You're forgetting that you're not paying taxes on it in the first place. Taking into consideration a ~20% tax rate, I'd be glad to take the $4,500/year loss to inflation.
We would offer classes to the faculty on how to properly use the equipment--it's really not that hard if you take an hour to learn how to use it all. The problem is that most professors don't care enough to show up.
Back in the day, recording labels and studios (i.e. Motown) would have recording boot camps for all signed artists. They would learn how to properly use microphones and the basics of the other gear, gain structuring, etc. There's only so stupid-user friendly you can make gear before you're just up against the laws of physics.
Go search Youtube for one of Christina Aguilera's live performances. Notice how she works the mic. There's no substitute for knowing how to do that as a performer. There's nothing an engineer can do to even approximate correct microphone technique.
The problem isn't typically with the gear--it's with the user. Just because the gear doesn't operate like your imagination would like it to doesn't mean it's bad gear.
Requiring Professors to teach by certain techniques is certainly going to lead to disaster...What benefit would forcing professors to teach integration with powerpoints bring?
I want to address this. Full disclosure: I worked for several years as an A/V tech at UC Berkeley.
Your first sentence is spot on the money but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. Professors are like petulant children when it comes to learning new technology--it's as if they're proud that they don't know how to operate a VCR or speak into a microphone properly.
But the part that you're missing here is webcasting. At Cal, webcasting is becoming a huge huge thing. The professors don't like it because it means fewer students show up for class (if I were a student I'd appreciate this because it would mean more access for me) but the administration LOVES the idea. It goes something like this: "If all of the students could just stay home and watch the lectures online then why are we paying to heat the lecture halls?"
This is the way things are moving. The webcasting program at Cal, despite using stone-aged RealMedia technology, has been astoundingly successful. We'd get emails from the other side of the world thanking us for what we were doing (and complaining that the professors didn't know how to speak into a microphone properly).
What I'm trying to say is, whether or not the professors like it, this is the way things will be trending in the next generation. Professors that don't know how to interface with techonology will become relics.
Not like this will happen anytime soon--by and large the profs get their way. It was just a year ago that we finally discontinued support for SLIDE PROJECTORS for chrissakes. I should only hope that they're phasing out the VCR's by now.
In the end, though, the people who suffer when the prof doesn't want to learn the tech are the students and even moreso the people who are watching the webcasts online for free--people who possibly cannot afford a proper education or live in a part of the world where such a thing is unavailable to them. To them, a professor that can't take ten minutes to figure out where to pin a lavalier mic on their lapel should be nothing short of an insult.
You're suffering from what we call "limited thinking."
I'm totally game for socialism. It's working beautifully in Northern Europe.
But please, tell me: what's wrong with socialism and "big gub'ment?" I swear, there isn't a single conservative talking point that isn't total hypocrisy.
Personally, I think it behooves us to move beyond a money economy, but that won't happen for generations...
Eating McDonald's Happy Meals and Spaghetti-O's were a couple of my founding principles--I used to eat that shit all the time when I was five years old. Nowadays, it has no place in my life.
Whenever I see pictures of meals people bought in a restaurant in my Facebook feed, my eyes they start-a-rolling.
It's the same thing as when people make these status updates along the lines of, "OMG my life is so awesome! I love my life!" They might as well be saying, "Your life isn't as good as mine."
I am sure I could garner 9% of the popular vote in the US with a Tittie Party. I suspect unless the turnout was heavily in favor of gays and women it might be close to 20%.
I'd like to see you try.
The Pirate Party having 9% means nothing.
No, you posting about it means nothing. Having 10% of a population supporting a radical political party means far from nothing.
Batman: Arkham Asylum had a fake leaked version that crashed at a certain point. Comments on the Assassin's Creed II torrents say it's a 7 gig document of just spaces hidden behind a passworded.rar
No it hasn't. It's not even due to come out until the second week of next month. Going by the moderation system on BTJunkie.org, any Assassin's Creed II torrents currently available are fakes.
