Depends on what the points are awarded for really. Process or result. There are situations where some points can be awarded for both and its a trade off but if the question is what is the formula of water and the student writes (very neatly) CO2 they shouldn't get any marks because the remembered two out of three and it was neat and you could see they really tried and they did understand what the notation means.
If the question is about process then yes give part marks.
I see my kids doing science (and other subjects like history) and its all process. The facts don't see to matter as much and while that may be a good thing there will always be different views on the balance.
In the end the US and UK didn't ask for a vote on the resolution that would authorized action without further reference to the Security Council ie a blank cheque for the US and coalition to move whenever they felt it was time.
If you don't ask I suppose it means you haven't been told you can't. But the reason they didn't ask was clearly because they the Security Council would not have agreed. And I don't mean the French. I suspect there would have been only 4 or 5 yes votes and 4 veto's and 8 or nine no's.
hThe resolution is still on the table but will not be pput to the vote by the sponsors.
Do you find it surprising that no-one wants to go to war with an insane country with nukes.
Hell, I don't even want to get into a shouting match with the North Koreans let alone the Americans. Why do you all think we Aussies have rolled over for Dubya. So far it seems to be working.
Umm, the separation of powers doctrin generally provides for 3 centres of power.
The Legislature: Makes laws
The Executive: Administers Law
The Judiciary: Judges transgressions and in Constitutional cases determins if laws are 'lawful'
I'm sure its the same in the US though in all jurisdictions high level executive and legislative powers tend to mix a bit, which makes an independent judiciary even more important.
and verifies the user's identity and then... What? We all go round their place and blow up their letter box?
No the next step must be painful. And permanent. If a few spammers need to die to make the world a nicer place, it's a price I'm prepared to pay.
interoperability should not depend on font size
on
Office 2003 and XML
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I thought xml was supposed to describe data so that an application could do what it wanted without having to follow the rules of the sending app. eg in finance, there will be a set of industry standard tags that an accounting program will set to data in an xml file and if i get that file my program will understand the tags and use the info in ways i want.
it's not limited to allowing me to dispaly a word document of a report in open office and have it look exactly the same. I want to be able to import the xml file and have my analysis software know that a particular record is an non-current asset etc.
who cares what font was used. Interoperability should not depend on font size or colour.
It's precicesly the Microsoft specific bits of a file that should be stripped out. If a display property is only available on a ms platform then the xml file should not contain them.
The big if is wheter ms takes out more and leaves the xml file unusable because there is insufficient description.
What you will find is that industries and user groups will begin to define xml schema for their data. WP will be different but xml will still have a place.
Then they would lose in Court and yopu wouldn't have anything to worry about.
The wonderful thing about the rule of law is that in the end the meaning of a law including the constitution is decided by the courts. thats what they are there for. so if the court says x and you say y then you are wrong.
Such "theft" as this thread is talking about is actually a crucial part of bringing the v/m ratio back down to where it is better for the consumer
Are you suggesting that "theft" is useful in that it keeps prices down for the consumer. Is this a general rule or only applicable where the original prices are inflated because of over-estimates of theft.
Why do you assume that the record company's complaints are intended to reduce theft below what they expected. I would have assumed that they are finding that the level of theft is higher than they anticipated We are always being told that they haven't understood the internet and its effect on their business model. Why would I think that the misunderstanding was an over-estimate of the potential damage. In that case your point is invalid.
The grey market exists because the same product is sold in different markets at different prices. Grey market is arbitrage. The reason why prices are different is because generally one market is poorer than the other. Manufacturers can sell into those poorer markets at a lower price because the home markets supporet the low price. If that low price is sent back to the home market by intermediaries that will canabalize sales of the higher profit home market sales and lower the overall profit of the product. These losses will be made up by higher prices overall in later products.
To think that it doesn't operate basically like this or that this is a good thing as a rule misses the point of the market economy.
Unless you did it to everyone all the time it wouldn't work. Or it would work about as well as speeding fines. ie It wouldn't except in known trap areas. As it is people see speeding tickets as a form of tax or the karma cost of all the other speeding they do.
