Han shoots first.
Greedo shoots first.
Both shoot at the same time.
Greedo doesn't shoot.
Han doesn't shoot. Greedo accidentally shoots himself.
Nobody shoots. Greedo declares the life of a rogue is not for him, and goes off to enjoy the sunshine
Jabba shoots first.
I would be amazed if anyone with as much money as Walmart or any bank would ever consider such a blatantly illegal scheme (though many have tried other, more subtle schemes).
I don't think they'd do anything so risky. Read the expemption requirements. They'd have to give them the right to hire and fire other staff.
Charging for storage media and breakables. Sad thing is that it is probably in the contract they signed and there is nothing they can do about it.
A creative lawyer may well be able to make something of this. The band agreed to pay for damage and packaging. The deduction is for this exact purpose, and no other. The record company is claiming for this damage and packaging, even though there isn't any. There was no need for the record company to do so. Surely they're making fraudulent claims.
Are you trying to tell me that each album produced can't be assigned a different packaging,breakage, etc cost?
It's possible that they don't work this out on a per album basis. They just get all the royalties, deduct a fixed amount for their cut, breakages etc, and then dish it out to the artists again in proportion to earnings.
I think it's pretty obvious the record companies are trying to screw the artists. I find it extremely hard to believe that this is some dumb accounting limitation
I don't disagree here. The accouning system can be changed. It's just not in the record company's to change it.
Okay, I see the moral distinction. The problem is that I see no way to word a law that would allow one of these and not the other. Whether you offer a faster connection to your end user for those who will pay, or a slower connection to the end user to those who don't, there isn't a way to distinguish between these case reliably.
"Breakages" - These are completely outdated anyway. CDs are a lot more robust than vinyl, and even then, it's a little dubious that the royalties were worked out the way they were rather than a fixed fee per record sold (after advances were repaid).
Well, yes. But what's the difference between offering an inferior service to a third party internet company (e.g. iTunes) who refuses to pay extra, and offering a superior service to a third party internet company (e.g. my hypothetical VoD service) who wants to pay extra to get the required end to end bandwidth?
Last time I checked, there were dozens of games companies in Britain, and a smattering in France and even a fair few in Sweden. There's no evidence that poor working conditions lead to better games.
Surely, this would prevent suppliers from offering me services that require high bandwidth for a short time. For example, a 10x normal speed connection with QoS for the purpose of watching HDTV video on Demand. If they offered this speed to the VoD suppliers for a cut of the download fee, they'd surely have to offer this speed to all services for free.
Ah - it's the old Laissez faire copitalist employer argument.
However, in the civilised world, we expect people to behave with decency and civility rather than using the difference in negotiating positions to force the employee to accept some fairly draconian positions. Since such civilised behaviour is unfortunately wishful thinking, we enact laws to prevent employees from being exploited in this way.
Indeed. We have a fundamentally different approach to our desires in Europe. Discussions about comparityive quality of life (or rather "You all suck" flamewars) usually fail to appreciate this fundamental difference. Most Europeans are simply unable to comprehend America's extremely capitalistic approach, and so feel the quality of life in Europe is better where there are better social safeguards and shorter working hours. Most (but probably not all) Americans on the other hand can't believe that Europe could have a better qaulity of life because high taxes reduce the purchasing power of its citizens.
Personally, one of my aspirations is a 4 day working week.
Oh, I completely agree. The problem is there's very much a culture of overwork, and managers lack the imagination to work out other ways out of slippage other than working overtime. Which doesn't work anyway.
What exactly is the employee's motivation other than termination?
Making cool games. Fitting in with the team. The threat of termination is not really a factor. There's possibly a perception that this is the case but it's typically never threatened, and rarely even hinted at.
The problem is, when you're told the rest of the team is working late, so you should too, it puts you into an awkward position. Generally you quite like these guys. You don't want them to suffer. In addition, you do want to see your game come out. Seeing a game you've worked on on the shelves is really a very rewarding experience.
I only do it to coax people to jump on me. I'm just a troll at heart, but I hope the responses cause some amusement to those who realise I'm not serious.
The movie industry is very clear on this matter! Piracy is theft. If it's theft, then they must be losing money. But they can't possibly lose more than they charge for it otherwise they'd be losing money on sales. Therefore, lower cost price = lower piracy losses.
