Now let's add the graphics and audio. Please remember that's 5.1 audio and the graphics ability is capable of micro-polygon support in the range of 300 M/sec, with TV-out.
Then lets add the (admittedly small amount of) RAM. We'll need at least 6.4G/sec bandwidth for that RAM, btw. Now add the 4x DVD Then the 8G hard drive Then the game-controller Then the power supply Then the network card Then the case
And do this all in a format that I can sit next to my TV, won't look like ass, and doesn't make a load of noise.
Then, just for shits and giggles, why don't you throw in two games?
When you've done all that for $180 or less, give me a call.
Excuse me? You seem to think there is some giant machine just eating money and churning away X-boxes, with no way for MS to stop it.
Let's take a look at the possibilities here.
1. You buy it to hack. 2. You don't, and nobody else buys it. 3. You don't and somebody buys it for its intended usage. 4. You don't and somebody else buys it to hack.
Case 4 is really the same as Case 1, just from a different POV.
Case 3 winds up as profit for MS in the game sales.
Case 2 winds up as a net loss for MS of $300.. except.. case 2 doesn't actually exist, because sooner or later someone is going to purchase it - either at that store, or, if they send it back, at some other store. Until it gets sold, that's one less X-box MS is producing. So your maximum loss is $300, and that's only if it goes into the landfill, unused - the odds of that?
So we come back to case 1. In Case 1, MS sees a loss of $100, but they don't know it's a loss at this point. It could be a successful sale (Case 3) in which case it behooves them to produce another one, in hopes of catching yet another case 3.
Which in the end means that only in case 1 (or case 4, which is the same thing) do we see that MS actually loses money, as otherwise, the sale of the machine becomes profit for them, and the non-sale of the machine eventually winds up as a sale simply because they don't have to produce any more until it's sold.
..for a college level paper, you should receive a C at most.
Anyway, to the flaws:
1. None of your quotes are cited properly (if at all). A rigorous marker (like myself) would return the paper at this point with a note along the lines of "Don't pull this stuff from your ass, show me where" though I'd probably phrase it more politely than that on the actual paper.
2. You haven't actually disproved the notion that file-sharing is the cause of lowered sales. You've provided a number of alternative explanations, all quite reasonable, but shown no evidence that any of your alternatives have any greater correlation to the sales drop than the record industries assertion of file-sharing.
3. You give no proof of the assertion that "the current downward trend in record sales would have to continue for 10 years for a loss of 4 billion dollars to occur." Nowhere in the paper have you stated a dollar amount of what the record industry actually lost. The only amount is the 4 billion they state which you dispute on the basis that you, personally, could not find corroborative evidence, in your vast research which encompassed.. let's see here.. eight citations all from the web. Bibliophobe, perhaps? Still, this is an English paper, so maybe we can let that slide.
4. Your blanket assertion that the DMCA is unconstitutional is on shaky grounds at best. If Lessig's argument that retroactive extensions applied directly to copyright are unconstitutional was not accepted, how will a law that says nothing about copyright terms at all likely be seen? If anything, this is more open, because there is nothing in the law that says companies cannot release some sort of "master key" that works once copyright is expired - and until they fail to do this once the copyright is expired, we can't say that the DMCA has prevented "limited times" from being expressed.
5. Again, you assert something about the record industry (namely the terms of their contracts) without providing any type of citation as to where exactly you drew the material from.
6. Don't piss around with numbers. If you're going to try and use numbers to back up your argument, you better be comparing apples to apples. So comparing a record contract that has various costs applied to it to a bar gig without also noting the various hidden costs there (transportation, accomodation, road-managers, merchandise costs, etc) is not exactly fair. Now, I'll readily admit that bands probably do make more, but by missing the details, you haven't shown it.
That's some of the basic flaws with specifics.
Looking at the whole thesis, the question immediately arises: What is the unjust law you are drawing attention to by your actions? Which law, specifically, does your downloading music protest? Have you informed those who might punish you for breaking the law that you are doing so, because if you haven't, it strikes that you are not willing to go by the words of MLK and accept the punishment. In fact, MLK was quite specific about that, it's not the act of breaking the law that's the protest, it's suffering the enforcement of it to draw attention to the injustice of the law.
Until you do that, you're not some moral crusader, so stop pretending. Leave the moral crusades for those, like MLK Jr, who had the guts to go through with it.
On the other hand, there were stories about how the artists would occasionally score a victory. I think it was Dean Martin, beholden to his label for seven more albums, who showed up, dropped seven albums worth of shit tracks on the desk, and said "Ciao!"
You only get away with crap like that once.
I hear the standard boilerplate has now evolved to the point where it's the label that gets to decide what counts as a "marketable album" and they base your contract on a certain number of "marketable album".
