It's a good thing that the manufacturers of horse-drawn carriages were unable to sue automobile makers out of existince. This "horseless carriage" completely messed up their business model, didn't it? And damn it, they have a RIGHT to keep making money even when something better comes along! "Judge! You have to watch Ford, and Olds, and Benz! Their plan is evil and YOU CAN'T LET THEM MESS WITH OUR PROFITS!"
No, not quite.
Look, this whole thing is pissing me off to no end. I pay for satellite TV. What I do with those TV signals once their decoded IN MY OWN HOUSE is my own damn business. If I want to capture every frame on my computer, print them out, and piss on them... I can do that. If I want to put them on video tape, toss the tapes into a bonfire, and dance around it chanting anti-Disney phrases, fine. Skip commercials? Fine. Watch commercials again and again. Fine.
How are the capabilities of a ReplayTV unit at all different from what I can do with a VCR, a video tape, and the US Mail? What are they going to do? Sue VCR makers out of existance? Oh wait, they already tried that!
Haven't you people heard by now? Deep linking without proper protection has been shown to spread disease and if things really go wrong it may even cause you to spawn child processes and multiple web pages.
We have a serious problem with sick websites and internet overpopulation, so please stop deep linking each other, OK?
Hemos wrote...but the vendor lockin with someone who's being sued by *everyone* does throw some cold water on desire for the machine.
So tell me... how exactly is paying the fee up front (for a cost that'll probably equal about 2 to 2.5 years worth of "subscription") a better idea? You do realize that exactly what you do when you buy a Replay machine, right?
If you throw down your extra $200-$250 as part of the cost of the machine and 6 months later they're sued out of business, then what? At least with a subscription you're NOT locked in.
The ones who get caught stealing the car will spend a night or two in jail, get probation (maybe), and get another line added to thier probably already long list of offences to society. Then they'll be back on the street.
In the meantime people are getting locked up for writing software that the MPAA and/or RIAA (or Adobe) takes offense to. Or for smoking a plant. Or for consentual activities between adults.
The wireless GPS car is all very well and good, but taking thousands of dollars worth of property that is not yours is an offense that, IMO, should land someone in jail for a time on the order of decades, not days. But we all know exactly what will happen to those who are arrested.
Huh? How would raising taxes to pay higher civil service salaries encourage civil servants to spend said money more wisely?
Because you'd have better people in those jobs. I'm not saying just give eveyone a raise and things will be better. I'm saying increase the pay scales and you'll get better people. As it is now, the states mostly (and I assume CA is no differnet) pay fairly low salaries to state workers. That means that people working for the state are there because they couldn't get a job working somewhere else (yes yes, before you state workers jump down my throat, I know there's exceptions).
I think teachers are THE prime example of this. I'm not saying public school teachers are bad... many of them are amazing individuals... but in general you'd get much better teachers if the pay was competitive with the private sector.
Same is true for state workers... pay them well for doing a good job (which includes stopping wasteful state spending), get good/qualified people in positions, and I'm pretty sure things like this wouldn't happen.
Pay typical state wages to those making decisions and get poor decisions in return. When the state becomes wage-competitive with other industries, you'll get higher quality people in state jobs and less sloppy decisions.
Tom, you're confused about the United States Constitution. The ammendments were added after the original document was drafted (and thus they're "ammendments") and they're numbered in the order in which they were added. It's a fairly difficult process to have the consitution ammended (it requires a 2/3 vote of both houses of the legislature).
At the moment there are 27 ammendments with some VERY important ones further down the list. For example, the 15th Ammendment gave all citizens the right to vote regardless of race or color.
It just seems that the First, Second, and Fourth are the ones most commonly under attack in the United States (see sig). It doesn't mean that they get priority over other ammendments.
Just sticking the CPU board into a mini-fridge would be cheap and would probably work pretty well. Plus any extra space could be used to keep your beer cold.
The big problem, if I'm reading a lot of these messages correctly, is that local advertisers will suddenly be "competing" on a national scale. What good is to to them to advertise if only a tiny percentage of the people who are actually local will see the ad.
But there's a technological fix to this problem. If satellite customer had some level of PVR (TiVo-like) functionality built into the receiver, they could easily allocate some amount of storage for local advertising. When the user isn't watching TV, or in the middle of the night, the thing could record a set of local advertisements. Then when your watching TV, it'll just insert those 30 second spots seemlessly where there ads would go. If you the NBC feed from Las Angeles even though your in Orlando, instead of getting LA local ads, you get Orlando ads which your PVR recorded and stored without you even knowing it.
