Actually, given the history of human-based evil, it has a nasty habit of imploding from the inside, given enough time. Its hierarchical structure is something which consumes way too much energy for the human beings involved, leading to all sorts of unhappy endings.
Now, is that because libertarians are simply hard to please, or because, according to various definitions, we don't really have any free countries in existence today?
Now, did you jump to respond to my above posting, with an almost reactionary "Of course we live in a free country, STFU ur a moron" or did you spend several moments asking yourself what metric we use to decide the magnitude of freedom in a country today, then draw a conclusion? Was your response to vapid reflexive programmed response, or the thinking response? If either, why?
So, when someone from one of the media companies decides to pirate a show from another media company, and does so more than six times, what kind of fines are we looking at?
Hmm. Indeed. Blu-Ray needs 100GB discs to remain somewhat viable. The things which would benefit from Blu-Ray are the things that are too large for a Blu-Ray disc.
For instance, making backups on my main drive: if I used a 100GB Blu-Ray disc, that may be only two or three of them per week. If I use 25GB Blu-Ray discs...well, I have other things to do than play disc jockey.
I'm thinking more along the lines of entire seasons of various shows on a single disc. Of course, I have a giant stack of Blu-Rays, and yet have not burned a single one...I think part of the problem is that 25GB is too small for a complete show in some instances, and that I have to hand label them / print labels to put on them (I love my LightScribe, but the Blu-Ray discs I have do not have that option). Plus there's the minor fact that it's not compatible with most of the things in my house...save other computers I've built (perhaps some of the laptops I have not? not sure).
The amount of effort it takes to put together a setup that will play a Blu-Ray disc in its original movie form is...a pain. Need software, and a firmware updater in case certain keys are revoked. Connections need to be DVI or HDMI...and so on. Annoying.
Indeed. The Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD wars really damaged things so far as optical drives are concerned, with the costs for media really holding Blu-Ray back. I imagine that is due in part to Sony, which has a serious problem when it comes to licensing / pricing to remain competitive at times; they've apparently killed a number of technologies, superior ones, simply because they wanted way too much money for licensing rights.
And one which would hasten their death. They have no long term plans if the hard drive market goes belly up, and SSDs are slowly creeping up on them.
When SSD capacity / costs are less than HDs, they're done. And yes, I've seen Seagate's Pulsar SSDs, and no, I do not know anyone planning to pay that kind of money for what is, if I remember the reviews correctly, worse than consumer level SSDs: they were essentially late to the party, and have been trying to pitch their underwhelming product as an 'Enterprise' level SSD, at prices that are rather frightening.
Yup, did a quick double-check to make sure my information was still valid, and yes, those prices are outrageous (cue guitar riff).
Indeed. They've come out with 4TB drives, but the prices for them are way up there -> I think it's more cost effective to buy 2 3TB drives than 1 4TB drive. And that's bad.
What more, I am not using most of the storage I currently have. It's not like how it was during the '90s, when every extra GB was something amazing. Now it's 'the next storage capacity needs to be twice the previous' at an agreeable cost for me to upgrade. Paying good money for last year's storage capacity is an annoyance, and not likely to last (SSDs are slowly creeping up there in capacity).
I think Seagate made a short-term profit at the cost of future market-share. They took advantage of a bad situation, and have aimed to extend it as long as possible, reasoning that computers need hard drives, and OEMs do not have any other options. Well, OEMs do have other options: they're called SSDs. And while Seagate was busy making a tidy profit, it also was providing a good excuse for many people to try out SSDs. And they learned that they like them.
If I have to choose a 2 TB SSD or a 4 TB HD, the SSD is going to win. All my hard drives are going to be swapped with SSDs once the capacity gets up there. And I've looked at Seagate's SSD offerings -> they are proof that Seagate is not taking the SSD market seriously.
I would consider keeping hard drives around if their capacity was around 8 TBs, or perhaps at least 6 TBs. But it looks like SSDs, which are doubling their capacity at a frightening rate, will be overtaking hard drives long before they reach that capacity. The practical upshot of this is that no one will do business with Seagate, and I can finally watch the last of Maxtor die its long overdue death. A pity since before the merger, Seagate was, from what I've heard, a decent company. But like HP & Compaq, the disease spread.
And they will continue with business as usual until you let them fail, at least once, to get the message across.
After you do so, their insurance companies / etc. will explain to them that they need to meet certain criteria, or they'll need to find someone else to cover them.
If you keep it as is, the only lesson they've learned is that in the event of an emergency, their political counterparts will bail them out, no questions asked.