Unless people believe that they will likely get caught if they do it or if the potential cost is hugh even if they are less likely to get caught they will weigh the risks and continue doing the thing.
People speed because most of the time there is no bad result.
Copyright violation occurs because people don't think its a bad thing.
If that is the case hugh penalties will be resented (or people will not believe that it could happen to them)but small penalties will be ignored or worse seen as the karma cost of all the other copyright violations they do.
The record companies can't win this but there will be a lot of pain before they go.
And after that I predict the end of music if all we have to replace it is filesharing and self produced downloadable tracks from mp3.com or whatever.
Therefore, this would be nothing but a random and haphazard charity for an industry that doesn't need or deserve it.
I'm sure that between themselves they could allocate the money on some mutually agreeable basis. So don't worry about that as a reason for not getting it in the first place.
It would be penalizing EVERYONE
There are lots of ways I pay for the cost of things that I don't use. I either accept the need for them as a general rule or they are so small as to not be worth my while to argue about them.
on the basis of the industry's absurd projections about how much piracy is costing them.
They simply add up the retail price of every unauthorized copy and call that their "losses"
Is that the case. I've not seen how they get their 'loss' figure but if that is the way then I agree that it is absurd.
when the obvious fact of the matter is that people download 10-100 times more than they would actually have paid for hard copies of if they hadn't been able to download anything unauthorized.
Every time I read that point I get more confused as to what it actually means.
An alternative argument would be that record companies sell music and the downloaders are getting the benefit of the music without paying anything for it. But that opens up the old argument about the validity of copyright per se and we don't want to start that argument again.
Go to the local record shop with your recorder and instead of listeneing through the headphones jack you recorder in a see what the record store says. I don't think they will understand that you are "only interested in recording the cds you would not have bought anyway so whats the beef".
Plus, mp3 downloads have the mixed benefit of providing record albums with free marketing.
I agree that there are some cases where more cds are purchased by individuals after hearing downloads but as you said in respect of the record company claims about statistics I doubt that every downloader has increased their purchasing. I suspect on balance that there has been a drop in overall sales volume.
They actually PAY radio stations to play the songs (not the other way around) as a form of marketing, so how is this so bad?
They may pay the radio station but they can work out easily if that payment was worth it by seeing the increase in sales. I think if the recoed companies truly believed that downloading increased sales they might not be so upset. Any evidence that it is beneficial is anecdotal at best.
If people really like the album they will buy the whole thing instead of going to the trouble of collecting the low-quality songs individually on Kazaa or Bearshare.
Most rips are of good quality and perfectly useful for casual listening.
And the argument is usually that we sholudn't have to buy the whole cd just to get one or two songs. This of course avoids entirely the question of which songs on an album are the good ones. If its the single releases then they are already available as singles so there goes that argument.
And cds these days have so little on them that it is ridiculous. Is it true that the new Linkin Park cd produced at hugh expense and time has about 34 minutes of music on it.
Therefore, in effect, the industry's projected losses figures are inflated from their real world losses by a factor of at least 20.
As are you estimates of the benefits of file sharing.
The fact of the matter is that the reason the industry is only posting meager profits is because their expenses are unnecessarily through the roof. More than 75% of all of their revenue is spent on marketing, lobbying, PR, and other such bullshit that contributes nothing towards actually putting out a good product for a good price. Maybe the RIAA should try the latter for the change.
And this is the biggest joke of all. The reason why record companies spend so much on marketing is to get t
This whole "marginal cost is low or even zero" excuse is rubbish isn't it. It would only be relevant if you personally having an extra copy made. The marginal cost (which would generally include only material, distribution and selling expenses) would be lower than the average cost because development costs etc are covered by the ordinary sales volume.
To the extent that what you do reduces the ordinary volume of sales on which the record company has based its expected profit then each non-sold CD has the effect of reducing their net profit by the whole of the CD price not just the marginal cost.
That's like arguing that after he made a loss of $800M on the first copy of WinXP M$ is making 100% profit on every copy they sell. or the first copy of the new REM album is going to cost them $1m but after that they are just ripping us off for $20 or whatever.
even Greenpeace might embrace nuke plants as the lesser evil.
