Do they love money enough to actually work for it?
Therein, as the Bard would tell us, lies the rub. They've been coasting on free money from these tiny users paying full bills... a low-cost, low-usage ISP might just be enough to shake up the status quo
You are wrong. 25 billion times wrong and counting : iTunes.
How can you act like we haven't already been through this whole song and dance before, except with music instead of movies. Napster ring a bell? Then Kazaa and Morpheus and Limewire, now torrents and usenet... so many free ways to get music, yet iTunes has sold (as of last month) over 25 billion songs (yes, twenty-five billion, with a B) in the decade it has existed. That's a lot of people who disagree with you.
You've laid out the bad pretty clearly. If all the small fry accounts leave, the ISPs will try to wring out that lost profit from all that remain. Plus they'll have the ammo to go after the heavy users, as they'll stand out more
On the potential good side, those low-impact users were allowing the ISPs to remain afloat while neglecting any real infrastructure upgrades. For every big fish that might complain about slow speed or data caps, they have a dozen customers who quietly pay their bill and never complain. If those customers leave, the major ISPs might just crash and burn under the weight of high % power users. Could force their hands on upgrades, and if we're very very lucky, they might actually start treating us like customers; like they actually want our business. Who knows, it might even introduce a little competition.
translation: package your product how i want it or i'll steal it.
Well... yeah. Not me in particular, of course, but the internet-faring populace at large has demonstrated that companies who do not adapt will simply be circumvented. I'm not saying it's right, but it's fact. Standing on ceremony and crying "It's not fair, it's not fair" has not slowed down piracy one bit
The entertainment industry needs to grow up, learn that life isn't fair, and adapt.
now let's define "how i want it". pretty hard to do in a universal fashion. for a good portion of the population, it means "free". there's a lot more people with more time than money than the other way around.
not to mention, it's getting hard to beat the torrents on ease of use and convenience.
"How I want it" was your question, not mine, and it's a question I've already answered : Netflix. That's a great method for distribution. The interface is simple and effective, setup is easy on almost any game console or most newer TVs (my freaking grandma figured out how to set up Netflix on her Wii) At worst, a dedicated device is $50. http://shop.roku.com/ Is Netflix the 100% perfect solution for everyone? Maybe not, but it's a pretty good starting point. We might be able to find that perfect solution if we could actually let it grow, instead of breaking it's kneecaps.
But it doesn't necessarily have to be Netflix. That's just one company. The studios could start their own businesses: SonyFlix, ParamountFlix, FoxFlix. Maybe with slightly more creative names, but you get the drift. The studios could still keep control over their products, and all revenue would come back directly to them. They might try to mix it up, have a rotating list of movies available instead of a fixed set or establish pricing tiers that allow access to newer content sooner, with cheap $1-3 "rental" fees for the very latest releases. Adapt, work with the systems in place instead of trying to fight them.
Fighting the pirates has proven to fail. They can keep trying the same thing, expecting different results... but that seems pretty insane to me;)
How should copyright holders enforce their rights?
Enforce their rights by actually putting the content out there in a controlled fashion
Hypothetically speaking, lets assume I pirate movies. I have to decide if it's worth my time/effort to find a torrent, download a movie, make sure it's intact, hope it has proper subtitles where necessary, name it in accordance with my file structure, move it to a storage system so that I can watch it on my TV in a different room, all balanced against the potential legal ramifications.... Or I could just pay the $8 a month and watch it on Netflix, if it was there.
Right now, pirating provides both a better service and a better price. Copyright holders can't compete on price, so they have to improve their service. Netflix, Hulu etc are a decent start, but they're been hamstrung at every turn by organizations that don't understand business, despite employing "Masters of Business Administration."
Third possibility. Creating a strawman case for the crackdown of such devices, for two possible sub-reasons
1) extra funding : "These things are a menace, we at the FAA/FBI/etc need a couple billion to ramp up protection, think of the children"
2) eliminate/lower the public's ability to monitor and track big brother : "Only we at the FAA/FBI/etc should be spying on people. These hobby craft are an affront to our uncontested power."
Can't really blame slashdot on this one, though... the band has a hard name to parse. "Live building a datacenter," sounds like a video where we watch construction crews, live!
As the AC's pointed out, the gripe was more about recharge time than range alone. Going 50 miles on a charge/tank isn't crippling if there are recharging stations (aka gas pumps) every few miles.
