It often seems that Sony is playing for a the stockholder audience rather than the customer audience. You see if they say they're worried the stock goes down, which is bad for them, and it's unsure whether saying they're worried would have any positive response from customers. I expect them to make a few small concessions on the obviously wrong issues, like they did with the HDMI port without ever really admitting that their competition exists. The stock market loves unbridled optimism and arrogance, as long as nothing goes too obviously wrong.
I think episodic content on TV shows may be driven by medium. Each station can only carry one show at a time, and most people can't (or won't) spend 26 hours in a row watching a full season of the show all at once.
Games are different, you can pause (save) your position in a game and return to it later, something you can only do with PVR or "On Demand" television. My experience is that people tend to play one game to the exclusion of others, and then when they've completed the game they move on to other games. On the other hand most people are willing to watch multiple TV shows over the course of a week.
I don't see a big demand for smaller packages of content released more frequently. The main benefit, of course, of episodic content would be to the leveraging of game engines. If you could release 10 "smaller" games that each sold for 1/3 of the price of your original game, you could make a lot more money. However, the problem would be more along the lines of whether anyone would want to actually buy 10 episodes of your game, and whether you can get them out on time. Blizzard promised monthly updates to WoW, and 2 years later, they've release 12 updates.
The entire basis of this case is the ownership of the game, I doubt there is any actual evidence that the boy played the game, let alone played it obsessively. The parents mental, emotionally, physically and sexually abused him.
Occam's razor: It was probably the abuse that made him snap, not the video game.
Personally, I think the sexual and physical abuse might have been more important than allowing him to play violent video games, but then I'm not a disbarred lawyer like Jack Thompson...
Years of physical abuse are nothing compared to minutes spent with a video game.
Take 2 Interactice should counter sue them for negligence causing death for not stopping the abuse the kid suffered at his father's hands. Sometimes it's too bad lawsuits can't be considered libel or slander.
Indeed Microsoft is just following their standard practice, kill off the strongest competitors first, then smother and marginalize the weaker competitors, but keep them alive so you are "not a monopoly", despite all evidence to the contrary.
You realize that everyone is potentially a terrorist, right? Especially any one who disagrees with the government, they're the ones most prone to being terrorists. Therefore, of course, it's the government's duty to keep a close eye on those who oppose the government. They need to be constantly watched and received the severest of all punishments as soon as they slip up. In fact, it is obvious that only unpatriotic and cowardly people who dare run in an opposition party, so it is the definitely in the best interests of everyone, if the government just makes it illegal to have any part other than the one in power. Because the other parties all want to molly-coddle terrorists and that's just plain disloyal. These traitors to country and state need to be executed to make sure they never threaten the people of the United States of America with their traitorous talk of liberty and government change.
There's a really good reason why you need a warrant for wiretaps, it's there to prevent abuse of surveillane to supress legitimate political dissent. Of course, there's a good reason why Bush wants warrantless witetaps, it's to supress legitimate political dissent.
I think you missed my point... It wasn't that the Daily Show is a "News Show" but that it's appropriate for a "Fake News" Channel to consider a Fake "News Show" a competitor. It'd be unthinkable for "The National" to ever consider "This Hour has 22 Minutes" or "The Rick Mercer Report" to be competitors. That seems to be the difference between Canadian and American news.
It's an entertainment program, just like the actual news. As long as the "real news" programs compete for ratings, you won't get real news, you'll get the most sensationlist stuff that drives viewers to the show.
Yeah, well if the allegations of Vote Fraud are true, then there's a simple explanation for why he won with a greater margin of victory: Vote Fraud.
Given the multitude of evidence to support a widespread effort to commit vote fraud, the partisan nature of some of the people in charge of the vote counting, and the discrepencies between independently predicted results and the actual results, it's completely reasonable to suspect that Vote Fraud may have been comitted.
You can't be sure it had no effect until you can be sure that the vote count was accurate. And frankly, I don't think I can trust any election that is run by a campaign executive for one of the parties involved. That's an unconsciable conflict of interest. Of course, given that most Americans don't seem to mind having their congressional election results fixed ahead of time, it may not seem that bad.
Have you watched CNN? The Daily Show does a much better job of keeping people informed about "The News" than CNN does. Hence, they are a competing news program.
