worked so hard to extend the copyright term to such a ridiculous time frame that no one is allowed to have an original idea anymore. They're stuck doing remakes and re-imaginings of previous properties, hoping that people won't remember its been done already.
So why bother with removable media?
If my removable media gets a scratch or starts to degrade, chances are I'll be able to recover the parts of the disc that aren't corrupted by myself. If my player fails and the standard is somewhat widespread, pretty much any player should be able to read the disk.
If my removable hard drive fails, I need a clean room (a spec of dust caught under the read head can scratch the platter all to shit), the exact same hard drive controller, and about $1,000.00 for the data recovery team to put the guts of the broken drive into one that might work but probably won't because your drive isn't made anymore and you had to buy this one on E-bay. And even if it does work getting the data off the thing in ideal conditions means you've also got to screw around with hard drive enclosures, cables, power supplies, and making sure no one drops it, or bangs it around too much, while transporting it.
But not only that, there is also the environmental aspect of it too. A blank disk is a bit of reflective material and some die held on a piece of polycarbonate. A hard drive is a complex piece of equipment filled with rare earth metals, magnets, power components, silicon, and plastic. I know its probably not much, but I like to save the environment when I can.
It gives the phrase "the computer is down" a whole new meaning.
Let's hope that's the least of our worries, I don't even want to imagine what a BSOD error would look like.
someone else will come along and will replace it, and there'll be a mass migration to the latest thing.
Yes, and then that new someone will have an overload of visitors and they'll need to buy more servers and bandwidth. The "customers" won't want to pay for it, just like they don't pay for it now. To keep the site from going under the new guy, who will by now have burned through most of their venture capital, will open up the floodgates on the massive data collected to advertisers. Then another new guy, who is pissed because the "site sold out", will create a new site and the whole thing starts over again.
Now personally I don't really understand the whole "social networking" thing. Message boards are just fine, though I really miss usenet, as I can share ideas with people I'd never meet in real life and learn something interesting. But if I want to tell you about my trips, or what I'm doing in my day, or show off some really embarrassing photos, I'll tell my actual real friends whom I've met face to face thank you very much! Though I will admit I've done the "twitter" thing a bunch of times and no, I've never figured out the point to it either.
Nope, I'm not some teeny bopper trying to be cool, nor am I a mid thirties person trying to relive a stylized nostalgic fantasy of my high-school days. I mean seriously people, are you really so deluded as to pretend the guy who shoved you into lockers between periods, while making you look like a dork in front of the cute girl from your fourth period English class you were crushing on since freshman year and never had the guts to talk to, is now your bestest awesomest friend?
But if Facebook is so important to people, they should be willing to pay a fee to cover the expense of those servers and the costs of having real security. But what? Pay!? For something on the internet?!?! No way!
I don't know what we can do to get people to pay for stuff online, I know I would switch websites in a hurry if Slashdot went to subscriber only, but if a site has become such a big part of a person's life, like Facebook has for some people, they should pay for it. Otherwise, they shouldn't complain when they have to trade their time freeloading on the site for some lost privacy.
As for me, I am in my mid thirties and I have absolutely no illusions that High-School was some wonderful bed of roses whose absence leaves a gaping hole in my heart, it was a hell we all wanted to get the frak out of. Yet for those precious few that I cared about, that I could actually call "friends", I certainly still do have contact with them in real life. I don't need a Facebook or a MySpace or a Flickr or any other nonsense social networking crap. E-mail and my trusty old land line with an el cheapo GE answering machine work just fine...
I guess space sims really are dead. :(
Sadly I think you're right. I certainly loved X-Wing and Tie Fighter, but the one thing that could really get me to spend money on a PC was the Wing Commander franchise. I spent so much money upgrading my systems to play those games, Origin really liked to push the limits of what was possible back then.
Unfortunately they were bought out by EA, who promptly stopped making Space Combat Sims. Now that they haven't made a decent space combat sim in a long time, and no I don't count a sim that requires me to pay a monthly fee for game play likened to working two full time jobs, I've really had no incentive to upgrade my system.
Luckily DosBox works just fine on my early 2009 iMac, so I've been playing some Wing Privateer (that would be one hell of a great game if they made it into an MMO). ;-)
It's just that a fear of flying isn't normally a problem when the checkpoint is at the railway station or a border crossing. ;-)
You're still going to get a lot of false positives.
When I'm surrounded by a lot of people I start feeling claustrophobic and suffer panic attacks, the railway station with all those people milling about will get my heart rate up and I'll be sweating like a pig. While I have fairly decent coping mechanisms, I certainly do try to avoid large, tight, crowds like that. I'm sure I'm not the only one, so I can only imagine the false positives their little machine is going to give them.
I just want to get to my seat, close my eyes, breathe deeply for a few minutes, and calm down; they want to shackle me and lock me in a small cage because their little machine says I'm going to blow up the train.
It seems to have worked for Star Trek: 90210.
Don't you mean Stargate Universe?
Hell, they could have pulled a 'Six Day' twist and had the lead be a terminator who thought he was John Connor.
I remember reading, or hearing, somewhere that this is how Salvation was supposed to end.
Apparently John Connor was supposed to be a very minor part in T4 with the bulk of the film being about Marcus' salvation, hence the name of the film. In the end Connor, having setup the resistance, was supposed to die with a now redeemed Marcus taking up the mantle of John Connor.
From what I heard Christian Bale really wanted to play the part of John Connor, he was told the above and was supposedly okay with it. Then with the uber success of "The Dark Knight" he apparently asked for more screen time and stated he didn't want to die in the end. To accommodate his request they had to rewrite whole sections of the movie, and the ending, resulting in the disjointed suck-fest we were subjected to.
Of course its all rumors and speculation as I can't remember where I read and/or heard this, but considering Bale's infamous blow up on set I can almost believe that this might be true.