They addressed the point in more detail during a different episode, where they took a road trip in a Leaf and some other car with a funny name. A quick google search tells me it was Series 17 ep 6, and the funny named car was Peugeot iOn (AKA Mitsubishi i-MiEV, AKA Citroën C-Zero.) They were actually fairly gentle with the two cars, and again, the only gripe was finding a publicly available wall-socket for recharging, and then waiting the several hours for the recharge to occur.
They even had a minor epiphany after the test, while playing around in carnival bumper cars, which are electric. We just need a ton of electrically charged chicken wire mesh running atop the freeway to provide constant charging:)
To be fair, Top Gear still is about cars... just not about fair an unbiased bench marking. And as far as I know, that's the way it's always been. Not like they used to be a reliable source for carefully researched data, then switched to something completely different.
They'd just rather see if it's possible to peel out in a Tesla, rather than clock it's median driving distance under optimal conditions. Or see how fast you have to be going to roll a Robin Reliant. Speaking of rolling cars, has Michael Gambon been back recently?
The software devs at Valve have an genuine desire to make games. Hell, most of them probably make games *they* want to play. They fact that they get paid to do so, and that the rest of us get to play them too is all bonus. They certainly don't need a boss telling them to do more of it. So for them, the lack of direct leadership works.
I can't see the same method working for wage-slave type positions, or jobs without distinct landmarks and end goals. An IT call center worker or retail worker probably has no real motivation to come back from lunch and get to work. No real reason to spend all day working instead of slacking of browsing slashdot, or just dicking around on your phone. So what, they answered 10 calls instead of 20, or helped a few less customers find what they were looking for in housewares. Without a boss to "crack the whip," can't see a lot getting done in those types of jobs.
There's a difference between keeping up with the Jonses (or rather, staying a step ahead of...) and ordering almost 2,500 of the most expensive fighter jet ever designed.
I'm not suggesting we completely axe any and all defense spending... just that we take an honest look at how insanely much we spend, and what we're actually getting as a return on investment. Do we honestly need 2,443 of these fighters (and yes, that's Washington's current order)? In what possible scenario is that useful?
Any cuts that are made can be supplemented with other endeavors. I gave Space and Sea exploration as examples, but we can certainly go down other paths. Keep our engineers employed without filling a thousand hangars with unused F-35s
We have zero need for advanced dogfighter and air superiority craft currently. What foreign power are we planning to dogfight against? Over what potential enemy do we not already have complete air superiority?
I can't really blame the aerospace companies though. The government said "Here's a couple billion $$ to build some war-planes," without ever putting critical thought into whether or not we actually NEED a billion dollars worth of war-planes. But Lockheed isn't really going to argue, so they start building $100m warplanes. Why not divert some of that funding to space or sea exploration. Sure, Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop, etc aren't exactly in that business right now. They might not have the engineering skillset for space or sea, but I guarantee if the government offered up a billion dollar contract to build a better lunar rover, those guys would become experts very quickly.
The events of 9/11, which ostensibly created the need for these enhanced pat downs and radiation machines, cannot possibly happen again. It took *literally* an hour from the time the first place crashed, for word to spread and the 3rd plane's occupants fought back. In the following days, pilot doors were locked and reinforced, and a new mindset spread amongst airline passengers and pilots. A commercial airliner will not be hijacked again. Everyone knows that, including anyone wishing us harm. They know it and will adjust their targets accordingly.
Meanwhile, I'm stuck getting groped and irradiated while we search for some hypothetical boogeyman who has long since moved on.
Why would you require multiple people working in concert? Sure you're limited to 3oz bottles, but there's no limit on how many 3oz bottles you can bring. One person with 4 or 5 bottles, or hell, 15 bottles... but a single 4oz bottle, now we've got a problem.
How is FB tracking via my browser, if I'm not logged on via FB? Until FB or some other track-happy set of credentials becomes mandatory, anonymous is the default state
Even IP tracking is a rough estimate at best. This site is quite adamant that IP addresses are *not* strictly tied to people.
The existence of Facebook login at other sites is hardly cause for alarm. Facebook accounts are valid here on slashdot, but it certainly doesn't stop people from posting anonymously.
Even using a slashdot account is still pretty anonymous.
But the real question : how much are the CEOs at HP making, compared to google?
Upper management count give two shits how the company is perceived, or actually performing, so long as their next yacht purchase isn't impeded. If the company performance is tanking, they'll just hire more H1Bs to offset the loss.