There's your problem right there. I doubt if Greenpeace would even understand that you were proposing a solution to a problem. I think their question would be along the lines of
"Let me get this straight, you want to make cars nukular".
The US will be free to promote democracy in countries like Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, and Iran.
Nice how they leave Iraq out of the list. But apart from that why would anyone think the US would show any interest in those countries at all if they didn't have oil. I don't see them 'promoting democracy' in any of the surrounding countries
Once a month you get one clearly identifiable item in your hotmail inbox and THAT is the worst kind of spam possible. no other spam msg has made me feel so helpless and so angry.
And your response is to get a domain and establish your own email host.
That will guarantee you one less piece of spam per month. Of course having your own domain guarantees you a whole bunch more.
I hope you are not in charge of anyone else's money in your job.
The artist already pays the upfront recording costs (through advances on their royalties)
Well which is it, themselves or the record company. Don't tell me you have mixed up who fronts the cash and who eventually wears the cost.
And the next paragraph tells us that the bands should take over their own promotion and distribution via the website. Who going to advance them that money, the same record companies who advanced them the recording costs.
Or are you suggesting that the ability to get ahead in the music business is to be based on who had the most money to start with.
The price won't be 'fair' until the record companies work out a way to avoid every major record retailer closing down the day they price downloadable tracks at 10c a track (or anything less than about $1 a track)
As far as I can see that will be the major problem in the record companies transition to an online system.
That whole sector of the distribution chain will disappear and whatever your opinion of the worth of the sector it will be a major issue that is not addressed by simplistic complaints about profit and control hungry record companies.
Yes that's right squareball, all the censors want to hide pictures of their large penises or vaginas and pictures of them doing things with the aforementioned items.
Although we are talking about New Zealand we will not bring sheep into the conversation at this point.
All these simple solutions to a complex problem that all involve someone else paying. Sure i get a lot of spam but not that much really that it detracts from my ability to use the net (and I'm on a 4GB a month satelite connection). I don't see it as immoral that I have to pay for the stuff I ask for from the net which as far as I can tell is the vast bulk of the traffic that comes to my machine.
Maybe/. can tell us exactly how long it would stay on the air if they had to start paying for both their and my data charges.
And most ISP's would close tomorrow if they couldn't charge for data downloads.
After you have gotten your line and paid for the cost of the telephone system let me know because it will only cost the telco a little bit to put an extra line put to my house from the corner box and then I can surf for free forever. Thank you kind sir.
Its like the phone bill, it doesn't cost the phone company more money when you make 1000 local calls or 2 local calls, so you have a flat rate for unlimited local calling.
Not everywhere has this system. Many people still feel that usage should relate directly to cost and so would feel that the person making 2 calls was unfairly subsidising the 1000 call a day person. That's human nature, however you feel about it politically or ideologically. Flat rate for everyone works best if everyone thinks they are getting a similar deal.
Again, that's my take on the human aspect. Don't come back telling me people shouldn't think like that. They do!
not provide that same (nearly continuous) data rate to internet connections
Don't most cable internet providers allow free access within their own domain to things like ftp sites and games servers?
As far as I know no cable tv company allows unlimited random access to other cable networks. That's what makes it the 'Inter'net.
you could call your local BBS and be charged a phone call while DLing full-speed for hours
Same thing. One call to your BBS fixed point using a one on one modem and a circut switched connection.
And in Australia there was a big push by Telstra to allow them to time charge for all data calls because those neverending calls cost them the entire circut connection cost and they got 25c in total revenue. So when they moved into ISPing in a big way the first thing they did was start charging for time. And when always on high speed connections came along ie cable and adsl, for volume.
Companies baulk at paying things out for the same reason you do. If you don't have to, why do it. It a lot more fun to decide who gets the money saved, the customer or the shareholder, if the shareholder is holding the money at the time.
