Nothing noble about it. They have no obligation to give me anything. They aren't going to unless they think they can make a profit from it. I'm not going to pretend I'm legally entitled to anything.
Hell, theiur entire business model is based on getting as much out of me as they can. I therefore have no qualms about giving them as little as I can manage.
I'm not claiming it's noble. Just a piece of negotiation. I'm not claiming I owe them any favours here.
Their entire business model is based on getting as much from me as they are legally able. I therefore have no qualms about doing as much as possible to get as much as possible for them as I can legally manage.
I agree. Hell, I'll try my luck, and might even kick up a fuss if they refuse to honour it to see if I can get a gift voucher or something from them, but I'm not going to claim I deserve anything.
That wasn't a legal thing. Kodak just realised the bad PR that was being generated was probably costing them more than the value of the cameras.
There's also the consideration that the price was not quite obviously wrong. Very very cheap, perhaps, but this was at a time when digital camera prices were dropping like crazy. Nobody would consider a PDA to cost £7. They'd be sceptical if it was a used gameboy at that price.
Because it was posted on the basis that a piece of arbitrary copy and paste from a biased source is quite likely to get a few flames. Hence it was baiting these flames.
Anything that is bait for flames will be flamebait, by definition. "Flame", "Bait". "Flamebait". See.
That is true. Another possibility is the surveilance equipment would be tampered with to gain unauthorised and untraceable access. This leads me to the conclusion that most safguards are inadequate.
That's the best argument against public usage you can make?
Sigh. People always make the mistake of going for extreeme examples. How about - my work may use it to see that I'm calling in sick or moonlighting or something. The media might use it to keep tabs on celebrities
Excellent solution. Cameras might be on every street corner, but nowhere will they be as numerous as in the police stations and City Hall. Public servants, after all...
Sounds like too much effort to me. To watch the watchers, all we need is to keep track of who's been looking at what, and when. If you want to see if someone's watching you, keep track of your movements, and see if anyone has looked at tapes of all the placews you've been.
I do not believe that anyone has a "right" to steal, period
Just to clarify, neither do I. I do see that some people see this differently though. People seem to be very good at justifying things on the basis that "everyone else does it". Mob psychology is powerful stuff.
And I totally agree on the IP argument. I really think the term intellectual property needs to be abandoned. Property is not a good metaphor. It restricts our thinking of how best to compensate artists to a property model.
Still, I'm more impressed with a few others. MIPS has no MOVE instruction in hardware, although it does in the assembly language. Early computers often had a subtract, but no add. Hardware was too expensive, so to add you simply subtracted a negative number.
No. It is not the "human condition" to steal. I do not steal towels or cutlery or glasses because that is physical property that someone had to manufacture and someone else had to buy. It would be immoral and unethical for me to steal those things.
You know, so many people do steal from hotel rooms that they simply assume that it will happen and add it to the standard room rate. British Airways even went as far as putting "Nicked from BA" on the salt and pepper shakers that came with the meal in First class.
If you still feel it's unethical, then I applaud your honesty, but you have to admit, it's obvious that some people will feel they have a right to steal.
But of course that's not a problem. Piracy is probably pretty much saturated right now. I guess there is still a small gap in the market for people who want to give their entire mp3 collection to a friend or something. Quite honstly though, I have trouble seeing this.
On the other hand, this will increase the overal demand in music (by a trivial amount perhaps). It will allow someone to carry a large part of their music collection with them. Or perhaps it will make people feel obliged to buy more music to fill those discs. Once again, I can't quite see that this is what most people want, but I would like my mp3 collection on my PC to be a little more portable.
What it really does is open up a potential mechanism for selling singles. Go to a booth. slot in the disc, drop in some money, select a song, and copy it onto the disc. The record company has virtually no per-unit cost for a disc, apart from a couple of overheads.
What would happen to Disney without copyright protection continuing for Mickey? Would someone else start using a mouse character to promote a theme park?
I'm not totally sure I underrstand copyrights and trademarks 100%, but if I'm not mitaken, Disney will ahve Mickey Mouse as a trademark for as long as they use it and defend it. So, nobody else could use it to promot e a theme park. They could use the character in their own cartoons, but that's about it.