The music industry wanted tighter control over content, eschewing music CDs and MP3s (etc.), for streaming services that let end-users play content but not 'download it / save it to a hard disk.' And their tight-fistedness backfires -> users have found ways to legally download those streamed videos / audio, and are apparently totally okay with the decayed quality it represents; it's actually so bad, that many users prefer the weird artifacts present in lossy-compressed audio files to uncompressed clean ones.
Now, the music industry is probably going to think "Ok, then we'll just restrict the quality of YouTube videos / music; except that as I've pointed out before, the people downloading that music do not care about the quality; it could be a 96K MP3 with serious distortions, and, because of the damage done to their ears by shitting iPod headphones, they won't care." Then they might think "Well, then, we'll just limit the number of times that someone can watch / listen to a music video / song; except that they'll just download it with a clean IP address, after they catch onto your new trick." Then they might think "We'll just change the player / encryption so they can't download it; except that someone will crack it again in a few weeks, and you set up an arms race you can't win."
You could try to explain to them that they can't win, they can only hope not to lose. But it would go over their heads.
But yes, selling CDs after a performance, with the artist on hand to sign them / take a photo with fans, is a very good stop-gap idea. At least until the music industry gets things 'right.'
Possibly. Or justice will take on a new, and probably insane role -> peeking into a suspect's mind to reveal what they think about various things.
Except that that would be an extremely naive approach, as one may entertain billions of thoughts, but only act on a handful of them. However, given the low quality of 'social' justice I've seen up until now, I'd much prefer to be dead before they put any kind of system like that into play. The rampant stupidity of trying to explain to a court with a senile ("What are you kids doing on my lawn?") judge, a delinquent psychologist ("Of course this machine works!"), and a pure evil (Son of Satan, needs a 100% conviction record to move into higher politics) attorney general would probably cause me to have repeated grand mal seizures just from being in their presence.
I'm not saying I wouldn't trust these people to be left alone with a pair of scissors without hurting someone, but I wouldn't trust these people with a pair of scissors. Reading any amount of human history (go ahead, read the books, visit a library or read about it on the internet) would argue that these people will lead the inquisitions, which will kill millions, if not billions, of innocent people. It's shame to think we will be blessed with the kinds of people who, through a defect not their own, will be incapable of understanding why many of the people under their 'righteous' rule will probably commit suicide just to get away from them.
Bob, your problem here, as always, is that cable companies do not operate in a free market: they're regional monopolies, not by market forces, but because your local politicians / committees voted, into law, that these particular companies would receive special treatment in return for certain considerations. They have rights of ways, special low rates / taxes, etc. and whatever, for the thousandeth time, that their competitors do not get, and have trouble competing against. That's about as free market as blue is red.
Free market, like it or not, is kind of an all or nothing deal. The entire market is free, or it isn't. There is no middle ground, because any compromise destroys the part of it known as 'free.' Guess which part everyone compromises on? If you said the free part, you'd be right. Everyone wants what the free market offers, unless it's not in their favor; they all want a little button to press to 'fix' the market whenever it looks like it might do something they don't like. The problem is, is that the market is kind of like the AI that controls a jet engine -> you may not like a time T0 that the engine suddenly requested more fuel than you deemed necessary, but that's because the AI was trying to prevent an engine stall at T1; your little override causes a much worse problem than if the engine was completely manual, or completely controlled by the AI. The market is a state-machine, like what you have in a logic course, a computer science course, or a math / engineering course; once put into action, it will continue to reassert valid states in the event of any exceptions. Your problem is that you are denying it that opportunity, and in doing so, making things worse.
But it's more idiotic than that. You're the guy who, despite using a program that can work, and work well, wants to run the program, after it's out of QA, in debug mode, just so you can swap individual values on the stack when you feel like it. It doesn't matter that that's not how it's meant to work, nor that you're not a programmer; it's just what you want to do, and think, hey, instead of getting someone to rewrite the code if there's a problem, I'll just randomly swap values that the program thinks are constants. Holy ^*^*&, the program didn't like that! Well, I guess I need to keep tampering with it, until it stop throwing up errors / output I don't like. You could drive an AI mad, like batshit crazy; you would be the General who would demand an AI be outfitted with a robotic arm so it could salute you whenever you walked by.
Because noticing the increase in 'market value' of the people you employ is, I don't know, a standard part of business operating procedures? Because people aren't serfs? They aren't tied to the land, so to speak, and if they are treated ill, they can leave (and not return)?
