I agree that there is a cost to stealing, but I disagree that the cost is time.... It really is more convenient and less time consuming to download music.
I think what you really mean is that there is a relative benefit in time cost of stealing vs. buying, not that stealing does not have a time cost.
Everyone agrees that the RIAA could profit in all sorts of ways by taking advantage of this fact. Downloadable albums? Sure. Why doesn't the RIAA do this? Because any fuckhead can set up his own music download site, and nobody needs the RIAA record companies to distribute music anymore. Everything that the RIAA says is corporate PR bullshit that people, for some inexplicable reason, take at face value.
Stealing will always be free (esp. when P2P cuts out the street corner middle man in the trenchcoat), and they can never compete with free.
Stealing is not free!!
That's a misconception. It doesn't cost any *money* to steal, but stealing still has cost. Most notable is time cost -- it takes time to locate and download a song you want. And even then once you're done you can't be sure you didn't get a lot of data errors in the track or different songs in the album were recorded with different loudness, etc.
Theoretically, if the recording industry priced CDs below ((peoples' value of own time * length of time it takes to find the cd) + value of quality) then the could compete with piracy on a price level. Obviously everyone's value of their time is different so they'll never be able to get everyone. For me, if CDs cost $5-$10 I would never mess around with Kazaa, and I think a lot of other people wouldn't either. $20? No, thanks.
I have a solution to the problem that will make everyone happy.
Let us moderate stories, but leave the default threshold at -1. That way, only the power users who really care about that sort of thing will turn it on, and the more casual users who aren't really bothered won't have to see it.
Everytime we get a dupe like this, especially the < 24 hours kind, it makes me wish we could moderate stories. This kind of thing has seems like it has been happening almost daily lately. If we could moderate a story (-1 Dupe) it would make the problem go away.
Also, (-1 Troll) and (-1 Flamebait) would be nice, too.
Price ceilings are not a conservative, free-market response to inflation.
They are when you want to win an election!
Nixon begged Eisenhower to slash interest rates in 1960 to instigate a temporary boom. The resulting recession probably cost him the election.
Years later, Nixon had his shills in the Federal Reserve slash interest rates while he instituted price ceilings just before the 1972 election. The economy boomed, and Nixon won. After the artificial price ceilings and interest rates were taken away the economy remained in recession for the next three years.
And more recently, President Bush recently instituted 30% steel tariffs -- in swing states.
Remember, the ideology of the free market stops counting when you're afraid that you don't have enough market power.
It's interesting how he uses the same characters left over from the days when you had to be creative to make any sense.
When you're making a game where you only have a few bytes to describe the character, you have to think up something creative or else the character will be boring or won't make sense. So, he thinks up a plumber who always wears red and his brother who prefers green. Mario gets a few extra pixels around his stomach.
But now, with full 3-D games, they could make whatever characters they wanted to. Your character could look like a relatively normal peson because you could display all kinds of little subtleties that would be impossible when you're working in 4 or 8 bit. But we're seeing the original 8 bit characters like Mario or Donkey Kong translated into full 3D. I don't know if that's good or bad, but it's kind of funny if you think about it. I think limitations encourage creativity.
I have to wonder, who made the decision to depend upon the russians for financial support.
One thing that's funny that I noticed was that the American press releases about the ISS always described it as "a joint project by x many nations led by the United States" while the same press release from the Russians said "a joint project by x many nations led by the Russian Federation". Otherwise, the two documents were identical.
Isn't it time for us to come down our moral high horse and take refreshed look at what/who we are demonizing in our 'modern' culture?
Ho, ho, ho! Name any time in history when people really questioned what they were doing. Most people don't actually realize or think about why they really think something. It's nice to abstract away and say "X belief should be changed" but good luck actually getting it to happen.
[P.S. you listed Super Mario Bros. as a negative influence! They're just plumbers trying to earn an honest living (collecting gold coins), save princesses and uhh eating special mushrooms...]
(If it's a percentage, then why does the unit matter?)
To come up with their predictions, analysts sit around and huff paint thinner until they lose consciousness. Once in a full state of dementia, fully developed predictions appear in rounded pod form from the brilliant, corpulent, snake-like ether of the true ultrafied space-time ribbons, at which point the analyst must delicately pluck them from the mind-hive before they can be sold to the public. Sometimes it comes out in both percents and gigabytes.
Is it just me, or do I remember that "methods of doing business" are not patentable from my business class? Isn't this a method of doing business?
The absurdity is that they are not patenting "devices", in this case a program, like what patents are intended for, but they are patenting the outcome of those devices. You could write any number of different perl or php scripts to implement a one-click or gift coordination scheme, and each of them would violate amazon's patents, even though they could use totally different mechanisms for completing the task!!!