In any case McD has the probable cost of lawsuits built into their cost structures already. It's only going to be unusual lawsuits or unusual payouts that will effect their profits. Any sensible company will have a contingency for claims included in costs that are used to maximize profits.
If they have an excess of say $25,000 per claim they estimate that on past experience they get 1000 claims a year they layoff the cost of $25,000,000 over the x billion burgers they sell this year. It's only when they get 1200 claims in a year that they might have to increase prices.
Unless of course your auditor is Arthur Andersen and you can convince him that 1200 is a blip..
And Wendy's etc will have similar histories and so similar amounts built into their cost structures. So there is little margin for significant price competition in that area.
its not the bandwidth that is expensive its the hardward and maintance... The company that owns and maintains the fiber should have a fixed price to maintain it.
Yes and when that fibre is full because of spammers and worms etc they will build more fibre ( or in the case of Austraila more gain paired copper) and charge a fixed price to maintain it. But who is paying to build it in the first place?
Why isn't usage a reasonable basis for cost sharing (and therefore pricing) on a packet based network?
The whole argument reminds me of the joke about how the first copy of Windows that Bilg sold lost him $800M but look at the profit margin on every copy since. Some people obviously didn't get the joke.
They do keep us free from terror ( pr0n is a state issue). But Copyright is a federal law and it does have criminal aspects I think. So its within their area of responsibility. As I said elsewhere I don't think this is a mp3 downloader issue. downloaders don't store files on servers as a rule.
Slashdot Mirror
Assume: The pigs are standing on two legs.
Answer: There is insufficient data to answer the question. Please specify know how many ears were visible.
If the question is about process then yes give part marks.
I see my kids doing science (and other subjects like history) and its all process. The facts don't see to matter as much and while that may be a good thing there will always be different views on the balance.
If you don't ask I suppose it means you haven't been told you can't. But the reason they didn't ask was clearly because they the Security Council would not have agreed. And I don't mean the French. I suspect there would have been only 4 or 5 yes votes and 4 veto's and 8 or nine no's.
hThe resolution is still on the table but will not be pput to the vote by the sponsors.
Hell, I don't even want to get into a shouting match with the North Koreans let alone the Americans. Why do you all think we Aussies have rolled over for Dubya. So far it seems to be working.
The Legislature: Makes laws
The Executive: Administers Law
The Judiciary: Judges transgressions and in Constitutional cases determins if laws are 'lawful'
I'm sure its the same in the US though in all jurisdictions high level executive and legislative powers tend to mix a bit, which makes an independent judiciary even more important.
No the next step must be painful. And permanent. If a few spammers need to die to make the world a nicer place, it's a price I'm prepared to pay.
it's not limited to allowing me to dispaly a word document of a report in open office and have it look exactly the same. I want to be able to import the xml file and have my analysis software know that a particular record is an non-current asset etc.
who cares what font was used. Interoperability should not depend on font size or colour.
It's precicesly the Microsoft specific bits of a file that should be stripped out. If a display property is only available on a ms platform then the xml file should not contain them.
The big if is wheter ms takes out more and leaves the xml file unusable because there is insufficient description.
What you will find is that industries and user groups will begin to define xml schema for their data. WP will be different but xml will still have a place.
Then they would lose in Court and yopu wouldn't have anything to worry about.
The wonderful thing about the rule of law is that in the end the meaning of a law including the constitution is decided by the courts. thats what they are there for. so if the court says x and you say y then you are wrong.
Are you suggesting that "theft" is useful in that it keeps prices down for the consumer. Is this a general rule or only applicable where the original prices are inflated because of over-estimates of theft.
Why do you assume that the record company's complaints are intended to reduce theft below what they expected. I would have assumed that they are finding that the level of theft is higher than they anticipated We are always being told that they haven't understood the internet and its effect on their business model. Why would I think that the misunderstanding was an over-estimate of the potential damage. In that case your point is invalid.
The grey market exists because the same product is sold in different markets at different prices. Grey market is arbitrage. The reason why prices are different is because generally one market is poorer than the other. Manufacturers can sell into those poorer markets at a lower price because the home markets supporet the low price. If that low price is sent back to the home market by intermediaries that will canabalize sales of the higher profit home market sales and lower the overall profit of the product. These losses will be made up by higher prices overall in later products.