The market, when functioning properly, is neither pro-employee nor pro-employer. It will, in general, match up, in the job market, the best employee with the best employer. That's when it's functioning properly. When it isn't, chaos rules the day; the bad kind of chaos, where people's lives are ruined during a Tuesday afternoon, from afar, simply because killing a profitable company would make someone else's stock rise a quarter point (the real kind of madness, where someone would execute a large corporation, like IBM, with a double tap to the head, on a day when it made no sense to happen, simply because it was doing well, and because it was doing well, the chaos to follow would be that much more volatile; people expect sick companies to die, decent ones to grow; they don't expect sick ones to be borderline immortal, and good ones to suddenly keel over from a heart-attack; why? Because if you short a sick company, you don't gain much; but if you short, then execute, a healthy company, then you make out like a king).
But back on topic. I am going to resort to a crude caricature here, for the sake of argument: the company who does not notice your increase in worth is possibly the same company which does notice your decrease in worth. They're the kind of people who do not want to pay a dollar more than they have to, and will press their advantage as much as possible when the job market is in their favor; then they'll play the loyalty card when it swings in your favor. Switching to a more sane argument: who wants to work at a company who DOES NOT notice your worth? A company who would rely on you to do important things for decades, but never issue a raise or promotion? Who would want to work for a company who is not attuned enough to the ongoings of the market such to care about such minor, but important details? You might as well be storing money in a bank that didn't notice that it had been robbed 3 months ago, but did notice that your payment for your mortgage was 30 minutes late.
During the fall of any great civilization, they tend to burn down the libraries. And what is the Internet, but the largest library on Earth? And who wishes to burn it down, but armed forces?
I imagine the Library of Alexandria faced a similar problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, given the history of human-based evil, it has a nasty habit of imploding from the inside, given enough time. Its hierarchical structure is something which consumes way too much energy for the human beings involved, leading to all sorts of unhappy endings.
Somalia with its several competing gang-based governments is a free country? When I say the word free, this is what comes to your mind?
Such a fascinating word association. No doubt if I asked what word came to mind if I said 'love,' you might respond with 'rape' or 'slavery.'
Now, is that because libertarians are simply hard to please, or because, according to various definitions, we don't really have any free countries in existence today?
Now, did you jump to respond to my above posting, with an almost reactionary "Of course we live in a free country, STFU ur a moron" or did you spend several moments asking yourself what metric we use to decide the magnitude of freedom in a country today, then draw a conclusion? Was your response to vapid reflexive programmed response, or the thinking response? If either, why?
Ah, but they just removed due process, and did so without your consent.
Now I just need to convince them to begin conferring titles, and we will have come full circle.
So, when someone from one of the media companies decides to pirate a show from another media company, and does so more than six times, what kind of fines are we looking at?
Hmm. Indeed. Blu-Ray needs 100GB discs to remain somewhat viable. The things which would benefit from Blu-Ray are the things that are too large for a Blu-Ray disc.
For instance, making backups on my main drive: if I used a 100GB Blu-Ray disc, that may be only two or three of them per week. If I use 25GB Blu-Ray discs...well, I have other things to do than play disc jockey.
I'm thinking more along the lines of entire seasons of various shows on a single disc. Of course, I have a giant stack of Blu-Rays, and yet have not burned a single one...I think part of the problem is that 25GB is too small for a complete show in some instances, and that I have to hand label them / print labels to put on them (I love my LightScribe, but the Blu-Ray discs I have do not have that option). Plus there's the minor fact that it's not compatible with most of the things in my house...save other computers I've built (perhaps some of the laptops I have not? not sure).
The amount of effort it takes to put together a setup that will play a Blu-Ray disc in its original movie form is...a pain. Need software, and a firmware updater in case certain keys are revoked. Connections need to be DVI or HDMI...and so on. Annoying.
And yet strangely, they can be less expensive than their internal counterparts when shopping around online. Boggles the mind.
Indeed. Once people see their OS / applications on a SSD, they are unwilling to go back to a HD.
Indeed. The Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD wars really damaged things so far as optical drives are concerned, with the costs for media really holding Blu-Ray back. I imagine that is due in part to Sony, which has a serious problem when it comes to licensing / pricing to remain competitive at times; they've apparently killed a number of technologies, superior ones, simply because they wanted way too much money for licensing rights.
And one which would hasten their death. They have no long term plans if the hard drive market goes belly up, and SSDs are slowly creeping up on them.
When SSD capacity / costs are less than HDs, they're done. And yes, I've seen Seagate's Pulsar SSDs, and no, I do not know anyone planning to pay that kind of money for what is, if I remember the reviews correctly, worse than consumer level SSDs: they were essentially late to the party, and have been trying to pitch their underwhelming product as an 'Enterprise' level SSD, at prices that are rather frightening.