What Clinton did was balance the budget, let U.S. citizens prosper. In contrast since George W. Bush came into office, all of the U.S. economic growth can be attributed to one field: Healthcare. Without healthcare the U.S. economy is totally stagnant and has been for six years.
It certainly may look like Clinton did nothing but as a wise entity once said "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all." There is rarely much need for a government to actually do stuff, most the time they should be simply sitting there and saying "no" to an endless list of new laws that people want to pass.
When the surgeons and doctors were shouting hoarse in 1970s, people ignored them as fools and continued smoking.. and now they sue the companies for supplying them in first place.
Yes, in the 1970s smokers trusted the tobacco companies who told them explicitly that their product was safe and fun. It's the lies they told to promote their product that really got them into trouble. It's not "I got cancer from smoking" that makes them liable it's "I got cancer from smoking cigarattes you told me weren't dangerous when you damn well knew they were, and here are the documents to prove you deliberately lied about your research".
Ironically the laws that forced tobacco companies to label cigarette cartons with health warnings will someday be their biggest defense against future litigation. Started smoking in the 90s? Sorry, the was a warning on the package telling you would likely get lung cancer.
Um, Innovation is combining old components in new ways. Pretty much everything is innovative, that's why Microsoft uses it as their rallying cry. They're not very inventive, but they always come up with new ways to use other people's ideas.
I think maybe it's time for Sony shareholders to find themselves a new board of directors, because the current leadership at Sony is displaying an apalling amount of incompetence. Underestimating public backlashes, constantly failing to meet production schedules, making contradictory public announcements about the state of production for one of their flagship products. Displaying the same goods 2 years in a row at trade shows. They're going to be in for a world of pain if they let the PS3 launch date slip again.
In case you didn't know the "Progressive Conservative Party" was formed by the merger of the "The Progressive Party" and "The Conservative Party". Progressive Conservative was actually a decent name for them, they tended to be socially liberal and fiscally conservative. They no longer exist, they merged with "The Alliance Party" which was formerly known as the Reform party and almost known as the Conservative Reform Alliance Party, but someone tried to make a t-shirt with the acronym and realized it would sell too well. The Reform party was actually just the social conservatives who quit the Progressive Conservative party in the mid 90s. So the new Conservative Party of Canada is now a lite version of American Politics, socially conservative and fiscally ambiguous.
What makes you think it was a decent plan? The idea seems solid, until you look at the details and realize it was planned to fail. Sometimes an idea gets shot down based on the implementation plan being aweful and unfixable.
This is not entirely true--your logic is sound, but it doesn't accurately reflect the market. When a musician is contracted, yes, they are paid a lump sum, but this is an advance, not an independent payment. The artist actually ends up paying it back in royalties, assuming he/she is successful. The artist also pays back numerous other sums too--really, the recording artist gets fairly dicked in the recording industry. But if enough albums are sold, the royalties exceed the costs and the artist actually starts making money. So what happens if he/she stops selling albums? You guessed it--the artist is screwed. (Check here for a succinct, if simplistic, summary of how music royalties work.)
I'm amused by the fact that performers aren't paid when their songs are played on the radio, but the publishers are.
The theft of medium (and thus music) does affect the musician, and you had asserted that it does not--unfortunately, this is not the case.
The problem here is simple, performance artists are taking a gamble that they will sell more CDs than they the recording company would be willing to pay them up front for the performance. Whether or not that gamble pays off for them is not my problem. Like any other gamble it's a risk and you can't complain if you lose.
However, the real issue is you deliberate choice to obsfucate the truth. The theft of medium is a crime, the medium has been stolen. Whoever you stole it from has one less CD/Tape/Record in their possession. This is clearly theft. The "pirating" of music, however, is a much more ethically neutral area. The music file still exists where you downloaded it from, they didn't lose anything. How is it theft? You might say "well the performance artist who played it didn't get paid", and you'd be right in that he didn't. However, he doesn't get paid when it's played on the radio either. So why is one theft and not the other?
To truly understand the issue you need to step even further back and look at the intent of copyright in the first place. Essentially, you need to understand that copyrights are essentially a faustian deal. We created them to encourage the creation of more (good) music, however, that deal was developed under a system where music creation and distribution were expensive. This is no longer the case.
