I daresay that the Nvidia execs are unaware of that bit of car legislation, all driving company cars and having them serviced at registered brand outlets.
Because *obviously* Al-Qaeda is on the verge of launching an all-out cyberattack on the US, from the crank-driven laptop they have in their cave. Why, the CIA confirmed only yesterday that they forked out on an amazing full megabit of sattelite bandwidth for exactly that purpose. That's 1.000.000 bits per second !
Exactly. They'll be paying (relative) peanuts, so they'll get the not-quite brand of expert, while the brunt of the real threat they're up against consists of a) the real experts they couldn't pay enough to hire, and b) the smart kids who've nothing better to do all day than figure out how shit works.
Their experts will be very effective, however, against the rather common type of attacker that you can block with the kind of network protection that anyone with half a brain already has. Their effectivity numbers will reflect the number of attacks repelled, and thus they'll be commended for their excellent work.
The details may change, but physical media for music haven't exactly become an anchronism, yet. They'll be more of a collector's item, not unlike today's special edition CDs, but I believe there will always be that part of the public that appreciates the smell and feel of a real book, and the look of a shelf full of them.
That said, technical volumes may sooner become all-digital,exactly for the reasons you mention, but I suspect that the people most prone to read the "better" kind of literature, may also be the people who prefer an actual book. Maybe a smaller but lucrative niche market will evolve around those people.
Music has not always been expected to be portable. Well, unless you were very very rich, and could afford having a symphonic orchestra following you around wherever you went.
There also has not always been a market for digital media - that only came about gradually, as the technology permitted. The rise of ebook readers, and especially the availability of the first *really* good one, will create a market where there was none. The iPod did that for music. No telling what'll do it for books, but I don't think it'll be any of the current offerings.
I fear that they never did because they were too busy actually publishing books. Now that the MAFIAA has been giving the example of how to run a modern business, however...
> For entertainment purposes, it's almost inconceivable that you read more than one book at once... so what's the benefit in having a device that lets you store multiple books?
Oh, I almost permanently read several books concurrently, although obviously not literally at the same time. I've got one in my backpack for when I'm commuting, one at my mom's place, one next to my bed, a few tech volumes at work (although those might more qualify as 'lookup' as I don't always read them cover-to-cover), often one in the loo, and then also sometimes one next to the bed at my boyfriend's place.
I have no problem whatsoever with picking up any one of them and continue to read where I left off. In fact, I started reading LOTR about a year before the first movie hit the big screen (shame on me, I know), got about halfway the second book, and still have to finish it now. I've done a few chapters last year, first time since the movies, and I had to parse all of ten pages back from my bookmark before it started coming back to me and I could continue.
However, all this is done, and is possible, because I can just leave the damn things where they are - I don't have to be arsed to drag them with me everywhere. Storing a dozen books on a Kindle is all very fine, but doesn't solve my basic problem: despite being good at remembering events and context from half a dozen books at once, my brain just can't be arsed to remember to grab a book before running for the loo.
Mmmh, I'm not entirely convinced. Yes, my collection is also 99.999% legit, save for the odd copy of something bloody hard to find that I got from a friend.
My personal experience on the iZune thing, however, is that a lot of them are bought by young people, who, almost per definition, often don't have the money to buy a lot of the argumentably too expensive on-media music. That drove them to learn how to get the music they want for cheap, and because the industry has been too stupid to swiftly hop on to the digital bandwagon, 'for cheap' became 'downloaded from the internet for free'.
A very convenient habit, and one very hard to break even now that the music industry have started to realise that there is something to this whole intarweb thing after all.
Yes, us older types with a good income and a lot of appreciation for the bands we choose to listen to will buy the stuff, often on physical media. However, add to the above circumstances the fact that music has become not so much of an art as another mass-produed consumer item to be rammed down the shee-err, valued customers' collective throat, and what incentive is there to pay good money for something that you'll never listen to again in three weeks, when the newest fad buys airtime ?
Again, the above is based on personal experience, but I have a feeling that the share of illegal copies on the world's music players, while spectacularly less than what the MAFIAA wants us to believe, is still a lot more than you seem to think.
> my issue is that the foreigners we let in are the scum their own countries are glad to be without.
Not all of them are scum, quite the contrary - don't forget that mass immigrations started because we rich people weren't interested in doing the dirty jobs anymore. A lot are honest, hard-working people.
However, the foreigners I know personally tend to agree that it is often the no-good assholes who try to emigrate to a different country because they're not welcome at home anymore. Also, you only ever see the bad ones in the news, not the good ones.
Correct. So, it would actually be a good idea to multiply a portion of the price per byte with the fraction of usage in the pipe at that time.
Say an MB of transfer costs you 15 cent. Of that, there's 5 cent fixed price (infrastructure et al). If the pipe is only used 10%, at night for example, your MB will cost you 5 + 10 * 0.1 = 6 cents. If you want to transfer that MB during lunch hour, when everyone is surfing and the pipe is 95% full, it'll cost you 5 + 10 * 0.95 = 14.5 cents.
Yes, I realise this is hell to implement from a technical point of view, but it'd be a good way to both get cheaper downloads, and to get infrastructure usage less peaky.
Electricity companies already have a very simple implementation of this: night tariff.
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I daresay that the Nvidia execs are unaware of that bit of car legislation, all driving company cars and having them serviced at registered brand outlets.
Because *obviously* Al-Qaeda is on the verge of launching an all-out cyberattack on the US, from the crank-driven laptop they have in their cave. Why, the CIA confirmed only yesterday that they forked out on an amazing full megabit of sattelite bandwidth for exactly that purpose. That's 1.000.000 bits per second !
Does that mean that any post referring to the DHS now also triggers godwin ?