Yup, did a quick double-check to make sure my information was still valid, and yes, those prices are outrageous (cue guitar riff).
http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Pulsar-2-2-5-Inch-Internal-ST100FM0012/dp/B0089V4XPU/ref=pd_sim_sbs_pc_3
$1,319.99 for a 200GB MLC drive.
Indeed. They've come out with 4TB drives, but the prices for them are way up there -> I think it's more cost effective to buy 2 3TB drives than 1 4TB drive. And that's bad.
What more, I am not using most of the storage I currently have. It's not like how it was during the '90s, when every extra GB was something amazing. Now it's 'the next storage capacity needs to be twice the previous' at an agreeable cost for me to upgrade. Paying good money for last year's storage capacity is an annoyance, and not likely to last (SSDs are slowly creeping up there in capacity).
I think Seagate made a short-term profit at the cost of future market-share. They took advantage of a bad situation, and have aimed to extend it as long as possible, reasoning that computers need hard drives, and OEMs do not have any other options. Well, OEMs do have other options: they're called SSDs. And while Seagate was busy making a tidy profit, it also was providing a good excuse for many people to try out SSDs. And they learned that they like them.
If I have to choose a 2 TB SSD or a 4 TB HD, the SSD is going to win. All my hard drives are going to be swapped with SSDs once the capacity gets up there. And I've looked at Seagate's SSD offerings -> they are proof that Seagate is not taking the SSD market seriously.
I would consider keeping hard drives around if their capacity was around 8 TBs, or perhaps at least 6 TBs. But it looks like SSDs, which are doubling their capacity at a frightening rate, will be overtaking hard drives long before they reach that capacity. The practical upshot of this is that no one will do business with Seagate, and I can finally watch the last of Maxtor die its long overdue death. A pity since before the merger, Seagate was, from what I've heard, a decent company. But like HP & Compaq, the disease spread.
And they will continue with business as usual until you let them fail, at least once, to get the message across.
After you do so, their insurance companies / etc. will explain to them that they need to meet certain criteria, or they'll need to find someone else to cover them.
If you keep it as is, the only lesson they've learned is that in the event of an emergency, their political counterparts will bail them out, no questions asked.
Your
The music industry wanted tighter control over content, eschewing music CDs and MP3s (etc.), for streaming services that let end-users play content but not 'download it / save it to a hard disk.' And their tight-fistedness backfires -> users have found ways to legally download those streamed videos / audio, and are apparently totally okay with the decayed quality it represents; it's actually so bad, that many users prefer the weird artifacts present in lossy-compressed audio files to uncompressed clean ones.
Now, the music industry is probably going to think "Ok, then we'll just restrict the quality of YouTube videos / music; except that as I've pointed out before, the people downloading that music do not care about the quality; it could be a 96K MP3 with serious distortions, and, because of the damage done to their ears by shitting iPod headphones, they won't care." Then they might think "Well, then, we'll just limit the number of times that someone can watch / listen to a music video / song; except that they'll just download it with a clean IP address, after they catch onto your new trick." Then they might think "We'll just change the player / encryption so they can't download it; except that someone will crack it again in a few weeks, and you set up an arms race you can't win."
You could try to explain to them that they can't win, they can only hope not to lose. But it would go over their heads.
But yes, selling CDs after a performance, with the artist on hand to sign them / take a photo with fans, is a very good stop-gap idea. At least until the music industry gets things 'right.'
Have you been watching the news lately? I don't think they care whether they are routing suppliers or buyers.
And you don't get it. The CIA hates competition, and will stop at nothing to ensure that they are the only 'suppliers' on the market. ^_^
Possibly. Or justice will take on a new, and probably insane role -> peeking into a suspect's mind to reveal what they think about various things.
Except that that would be an extremely naive approach, as one may entertain billions of thoughts, but only act on a handful of them. However, given the low quality of 'social' justice I've seen up until now, I'd much prefer to be dead before they put any kind of system like that into play. The rampant stupidity of trying to explain to a court with a senile ("What are you kids doing on my lawn?") judge, a delinquent psychologist ("Of course this machine works!"), and a pure evil (Son of Satan, needs a 100% conviction record to move into higher politics) attorney general would probably cause me to have repeated grand mal seizures just from being in their presence.