Gore, maybe... but an actual firefight? I've yet to see a video game reproduce that.
How about a real wartime scenario videogame? Trying to catch whatever few hours of sleep you can, in a hole you dug... walking around with a metric fuckton of gear strapped to your ass. Setting up camp, burning barrels of poo, MREs, sand in your everywhere... oh, and no respawning. That game would just FLY off the shelves, ya?
I think the truth is actually buried in the muddle of your post. The correct statement would be, "now that gaming has gone mainstream; a significant percentage of gamers are idiots."
I don't know a googley from a biffer... but lemme try my hand at a cricket analogy : A batsman who always gets a solid number of runs across, but almost never hits the century mark
Not sure if that's correct terminology or exactly mirrors... suffice to say someone who is very consistently good while rarely being great. JJ's movies are all very enjoyable (I'm personally less familiar with his TV shows, outside of Lost) without any of them being amazing and memorable, or being horrible and cringe-inducing.
As bad as the Star Wars prequels were (and they were really really bad) at very least they were memorably bad. Darth Maul, despite being very limited in screen time, has stuck with us. We still remember the pod racing, the "oops" of young anakin blowing up the drone-base-thing... we even remember his stupid braid thing from Ep2 and how terrible Hayden Christensen's acting was. Who has forgotten Yoda's light saber duel? Mace Windu being a bad ass mutherfukin Jedi all up on Jango Fett? We haven't even forgotten Boss Nass and Jar Jar freaking Binks?
And that's almost 15 years later... Phantom Menace came out in '99. And yet it sticks with us, in all it's terrible terrible glory. A decade from now, how clearly will we remember JJ's Trek reboot? Lens flare and... lens flare aaanndddd... Lens flare and Leonard Nimoy *shrug*
Slashdot Mirror
Do they love money enough to actually work for it?
Therein, as the Bard would tell us, lies the rub. They've been coasting on free money from these tiny users paying full bills... a low-cost, low-usage ISP might just be enough to shake up the status quo
You are wrong. 25 billion times wrong and counting : iTunes.
How can you act like we haven't already been through this whole song and dance before, except with music instead of movies. Napster ring a bell? Then Kazaa and Morpheus and Limewire, now torrents and usenet ... so many free ways to get music, yet iTunes has sold (as of last month) over 25 billion songs (yes, twenty-five billion, with a B) in the decade it has existed. That's a lot of people who disagree with you.
I see potential good and bad here.
You've laid out the bad pretty clearly. If all the small fry accounts leave, the ISPs will try to wring out that lost profit from all that remain. Plus they'll have the ammo to go after the heavy users, as they'll stand out more
On the potential good side, those low-impact users were allowing the ISPs to remain afloat while neglecting any real infrastructure upgrades. For every big fish that might complain about slow speed or data caps, they have a dozen customers who quietly pay their bill and never complain. If those customers leave, the major ISPs might just crash and burn under the weight of high % power users. Could force their hands on upgrades, and if we're very very lucky, they might actually start treating us like customers; like they actually want our business. Who knows, it might even introduce a little competition.
translation: package your product how i want it or i'll steal it.
Well ... yeah. Not me in particular, of course, but the internet-faring populace at large has demonstrated that companies who do not adapt will simply be circumvented. I'm not saying it's right, but it's fact. Standing on ceremony and crying "It's not fair, it's not fair" has not slowed down piracy one bit
The entertainment industry needs to grow up, learn that life isn't fair, and adapt.
now let's define "how i want it". pretty hard to do in a universal fashion. for a good portion of the population, it means "free". there's a lot more people with more time than money than the other way around.
not to mention, it's getting hard to beat the torrents on ease of use and convenience.
"How I want it" was your question, not mine, and it's a question I've already answered : Netflix. That's a great method for distribution. The interface is simple and effective, setup is easy on almost any game console or most newer TVs (my freaking grandma figured out how to set up Netflix on her Wii) At worst, a dedicated device is $50. http://shop.roku.com/ Is Netflix the 100% perfect solution for everyone? Maybe not, but it's a pretty good starting point. We might be able to find that perfect solution if we could actually let it grow, instead of breaking it's kneecaps.