I could almost not reply to this, but I'm having fun with this conversation.
The question I'm at now is: how many extra units must a company sell in order to "break even" on DRM?
So like, if DRM for big budget Game X costs let's say $.5mil and the company makes $10 per unit sold, it would take 50,000 extra units sold to break even on DRM.
So for a high profile game that sells 1mil+ units, the cost of DRM would only represent half a percent of the profits.
Of course, this wouldn't be an option for a smaller studio that doesn't expect to sell more than 200k copies of a game. I think I read somewhere that an MMO can be successful at 50k subscribers, so I guess the lesson we can take away from this exercise in wild speculation is that for now, it's only the big boys that will be able to afford DRM. I guess that's kind of a silver lining.
I read some of your other posts in this thread and I'd like to go ahead and reply to your counterpoint about putting the CD in the CD tray being an annoyance. My TV has a remote that turns it off and on, adjusts the volume, changes the channel, etc. There are buttons on the side of my TV that do this, too, but if I'm in my chair I'm not likely to get up to change the channel--I'll use my remote.
Putting a CD in the drive when everything on that disc has already been copied to my hard drive is an unnecessary step akin to getting up to change the channel on the TV. I have all the technology necessary to live without the inconvenience and yet I'm inconvenienced anyway.
I think lost sales due to using DRM would only encompass a smaller, more savvy audience. I used to work in a game store and I can tell you, most people buy based on the box art. I couldn't count the number of times someone came up to me with "Shitty War Game" and asked, "Is this one good," to which I replied in the negative and recommended "Awesome War Game." Nine times out of ten, they'd buy the shitty one.
The tech support part is a good catch, though. I hadn't thought of that.
I'm very curious as to what those "rough estimate" figures look like.
Negative press + threat of consumer backlash/boycott + ineffectiveness to combat the problem it was meant to solve = MUST BE DOING SOMETHING RIGHT! KEEP IT UP!
...how much these companies pay to have DRM integrated into their product. Or even how much they have to pay for the DRM vs. how much it "gets them back" vs. piracy.
But I'd be really interested to see the numbers they project to lose to piracy vs. how much they're spending on DRM. It seems to me that buying the DRM would only hurt them more--it obviously does very little if anything to deter piracy. Wouldn't piracy be hurting their bottom line like this?:
Income lost to piracy = income lost to piracy + cost of DRM
It's like if you lost some jewelry down the sink so you throw more down there to clog the hole so no more can get through. Just doesn't make any damn sense.
I had a friend with four TV's, four Xboxes, four copies of Halo and sixteen controllers in his apartment who would regularly have Halo/Halo 2 throwdowns (he was a manager of a GameStop).
Countless hours playing Halo at his place later and I'm still not wowed. We all pretty well agreed, the only reason we played Halo all the time was because there wasn't anything resembling an apt suitor on Xbox. Nobody denied that PC FPS's had WAY more to offer (there's nothing Halo did except for the recharging armor that Bungie didn't steal from Half-Life).
It's a slightly-above-average FPS that just happened to drop in exactly the right place at the right time. I have more fun in 4 player L4D and L4D2 on my PC over the internets than I ever did playing Halo in the same room as my opponents.
The campaign level design was extremely lacking. Copy+paste does not good level design make. Putting another player in a co-op situation does nothing to fix the abhorrent level design.
That, and OMG everybody moves so damn slow! I can't stand it!
to append: the only reason we're even considering giving this girl the benefit of the doubt is because her work appeared in the correct venue for truth telling in that particular media--she published a book.
Words are cheap. Especially in the world of computers where copy+paste roams free.
Music samples are not cheap, at least not in the same way. I understand, when writing books or poetry there's a process involving many people beyond the author: there's publishers and editors and publicists, oh my, but in music samples, there are oftentimes conditions that can never be repeated.
If I read some song lyrics I like, it's fairly trivial for me to copy those into a new work, but say I wanted to recreate a particular guitar riff from a certain album. Approximating that sound is going to be exceedingly difficult and probably expensive.