In fact advertisers might really start to like this idea as it would allow them some level of targeted TV advertising right to a given neighborhood or maybe based on user preferences.
This is essentially what local cable companies do with national feeds. You DO get local advertising on ESPN and whatnot, but NOT over the satellite. The ESPN (or other network) feed has spaces for local advertising. If you're a DirecTV subscriber, you've seen the Miss Cleo tarrot card ads and other junk like that right? Those are contracted with DirecTV. While you're watching those ads, your buddy who has cable might be seeing an ad for a local business.
The trick will be to make sure PVR are a STANDARD part of the satellite offering, not an add-on.
It's about a modestly successful startup whose mission was to build a product and sell it at a profit
You missed their business model completely.
Their actual business model was probably something more like this:
a) Create product and sell at little or no profit.
b) Sign book deal chronicling a)
c) Collect $$$ on book deal and royalties
I figure that's the only possibility since we all know that the only way to make money these days is cross licencing deals, book deals, collecting and selling customer information, lawsuits, and monopolies.
Honestly, does the mere existence of a pan-and-scan version cause you mental anguish?
Yes, in a way it does actually. It means that the studio and director copped out. They were willing to sacrifice the artistic integrity of the movie in order to get a few more sales.
Movies are now starting to show up on DVD in Pan and Scan ONLY, and that's REALLY bothersome. Luckily this one was not the case. Here the studio could have taken the opportunity to educate the public on the reasons for preserving OAR (Original Aspect Ratio) on what will surely be a HUGE selling DVD, but instead they took the low road.
Instead of selling a pan and scan version, they could have put in a very short demonstration on the disc that showed the difference between pan 'n scan and OAR.
I've yet to meet someone who, once properly shown what is lost when the sides are chopped off, didn't understand and accept OAR (and yes, that sometimes means "not filling the whole screen").
There's excellent examples of the damage pan and scan does here and here.
Even if you don't have the ability to record those copy-protected CDs to your computer, chances are that someone else does and probably already has. Just hop online to your favorite p2p file sharing site and download the songs that someone else has recorded. Problem solved!
I know there's people out there that still don't quite understand that you can't fit a rectangle shape into a (roughly) square shape without leaving some space at the top and bottom... but sheesh. They spend all that money on making a movie with very dramatic scenery and giagantic battle scenes only to chop off the sides to appease some segment of the Wal-Mart shopping public who just wants the movie "to fit their whole screen".
Obviously I'm quite happy that there will be a version that preserves the original aspect ratio (as well there should be), but I just don't get the need to butcher the artform and release a pan and scan version at all. It's time for said Wal-Mart shoppers to get with the program.
You're right to a certain extent, and it's certainly not a universal test for the morality of any action. But it does apply to cases like this. The question is "would the world be a better or worse place if everyone made the same decision as you're about to make." The person throwing a small bit of trash out the car window can justify their actions in their own mind by saying "Yea, but it's OK since not everyone does it and it's not a big deal."
The point is that when you justify your actions by using that excuse, you have to ask yourself "Yea, but if everyone DID to it?"
Spammers can justify their wrongdoing in their own mind by saying "it's just one message", but it's when they use that excuse that they should apply that test.
Canter wrote:
But something does have to be done to eliminate the unbelievable volume (of spam) that many people get.
Apparantly his parents were lacking in teaching him morals. My parents always taught me "Before you do anything, think about what the world would be like if EVERYONE did that thing. Before you toss that gum wrapper out of the car window, think about what the street would look like if everyone did it. Before you say something nasty to someone, think about how you'd feel if the rolls were reversed."
It's pretty basic stuff. I can't tell you how many spammers I've confronted via email (I report every spam I get) only to be told "Lighten up jerk! It's only one email. My response is always "Yea, but what if every business on the planet did what you did?"
I'll never understand spammers. They seem to be almost universally lacking in the ability to tell right from wrong. That Canter's excuse is "if I hadn't done it, someone else would have, so it's OK" only shows that he too is lacking in that ability.