20 years is a nice duration for a copyright. An author or artist could live off a creation for about 1/3 of a long adult life-span.
I sort of agree. Sometuimes I'm less inlcined to though. I saw The Iron Giant some time ago. This was a good film based on a very nice children's book (The Iron Man by Ted Hughes). Somehow it seems that Ted Hughes deserves at least some of the proceeds of the film. No real reason, it just seems right.
This being the case, I'd actually go for some sort of gradual decay of protection. Total control for some time, followed by a right to royalty for some time after.
Extending patents and awarding patents for software do not encourage creativity.
Well.... the patents covering mp3 did produce Ogg. those covering RSA resulted in a lot of research into other public key techniques (eliptic curve etc). But this isn't really how it should work.
In a nutshell, if you are ever a major motion picture star or agent for one, make sure that you get a piece of the gross and not the net.
Wise words. If only Stan Lee had heeded them, he would have been much richer.
It's true. the majority of movies make a loss on paper. It's an impressive feat that a film that costs $100 million to make, $100 million to market, and makes $500 million in worldwide box office sales can break even, but apparently it does.
Unfortunately this is low-crime Japan. You'd have to spend a few minutes explaining to the police what mugging means, and convincing them that someone would be so dishonourable as to do such a thing.
It all depends on the level that you're looking at things. The connection between software and the raw data is irrelevent to some fields, and critical to others.
I'm not actually sure how USB works. I always assumed it used the basic transfer technique that serial does for the actual communications (i.e. high = 1 low = 0, we have a paritiy bit, etc...). What you really need to know about communications though is things like different data encoding methods, handshaking, and the various protocols used for sending data down a single piece of wire. Given enough of this ionformation, you can understand any design with just a few key words. e.g. ethernet uses fixed legth packets with a packet size of X(Can't quite remember - how embarrasing), and manchester encoding.
When someone competes on price, they're not coming into my store and stealing something. Competition != stealing.
but you lose the same amount of money from people buying from a competitor as if someone steals from you. Why is competition not stealing if it causes me to make a loss?
Nor does that in any way justify stealing. Would you justify that homicide is ok? Just because there is doctor assisted suicide, that means it's ok for you to go to someone's house and murder them?
Never said stealing was okay. Just have an issue that the loss is the amount that you assume someone will pay.
If the thief didn't want to pay for something, they shouldn't be stealing it.
They did though didn't they. The business model has to take this into account. If you can't make a profit after shrinkage, then you will make a loss. It may be someone elses fault, but it's up to you to deal with the costs. My example above showed that I was making $36 profit despite shrinkage of 50%. I'm still in profit. Not as much as I would be without the theft, and so I would like ot discourage the theft, but I'm not going to foool myself into believing that that thief would have spent $40 on the item he stole when he may not have paid for it at all.
The cost was the possible profit you could've had.
So, if I put a price tag of $1 000 000 on a loaf of bread, and someone steals it, I've lost $1 000 000 even if I can replace it for 30c? Nobody was ever going to give me that much for the loaf.
The amounts are very not arbitrary.
Yes they are. If you set a price, you pick arbitrarily. You choose that amount you think people will pay.
As I pointed out, you have no understanding of basic economics.
My understanding of basic economics statres that if I have $36 more than when I started, I've made a profit.
You also seem to be in love with the idea that stealing isn't stealing. I'll leave you to smooch with that idea, since it's very ugly to me.
No. I'm just resigned to the idea that stealing is something that happens. You comment that "Stealing is stealing" is a tautology. Of course stealing is stealing. Stealing is also something that cannot be adjusted by the business model.
I disagree on the cost of crime. You seem to be interpreting this as a belief that criminal activity is okay.
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing noble about it. They have no obligation to give me anything. They aren't going to unless they think they can make a profit from it. I'm not going to pretend I'm legally entitled to anything.
Hell, theiur entire business model is based on getting as much out of me as they can. I therefore have no qualms about giving them as little as I can manage.
I'm not claiming it's noble. Just a piece of negotiation. I'm not claiming I owe them any favours here.
Their entire business model is based on getting as much from me as they are legally able. I therefore have no qualms about doing as much as possible to get as much as possible for them as I can legally manage.