To think that it doesn't operate basically like this or that this is a good thing as a rule misses the point of the market economy.
I can prove prior art. you owe me many monies.
Unless people believe that they will likely get caught if they do it or if the potential cost is hugh even if they are less likely to get caught they will weigh the risks and continue doing the thing.
People speed because most of the time there is no bad result.
Copyright violation occurs because people don't think its a bad thing.
If that is the case hugh penalties will be resented (or people will not believe that it could happen to them)but small penalties will be ignored or worse seen as the karma cost of all the other copyright violations they do.
The record companies can't win this but there will be a lot of pain before they go.
And after that I predict the end of music if all we have to replace it is filesharing and self produced downloadable tracks from mp3.com or whatever.
I'm sure that between themselves they could allocate the money on some mutually agreeable basis. So don't worry about that as a reason for not getting it in the first place.
It would be penalizing EVERYONE
There are lots of ways I pay for the cost of things that I don't use. I either accept the need for them as a general rule or they are so small as to not be worth my while to argue about them.
on the basis of the industry's absurd projections about how much piracy is costing them. They simply add up the retail price of every unauthorized copy and call that their "losses"
Is that the case. I've not seen how they get their 'loss' figure but if that is the way then I agree that it is absurd.
when the obvious fact of the matter is that people download 10-100 times more than they would actually have paid for hard copies of if they hadn't been able to download anything unauthorized.
Every time I read that point I get more confused as to what it actually means.
An alternative argument would be that record companies sell music and the downloaders are getting the benefit of the music without paying anything for it. But that opens up the old argument about the validity of copyright per se and we don't want to start that argument again.
Go to the local record shop with your recorder and instead of listeneing through the headphones jack you recorder in a see what the record store says. I don't think they will understand that you are "only interested in recording the cds you would not have bought anyway so whats the beef".
Plus, mp3 downloads have the mixed benefit of providing record albums with free marketing.
I agree that there are some cases where more cds are purchased by individuals after hearing downloads but as you said in respect of the record company claims about statistics I doubt that every downloader has increased their purchasing. I suspect on balance that there has been a drop in overall sales volume.
They actually PAY radio stations to play the songs (not the other way around) as a form of marketing, so how is this so bad?
They may pay the radio station but they can work out easily if that payment was worth it by seeing the increase in sales. I think if the recoed companies truly believed that downloading increased sales they might not be so upset. Any evidence that it is beneficial is anecdotal at best.
If people really like the album they will buy the whole thing instead of going to the trouble of collecting the low-quality songs individually on Kazaa or Bearshare.
Most rips are of good quality and perfectly useful for casual listening.
And the argument is usually that we sholudn't have to buy the whole cd just to get one or two songs. This of course avoids entirely the question of which songs on an album are the good ones. If its the single releases then they are already available as singles so there goes that argument.
And cds these days have so little on them that it is ridiculous. Is it true that the new Linkin Park cd produced at hugh expense and time has about 34 minutes of music on it.
Therefore, in effect, the industry's projected losses figures are inflated from their real world losses by a factor of at least 20.
As are you estimates of the benefits of file sharing.
The fact of the matter is that the reason the industry is only posting meager profits is because their expenses are unnecessarily through the roof. More than 75% of all of their revenue is spent on marketing, lobbying, PR, and other such bullshit that contributes nothing towards actually putting out a good product for a good price. Maybe the RIAA should try the latter for the change.
And this is the biggest joke of all. The reason why record companies spend so much on marketing is to get t
To the extent that what you do reduces the ordinary volume of sales on which the record company has based its expected profit then each non-sold CD has the effect of reducing their net profit by the whole of the CD price not just the marginal cost.
That's like arguing that after he made a loss of $800M on the first copy of WinXP M$ is making 100% profit on every copy they sell. or the first copy of the new REM album is going to cost them $1m but after that they are just ripping us off for $20 or whatever.