It's as if the patent on Eli Whitney's cotton gin did not give him protection for his cotton separator, but for all separated cotton. It's absolutely absurd, and it's a damn shame that this patent has been sucessfully enforced.
That only happens with really popular media stuff, which really doesn't need amateur reviewing.
Book reviews are much more thoughtful and balanced. Off-beat music and movies have less emotional reviews. Reviews of technical items like DVD players tend to be very helpful regarding the features and pitfalls of that particular product.
I tend to pay a lot more attention to the reviews which list both positives and negatives, rather than the raving 5 or 1 star reviews.
Why do you think people become addicted to Slashdot posting? Because Slashdot (used to) give you arbitrary, token "points" for posting good comments.
When you give someone a token, meaningless reward like a karma point, people tend to internalize the behavior. Remember Pepsi points or Marlboro miles? People started just wanting the points. Same with Amazon. People who give good reviews are given a rank according to who gets the most "Did you find this review helpful?" clicks.
Additionally with Slashdot and Amazon, the points/rank are determined by peer review. You get points from other, regular people, because they approve of what you wrote. People *love* peer approval, even if they like to pretend they don't.
There you go, my psychological review. Engineers really out to read up on their marketing!:)
Sometimes buying a name brand is not just buying a name. What you're really paying for with all that extra money is quality insurance. While a recognizable brand name can charge higher margin, it lso must spend extra to make sure that every unit is a quality product -- or else people who get burned will stop buying all of the brand's range of products.
Look what happened to Aiwa. They used to be a great brand in the 80's, then they started making junk electronics that was cheap but invariably broke between 3 and 6 months after purchase. What happened? They're gone.
Computer books used to suck on average. O'Reilly found an opportunity to start a quality, recognizable brand. Now I almost exclusively but O'Reilly's books because I know that almost every one of them is thoughtful, careful, thorough, and well-written. That's the value of branding -- they can charge a little extra, I don't have to worry that the book I need is going to careless and full of mistakes.
I don't think that Apple is pushing everyone hard to move to OS X for profit's sake. That doesn't make sense: OS 9 will only stop working on *new* machines, which come with OS X for free.
I think that Apple is pushing everyone to move to OS X because Jobs is a big control freak and hates the idea that anyone is still using OS 9. From NeXT to Aqua, OS X is really *his*, and OS 9 is not.
By definition, being criminals, they will not surrender the firearms in their posession. So they they have them, and no one else does.
I hate this argument. 1) Criminals are not a Java class, they don't have a "definition" that makes them choose to disobey all laws whenever possible. That's bullshit. 2) All criminals will not have guns. If they don't all have guns now, and they don't, then they won't magically recieve them once guns are banned. Some of them have and will have them, and it's out of scope to try to predict whether the proportion will increase or decrease 3) "no one else does" except law enforcement.
If guns were banned, then only some criminals and the police will have guns.
The crimnals do not know which household may or may not have a gun inside, and so may be less inclined to break in.
This is one ot the few anti-gun control arguments I think makes some sense.
I shouldn't have used the word "love". I still think it's more or less true, I think that gun owners have strong feels connected to their arms, but I still shouldn't have used that word. Ask any of the gun owners I know about their guns and they'll break into a big smile, start talking about the "stopping power" of X weapon, how it's their insurance against a Russian invasion, burgalars, etc (It makes them feel powerful, IMO).
But all of that is distracting from my main point which was that the conclusions that the NRA. the Brady Foundation, or any other politically motivated group draw are decided long before they look at the facts. I should have said they "like" or "want" guns instead. "Love" sounded biased.
I shouldn't have used the NRA alone like I did, it made me look like I was taking a side and just trying to say the NRA alone is subject to that phenomenon. I should have included the Brady Foundation in the example, saying that they probably do the same thing.
I think it's a common problem that isn't prevalent to either side of most issues.
Outlawing guns will only raise their price on the black market. Anything demanded will be supplied. That is basic economics.
Let's see you face up to this economics: when you raise price, quantity demanded at all levels of demand will decrease. Guns still be supplied, but in lower quantity than before. Duh.
If you think I'm trolling, let me throw you a bone: despite that price may decrease quantity demanded, the benefit of gun use by criminals could increase if guns were banned. Assuming criminals want guns according a function of their benefit minus their cost, then they would be willing to pay more for guns at all levels of supply increasing total demand and the total quantity of guns in criminal hands.
So, get back to me when you figure out the exact changes in 1) black market price of guns 2) marginal benefit of criminal gun use after a ban and I'll figure out for you what total change will be. Sheesh.