I agree. Hell, I'll try my luck, and might even kick up a fuss if they refuse to honour it to see if I can get a gift voucher or something from them, but I'm not going to claim I deserve anything.
That wasn't a legal thing. Kodak just realised the bad PR that was being generated was probably costing them more than the value of the cameras.
There's also the consideration that the price was not quite obviously wrong. Very very cheap, perhaps, but this was at a time when digital camera prices were dropping like crazy. Nobody would consider a PDA to cost £7. They'd be sceptical if it was a used gameboy at that price.
Because it was posted on the basis that a piece of arbitrary copy and paste from a biased source is quite likely to get a few flames. Hence it was baiting these flames.
Anything that is bait for flames will be flamebait, by definition. "Flame", "Bait". "Flamebait". See.
The problem is that logs can be tampered with.
That is true. Another possibility is the surveilance equipment would be tampered with to gain unauthorised and untraceable access. This leads me to the conclusion that most safguards are inadequate.
It made money, but not "profits" as defined by the studio lawyers.
Essentially, it's a tax dosge and a way to get out of paying creators. ref from BBC news
Didn't it officially make a loss? Most films do, after all.
That's the best argument against public usage you can make?
Sigh. People always make the mistake of going for extreeme examples. How about - my work may use it to see that I'm calling in sick or moonlighting or something. The media might use it to keep tabs on celebrities
Excellent solution. Cameras might be on every street corner, but nowhere will they be as numerous as in the police stations and City Hall. Public servants, after all...
Sounds like too much effort to me. To watch the watchers, all we need is to keep track of who's been looking at what, and when. If you want to see if someone's watching you, keep track of your movements, and see if anyone has looked at tapes of all the placews you've been.
This is only one step short of 'does it support Ogg?' in the big list of the world's stupidest questions.
Why is that a stupid question? I have several CDs full of Oggs. Don't want to recode them to mp3.
There must be others on the market that do more or less the same, surely.
Isn't thjat already the discount price? I thought they were £400 new.
I do not believe that anyone has a "right" to steal, period
Just to clarify, neither do I. I do see that some people see this differently though. People seem to be very good at justifying things on the basis that "everyone else does it". Mob psychology is powerful stuff.
And I totally agree on the IP argument. I really think the term intellectual property needs to be abandoned. Property is not a good metaphor. It restricts our thinking of how best to compensate artists to a property model.
The third ammendment seems to be holding up quite well. I don't know anyone who has had their home requisitioned by the US army recently.
But ADC and ADD are slightly different.
Still, I'm more impressed with a few others. MIPS has no MOVE instruction in hardware, although it does in the assembly language. Early computers often had a subtract, but no add. Hardware was too expensive, so to add you simply subtracted a negative number.
No. It is not the "human condition" to steal. I do not steal towels or cutlery or glasses because that is physical property that someone had to manufacture and someone else had to buy. It would be immoral and unethical for me to steal those things.
You know, so many people do steal from hotel rooms that they simply assume that it will happen and add it to the standard room rate. British Airways even went as far as putting "Nicked from BA" on the salt and pepper shakers that came with the meal in First class.
If you still feel it's unethical, then I applaud your honesty, but you have to admit, it's obvious that some people will feel they have a right to steal.
But of course that's not a problem. Piracy is probably pretty much saturated right now. I guess there is still a small gap in the market for people who want to give their entire mp3 collection to a friend or something. Quite honstly though, I have trouble seeing this.
On the other hand, this will increase the overal demand in music (by a trivial amount perhaps). It will allow someone to carry a large part of their music collection with them. Or perhaps it will make people feel obliged to buy more music to fill those discs. Once again, I can't quite see that this is what most people want, but I would like my mp3 collection on my PC to be a little more portable.
What it really does is open up a potential mechanism for selling singles. Go to a booth. slot in the disc, drop in some money, select a song, and copy it onto the disc. The record company has virtually no per-unit cost for a disc, apart from a couple of overheads.
I though he got chained to a rock, and had an eagle rip his liver out every day, or something
Do I get the $1 if I get an essential computer taken offline (e.g. University webserver)?
