With a full plane, though, you have the advantage of it being ready transportation or a missile in and of it self (depending on what era of hijacking you're into). Take down a plane, and you can wipe out quite a bit on the ground... at least make a good picture for the news media... or you can get the money wired to you and jet off to some sympathetic nation.
Of course, this is assuming everyone else on the plane doesn't go group-beatdown on you the moment you start shouting-- this is a dangerous new world we live in, you know.
And they were patting down a disabled WWII vet in a wheelchair. I told the fresh out of high school kid that he should be embarrassed.
If you're going to have random (or universal) searches, though, they should always be at least random. If you have exemption criteria that mandates disregarding a "hit", then you're allowing a loophole that becomes a known "pass". How hard would it be for the ever-present "potential terrorist" to fake being a wheelchair-bound war vet? For that matter, is it completely outside the bounds that a wheelchair-bound vet might have terrorist intentions?
Admittedly, I'm not that well-traveled, but from the couple times I've been to the Cancun airport in Mexico, I really liked their random screening method for customs. There's a big traffic light and a button, presumably on a randomizer. Hit the button: if it buzzes and goes red, your stuff gets the high-intensity search. Not only does it give an exciting game-show contestant mentality to the whole thing, it also makes it clear to everyone involved that it's just plain luck-of-the-draw, whoever's chosen.
Artists-- Create art for placement (not layout): Photographers, illustrators, etc. Designers-- Strategize and develop layouts, placing and utilizing the artists work. Developers-- Implement layout guidelines from designers in code. Solve problems of implementation.
If Starbucks doesn't have dedicated or uniquely-defined staff filling the "Artists" role (above), I suppose I could see how they'd bump the roles up one.
From my experience, those sorts of rules are the "quick 'n' dirty" distillations of composition theory-- they're memorable guidelines that are quick enough to remember while still being able to rapidly compose a scene.
I would say that the finer-grained rules of design and visual composition inherent in a layout or web page translate themselves better to photography than the other way around.
With the time and control involved in design (both in being able to and in needing to control every element in the composition), the general rules of thirds, eyepaths, etc., while they hold on their own, gain complexity as things like interactive usage patterns and type selection and spacing gain a larger role.
As I saw mentioned somewhere, though (forget the reference): There's a large and influential population of disabled web viewers out there-- search spiders. Although some accessibility measures might be overkill, a lot of accessibility features also serve the purpose of making the site search-friendly and usable across a wide range of agents. Side-effects also include cleaner and more logical code, and a "best practices" mentality that makes for better websites.
I suppose I would agree that accessibility isn't primary (or even achievable) for all websites and situations, but keeping it in mind as a goal does little but help.
You can still get "impossible designs" from print people. The ones I've often seen involve not understanding that there's no set "page size", and that you have to design for expansion and contraction. You'll have layouts that look great in a 1024x768 Photoshop file, but start to fall apart when you have to either expand them to wider or end up with whitespace on the sides.
Or you just end up with the "static block in the center of a field of boring space" (or the "one flash file smack in the center") website that pretty much points to "print designer out of their element".
I think that more depends on what classes you were offered or taking. If you're taking fine arts classes, no, you're probably going to have less of a practically-focused design curriculum as someone who took graphic design classes. Although they say that a good designer can design most anything, I've more often than not found that in most cases, niches and specific talent areas do hold true. For example, I've seen some hideous typography and layout with really sharp illustrations, from folks that were educated in illustration. I, however, would probably make a well-laid-out but cringeworthy work myself if it had to include my own illustration. My drawing skill can take me as far as "for position only", but I was trained in graphic design, not illustration or fine art.
From what I've seen, I'm inclined to agree with the GPP. I know, for instance, that my state's transportation department maps (MI) are Copyrighted, All Rights Reserved. AFAIK, Federal government works are free from copyright, but that doesn't necessarily extend to State government works. Although geographically, a state is part of the nation, its State government is not a subsidiary or dependent.
Luckily, for the Federal government, any rights not specifically enumerated in the Constitution can be easily wedged into conflicting with Congress' rights in the Interstate Commerce Clause.