I find the figure of $1 per spam to be kind of ludicrous
I don't. A really good employee is paid, say $150/hr. That's not unreasonable for someone who's making decent money if you include their overhead (benefits, etc.). At that rate, $1 works out to be about 24 seconds worth of time. Add in a bit of network and infrastrucure costs to deal with the traffic and of course the time for the person(s) setting up the blocks and dealing with email traffic...
Yea, I can easily see where corporations might see the costs of spam as something like $1 per.
You're absolutely right... it certainly didn't begin in '96... but certainly the deregulation opened the flood gates media mergers. The last 6 years have shown more conosolidation in the media industry than we've ever seen before.
And no, I was born in the late '60s. And your comments about the Police and U2 are particularly relevant. Those bands would NEVER get launched today. They got huge because they toured relentlessly, connected with the audience, and had local DJs across the country that were willing to give them a chance.
There are -no- bands today that will come out of nowhere.
I should probably tack on an addendum to this as well...
Crappy radio is -the- reason I've taken to downloading music. The internet is the way that I discover new bands and new music. In fact if it wasn't for the internet and the ability to download music, I pretty much wouldn't buy ANY CDs anymore because I probably would have given up on music based on what I hear on the radio.
Congress passed the 1996 Telecommunications Act which, among other things, deregulated the airwaves. That put control of a majority of the big-market radio stations in the hands of a small number of companies. DJs are no longer DJs, they're "radio personalities". Playlists come from corporate and they're narrower than ever. As a result, the music that gets played is homogenous in the extreme. Oh, by the way, one company in that mix controls the majority of concert promotions too (Clear Channel Communications).
So why are CD sales off? Maybe because music that's on the radio is so weak and generic. Because the bands that get promoted are done so from on high in a corporate boardroom. The record companies have always managed things from above, but before the great airwave merger-fest started in 1996, they still had to work with local DJs and concert promoters and that invariably meant more variety. Now they all work in a harmonious corporate union and the result is music that more or less sucks.
They want a scapegoat? They need to look at this slick machine they've created.
Note that there have been rumors of an RSA cracker built by a
three-letter agency in custom silicon before this, but until
analyzing Bernstein's paper I had always dismissed them as
ridiculous paranoid fantasies. Now it looks like such a device
is entirely feasible and, in fact, likely.
Now let me guess...
It's disguised to look like an answering machine, right?
Slashdot Mirror
Give away the razors and sell them the blades...
-S
By this you imply that they become usable at version 3.0.
I respectfully disagree.
-S
It's a good thing that the manufacturers of horse-drawn carriages were unable to sue automobile makers out of existince. This "horseless carriage" completely messed up their business model, didn't it? And damn it, they have a RIGHT to keep making money even when something better comes along! "Judge! You have to watch Ford, and Olds, and Benz! Their plan is evil and YOU CAN'T LET THEM MESS WITH OUR PROFITS!"
No, not quite.
Look, this whole thing is pissing me off to no end. I pay for satellite TV. What I do with those TV signals once their decoded IN MY OWN HOUSE is my own damn business. If I want to capture every frame on my computer, print them out, and piss on them... I can do that. If I want to put them on video tape, toss the tapes into a bonfire, and dance around it chanting anti-Disney phrases, fine. Skip commercials? Fine. Watch commercials again and again. Fine.
How are the capabilities of a ReplayTV unit at all different from what I can do with a VCR, a video tape, and the US Mail? What are they going to do? Sue VCR makers out of existance? Oh wait, they already tried that!
-S
Haven't you people heard by now? Deep linking without proper protection has been shown to spread disease and if things really go wrong it may even cause you to spawn child processes and multiple web pages.
We have a serious problem with sick websites and internet overpopulation, so please stop deep linking each other, OK?
-S
So tell me... how exactly is paying the fee up front (for a cost that'll probably equal about 2 to 2.5 years worth of "subscription") a better idea? You do realize that exactly what you do when you buy a Replay machine, right?
If you throw down your extra $200-$250 as part of the cost of the machine and 6 months later they're sued out of business, then what? At least with a subscription you're NOT locked in.
-S
The ones who get caught stealing the car will spend a night or two in jail, get probation (maybe), and get another line added to thier probably already long list of offences to society. Then they'll be back on the street.
In the meantime people are getting locked up for writing software that the MPAA and/or RIAA (or Adobe) takes offense to. Or for smoking a plant. Or for consentual activities between adults.