If all music were composed and performed in General MIDI, then I could see stealing words equated to sampling. And I guess in both cases it would still be plagiarism.
But I think that's why sampling is considered legitimate. Getting those musicians together again using the same instruments in the same condition they were in at the time of the recording, in the same humidity with the same microphones and the same mix console... You feel me? In that context, copy+paste becomes so much more powerful a tool. With creative sampling (which often involves rearranging source material to the point it's nearly unrecognizable) someone without access to expensive gear/instruments/musicians can produce new, compelling, and most importantly perhaps, PROFESSIONAL SOUNDING recordings.
Like, I'm reading Amusing Ourselves to Death at the moment and he's talking about how form has a lot to do with how truth is perceived. Examples are rhetoric in Ancient Greece, the use of the written word versus spoken testimony in a court of law. Every form of media has a kind of zeitgeist of what is an acceptable form for the transmission of truth--if the truth comes in other forms it will be ignored. For example, let's imagine someone emailed you Blinding Truth but it hit your spam filter because it was also trying to sell you Viagra.
People won't take recorded music seriously unless it "sounds" vaguely like the radio. Just like they won't take the newsletters homeless people make on the same ground as the New York Times. We look to the New York Times (an example) for truth whereas homeless people ask us for money.
Slashdot Mirror
This list is WRONG.
That game had a full on rape scene. A RAPE SCENE. WITH ACTORS.
Not to mention the whole demon reaching into your face and ripping it in half, goatse style thing, either.
Then why can't I do the same from the email account that's registered to my Facebook account?
I think the truth is that it's a little of both. It's a means for them to collect phone numbers without being the bad guy.
You're forgetting that you're not paying taxes on it in the first place. Taking into consideration a ~20% tax rate, I'd be glad to take the $4,500/year loss to inflation.
We would offer classes to the faculty on how to properly use the equipment--it's really not that hard if you take an hour to learn how to use it all. The problem is that most professors don't care enough to show up.
Back in the day, recording labels and studios (i.e. Motown) would have recording boot camps for all signed artists. They would learn how to properly use microphones and the basics of the other gear, gain structuring, etc. There's only so stupid-user friendly you can make gear before you're just up against the laws of physics.
Go search Youtube for one of Christina Aguilera's live performances. Notice how she works the mic. There's no substitute for knowing how to do that as a performer. There's nothing an engineer can do to even approximate correct microphone technique.
The problem isn't typically with the gear--it's with the user. Just because the gear doesn't operate like your imagination would like it to doesn't mean it's bad gear.
Requiring Professors to teach by certain techniques is certainly going to lead to disaster...What benefit would forcing professors to teach integration with powerpoints bring?
I want to address this. Full disclosure: I worked for several years as an A/V tech at UC Berkeley.
Your first sentence is spot on the money but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. Professors are like petulant children when it comes to learning new technology--it's as if they're proud that they don't know how to operate a VCR or speak into a microphone properly.
But the part that you're missing here is webcasting. At Cal, webcasting is becoming a huge huge thing. The professors don't like it because it means fewer students show up for class (if I were a student I'd appreciate this because it would mean more access for me) but the administration LOVES the idea. It goes something like this: "If all of the students could just stay home and watch the lectures online then why are we paying to heat the lecture halls?"
This is the way things are moving. The webcasting program at Cal, despite using stone-aged RealMedia technology, has been astoundingly successful. We'd get emails from the other side of the world thanking us for what we were doing (and complaining that the professors didn't know how to speak into a microphone properly).
What I'm trying to say is, whether or not the professors like it, this is the way things will be trending in the next generation. Professors that don't know how to interface with techonology will become relics.
Not like this will happen anytime soon--by and large the profs get their way. It was just a year ago that we finally discontinued support for SLIDE PROJECTORS for chrissakes. I should only hope that they're phasing out the VCR's by now.