The problem is in drawing a conclusion from those facts. There is not a single "correct" conclusion that can be drawn, or we wouldn't have the various viewpoints that we have.
I totally disagree. Normatively people don't take a look at the facts, evaluate them objectively, and then draw a variety of different conclusions. They decide what they want their conclusion to be in the beginning and then find facts to support that conclusion.
Look at the NRA. Do you think everyone in the NRA went to the library, carefully and thoughtfully evaluated the statistics, then reluctantly decided to support gun ownership because the facts supported it? No! They decided to support gun ownership because they love guns. Facts, if any, were found afterward to reinforce the position they already had regardless of them.
It doesn't matter that it may lead to a lower quality end product, the fact is consumers *love* convenience, and are willing to trade off all sorts of other sources of value to get it.
Of course cat5 is better. Everyone knows that. I use it. But it could take countless hours to put it in the walls, install wall plates, cut the patch cables to length, set up the hubs and routers in the basement.... and with WiFi all you need is one or two access points and an uplink and you'e all set. No assembly required.
Slashdot Mirror
I think what you really mean is that there is a relative benefit in time cost of stealing vs. buying, not that stealing does not have a time cost.
Everyone agrees that the RIAA could profit in all sorts of ways by taking advantage of this fact. Downloadable albums? Sure. Why doesn't the RIAA do this? Because any fuckhead can set up his own music download site, and nobody needs the RIAA record companies to distribute music anymore. Everything that the RIAA says is corporate PR bullshit that people, for some inexplicable reason, take at face value.
Stealing is not free!!
That's a misconception. It doesn't cost any *money* to steal, but stealing still has cost. Most notable is time cost -- it takes time to locate and download a song you want. And even then once you're done you can't be sure you didn't get a lot of data errors in the track or different songs in the album were recorded with different loudness, etc.
Theoretically, if the recording industry priced CDs below ((peoples' value of own time * length of time it takes to find the cd) + value of quality) then the could compete with piracy on a price level. Obviously everyone's value of their time is different so they'll never be able to get everyone. For me, if CDs cost $5-$10 I would never mess around with Kazaa, and I think a lot of other people wouldn't either. $20? No, thanks.
Let us moderate stories, but leave the default threshold at -1. That way, only the power users who really care about that sort of thing will turn it on, and the more casual users who aren't really bothered won't have to see it.
What do you think?
Also, (-1 Troll) and (-1 Flamebait) would be nice, too.
They are when you want to win an election!
Nixon begged Eisenhower to slash interest rates in 1960 to instigate a temporary boom. The resulting recession probably cost him the election.
Years later, Nixon had his shills in the Federal Reserve slash interest rates while he instituted price ceilings just before the 1972 election. The economy boomed, and Nixon won. After the artificial price ceilings and interest rates were taken away the economy remained in recession for the next three years.
And more recently, President Bush recently instituted 30% steel tariffs -- in swing states.
Remember, the ideology of the free market stops counting when you're afraid that you don't have enough market power.
Somebody tell that to George Lucas! :)
When you're making a game where you only have a few bytes to describe the character, you have to think up something creative or else the character will be boring or won't make sense. So, he thinks up a plumber who always wears red and his brother who prefers green. Mario gets a few extra pixels around his stomach.
But now, with full 3-D games, they could make whatever characters they wanted to. Your character could look like a relatively normal peson because you could display all kinds of little subtleties that would be impossible when you're working in 4 or 8 bit. But we're seeing the original 8 bit characters like Mario or Donkey Kong translated into full 3D. I don't know if that's good or bad, but it's kind of funny if you think about it. I think limitations encourage creativity.
One thing that's funny that I noticed was that the American press releases about the ISS always described it as "a joint project by x many nations led by the United States" while the same press release from the Russians said "a joint project by x many nations led by the Russian Federation". Otherwise, the two documents were identical.
Ho, ho, ho! Name any time in history when people really questioned what they were doing. Most people don't actually realize or think about why they really think something. It's nice to abstract away and say "X belief should be changed" but good luck actually getting it to happen.
[P.S. you listed Super Mario Bros. as a negative influence! They're just plumbers trying to earn an honest living (collecting gold coins), save princesses and uhh eating special mushrooms...]
Synopsis: Method by which information from reading a book enters the mind.
Improves upon existing patents #1289,3,2432.23: Books (Amazon.com, 1999); #123,34342,24545b: Eyes (Amazon.com, 1998)
eh, I already wrote about this. here, too.
To come up with their predictions, analysts sit around and huff paint thinner until they lose consciousness. Once in a full state of dementia, fully developed predictions appear in rounded pod form from the brilliant, corpulent, snake-like ether of the true ultrafied space-time ribbons, at which point the analyst must delicately pluck them from the mind-hive before they can be sold to the public. Sometimes it comes out in both percents and gigabytes.