Buying an unlicenced copy and copying make no difference. Why would it make a difference just because I gave someone else money? This is why copyright comes down so heavily on the distributer rather than the receiver.
Yes. Unless they take action and rapidly reduce the cost of the movie to free, of course they will. This is why they're so scared of piracy. A single person can, if they put enough effort into it, bankrupt them.
Every time you pirate a movie, the studios lose the cost of that movie. If the movie costs $20 then they lose $20, and if it costs $30, then they lose $30. They know they can't possibly compete with free, so they're doing the best they possibly can to reduce their losses. By only charging $1.50 for each copy, this will cut their piracy losses considerably even if they don't sell any.
Not sure if an objective study would reveal a lot. From a technical pont of view, they're remarkably similar. Both use essentially the same basic concepts, both have higher density than DVD, they use the same video formats and allow the same user control demanded by the studios. The main differences seem to be Blu-ray theoretically allows significantly higher capacity, and different studios are backing different formats.
I'm not convinced. Intel - like most other semiconductor companies - like to offer each product independently. In addition to this, they will usually licence most of their patents using a cross licencing scheme, so there's no benefit to using Intel. Intel isn't going to care because they still get their money.
This is true. Legalities of the situation are a red herring. It's quite possible to be totally legally correct, and morally reprehensible. This is one of the reasons that a free media is so essential.
Blizzard suffered quite severely over this. And quite righfully so. They completely failed to deal with this adequately in private. Attempting to deal with it on the forums lead to censorship, so the player took it public. They forced Blizzard to address the issue. Blizzard's defence was met with scorn by the public. Their only option was to back down, or suffer a serious PR hit.
Although from a legal point of view, Blizzard have a serious problem in that they have no internal analogy to a legal system. If you have a problem with the administration, there is no independent body to turn to for arbitration. If there's a blatant violation of policy by Blizzard itself, there's absolutely nothing anyone can do within the game framework.
Slashdot Mirror
Options:
Han shoots first.
Greedo shoots first.
Both shoot at the same time.
Greedo doesn't shoot.
Han doesn't shoot. Greedo accidentally shoots himself.
Nobody shoots. Greedo declares the life of a rogue is not for him, and goes off to enjoy the sunshine
Jabba shoots first.
I would be amazed if anyone with as much money as Walmart or any bank would ever consider such a blatantly illegal scheme (though many have tried other, more subtle schemes).
I don't think they'd do anything so risky. Read the expemption requirements. They'd have to give them the right to hire and fire other staff.
Charging for storage media and breakables. Sad thing is that it is probably in the contract they signed and there is nothing they can do about it.
A creative lawyer may well be able to make something of this. The band agreed to pay for damage and packaging. The deduction is for this exact purpose, and no other. The record company is claiming for this damage and packaging, even though there isn't any. There was no need for the record company to do so. Surely they're making fraudulent claims.
Are you trying to tell me that each album produced can't be assigned a different packaging,breakage, etc cost?
It's possible that they don't work this out on a per album basis. They just get all the royalties, deduct a fixed amount for their cut, breakages etc, and then dish it out to the artists again in proportion to earnings.
I think it's pretty obvious the record companies are trying to screw the artists. I find it extremely hard to believe that this is some dumb accounting limitation
I don't disagree here. The accouning system can be changed. It's just not in the record company's to change it.
Okay, I see the moral distinction. The problem is that I see no way to word a law that would allow one of these and not the other. Whether you offer a faster connection to your end user for those who will pay, or a slower connection to the end user to those who don't, there isn't a way to distinguish between these case reliably.
"Breakages" - These are completely outdated anyway. CDs are a lot more robust than vinyl, and even then, it's a little dubious that the royalties were worked out the way they were rather than a fixed fee per record sold (after advances were repaid).
Well, yes. But what's the difference between offering an inferior service to a third party internet company (e.g. iTunes) who refuses to pay extra, and offering a superior service to a third party internet company (e.g. my hypothetical VoD service) who wants to pay extra to get the required end to end bandwidth?
Last time I checked, there were dozens of games companies in Britain, and a smattering in France and even a fair few in Sweden. There's no evidence that poor working conditions lead to better games.