In the end, though, the people who suffer when the prof doesn't want to learn the tech are the students and even moreso the people who are watching the webcasts online for free--people who possibly cannot afford a proper education or live in a part of the world where such a thing is unavailable to them. To them, a professor that can't take ten minutes to figure out where to pin a lavalier mic on their lapel should be nothing short of an insult.
This sounds more like a problem of poor administration than poor teaching.
http://pix.motivatedphotos.com/2009/3/29/633739402465682160-THEDETHPHONE.jpg
You're suffering from what we call "limited thinking."
I'm totally game for socialism. It's working beautifully in Northern Europe.
But please, tell me: what's wrong with socialism and "big gub'ment?" I swear, there isn't a single conservative talking point that isn't total hypocrisy.
Personally, I think it behooves us to move beyond a money economy, but that won't happen for generations...
WTF are you talking about?
Eating McDonald's Happy Meals and Spaghetti-O's were a couple of my founding principles--I used to eat that shit all the time when I was five years old. Nowadays, it has no place in my life.
Just... maybe... just... maybe... we're... outgrowing... capitalism...?
And what major political party is disappearing, again?
I agree 100% with everything you say here.
But I still think it's an interesting statistic. Can't say I care for the spin, though.
I agree wholeheartedly.
Whenever I see pictures of meals people bought in a restaurant in my Facebook feed, my eyes they start-a-rolling.
It's the same thing as when people make these status updates along the lines of, "OMG my life is so awesome! I love my life!" They might as well be saying, "Your life isn't as good as mine."
Just... stfu already, people.
I am sure I could garner 9% of the popular vote in the US with a Tittie Party. I suspect unless the turnout was heavily in favor of gays and women it might be close to 20%.
I'd like to see you try.
The Pirate Party having 9% means nothing.
No, you posting about it means nothing. Having 10% of a population supporting a radical political party means far from nothing.
Reveals the authorities pursuing them as utterly incompetent.
FTFY
The government has "top men" working on this. Who? "Top men".
Besides, it's silly to think there could be oil elsewhere than the surface.
They're called that because they're so good at spinning a story!
Get it! Spinning! Top! Oye...
I had the same problem going from XP SP1 to SP2.
Later, I tried installing SP3 clean to the same machine. It blue screened every time during the progress bar part of the install sequence.
Bull.
Then provide a link.
Batman: Arkham Asylum had a fake leaked version that crashed at a certain point. Comments on the Assassin's Creed II torrents say it's a 7 gig document of just spaces hidden behind a passworded .rar
No it hasn't. It's not even due to come out until the second week of next month. Going by the moderation system on BTJunkie.org, any Assassin's Creed II torrents currently available are fakes.
I would love to hear an example of a company that managed to figure out exactly how much money they actually lose to piracy.
Both of our comments have something in common--they're lamenting a lack of information that is impossible to collect.
I could almost not reply to this, but I'm having fun with this conversation.
The question I'm at now is: how many extra units must a company sell in order to "break even" on DRM?
So like, if DRM for big budget Game X costs let's say $.5mil and the company makes $10 per unit sold, it would take 50,000 extra units sold to break even on DRM.
So for a high profile game that sells 1mil+ units, the cost of DRM would only represent half a percent of the profits.
Of course, this wouldn't be an option for a smaller studio that doesn't expect to sell more than 200k copies of a game. I think I read somewhere that an MMO can be successful at 50k subscribers, so I guess the lesson we can take away from this exercise in wild speculation is that for now, it's only the big boys that will be able to afford DRM. I guess that's kind of a silver lining.
I read some of your other posts in this thread and I'd like to go ahead and reply to your counterpoint about putting the CD in the CD tray being an annoyance. My TV has a remote that turns it off and on, adjusts the volume, changes the channel, etc. There are buttons on the side of my TV that do this, too, but if I'm in my chair I'm not likely to get up to change the channel--I'll use my remote.
Putting a CD in the drive when everything on that disc has already been copied to my hard drive is an unnecessary step akin to getting up to change the channel on the TV. I have all the technology necessary to live without the inconvenience and yet I'm inconvenienced anyway.