It's not a perfect system.
Shh don't give Jeff Bezos any ideas. Next thing you know Amazon will try to patent books.
The absurdity is that they are not patenting "devices", in this case a program, like what patents are intended for, but they are patenting the outcome of those devices. You could write any number of different perl or php scripts to implement a one-click or gift coordination scheme, and each of them would violate amazon's patents, even though they could use totally different mechanisms for completing the task!!!
It's as if the patent on Eli Whitney's cotton gin did not give him protection for his cotton separator, but for all separated cotton. It's absolutely absurd, and it's a damn shame that this patent has been sucessfully enforced.
Book reviews are much more thoughtful and balanced. Off-beat music and movies have less emotional reviews. Reviews of technical items like DVD players tend to be very helpful regarding the features and pitfalls of that particular product.
I tend to pay a lot more attention to the reviews which list both positives and negatives, rather than the raving 5 or 1 star reviews.
When you give someone a token, meaningless reward like a karma point, people tend to internalize the behavior. Remember Pepsi points or Marlboro miles? People started just wanting the points. Same with Amazon. People who give good reviews are given a rank according to who gets the most "Did you find this review helpful?" clicks.
Additionally with Slashdot and Amazon, the points/rank are determined by peer review. You get points from other, regular people, because they approve of what you wrote. People *love* peer approval, even if they like to pretend they don't.
There you go, my psychological review. Engineers really out to read up on their marketing! :)
close enough
Look what happened to Aiwa. They used to be a great brand in the 80's, then they started making junk electronics that was cheap but invariably broke between 3 and 6 months after purchase. What happened? They're gone.
Computer books used to suck on average. O'Reilly found an opportunity to start a quality, recognizable brand. Now I almost exclusively but O'Reilly's books because I know that almost every one of them is thoughtful, careful, thorough, and well-written. That's the value of branding -- they can charge a little extra, I don't have to worry that the book I need is going to careless and full of mistakes.
I think that Apple is pushing everyone to move to OS X because Jobs is a big control freak and hates the idea that anyone is still using OS 9. From NeXT to Aqua, OS X is really *his*, and OS 9 is not.
I hate this argument. 1) Criminals are not a Java class, they don't have a "definition" that makes them choose to disobey all laws whenever possible. That's bullshit. 2) All criminals will not have guns. If they don't all have guns now, and they don't, then they won't magically recieve them once guns are banned. Some of them have and will have them, and it's out of scope to try to predict whether the proportion will increase or decrease 3) "no one else does" except law enforcement.
If guns were banned, then only some criminals and the police will have guns.
The crimnals do not know which household may or may not have a gun inside, and so may be less inclined to break in.
This is one ot the few anti-gun control arguments I think makes some sense.
But all of that is distracting from my main point which was that the conclusions that the NRA. the Brady Foundation, or any other politically motivated group draw are decided long before they look at the facts. I should have said they "like" or "want" guns instead. "Love" sounded biased.
I think it's a common problem that isn't prevalent to either side of most issues.
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=normative ly
Let's see you face up to this economics: when you raise price, quantity demanded at all levels of demand will decrease. Guns still be supplied, but in lower quantity than before. Duh.
If you think I'm trolling, let me throw you a bone: despite that price may decrease quantity demanded, the benefit of gun use by criminals could increase if guns were banned. Assuming criminals want guns according a function of their benefit minus their cost, then they would be willing to pay more for guns at all levels of supply increasing total demand and the total quantity of guns in criminal hands.
So, get back to me when you figure out the exact changes in 1) black market price of guns 2) marginal benefit of criminal gun use after a ban and I'll figure out for you what total change will be. Sheesh.
I totally disagree. Normatively people don't take a look at the facts, evaluate them objectively, and then draw a variety of different conclusions. They decide what they want their conclusion to be in the beginning and then find facts to support that conclusion.
Look at the NRA. Do you think everyone in the NRA went to the library, carefully and thoughtfully evaluated the statistics, then reluctantly decided to support gun ownership because the facts supported it? No! They decided to support gun ownership because they love guns. Facts, if any, were found afterward to reinforce the position they already had regardless of them.
Convenience.
It doesn't matter that it may lead to a lower quality end product, the fact is consumers *love* convenience, and are willing to trade off all sorts of other sources of value to get it.
Of course cat5 is better. Everyone knows that. I use it. But it could take countless hours to put it in the walls, install wall plates, cut the patch cables to length, set up the hubs and routers in the basement.... and with WiFi all you need is one or two access points and an uplink and you'e all set. No assembly required.