In fact, you could reasonably make an argument that musical copyrights are now being used a way to limit the number and success of new musical creations. The rents from the monopoly support a very aggressive music industry that frequently directly or indirectly tries to quash any music it doesn't own. Payola isn't just about selling more CDs it's also about tactically limiting the public's exposure to non-payola music. Additionally music companies have an inherent interest in keeping the stable of successful performers small. Most of their profit is earned from economies of scale. It costs much less to produce (and market) 1 band that sells 10 million CDs then it does to produce (and market) 10 bands that sell 1 million CDs each.
My original assertion holds--downloading copyrighted music (that is intended to be sold) is theft. You can try and say: "But it's theft from people who don't deserve their money," which is its own ethical statement (and worthy of debate as well), but in this case that's not true--the theft still directly affects the recording artist.
You need a reality check. Downloading music can never be theft, for one very important reason, you have not deprived anyone of something they had. You might think that's a technicality, but it's about as important as the fact that a circle isn't a square because it's doesn't have any corners. It can never be more than copyright infringement, that is making a copy you don't have permission to make. So it's as morally wrong as photocopying a picture of a painting. The quality of the people who receive the money is part and parcel of the question, "are copyrights working as intended". Which is a question tha
By your own use of langauge - "not buy the CD" vs "pirate it" - you refute your own statement.
I'm afraid not. I'm trying to show you how two artificially distinct situations are not the same.
In the real world, "not buying" a cup of coffee is not the same as having a cup of coffee and doing a runner without paying.
Yes, but the real world analogy of "pirating" music isn't doing a runner with a cup of coffee. That's a lot more like stealing CDs from a music shop. Pirating is a lot more like walking by a busker and not tossing a quarter into the basket. Music used to be like coffee, when it came exclusively on records, tapes and CDs, now it's like music again. Some people want to keep selling music like it's coffee, but it's not.
Slashdot Mirror
It often seems that Sony is playing for a the stockholder audience rather than the customer audience. You see if they say they're worried the stock goes down, which is bad for them, and it's unsure whether saying they're worried would have any positive response from customers. I expect them to make a few small concessions on the obviously wrong issues, like they did with the HDMI port without ever really admitting that their competition exists. The stock market loves unbridled optimism and arrogance, as long as nothing goes too obviously wrong.
I think episodic content on TV shows may be driven by medium. Each station can only carry one show at a time, and most people can't (or won't) spend 26 hours in a row watching a full season of the show all at once.
Games are different, you can pause (save) your position in a game and return to it later, something you can only do with PVR or "On Demand" television. My experience is that people tend to play one game to the exclusion of others, and then when they've completed the game they move on to other games. On the other hand most people are willing to watch multiple TV shows over the course of a week.
I don't see a big demand for smaller packages of content released more frequently. The main benefit, of course, of episodic content would be to the leveraging of game engines. If you could release 10 "smaller" games that each sold for 1/3 of the price of your original game, you could make a lot more money. However, the problem would be more along the lines of whether anyone would want to actually buy 10 episodes of your game, and whether you can get them out on time. Blizzard promised monthly updates to WoW, and 2 years later, they've release 12 updates.
The entire basis of this case is the ownership of the game, I doubt there is any actual evidence that the boy played the game, let alone played it obsessively. The parents mental, emotionally, physically and sexually abused him.
Occam's razor: It was probably the abuse that made him snap, not the video game.
Personally, I think the sexual and physical abuse might have been more important than allowing him to play violent video games, but then I'm not a disbarred lawyer like Jack Thompson...
Years of physical abuse are nothing compared to minutes spent with a video game.
Take 2 Interactice should counter sue them for negligence causing death for not stopping the abuse the kid suffered at his father's hands. Sometimes it's too bad lawsuits can't be considered libel or slander.
Indeed Microsoft is just following their standard practice, kill off the strongest competitors first, then smother and marginalize the weaker competitors, but keep them alive so you are "not a monopoly", despite all evidence to the contrary.
Video Game Maxim #1: Anything optional will be used less frequently than standard components.
Like the obvious solution of making their game for a different console?
You realize that everyone is potentially a terrorist, right? Especially any one who disagrees with the government, they're the ones most prone to being terrorists. Therefore, of course, it's the government's duty to keep a close eye on those who oppose the government. They need to be constantly watched and received the severest of all punishments as soon as they slip up. In fact, it is obvious that only unpatriotic and cowardly people who dare run in an opposition party, so it is the definitely in the best interests of everyone, if the government just makes it illegal to have any part other than the one in power. Because the other parties all want to molly-coddle terrorists and that's just plain disloyal. These traitors to country and state need to be executed to make sure they never threaten the people of the United States of America with their traitorous talk of liberty and government change.