I'm not saying I wouldn't trust these people to be left alone with a pair of scissors without hurting someone, but I wouldn't trust these people with a pair of scissors. Reading any amount of human history (go ahead, read the books, visit a library or read about it on the internet) would argue that these people will lead the inquisitions, which will kill millions, if not billions, of innocent people. It's shame to think we will be blessed with the kinds of people who, through a defect not their own, will be incapable of understanding why many of the people under their 'righteous' rule will probably commit suicide just to get away from them.
*shrugs* Wasn't a problem in Shadow Warrior. Half would camp, half would devise effective strategies to get around camping.
Bob, your problem here, as always, is that cable companies do not operate in a free market: they're regional monopolies, not by market forces, but because your local politicians / committees voted, into law, that these particular companies would receive special treatment in return for certain considerations. They have rights of ways, special low rates / taxes, etc. and whatever, for the thousandeth time, that their competitors do not get, and have trouble competing against. That's about as free market as blue is red.
Free market, like it or not, is kind of an all or nothing deal. The entire market is free, or it isn't. There is no middle ground, because any compromise destroys the part of it known as 'free.' Guess which part everyone compromises on? If you said the free part, you'd be right. Everyone wants what the free market offers, unless it's not in their favor; they all want a little button to press to 'fix' the market whenever it looks like it might do something they don't like. The problem is, is that the market is kind of like the AI that controls a jet engine -> you may not like a time T0 that the engine suddenly requested more fuel than you deemed necessary, but that's because the AI was trying to prevent an engine stall at T1; your little override causes a much worse problem than if the engine was completely manual, or completely controlled by the AI. The market is a state-machine, like what you have in a logic course, a computer science course, or a math / engineering course; once put into action, it will continue to reassert valid states in the event of any exceptions. Your problem is that you are denying it that opportunity, and in doing so, making things worse.
But it's more idiotic than that. You're the guy who, despite using a program that can work, and work well, wants to run the program, after it's out of QA, in debug mode, just so you can swap individual values on the stack when you feel like it. It doesn't matter that that's not how it's meant to work, nor that you're not a programmer; it's just what you want to do, and think, hey, instead of getting someone to rewrite the code if there's a problem, I'll just randomly swap values that the program thinks are constants. Holy ^*^*&, the program didn't like that! Well, I guess I need to keep tampering with it, until it stop throwing up errors / output I don't like. You could drive an AI mad, like batshit crazy; you would be the General who would demand an AI be outfitted with a robotic arm so it could salute you whenever you walked by.
Because noticing the increase in 'market value' of the people you employ is, I don't know, a standard part of business operating procedures? Because people aren't serfs? They aren't tied to the land, so to speak, and if they are treated ill, they can leave (and not return)?
The market, when functioning properly, is neither pro-employee nor pro-employer. It will, in general, match up, in the job market, the best employee with the best employer. That's when it's functioning properly. When it isn't, chaos rules the day; the bad kind of chaos, where people's lives are ruined during a Tuesday afternoon, from afar, simply because killing a profitable company would make someone else's stock rise a quarter point (the real kind of madness, where someone would execute a large corporation, like IBM, with a double tap to the head, on a day when it made no sense to happen, simply because it was doing well, and because it was doing well, the chaos to follow would be that much more volatile; people expect sick companies to die, decent ones to grow; they don't expect sick ones to be borderline immortal, and good ones to suddenly keel over from a heart-attack; why? Because if you short a sick company, you don't gain much; but if you short, then execute, a healthy company, then you make out like a king).
But back on topic. I am going to resort to a crude caricature here, for the sake of argument: the company who does not notice your increase in worth is possibly the same company which does notice your decrease in worth. They're the kind of people who do not want to pay a dollar more than they have to, and will press their advantage as much as possible when the job market is in their favor; then they'll play the loyalty card when it swings in your favor. Switching to a more sane argument: who wants to work at a company who DOES NOT notice your worth? A company who would rely on you to do important things for decades, but never issue a raise or promotion? Who would want to work for a company who is not attuned enough to the ongoings of the market such to care about such minor, but important details? You might as well be storing money in a bank that didn't notice that it had been robbed 3 months ago, but did notice that your payment for your mortgage was 30 minutes late.
Says someone who doesn't live where they are rolling out fiber.
Allow us to charge you with some heavy-handed crimes, and see how well you handle it.
Such is the cost of being a 'social' being; when the group turns against you, even if you are purely innocent, you still pay.
I believe 25 years is more than a few years.
During the fall of any great civilization, they tend to burn down the libraries. And what is the Internet, but the largest library on Earth? And who wishes to burn it down, but armed forces?
I imagine the Library of Alexandria faced a similar problem.