The wireless GPS car is all very well and good, but taking thousands of dollars worth of property that is not yours is an offense that, IMO, should land someone in jail for a time on the order of decades, not days. But we all know exactly what will happen to those who are arrested.
-S
Because you'd have better people in those jobs. I'm not saying just give eveyone a raise and things will be better. I'm saying increase the pay scales and you'll get better people. As it is now, the states mostly (and I assume CA is no differnet) pay fairly low salaries to state workers. That means that people working for the state are there because they couldn't get a job working somewhere else (yes yes, before you state workers jump down my throat, I know there's exceptions).
I think teachers are THE prime example of this. I'm not saying public school teachers are bad... many of them are amazing individuals... but in general you'd get much better teachers if the pay was competitive with the private sector.
Same is true for state workers... pay them well for doing a good job (which includes stopping wasteful state spending), get good/qualified people in positions, and I'm pretty sure things like this wouldn't happen.
-S
Pay typical state wages to those making decisions and get poor decisions in return. When the state becomes wage-competitive with other industries, you'll get higher quality people in state jobs and less sloppy decisions.
-S
Tom, you're confused about the United States Constitution. The ammendments were added after the original document was drafted (and thus they're "ammendments") and they're numbered in the order in which they were added. It's a fairly difficult process to have the consitution ammended (it requires a 2/3 vote of both houses of the legislature).
At the moment there are 27 ammendments with some VERY important ones further down the list. For example, the 15th Ammendment gave all citizens the right to vote regardless of race or color.
It just seems that the First, Second, and Fourth are the ones most commonly under attack in the United States (see sig). It doesn't mean that they get priority over other ammendments.
-S
-S
The big problem, if I'm reading a lot of these messages correctly, is that local advertisers will suddenly be "competing" on a national scale. What good is to to them to advertise if only a tiny percentage of the people who are actually local will see the ad.
But there's a technological fix to this problem. If satellite customer had some level of PVR (TiVo-like) functionality built into the receiver, they could easily allocate some amount of storage for local advertising. When the user isn't watching TV, or in the middle of the night, the thing could record a set of local advertisements. Then when your watching TV, it'll just insert those 30 second spots seemlessly where there ads would go. If you the NBC feed from Las Angeles even though your in Orlando, instead of getting LA local ads, you get Orlando ads which your PVR recorded and stored without you even knowing it.
In fact advertisers might really start to like this idea as it would allow them some level of targeted TV advertising right to a given neighborhood or maybe based on user preferences.
This is essentially what local cable companies do with national feeds. You DO get local advertising on ESPN and whatnot, but NOT over the satellite. The ESPN (or other network) feed has spaces for local advertising. If you're a DirecTV subscriber, you've seen the Miss Cleo tarrot card ads and other junk like that right? Those are contracted with DirecTV. While you're watching those ads, your buddy who has cable might be seeing an ad for a local business.
The trick will be to make sure PVR are a STANDARD part of the satellite offering, not an add-on.
-S
It's about a modestly successful startup whose mission was to build a product and sell it at a profit
You missed their business model completely.
Their actual business model was probably something more like this:
a) Create product and sell at little or no profit.
b) Sign book deal chronicling a)
c) Collect $$$ on book deal and royalties
I figure that's the only possibility since we all know that the only way to make money these days is cross licencing deals, book deals, collecting and selling customer information, lawsuits, and monopolies.
-S
Yes, in a way it does actually. It means that the studio and director copped out. They were willing to sacrifice the artistic integrity of the movie in order to get a few more sales.
Movies are now starting to show up on DVD in Pan and Scan ONLY, and that's REALLY bothersome. Luckily this one was not the case. Here the studio could have taken the opportunity to educate the public on the reasons for preserving OAR (Original Aspect Ratio) on what will surely be a HUGE selling DVD, but instead they took the low road.
Instead of selling a pan and scan version, they could have put in a very short demonstration on the disc that showed the difference between pan 'n scan and OAR.
I've yet to meet someone who, once properly shown what is lost when the sides are chopped off, didn't understand and accept OAR (and yes, that sometimes means "not filling the whole screen").
There's excellent examples of the damage pan and scan does here and here.
-S
Even if you don't have the ability to record those copy-protected CDs to your computer, chances are that someone else does and probably already has. Just hop online to your favorite p2p file sharing site and download the songs that someone else has recorded. Problem solved!