But it doesn't necessarily have to be Netflix. That's just one company. The studios could start their own businesses: SonyFlix, ParamountFlix, FoxFlix. Maybe with slightly more creative names, but you get the drift. The studios could still keep control over their products, and all revenue would come back directly to them. They might try to mix it up, have a rotating list of movies available instead of a fixed set or establish pricing tiers that allow access to newer content sooner, with cheap $1-3 "rental" fees for the very latest releases. Adapt, work with the systems in place instead of trying to fight them.
Fighting the pirates has proven to fail. They can keep trying the same thing, expecting different results ... but that seems pretty insane to me ;)
How should copyright holders enforce their rights?
Enforce their rights by actually putting the content out there in a controlled fashion
Hypothetically speaking, lets assume I pirate movies. I have to decide if it's worth my time/effort to find a torrent, download a movie, make sure it's intact, hope it has proper subtitles where necessary, name it in accordance with my file structure, move it to a storage system so that I can watch it on my TV in a different room, all balanced against the potential legal ramifications.... Or I could just pay the $8 a month and watch it on Netflix, if it was there.
Right now, pirating provides both a better service and a better price. Copyright holders can't compete on price, so they have to improve their service. Netflix, Hulu etc are a decent start, but they're been hamstrung at every turn by organizations that don't understand business, despite employing "Masters of Business Administration."
Third possibility. Creating a strawman case for the crackdown of such devices, for two possible sub-reasons
1) extra funding : "These things are a menace, we at the FAA/FBI/etc need a couple billion to ramp up protection, think of the children"
2) eliminate/lower the public's ability to monitor and track big brother : "Only we at the FAA/FBI/etc should be spying on people. These hobby craft are an affront to our uncontested power."
Glad I wasn't the only one.
Can't really blame slashdot on this one, though... the band has a hard name to parse. "Live building a datacenter," sounds like a video where we watch construction crews, live!
As the AC's pointed out, the gripe was more about recharge time than range alone. Going 50 miles on a charge/tank isn't crippling if there are recharging stations (aka gas pumps) every few miles.
They addressed the point in more detail during a different episode, where they took a road trip in a Leaf and some other car with a funny name. A quick google search tells me it was Series 17 ep 6, and the funny named car was Peugeot iOn (AKA Mitsubishi i-MiEV, AKA Citroën C-Zero.) They were actually fairly gentle with the two cars, and again, the only gripe was finding a publicly available wall-socket for recharging, and then waiting the several hours for the recharge to occur.
They even had a minor epiphany after the test, while playing around in carnival bumper cars, which are electric. We just need a ton of electrically charged chicken wire mesh running atop the freeway to provide constant charging :)
Gambon tried to roll, but failed.... but he did get a corner of the Top Gear test track named after him.
He tried twice actually, on the same corner ... In the Liana and the Lacetti.
That's why I asked if he'd been back recently. Third time's the charm, I'm told.
To be fair, Top Gear still is about cars... just not about fair an unbiased bench marking. And as far as I know, that's the way it's always been. Not like they used to be a reliable source for carefully researched data, then switched to something completely different.
They'd just rather see if it's possible to peel out in a Tesla, rather than clock it's median driving distance under optimal conditions. Or see how fast you have to be going to roll a Robin Reliant. Speaking of rolling cars, has Michael Gambon been back recently?
That explains a lot ... if the furniture was Swedish too, it probably just wasn't assembled correctly in the first place.
Only if you honestly and truly love what you do.
The software devs at Valve have an genuine desire to make games. Hell, most of them probably make games *they* want to play. They fact that they get paid to do so, and that the rest of us get to play them too is all bonus. They certainly don't need a boss telling them to do more of it. So for them, the lack of direct leadership works.
I can't see the same method working for wage-slave type positions, or jobs without distinct landmarks and end goals. An IT call center worker or retail worker probably has no real motivation to come back from lunch and get to work. No real reason to spend all day working instead of slacking of browsing slashdot, or just dicking around on your phone. So what, they answered 10 calls instead of 20, or helped a few less customers find what they were looking for in housewares. Without a boss to "crack the whip," can't see a lot getting done in those types of jobs.
There's a difference between keeping up with the Jonses (or rather, staying a step ahead of ...) and ordering almost 2,500 of the most expensive fighter jet ever designed.
I'm not suggesting we completely axe any and all defense spending ... just that we take an honest look at how insanely much we spend, and what we're actually getting as a return on investment. Do we honestly need 2,443 of these fighters (and yes, that's Washington's current order)? In what possible scenario is that useful?