Even if the consumer doesn't see the value of labels/promotion, the artist apparently has (since they did buy into it). So, the "10 to 14 cents" amount unfairly excludes the amount for those promotion services. If the artist is being paid direct for a total product, than that cut needs to be included, as work to that effect was done (assuming the music was on any sort of label or distribution channel).
Most bands that want to make it out of the local arena need something more in the way of production and promotion than "throw it on the heap and see who buys". While "labels" and "advertising" might be bad words so some, they do serve the purpose of filtering and dissemination so every person that wants to find good music doesn't have to wade through the crap heap of MySpace or MP3.com-style sites, and artists can have their name and work known to more of a sphere than they can personally get out to.
It's not spying, it's convenience. Since most people who use a computer aren't hiding sensitive data, and are trying to get things done efficiently, having a "Recent Files" menu or a "History" is generally considered to be a good thing. If you are paranoid about security, you take care of it by using software and practices that don't leave a trace.
Even better than reading, too, is getting kids to actually create something, rather that achieve or solve preordained puzzles. Drawing, writing, play-acting... or even getting them started on a programming language once they can read, so they can make their own games. (An old BASIC computer/implementation, or something very high-level and instant-gratification like INFORM 7 might be good.)
I know I was personally quite a way ahead of my peers in things like algebra growing up, from little more than having to know the concepts in order to get anywhere on my old C64.
They'd still be competing with commercial-cut versions that were just as easy to download, though. However, if the "legitimate content providers" banded together to make a central source for legal, quality, and quickly-downloadable video, people probably wouldn't mind ads. (Sort of what they're doing with a lot of these Flash-based sites. It's simpler, streaming, and legit.)
If you were really clever, you could download a "prebuffer" portion of a wide range of shows during the day, then continue downloading (while you were playing the buffered portion) once a show was selected.
I see where you're coming from, but you're missing a fundamental concept with intellectual work-- its value is not the worth of an individual copy, it's the worth of the sum of all copies.
In a society with fair trade, value of a good or service is determined, to a large degree, by the time, effort, or ability (expertise, access to resources) involved in production of that good. In a large part, shelling out money is drawing from a stored representation of your value-- money-- in order to have work done that you don't wish to do. I can't be bothered to taking singing lessons or build a studio, so I'll buy a CD instead.
Consider the effort in creating an original master recording. The artists involved have to first have the natural or trained talent to be able to compose and perform a listenable work. The value of this prerequisite could be said to be shared among all the artists' works, but it still is a prerequisite. Then, the artist may need to have instruments, and certainly has to have some manner of recording and mastering technology. Then, of course, the artist must have something to eat and a place to sleep.
This doesn't even cover reproduction, promotion, and distribution of the final product.
All this is not going to happen for the $12 price of a CD, yet a single CD is priced at $12. How? By virtue of cheap reproduction, the artist can, in a sense time-shift, space-shift, and fragment the effort put into producing the master-- and the value of the performance-- into a form that allows many people to experience their "slice" of the value without having to be there at the same time (which would be the case for a $20 concert ticket, for instance). Since cheap reproduction works just as well for people who haven't put in the expenditure, copyright makes sure that the purchases recoup the value to the proper creator.
On the other hand, the value of a physical good is much simpler to calculate. The value of one physical good is set by the point at which the buyer would rather pay than do the work themselves. Physical goods need no artificial copyright, because to copy one, the same amount of work and resources must be used as to create the original. Physical existence is its "DRM".
I would not disagree that the potential value of intellectual work, as set by way of copyright term limits, is higher than it should be. However, this does not mean that all intellectual content should be free or that copyright should be abolished. The concept is sound. The system just needs to be tuned to a more reasonable level....
Also, about your comment regarding a live concert, consider the similar argument: "Why should an artist make more money playing to a sold-out arena than a smaller crowd? The band is doing roughly the same amount of work on stage."
Even in a concert situation, the true value of the work is subdivided into the individual ticket prices. The event is happening regardless of whether any individual is there, just as a CD is recorded regardless of whether you buy it or copy it, and instead of copyright law, it's trespassing law that forces people to buy in to see the event.