-s
I know there's people out there that still don't quite understand that you can't fit a rectangle shape into a (roughly) square shape without leaving some space at the top and bottom... but sheesh. They spend all that money on making a movie with very dramatic scenery and giagantic battle scenes only to chop off the sides to appease some segment of the Wal-Mart shopping public who just wants the movie "to fit their whole screen".
Obviously I'm quite happy that there will be a version that preserves the original aspect ratio (as well there should be), but I just don't get the need to butcher the artform and release a pan and scan version at all. It's time for said Wal-Mart shoppers to get with the program.
-S
You're right to a certain extent, and it's certainly not a universal test for the morality of any action. But it does apply to cases like this. The question is "would the world be a better or worse place if everyone made the same decision as you're about to make." The person throwing a small bit of trash out the car window can justify their actions in their own mind by saying "Yea, but it's OK since not everyone does it and it's not a big deal."
The point is that when you justify your actions by using that excuse, you have to ask yourself "Yea, but if everyone DID to it?"
Spammers can justify their wrongdoing in their own mind by saying "it's just one message", but it's when they use that excuse that they should apply that test.
-S
Apparantly his parents were lacking in teaching him morals. My parents always taught me "Before you do anything, think about what the world would be like if EVERYONE did that thing. Before you toss that gum wrapper out of the car window, think about what the street would look like if everyone did it. Before you say something nasty to someone, think about how you'd feel if the rolls were reversed."
It's pretty basic stuff. I can't tell you how many spammers I've confronted via email (I report every spam I get) only to be told "Lighten up jerk! It's only one email. My response is always "Yea, but what if every business on the planet did what you did?"
I'll never understand spammers. They seem to be almost universally lacking in the ability to tell right from wrong. That Canter's excuse is "if I hadn't done it, someone else would have, so it's OK" only shows that he too is lacking in that ability.
-S
Well, Jack? Where's all those lawsuits?
-S
I don't. A really good employee is paid, say $150/hr. That's not unreasonable for someone who's making decent money if you include their overhead (benefits, etc.). At that rate, $1 works out to be about 24 seconds worth of time. Add in a bit of network and infrastrucure costs to deal with the traffic and of course the time for the person(s) setting up the blocks and dealing with email traffic...
Yea, I can easily see where corporations might see the costs of spam as something like $1 per.
-S
I can't help but think that the administration of this system is going to end up costing them more than the income they're going to receive from it.
-S
You're absolutely right... it certainly didn't begin in '96... but certainly the deregulation opened the flood gates media mergers. The last 6 years have shown more conosolidation in the media industry than we've ever seen before.
And no, I was born in the late '60s. And your comments about the Police and U2 are particularly relevant. Those bands would NEVER get launched today. They got huge because they toured relentlessly, connected with the audience, and had local DJs across the country that were willing to give them a chance.
There are -no- bands today that will come out of nowhere.
-S
I should probably tack on an addendum to this as well...
Crappy radio is -the- reason I've taken to downloading music. The internet is the way that I discover new bands and new music. In fact if it wasn't for the internet and the ability to download music, I pretty much wouldn't buy ANY CDs anymore because I probably would have given up on music based on what I hear on the radio.
-S
They already tried whined about that in the early '90s. The courts ruled that it would violate the first sale doctrine.
-S
Congress passed the 1996 Telecommunications Act which, among other things, deregulated the airwaves. That put control of a majority of the big-market radio stations in the hands of a small number of companies. DJs are no longer DJs, they're "radio personalities". Playlists come from corporate and they're narrower than ever. As a result, the music that gets played is homogenous in the extreme. Oh, by the way, one company in that mix controls the majority of concert promotions too (Clear Channel Communications).
So why are CD sales off? Maybe because music that's on the radio is so weak and generic. Because the bands that get promoted are done so from on high in a corporate boardroom. The record companies have always managed things from above, but before the great airwave merger-fest started in 1996, they still had to work with local DJs and concert promoters and that invariably meant more variety. Now they all work in a harmonious corporate union and the result is music that more or less sucks.
They want a scapegoat? They need to look at this slick machine they've created.
-S
Note that there have been rumors of an RSA cracker built by a three-letter agency in custom silicon before this, but until analyzing Bernstein's paper I had always dismissed them as ridiculous paranoid fantasies. Now it looks like such a device is entirely feasible and, in fact, likely.
Now let me guess...
It's disguised to look like an answering machine, right?
-S