Any cuts that are made can be supplemented with other endeavors. I gave Space and Sea exploration as examples, but we can certainly go down other paths. Keep our engineers employed without filling a thousand hangars with unused F-35s
We have zero need for advanced dogfighter and air superiority craft currently. What foreign power are we planning to dogfight against? Over what potential enemy do we not already have complete air superiority?
I can't really blame the aerospace companies though. The government said "Here's a couple billion $$ to build some war-planes," without ever putting critical thought into whether or not we actually NEED a billion dollars worth of war-planes. But Lockheed isn't really going to argue, so they start building $100m warplanes. Why not divert some of that funding to space or sea exploration. Sure, Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop, etc aren't exactly in that business right now. They might not have the engineering skillset for space or sea, but I guarantee if the government offered up a billion dollar contract to build a better lunar rover, those guys would become experts very quickly.
Bingo. Give the AC a cookie.
The events of 9/11, which ostensibly created the need for these enhanced pat downs and radiation machines, cannot possibly happen again. It took *literally* an hour from the time the first place crashed, for word to spread and the 3rd plane's occupants fought back. In the following days, pilot doors were locked and reinforced, and a new mindset spread amongst airline passengers and pilots. A commercial airliner will not be hijacked again. Everyone knows that, including anyone wishing us harm. They know it and will adjust their targets accordingly.
Meanwhile, I'm stuck getting groped and irradiated while we search for some hypothetical boogeyman who has long since moved on.
Did you moan a bit? I've found that giving a few subtle hints that I'm enjoying the enhanced pat down ends the whole thing very very quickly.
You're overthinking it.
Why would you require multiple people working in concert? Sure you're limited to 3oz bottles, but there's no limit on how many 3oz bottles you can bring. One person with 4 or 5 bottles, or hell, 15 bottles ... but a single 4oz bottle, now we've got a problem.
How is FB tracking via my browser, if I'm not logged on via FB? Until FB or some other track-happy set of credentials becomes mandatory, anonymous is the default state
Even IP tracking is a rough estimate at best. This site is quite adamant that IP addresses are *not* strictly tied to people.
The existence of Facebook login at other sites is hardly cause for alarm. Facebook accounts are valid here on slashdot, but it certainly doesn't stop people from posting anonymously. Even using a slashdot account is still pretty anonymous.
But the real question : how much are the CEOs at HP making, compared to google? Upper management count give two shits how the company is perceived, or actually performing, so long as their next yacht purchase isn't impeded. If the company performance is tanking, they'll just hire more H1Bs to offset the loss.
Gore, maybe ... but an actual firefight? I've yet to see a video game reproduce that.
How about a real wartime scenario videogame? Trying to catch whatever few hours of sleep you can, in a hole you dug ... walking around with a metric fuckton of gear strapped to your ass. Setting up camp, burning barrels of poo, MREs, sand in your everywhere ... oh, and no respawning. That game would just FLY off the shelves, ya?
I think the truth is actually buried in the muddle of your post. The correct statement would be, "now that gaming has gone mainstream; a significant percentage of gamers are idiots."
Likewise California. This state is so unbreakably blue that we rarely see a single political ad, from either side.
I don't know a googley from a biffer ... but lemme try my hand at a cricket analogy : A batsman who always gets a solid number of runs across, but almost never hits the century mark
Not sure if that's correct terminology or exactly mirrors ... suffice to say someone who is very consistently good while rarely being great. JJ's movies are all very enjoyable (I'm personally less familiar with his TV shows, outside of Lost) without any of them being amazing and memorable, or being horrible and cringe-inducing.
Exactly. Which is unfortunate.
As bad as the Star Wars prequels were (and they were really really bad) at very least they were memorably bad. Darth Maul, despite being very limited in screen time, has stuck with us. We still remember the pod racing, the "oops" of young anakin blowing up the drone-base-thing... we even remember his stupid braid thing from Ep2 and how terrible Hayden Christensen's acting was. Who has forgotten Yoda's light saber duel? Mace Windu being a bad ass mutherfukin Jedi all up on Jango Fett? We haven't even forgotten Boss Nass and Jar Jar freaking Binks?
And that's almost 15 years later... Phantom Menace came out in '99. And yet it sticks with us, in all it's terrible terrible glory. A decade from now, how clearly will we remember JJ's Trek reboot? Lens flare and... lens flare aaanndddd... Lens flare and Leonard Nimoy *shrug*