What hasn't been demonstrated is that new artists can establish their careers in a world of freely downloadable content.
The old MP3.com served as a pretty decent counterexample. Without promotion (a wholly evil practice, from what I hear), the consumer just ends up slogging through a sea of crap, guided only by the light of the feedback loop created by people sorting by popularity.
I doubt it. One of the benefits of the decentralization and modularization of "Linux", as well as its open-source, editable nature, is that everyone could just change to a distro that didn't have the offending "circumvention device" code/app in it.
You might, but I sincerely doubt that you're in the majority by a long shot. I even doubt you'd "continue buying books" as much as you say you would if the social/ethical/legal stigma of having to pay were removed. A fair amount of people, if there was no real or implied guilt, would not go out of their way to put down cash for something they could get free or cheaper.
Although people might put forth for outstanding books or for other tangental benefits, you also have to consider the workaday reads that most people would feel just as well about snagging for free as they would paying the money to buy a copy. Newspapers and periodicals, fluffy mass-market paperbacks... although they might not be the highest of culture, they deserve to get their fair slice of the entertainment dollars, whatever that slice may be.
So, instead of a common, baseline, known quantity which is nonetheless malleable by explicit license (see Creative Commons, GPL, etc.), you'd rather see a vast array of individualized rights assignments with requirements passed down among aftermarket sellers?
What is stopping a law enforcement agency from putting out a 'phishing' kit that actually phished the phishers?
The law, mostly. It's just as illegal for someone to make "counter-malware" to break into a computer uninvited as it is for anyone else to make malicious software that breaks in.
I'm personally from the LiveJournal generation, but I did take a look at MySpace when a lot of my friends started joining up, and recently have gotten a Facebook account, for the same reason. So far, I still only use the LJ (plus a Vox, which is basically a LiveJournal with better tech).
At least among me and mine, a few of the benefits...
A lot of the draw of MySpace is that has some good tools to allow you to find people you know easily, without having to know their URLs or screennames, and to build an "always-on" connection to your friends. For more "connected" folks, this can be a practical tool for a simplified social life.
Similar to the blogs that preceded it, MySpace gives everyone an easy audience-- someone to talk to... or at-- which is a big draw in and of itself. The messageboard nature of a lot of MySpace means that your communications can be longer than a quip and not considered as annoying as unwanted email.
It's not about "sheep" or "wolves" (as tired of cliches as those may be), it's more about the evolution of online communication. In the beginning, there were Web pages and email. It all mixed up, and Web pages got strikingly simplified to the point that they became a viable form of broadcast email, and social networking tacked on people-finding and access control.
Of course, this is all in the theoretical model known as the "Perfect MySpace", which basically forgoes the giant steaming mounds of braindead implementation: allowing custom code, ubiquity of Tom, constant errors, poor security and XSS flaws, letting the bands, movies, and other commercial outfits completely misuse the site, and, of course, enough Flash ads to kill any known browser... the list goes on.
Trying Facebook, I actually found myself (believe me, I was as shocked as you) wanting some of the features of MySpace. While MySpace suffered from letting the inmates run the asylum, Facebook had this sort of "maze of rules" mentality, with most of the actual functionality barred by cryptic, unexplained, or nonexistant failure messages and restrictions. Let's see... I can't find people who aren't in my geographical area, I can't pick more than one geographical area, even though I have ties to more than one place, and my account goes into lockdown for 90 days because I'm trying to wrap my head around all these restrictions. There was an overwhelming sense that I was a bad person for trying to actually use the site in ways that weren't spelled out in the three-step tutorial. Like something built by Apple.
Hell, you don't even have to go far from the source for an analogy. It's like typing in "www.example.com", and example.com giving up (Gasp! Shock! Horrors!) all of the information on that page! Even the HTML codes! Even if you never asked permission to phone the owner to secure permission to access the website signed and notarized!
Slashdot Mirror
With a full plane, though, you have the advantage of it being ready transportation or a missile in and of it self (depending on what era of hijacking you're into). Take down a plane, and you can wipe out quite a bit on the ground... at least make a good picture for the news media... or you can get the money wired to you and jet off to some sympathetic nation.