Surely, this would prevent suppliers from offering me services that require high bandwidth for a short time. For example, a 10x normal speed connection with QoS for the purpose of watching HDTV video on Demand. If they offered this speed to the VoD suppliers for a cut of the download fee, they'd surely have to offer this speed to all services for free.
Ah - it's the old Laissez faire copitalist employer argument.
However, in the civilised world, we expect people to behave with decency and civility rather than using the difference in negotiating positions to force the employee to accept some fairly draconian positions. Since such civilised behaviour is unfortunately wishful thinking, we enact laws to prevent employees from being exploited in this way.
Indeed. We have a fundamentally different approach to our desires in Europe. Discussions about comparityive quality of life (or rather "You all suck" flamewars) usually fail to appreciate this fundamental difference. Most Europeans are simply unable to comprehend America's extremely capitalistic approach, and so feel the quality of life in Europe is better where there are better social safeguards and shorter working hours. Most (but probably not all) Americans on the other hand can't believe that Europe could have a better qaulity of life because high taxes reduce the purchasing power of its citizens.
Personally, one of my aspirations is a 4 day working week.
Oh, I completely agree. The problem is there's very much a culture of overwork, and managers lack the imagination to work out other ways out of slippage other than working overtime. Which doesn't work anyway.
What exactly is the employee's motivation other than termination?
Making cool games. Fitting in with the team. The threat of termination is not really a factor. There's possibly a perception that this is the case but it's typically never threatened, and rarely even hinted at.
The problem is, when you're told the rest of the team is working late, so you should too, it puts you into an awkward position. Generally you quite like these guys. You don't want them to suffer. In addition, you do want to see your game come out. Seeing a game you've worked on on the shelves is really a very rewarding experience.
Interestingly he uses the same method. Last time he was right (Apple switching over to Intel) he'd been saying that for years.
I only do it to coax people to jump on me. I'm just a troll at heart, but I hope the responses cause some amusement to those who realise I'm not serious.
The movie industry is very clear on this matter! Piracy is theft. If it's theft, then they must be losing money. But they can't possibly lose more than they charge for it otherwise they'd be losing money on sales. Therefore, lower cost price = lower piracy losses.
Buying an unlicenced copy and copying make no difference. Why would it make a difference just because I gave someone else money? This is why copyright comes down so heavily on the distributer rather than the receiver.
Yes. Unless they take action and rapidly reduce the cost of the movie to free, of course they will. This is why they're so scared of piracy. A single person can, if they put enough effort into it, bankrupt them.
Every time you pirate a movie, the studios lose the cost of that movie. If the movie costs $20 then they lose $20, and if it costs $30, then they lose $30. They know they can't possibly compete with free, so they're doing the best they possibly can to reduce their losses. By only charging $1.50 for each copy, this will cut their piracy losses considerably even if they don't sell any.
Not sure if an objective study would reveal a lot. From a technical pont of view, they're remarkably similar. Both use essentially the same basic concepts, both have higher density than DVD, they use the same video formats and allow the same user control demanded by the studios. The main differences seem to be Blu-ray theoretically allows significantly higher capacity, and different studios are backing different formats.
True. But a lot of people do need better glasses. The difference between VHS and DVD was a lot more noticable.
I'm not convinced. Intel - like most other semiconductor companies - like to offer each product independently. In addition to this, they will usually licence most of their patents using a cross licencing scheme, so there's no benefit to using Intel. Intel isn't going to care because they still get their money.
Well, that would be tax evasion, which would result in a very long prison sentence. You're an idiot, and clearly can't even comprehend the argument.
I have no desire to discuss sexual preferences or anything else of a personal nature in an online game
That's nice. Some people have.
This is true. Legalities of the situation are a red herring. It's quite possible to be totally legally correct, and morally reprehensible. This is one of the reasons that a free media is so essential.
Blizzard suffered quite severely over this. And quite righfully so. They completely failed to deal with this adequately in private. Attempting to deal with it on the forums lead to censorship, so the player took it public. They forced Blizzard to address the issue. Blizzard's defence was met with scorn by the public. Their only option was to back down, or suffer a serious PR hit.
Although from a legal point of view, Blizzard have a serious problem in that they have no internal analogy to a legal system. If you have a problem with the administration, there is no independent body to turn to for arbitration. If there's a blatant violation of policy by Blizzard itself, there's absolutely nothing anyone can do within the game framework.