There's a really good reason why you need a warrant for wiretaps, it's there to prevent abuse of surveillane to supress legitimate political dissent. Of course, there's a good reason why Bush wants warrantless witetaps, it's to supress legitimate political dissent.
I think you missed my point... It wasn't that the Daily Show is a "News Show" but that it's appropriate for a "Fake News" Channel to consider a Fake "News Show" a competitor. It'd be unthinkable for "The National" to ever consider "This Hour has 22 Minutes" or "The Rick Mercer Report" to be competitors. That seems to be the difference between Canadian and American news.
It's an entertainment program, just like the actual news. As long as the "real news" programs compete for ratings, you won't get real news, you'll get the most sensationlist stuff that drives viewers to the show.
Yeah, well if the allegations of Vote Fraud are true, then there's a simple explanation for why he won with a greater margin of victory: Vote Fraud.
Given the multitude of evidence to support a widespread effort to commit vote fraud, the partisan nature of some of the people in charge of the vote counting, and the discrepencies between independently predicted results and the actual results, it's completely reasonable to suspect that Vote Fraud may have been comitted.
You can't be sure it had no effect until you can be sure that the vote count was accurate. And frankly, I don't think I can trust any election that is run by a campaign executive for one of the parties involved. That's an unconsciable conflict of interest. Of course, given that most Americans don't seem to mind having their congressional election results fixed ahead of time, it may not seem that bad.
Have you watched CNN? The Daily Show does a much better job of keeping people informed about "The News" than CNN does. Hence, they are a competing news program.
For a news organization, uncritical acceptance of political statements is support. It may not be enthusiastic support, but it is support.
What Clinton did was balance the budget, let U.S. citizens prosper. In contrast since George W. Bush came into office, all of the U.S. economic growth can be attributed to one field: Healthcare. Without healthcare the U.S. economy is totally stagnant and has been for six years.
It certainly may look like Clinton did nothing but as a wise entity once said "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all." There is rarely much need for a government to actually do stuff, most the time they should be simply sitting there and saying "no" to an endless list of new laws that people want to pass.
It's a fad, who cares?
When the surgeons and doctors were shouting hoarse in 1970s, people ignored them as fools and continued smoking.. and now they sue the companies for supplying them in first place.
Yes, in the 1970s smokers trusted the tobacco companies who told them explicitly that their product was safe and fun. It's the lies they told to promote their product that really got them into trouble. It's not "I got cancer from smoking" that makes them liable it's "I got cancer from smoking cigarattes you told me weren't dangerous when you damn well knew they were, and here are the documents to prove you deliberately lied about your research".
Ironically the laws that forced tobacco companies to label cigarette cartons with health warnings will someday be their biggest defense against future litigation. Started smoking in the 90s? Sorry, the was a warning on the package telling you would likely get lung cancer.
Unthinking nationalism is another way in which the U.S. controls it's citizens. Americans need to really think about by what measures the U.S. is "the best we have come up with as a species thus far". For most of those measures you'll find other countries ahead of you. The Japanese are healthier, the French get more action, the Venezualans are prettier, Denmark is happier, Luxembourg is richer, Finland is clearner, Canada is more libertarian, more educated and has a higher quality of life, China has more people, Russia is bigger, and Kuwait is safer.
The U.S. does have the largest christian population, one of the highest teenage pregnancy rates, one of the highest divorce rates, one of the highest prison population rates, but that's nothing to be proud of.
No, no, no. Nintendo has to releases their own online service now... WiiWater.
Um, Innovation is combining old components in new ways. Pretty much everything is innovative, that's why Microsoft uses it as their rallying cry. They're not very inventive, but they always come up with new ways to use other people's ideas.
I think maybe it's time for Sony shareholders to find themselves a new board of directors, because the current leadership at Sony is displaying an apalling amount of incompetence. Underestimating public backlashes, constantly failing to meet production schedules, making contradictory public announcements about the state of production for one of their flagship products. Displaying the same goods 2 years in a row at trade shows. They're going to be in for a world of pain if they let the PS3 launch date slip again.