What would happen to Disney without copyright protection continuing for Mickey? Would someone else start using a mouse character to promote a theme park?
I'm not totally sure I underrstand copyrights and trademarks 100%, but if I'm not mitaken, Disney will ahve Mickey Mouse as a trademark for as long as they use it and defend it. So, nobody else could use it to promot e a theme park. They could use the character in their own cartoons, but that's about it.
20 years is a nice duration for a copyright. An author or artist could live off a creation for about 1/3 of a long adult life-span.
I sort of agree. Sometuimes I'm less inlcined to though. I saw The Iron Giant some time ago. This was a good film based on a very nice children's book (The Iron Man by Ted Hughes). Somehow it seems that Ted Hughes deserves at least some of the proceeds of the film. No real reason, it just seems right.
This being the case, I'd actually go for some sort of gradual decay of protection. Total control for some time, followed by a right to royalty for some time after.
Extending patents and awarding patents for software do not encourage creativity.
Well.... the patents covering mp3 did produce Ogg. those covering RSA resulted in a lot of research into other public key techniques (eliptic curve etc). But this isn't really how it should work.
In a nutshell, if you are ever a major motion picture star or agent for one, make sure that you get a piece of the gross and not the net.
Wise words. If only Stan Lee had heeded them, he would have been much richer.
It's true. the majority of movies make a loss on paper. It's an impressive feat that a film that costs $100 million to make, $100 million to market, and makes $500 million in worldwide box office sales can break even, but apparently it does.
Unfortunately this is low-crime Japan. You'd have to spend a few minutes explaining to the police what mugging means, and convincing them that someone would be so dishonourable as to do such a thing.
It all depends on the level that you're looking at things. The connection between software and the raw data is irrelevent to some fields, and critical to others.
I'm not actually sure how USB works. I always assumed it used the basic transfer technique that serial does for the actual communications (i.e. high = 1 low = 0, we have a paritiy bit, etc...). What you really need to know about communications though is things like different data encoding methods, handshaking, and the various protocols used for sending data down a single piece of wire. Given enough of this ionformation, you can understand any design with just a few key words. e.g. ethernet uses fixed legth packets with a packet size of X(Can't quite remember - how embarrasing), and manchester encoding.
When someone competes on price, they're not coming into my store and stealing something. Competition != stealing.
but you lose the same amount of money from people buying from a competitor as if someone steals from you. Why is competition not stealing if it causes me to make a loss?
Nor does that in any way justify stealing. Would you justify that homicide is ok? Just because there is doctor assisted suicide, that means it's ok for you to go to someone's house and murder them?
Never said stealing was okay. Just have an issue that the loss is the amount that you assume someone will pay.
If the thief didn't want to pay for something, they shouldn't be stealing it.
They did though didn't they. The business model has to take this into account. If you can't make a profit after shrinkage, then you will make a loss. It may be someone elses fault, but it's up to you to deal with the costs. My example above showed that I was making $36 profit despite shrinkage of 50%. I'm still in profit. Not as much as I would be without the theft, and so I would like ot discourage the theft, but I'm not going to foool myself into believing that that thief would have spent $40 on the item he stole when he may not have paid for it at all.
The cost was the possible profit you could've had.
So, if I put a price tag of $1 000 000 on a loaf of bread, and someone steals it, I've lost $1 000 000 even if I can replace it for 30c? Nobody was ever going to give me that much for the loaf.
The amounts are very not arbitrary.
Yes they are. If you set a price, you pick arbitrarily. You choose that amount you think people will pay.
As I pointed out, you have no understanding of basic economics.
My understanding of basic economics statres that if I have $36 more than when I started, I've made a profit.
You also seem to be in love with the idea that stealing isn't stealing. I'll leave you to smooch with that idea, since it's very ugly to me.
No. I'm just resigned to the idea that stealing is something that happens. You comment that "Stealing is stealing" is a tautology. Of course stealing is stealing. Stealing is also something that cannot be adjusted by the business model.
I disagree on the cost of crime. You seem to be interpreting this as a belief that criminal activity is okay.
They should clamp down on for-profit piracy, and ease off on casual piracy on Kazaa etc.