There's your problem right there. I doubt if Greenpeace would even understand that you were proposing a solution to a problem. I think their question would be along the lines of
"Let me get this straight, you want to make cars nukular".
The US will be free to promote democracy in countries like Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, and Iran.
Nice how they leave Iraq out of the list. But apart from that why would anyone think the US would show any interest in those countries at all if they didn't have oil. I don't see them 'promoting democracy' in any of the surrounding countries
And your response is to get a domain and establish your own email host.
That will guarantee you one less piece of spam per month. Of course having your own domain guarantees you a whole bunch more.
I hope you are not in charge of anyone else's money in your job.
Well which is it, themselves or the record company. Don't tell me you have mixed up who fronts the cash and who eventually wears the cost.
And the next paragraph tells us that the bands should take over their own promotion and distribution via the website. Who going to advance them that money, the same record companies who advanced them the recording costs.
Or are you suggesting that the ability to get ahead in the music business is to be based on who had the most money to start with.
The price won't be 'fair' until the record companies work out a way to avoid every major record retailer closing down the day they price downloadable tracks at 10c a track (or anything less than about $1 a track)
As far as I can see that will be the major problem in the record companies transition to an online system.
That whole sector of the distribution chain will disappear and whatever your opinion of the worth of the sector it will be a major issue that is not addressed by simplistic complaints about profit and control hungry record companies.
Although we are talking about New Zealand we will not bring sheep into the conversation at this point.
Maybe /. can tell us exactly how long it would stay on the air if they had to start paying for both their and my data charges.
And most ISP's would close tomorrow if they couldn't charge for data downloads.
Its like the phone bill, it doesn't cost the phone company more money when you make 1000 local calls or 2 local calls, so you have a flat rate for unlimited local calling.
Not everywhere has this system. Many people still feel that usage should relate directly to cost and so would feel that the person making 2 calls was unfairly subsidising the 1000 call a day person. That's human nature, however you feel about it politically or ideologically. Flat rate for everyone works best if everyone thinks they are getting a similar deal.
Again, that's my take on the human aspect. Don't come back telling me people shouldn't think like that. They do!
Don't most cable internet providers allow free access within their own domain to things like ftp sites and games servers?
As far as I know no cable tv company allows unlimited random access to other cable networks. That's what makes it the 'Inter'net.
you could call your local BBS and be charged a phone call while DLing full-speed for hours
Same thing. One call to your BBS fixed point using a one on one modem and a circut switched connection.
And in Australia there was a big push by Telstra to allow them to time charge for all data calls because those neverending calls cost them the entire circut connection cost and they got 25c in total revenue. So when they moved into ISPing in a big way the first thing they did was start charging for time. And when always on high speed connections came along ie cable and adsl, for volume.
In any case McD has the probable cost of lawsuits built into their cost structures already. It's only going to be unusual lawsuits or unusual payouts that will effect their profits. Any sensible company will have a contingency for claims included in costs that are used to maximize profits.
If they have an excess of say $25,000 per claim they estimate that on past experience they get 1000 claims a year they layoff the cost of $25,000,000 over the x billion burgers they sell this year. It's only when they get 1200 claims in a year that they might have to increase prices.
Unless of course your auditor is Arthur Andersen and you can convince him that 1200 is a blip..
And Wendy's etc will have similar histories and so similar amounts built into their cost structures. So there is little margin for significant price competition in that area.
When did we move to China.
Yes and when that fibre is full because of spammers and worms etc they will build more fibre ( or in the case of Austraila more gain paired copper) and charge a fixed price to maintain it. But who is paying to build it in the first place?
Why isn't usage a reasonable basis for cost sharing (and therefore pricing) on a packet based network?
The whole argument reminds me of the joke about how the first copy of Windows that Bilg sold lost him $800M but look at the profit margin on every copy since. Some people obviously didn't get the joke.
They do keep us free from terror ( pr0n is a state issue). But Copyright is a federal law and it does have criminal aspects I think. So its within their area of responsibility. As I said elsewhere I don't think this is a mp3 downloader issue. downloaders don't store files on servers as a rule.