Of course, this is assuming everyone else on the plane doesn't go group-beatdown on you the moment you start shouting-- this is a dangerous new world we live in, you know.
And they were patting down a disabled WWII vet in a wheelchair. I told the fresh out of high school kid that he should be embarrassed.
If you're going to have random (or universal) searches, though, they should always be at least random. If you have exemption criteria that mandates disregarding a "hit", then you're allowing a loophole that becomes a known "pass". How hard would it be for the ever-present "potential terrorist" to fake being a wheelchair-bound war vet? For that matter, is it completely outside the bounds that a wheelchair-bound vet might have terrorist intentions?
Admittedly, I'm not that well-traveled, but from the couple times I've been to the Cancun airport in Mexico, I really liked their random screening method for customs. There's a big traffic light and a button, presumably on a randomizer. Hit the button: if it buzzes and goes red, your stuff gets the high-intensity search. Not only does it give an exciting game-show contestant mentality to the whole thing, it also makes it clear to everyone involved that it's just plain luck-of-the-draw, whoever's chosen.
Interesting. I'd break it down more like:
Artists-- Create art for placement (not layout): Photographers, illustrators, etc.
Designers-- Strategize and develop layouts, placing and utilizing the artists work.
Developers-- Implement layout guidelines from designers in code. Solve problems of implementation.
If Starbucks doesn't have dedicated or uniquely-defined staff filling the "Artists" role (above), I suppose I could see how they'd bump the roles up one.
Oh, and qualifications for the record: I'm a professional web/graphic designer, and an amateur (hack, but working on it) photographer.
From my experience, those sorts of rules are the "quick 'n' dirty" distillations of composition theory-- they're memorable guidelines that are quick enough to remember while still being able to rapidly compose a scene.
I would say that the finer-grained rules of design and visual composition inherent in a layout or web page translate themselves better to photography than the other way around.
With the time and control involved in design (both in being able to and in needing to control every element in the composition), the general rules of thirds, eyepaths, etc., while they hold on their own, gain complexity as things like interactive usage patterns and type selection and spacing gain a larger role.
As I saw mentioned somewhere, though (forget the reference): There's a large and influential population of disabled web viewers out there-- search spiders. Although some accessibility measures might be overkill, a lot of accessibility features also serve the purpose of making the site search-friendly and usable across a wide range of agents. Side-effects also include cleaner and more logical code, and a "best practices" mentality that makes for better websites.
I suppose I would agree that accessibility isn't primary (or even achievable) for all websites and situations, but keeping it in mind as a goal does little but help.
You can still get "impossible designs" from print people. The ones I've often seen involve not understanding that there's no set "page size", and that you have to design for expansion and contraction. You'll have layouts that look great in a 1024x768 Photoshop file, but start to fall apart when you have to either expand them to wider or end up with whitespace on the sides.
Or you just end up with the "static block in the center of a field of boring space" (or the "one flash file smack in the center") website that pretty much points to "print designer out of their element".
I think that more depends on what classes you were offered or taking. If you're taking fine arts classes, no, you're probably going to have less of a practically-focused design curriculum as someone who took graphic design classes. Although they say that a good designer can design most anything, I've more often than not found that in most cases, niches and specific talent areas do hold true. For example, I've seen some hideous typography and layout with really sharp illustrations, from folks that were educated in illustration. I, however, would probably make a well-laid-out but cringeworthy work myself if it had to include my own illustration. My drawing skill can take me as far as "for position only", but I was trained in graphic design, not illustration or fine art.
Cite?
From what I've seen, I'm inclined to agree with the GPP. I know, for instance, that my state's transportation department maps (MI) are Copyrighted, All Rights Reserved. AFAIK, Federal government works are free from copyright, but that doesn't necessarily extend to State government works. Although geographically, a state is part of the nation, its State government is not a subsidiary or dependent.
Luckily, for the Federal government, any rights not specifically enumerated in the Constitution can be easily wedged into conflicting with Congress' rights in the Interstate Commerce Clause.