I think lost sales due to using DRM would only encompass a smaller, more savvy audience. I used to work in a game store and I can tell you, most people buy based on the box art. I couldn't count the number of times someone came up to me with "Shitty War Game" and asked, "Is this one good," to which I replied in the negative and recommended "Awesome War Game." Nine times out of ten, they'd buy the shitty one.
The tech support part is a good catch, though. I hadn't thought of that.
I'm very curious as to what those "rough estimate" figures look like.
Negative press + threat of consumer backlash/boycott + ineffectiveness to combat the problem it was meant to solve = MUST BE DOING SOMETHING RIGHT! KEEP IT UP!
...how much these companies pay to have DRM integrated into their product. Or even how much they have to pay for the DRM vs. how much it "gets them back" vs. piracy.
But I'd be really interested to see the numbers they project to lose to piracy vs. how much they're spending on DRM. It seems to me that buying the DRM would only hurt them more--it obviously does very little if anything to deter piracy. Wouldn't piracy be hurting their bottom line like this?:
Income lost to piracy = income lost to piracy + cost of DRM
It's like if you lost some jewelry down the sink so you throw more down there to clog the hole so no more can get through. Just doesn't make any damn sense.
I had a friend with four TV's, four Xboxes, four copies of Halo and sixteen controllers in his apartment who would regularly have Halo/Halo 2 throwdowns (he was a manager of a GameStop).
Countless hours playing Halo at his place later and I'm still not wowed. We all pretty well agreed, the only reason we played Halo all the time was because there wasn't anything resembling an apt suitor on Xbox. Nobody denied that PC FPS's had WAY more to offer (there's nothing Halo did except for the recharging armor that Bungie didn't steal from Half-Life).
It's a slightly-above-average FPS that just happened to drop in exactly the right place at the right time. I have more fun in 4 player L4D and L4D2 on my PC over the internets than I ever did playing Halo in the same room as my opponents.
The campaign level design was extremely lacking. Copy+paste does not good level design make. Putting another player in a co-op situation does nothing to fix the abhorrent level design.
That, and OMG everybody moves so damn slow! I can't stand it!
to append: the only reason we're even considering giving this girl the benefit of the doubt is because her work appeared in the correct venue for truth telling in that particular media--she published a book.
This is how I'm thinking of this.
Words are cheap. Especially in the world of computers where copy+paste roams free.
Music samples are not cheap, at least not in the same way. I understand, when writing books or poetry there's a process involving many people beyond the author: there's publishers and editors and publicists, oh my, but in music samples, there are oftentimes conditions that can never be repeated.
If I read some song lyrics I like, it's fairly trivial for me to copy those into a new work, but say I wanted to recreate a particular guitar riff from a certain album. Approximating that sound is going to be exceedingly difficult and probably expensive.
If all music were composed and performed in General MIDI, then I could see stealing words equated to sampling. And I guess in both cases it would still be plagiarism.
But I think that's why sampling is considered legitimate. Getting those musicians together again using the same instruments in the same condition they were in at the time of the recording, in the same humidity with the same microphones and the same mix console... You feel me? In that context, copy+paste becomes so much more powerful a tool. With creative sampling (which often involves rearranging source material to the point it's nearly unrecognizable) someone without access to expensive gear/instruments/musicians can produce new, compelling, and most importantly perhaps, PROFESSIONAL SOUNDING recordings.
Like, I'm reading Amusing Ourselves to Death at the moment and he's talking about how form has a lot to do with how truth is perceived. Examples are rhetoric in Ancient Greece, the use of the written word versus spoken testimony in a court of law. Every form of media has a kind of zeitgeist of what is an acceptable form for the transmission of truth--if the truth comes in other forms it will be ignored. For example, let's imagine someone emailed you Blinding Truth but it hit your spam filter because it was also trying to sell you Viagra.
People won't take recorded music seriously unless it "sounds" vaguely like the radio. Just like they won't take the newsletters homeless people make on the same ground as the New York Times. We look to the New York Times (an example) for truth whereas homeless people ask us for money.