I can't help but wonder what constitutes an "interesting" reason to be wrong.
No, but it does make you way too smart to be a gubment exec.
Could you translate that for us nonamerican types ? What would the numbers for those various GS classes add up to ?
Exactly. They'll be paying (relative) peanuts, so they'll get the not-quite brand of expert, while the brunt of the real threat they're up against consists of a) the real experts they couldn't pay enough to hire, and b) the smart kids who've nothing better to do all day than figure out how shit works.
Their experts will be very effective, however, against the rather common type of attacker that you can block with the kind of network protection that anyone with half a brain already has. Their effectivity numbers will reflect the number of attacks repelled, and thus they'll be commended for their excellent work.
The details may change, but physical media for music haven't exactly become an anchronism, yet. They'll be more of a collector's item, not unlike today's special edition CDs, but I believe there will always be that part of the public that appreciates the smell and feel of a real book, and the look of a shelf full of them.
That said, technical volumes may sooner become all-digital,exactly for the reasons you mention, but I suspect that the people most prone to read the "better" kind of literature, may also be the people who prefer an actual book. Maybe a smaller but lucrative niche market will evolve around those people.
Music has not always been expected to be portable. Well, unless you were very very rich, and could afford having a symphonic orchestra following you around wherever you went.
There also has not always been a market for digital media - that only came about gradually, as the technology permitted. The rise of ebook readers, and especially the availability of the first *really* good one, will create a market where there was none. The iPod did that for music. No telling what'll do it for books, but I don't think it'll be any of the current offerings.
I fear that they never did because they were too busy actually publishing books. Now that the MAFIAA has been giving the example of how to run a modern business, however...
> For entertainment purposes, it's almost inconceivable that you read more than one book at once... so what's the benefit in having a device that lets you store multiple books?
Oh, I almost permanently read several books concurrently, although obviously not literally at the same time. I've got one in my backpack for when I'm commuting, one at my mom's place, one next to my bed, a few tech volumes at work (although those might more qualify as 'lookup' as I don't always read them cover-to-cover), often one in the loo, and then also sometimes one next to the bed at my boyfriend's place.
I have no problem whatsoever with picking up any one of them and continue to read where I left off. In fact, I started reading LOTR about a year before the first movie hit the big screen (shame on me, I know), got about halfway the second book, and still have to finish it now. I've done a few chapters last year, first time since the movies, and I had to parse all of ten pages back from my bookmark before it started coming back to me and I could continue.
However, all this is done, and is possible, because I can just leave the damn things where they are - I don't have to be arsed to drag them with me everywhere. Storing a dozen books on a Kindle is all very fine, but doesn't solve my basic problem: despite being good at remembering events and context from half a dozen books at once, my brain just can't be arsed to remember to grab a book before running for the loo.
Only because natalie portman isn't petrified and covered in hot grits.
Mmmh, I'm not entirely convinced. Yes, my collection is also 99.999% legit, save for the odd copy of something bloody hard to find that I got from a friend.
My personal experience on the iZune thing, however, is that a lot of them are bought by young people, who, almost per definition, often don't have the money to buy a lot of the argumentably too expensive on-media music. That drove them to learn how to get the music they want for cheap, and because the industry has been too stupid to swiftly hop on to the digital bandwagon, 'for cheap' became 'downloaded from the internet for free'.
A very convenient habit, and one very hard to break even now that the music industry have started to realise that there is something to this whole intarweb thing after all.
Yes, us older types with a good income and a lot of appreciation for the bands we choose to listen to will buy the stuff, often on physical media.
However, add to the above circumstances the fact that music has become not so much of an art as another mass-produed consumer item to be rammed down the shee-err, valued customers' collective throat, and what incentive is there to pay good money for something that you'll never listen to again in three weeks, when the newest fad buys airtime ?
Again, the above is based on personal experience, but I have a feeling that the share of illegal copies on the world's music players, while spectacularly less than what the MAFIAA wants us to believe, is still a lot more than you seem to think.
The analogy didn't have cars, there's your problem.
He meant "facebook friends", silly.
Now there's what I call long-term planning.
Aren't they called "twits" ?
"Forces to come off their lazy asses and provide a useful service for their money" is a new meaning for the word "endangered", is it ?
No, we think that doctors, nurses and paramedics are as human as the rest of us.
> my issue is that the foreigners we let in are the scum their own countries are glad to be without.
Not all of them are scum, quite the contrary - don't forget that mass immigrations started because we rich people weren't interested in doing the dirty jobs anymore. A lot are honest, hard-working people.
However, the foreigners I know personally tend to agree that it is often the no-good assholes who try to emigrate to a different country because they're not welcome at home anymore. Also, you only ever see the bad ones in the news, not the good ones.
There is such a thing as the 'bandwidth' of a conductor, in this case a powerline.
Correct. So, it would actually be a good idea to multiply a portion of the price per byte with the fraction of usage in the pipe at that time.
Say an MB of transfer costs you 15 cent. Of that, there's 5 cent fixed price (infrastructure et al). If the pipe is only used 10%, at night for example, your MB will cost you 5 + 10 * 0.1 = 6 cents.
If you want to transfer that MB during lunch hour, when everyone is surfing and the pipe is 95% full, it'll cost you 5 + 10 * 0.95 = 14.5 cents.
Yes, I realise this is hell to implement from a technical point of view, but it'd be a good way to both get cheaper downloads, and to get infrastructure usage less peaky.
Electricity companies already have a very simple implementation of this: night tariff.
And if you send your grandma a ten-page letter,you'll pay more, too.
I feel the razor should be updated to "Never attribute to stupidity what can be explained by corporate malice."
True, but it poses the same issues they're now whining about, so why didn't they just ban it on those grounds, then ?