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/constitution/index.html
I believe this is the same thing. Slightly less conveniently packaged (multiple PDFs), but slightly less $15.00, for the casual viewer on a budget.
Even if the consumer doesn't see the value of labels/promotion, the artist apparently has (since they did buy into it). So, the "10 to 14 cents" amount unfairly excludes the amount for those promotion services. If the artist is being paid direct for a total product, than that cut needs to be included, as work to that effect was done (assuming the music was on any sort of label or distribution channel).
Most bands that want to make it out of the local arena need something more in the way of production and promotion than "throw it on the heap and see who buys". While "labels" and "advertising" might be bad words so some, they do serve the purpose of filtering and dissemination so every person that wants to find good music doesn't have to wade through the crap heap of MySpace or MP3.com-style sites, and artists can have their name and work known to more of a sphere than they can personally get out to.
Who says they didn't, regardless?
It's not spying, it's convenience. Since most people who use a computer aren't hiding sensitive data, and are trying to get things done efficiently, having a "Recent Files" menu or a "History" is generally considered to be a good thing. If you are paranoid about security, you take care of it by using software and practices that don't leave a trace.
Even better than reading, too, is getting kids to actually create something, rather that achieve or solve preordained puzzles. Drawing, writing, play-acting... or even getting them started on a programming language once they can read, so they can make their own games. (An old BASIC computer/implementation, or something very high-level and instant-gratification like INFORM 7 might be good.)
I know I was personally quite a way ahead of my peers in things like algebra growing up, from little more than having to know the concepts in order to get anywhere on my old C64.
They'd still be competing with commercial-cut versions that were just as easy to download, though. However, if the "legitimate content providers" banded together to make a central source for legal, quality, and quickly-downloadable video, people probably wouldn't mind ads. (Sort of what they're doing with a lot of these Flash-based sites. It's simpler, streaming, and legit.)
If you were really clever, you could download a "prebuffer" portion of a wide range of shows during the day, then continue downloading (while you were playing the buffered portion) once a show was selected.
I see where you're coming from, but you're missing a fundamental concept with intellectual work-- its value is not the worth of an individual copy, it's the worth of the sum of all copies.
...
In a society with fair trade, value of a good or service is determined, to a large degree, by the time, effort, or ability (expertise, access to resources) involved in production of that good. In a large part, shelling out money is drawing from a stored representation of your value-- money-- in order to have work done that you don't wish to do. I can't be bothered to taking singing lessons or build a studio, so I'll buy a CD instead.
Consider the effort in creating an original master recording. The artists involved have to first have the natural or trained talent to be able to compose and perform a listenable work. The value of this prerequisite could be said to be shared among all the artists' works, but it still is a prerequisite. Then, the artist may need to have instruments, and certainly has to have some manner of recording and mastering technology. Then, of course, the artist must have something to eat and a place to sleep.
This doesn't even cover reproduction, promotion, and distribution of the final product.
All this is not going to happen for the $12 price of a CD, yet a single CD is priced at $12. How? By virtue of cheap reproduction, the artist can, in a sense time-shift, space-shift, and fragment the effort put into producing the master-- and the value of the performance-- into a form that allows many people to experience their "slice" of the value without having to be there at the same time (which would be the case for a $20 concert ticket, for instance). Since cheap reproduction works just as well for people who haven't put in the expenditure, copyright makes sure that the purchases recoup the value to the proper creator.
On the other hand, the value of a physical good is much simpler to calculate. The value of one physical good is set by the point at which the buyer would rather pay than do the work themselves. Physical goods need no artificial copyright, because to copy one, the same amount of work and resources must be used as to create the original. Physical existence is its "DRM".
I would not disagree that the potential value of intellectual work, as set by way of copyright term limits, is higher than it should be. However, this does not mean that all intellectual content should be free or that copyright should be abolished. The concept is sound. The system just needs to be tuned to a more reasonable level.
Also, about your comment regarding a live concert, consider the similar argument: "Why should an artist make more money playing to a sold-out arena than a smaller crowd? The band is doing roughly the same amount of work on stage."