In case you didn't know the "Progressive Conservative Party" was formed by the merger of the "The Progressive Party" and "The Conservative Party". Progressive Conservative was actually a decent name for them, they tended to be socially liberal and fiscally conservative. They no longer exist, they merged with "The Alliance Party" which was formerly known as the Reform party and almost known as the Conservative Reform Alliance Party, but someone tried to make a t-shirt with the acronym and realized it would sell too well. The Reform party was actually just the social conservatives who quit the Progressive Conservative party in the mid 90s. So the new Conservative Party of Canada is now a lite version of American Politics, socially conservative and fiscally ambiguous.
What makes you think it was a decent plan? The idea seems solid, until you look at the details and realize it was planned to fail. Sometimes an idea gets shot down based on the implementation plan being aweful and unfixable.
This is not entirely true--your logic is sound, but it doesn't accurately reflect the market. When a musician is contracted, yes, they are paid a lump sum, but this is an advance, not an independent payment. The artist actually ends up paying it back in royalties, assuming he/she is successful. The artist also pays back numerous other sums too--really, the recording artist gets fairly dicked in the recording industry. But if enough albums are sold, the royalties exceed the costs and the artist actually starts making money. So what happens if he/she stops selling albums? You guessed it--the artist is screwed. (Check here for a succinct, if simplistic, summary of how music royalties work.)
I'm amused by the fact that performers aren't paid when their songs are played on the radio, but the publishers are.
The theft of medium (and thus music) does affect the musician, and you had asserted that it does not--unfortunately, this is not the case.
The problem here is simple, performance artists are taking a gamble that they will sell more CDs than they the recording company would be willing to pay them up front for the performance. Whether or not that gamble pays off for them is not my problem. Like any other gamble it's a risk and you can't complain if you lose.
However, the real issue is you deliberate choice to obsfucate the truth. The theft of medium is a crime, the medium has been stolen. Whoever you stole it from has one less CD/Tape/Record in their possession. This is clearly theft. The "pirating" of music, however, is a much more ethically neutral area. The music file still exists where you downloaded it from, they didn't lose anything. How is it theft? You might say "well the performance artist who played it didn't get paid", and you'd be right in that he didn't. However, he doesn't get paid when it's played on the radio either. So why is one theft and not the other?
To truly understand the issue you need to step even further back and look at the intent of copyright in the first place. Essentially, you need to understand that copyrights are essentially a faustian deal. We created them to encourage the creation of more (good) music, however, that deal was developed under a system where music creation and distribution were expensive. This is no longer the case.
In fact, you could reasonably make an argument that musical copyrights are now being used a way to limit the number and success of new musical creations. The rents from the monopoly support a very aggressive music industry that frequently directly or indirectly tries to quash any music it doesn't own. Payola isn't just about selling more CDs it's also about tactically limiting the public's exposure to non-payola music. Additionally music companies have an inherent interest in keeping the stable of successful performers small. Most of their profit is earned from economies of scale. It costs much less to produce (and market) 1 band that sells 10 million CDs then it does to produce (and market) 10 bands that sell 1 million CDs each.
My original assertion holds--downloading copyrighted music (that is intended to be sold) is theft. You can try and say: "But it's theft from people who don't deserve their money," which is its own ethical statement (and worthy of debate as well), but in this case that's not true--the theft still directly affects the recording artist.
You need a reality check. Downloading music can never be theft, for one very important reason, you have not deprived anyone of something they had. You might think that's a technicality, but it's about as important as the fact that a circle isn't a square because it's doesn't have any corners. It can never be more than copyright infringement, that is making a copy you don't have permission to make. So it's as morally wrong as photocopying a picture of a painting. The quality of the people who receive the money is part and parcel of the question, "are copyrights working as intended". Which is a question tha
By your own use of langauge - "not buy the CD" vs "pirate it" - you refute your own statement.
I'm afraid not. I'm trying to show you how two artificially distinct situations are not the same.
In the real world, "not buying" a cup of coffee is not the same as having a cup of coffee and doing a runner without paying.
Yes, but the real world analogy of "pirating" music isn't doing a runner with a cup of coffee. That's a lot more like stealing CDs from a music shop. Pirating is a lot more like walking by a busker and not tossing a quarter into the basket. Music used to be like coffee, when it came exclusively on records, tapes and CDs, now it's like music again. Some people want to keep selling music like it's coffee, but it's not.