Even in a concert situation, the true value of the work is subdivided into the individual ticket prices. The event is happening regardless of whether any individual is there, just as a CD is recorded regardless of whether you buy it or copy it, and instead of copyright law, it's trespassing law that forces people to buy in to see the event.
What hasn't been demonstrated is that new artists can establish their careers in a world of freely downloadable content.
The old MP3.com served as a pretty decent counterexample. Without promotion (a wholly evil practice, from what I hear), the consumer just ends up slogging through a sea of crap, guided only by the light of the feedback loop created by people sorting by popularity.
I doubt it. One of the benefits of the decentralization and modularization of "Linux", as well as its open-source, editable nature, is that everyone could just change to a distro that didn't have the offending "circumvention device" code/app in it.
You might, but I sincerely doubt that you're in the majority by a long shot. I even doubt you'd "continue buying books" as much as you say you would if the social/ethical/legal stigma of having to pay were removed. A fair amount of people, if there was no real or implied guilt, would not go out of their way to put down cash for something they could get free or cheaper.
Although people might put forth for outstanding books or for other tangental benefits, you also have to consider the workaday reads that most people would feel just as well about snagging for free as they would paying the money to buy a copy. Newspapers and periodicals, fluffy mass-market paperbacks... although they might not be the highest of culture, they deserve to get their fair slice of the entertainment dollars, whatever that slice may be.
So, instead of a common, baseline, known quantity which is nonetheless malleable by explicit license (see Creative Commons, GPL, etc.), you'd rather see a vast array of individualized rights assignments with requirements passed down among aftermarket sellers?
I'll take copyright.
What is stopping a law enforcement agency from putting out a 'phishing' kit that actually phished the phishers?
The law, mostly. It's just as illegal for someone to make "counter-malware" to break into a computer uninvited as it is for anyone else to make malicious software that breaks in.
I'm personally from the LiveJournal generation, but I did take a look at MySpace when a lot of my friends started joining up, and recently have gotten a Facebook account, for the same reason. So far, I still only use the LJ (plus a Vox, which is basically a LiveJournal with better tech).
At least among me and mine, a few of the benefits...
A lot of the draw of MySpace is that has some good tools to allow you to find people you know easily, without having to know their URLs or screennames, and to build an "always-on" connection to your friends. For more "connected" folks, this can be a practical tool for a simplified social life.
Similar to the blogs that preceded it, MySpace gives everyone an easy audience-- someone to talk to... or at-- which is a big draw in and of itself. The messageboard nature of a lot of MySpace means that your communications can be longer than a quip and not considered as annoying as unwanted email.
It's not about "sheep" or "wolves" (as tired of cliches as those may be), it's more about the evolution of online communication. In the beginning, there were Web pages and email. It all mixed up, and Web pages got strikingly simplified to the point that they became a viable form of broadcast email, and social networking tacked on people-finding and access control.
Of course, this is all in the theoretical model known as the "Perfect MySpace", which basically forgoes the giant steaming mounds of braindead implementation: allowing custom code, ubiquity of Tom, constant errors, poor security and XSS flaws, letting the bands, movies, and other commercial outfits completely misuse the site, and, of course, enough Flash ads to kill any known browser... the list goes on.
Trying Facebook, I actually found myself (believe me, I was as shocked as you) wanting some of the features of MySpace. While MySpace suffered from letting the inmates run the asylum, Facebook had this sort of "maze of rules" mentality, with most of the actual functionality barred by cryptic, unexplained, or nonexistant failure messages and restrictions. Let's see... I can't find people who aren't in my geographical area, I can't pick more than one geographical area, even though I have ties to more than one place, and my account goes into lockdown for 90 days because I'm trying to wrap my head around all these restrictions. There was an overwhelming sense that I was a bad person for trying to actually use the site in ways that weren't spelled out in the three-step tutorial. Like something built by Apple.
Hell, you don't even have to go far from the source for an analogy. It's like typing in "www.example.com", and example.com giving up (Gasp! Shock! Horrors!) all of the information on that page! Even the HTML codes! Even if you never asked permission to phone the owner to secure permission to access the website signed and notarized!