Hence the whole Prince thing. He wanted to go more experimental, but the record companies weren't having it, and his contract prevented him from putting out anything for anybody else until they got what they wanted.
So much for the "creativity" that the RIAA purports to protect.
Of course, this does nothing to solve the problem that if you spread the work around for free, there is no incentive for people to pay.
No incentive for people to pay means a lot less people have the time to be creative because they're busy schleppin' away at McDonalds to make ends meet.
What we really need is for people who allow other artists music to be copied (it's not sharing, nor is it stealing) without the artists' permission to realize that it actually does wind up hurting artists and creativity, and as such, society as a whole.
Should the RIAA and the middlemen be removed? Mostly, yes. (though some of them do provide the valuable service of screening out the worst of the crap) Should we be spreading around what the artists have made without the artists permission? I'm emphatically on the "No" side about that. It's just disrespectful to the artist.
In November 2002, following an appeal and several court hearings, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia issued a judgment in the Massachusetts case prohibiting Microsoft from continuing certain unlawful conduct.
Talk about a meaningless injunction. "You broke the law! Now we have to pass another law saying you can't break the law!" Uhh.. yeah. Sure.
Obviously you gain something from allowing other people to copy an artist's music from you, whether that's just an ego boost or a sense of self-worth and doing good for the community.
In this case, you are profiting in a non-monetary way from someone else's hard work and creativity without that person's permission.
..but you don't share it. Sharing implies you put the music on and both of you listen to it at the same time. What you're doing is letting them copy it, and I guess you could even say you're selling it at a price point of an ego boost or some such.
MS has reached pretty close to a market plateau here. One of the problems with having a monopoly is it means once you've saturated your market, there's really no competition to grow from.
MS is reaching saturation, plus facing additional challenges via Linux etc.
Or, to put it another way, since the stock doesn't have a ton of room to grow anymore, they better do something else to keep its value up. If MS stock value drops then the stock options, which they use to keep the employees happy at what would otherwise be mediocre wages, become much less valuable, and MS starts to lose employees to competitors. (Which in turn precipitates a faster stock-fall, etc.)
Think about it, the economy is just starting to turn around, so by doing this large dividend now, they work to stop their employees getting twitchy as the market recovers.
I'd be willing to bet you'd be able to expect substantial dividends from MS so long as the economy doesn't look to be slowing down. Once that happens, the dividends will drop because the employees will have fewer options.
We do indeed pay a levy on each CD-R (and that's a levy, not a tax as our government is so quick to inform us.. I guess along the same lines as: floats like a duck, weighs the same as a duck, probably a witch.)
And the benefit is that it is entirely legal for Canadians to copy/download any music at all. It is not, however, legal for us to upload this music and make it available for others. The fun part is that the RIAA doesn't like this legislation either, because it opens them up on several fronts such as when they try Digital Restriction Mechanisms on CDs, and because they haven't seen a cent of the money yet.
The money from these levy's so far has all been going to pay the lawyers of the lobby that got this little deal worked out.
You don't want it, don't buy it. You want it, well hey, they certainly should be allowed to profit off of that by providing it.
Personally, I won't be purchasing this but only because I don't have a console system. Now if they released it for PC, I'd be dropping my money on this collection in a heartbeat.
Yeah, I can get all the MAME's, but that's not the point. The point is using your dollar to encourage quality.
I'm not sure about the native OS, but the latest Windows(R) definitely has some speech recognition in it. It snot bad. Though yule-log fence wear that it wood be better without it.
..President George Bush has recently announced that the CIA and FBI have received "reliable information" from Microsoft and the RIAA indicating that Saddam Hussein has relocated to Brazil, hotbed of godless Communism and Linux supporters, where he is currently setting up WMD factories with funding from Osama Bin Laden, who is expected to be arriving there shortly to personally oversee the distribution.
The President has announced that he is specifically not taking the nuclear option off the table, though he declined to comment further on what exactly he meant by this.
John gets a bit hammered and the local bar, goes home, can't find his keys, so uses his crowbar to break into his house.. probably legal
John finds out that, oops, this isn't his house he just broke into. Uh-oh. Now he's a criminal.
Obviously, John wasn't intending to break into someone elses house, and may not have intended to "break into" anything, but he could get caught by the police anyway. The question isn't how do we protect people like John, it's why would we want to protect people from taking responsibility for their own actions?
The latest Blur CD, Think Tank is, like many techno CD's, seamless. All the songs are meant to flow into each other with no breaks.
That is.. until you put the thing into your computer. Whereupon the Digital Restrictions Management loads it's little mickey mouse player (mickey mouse both for its power and the DRM associations) to play the CD for you....except.. the damn player inserts 1 second pauses between tracks. Since the album is supposed to be seamless, these pauses are jarring to say the least.
So what I want to know is, how come we don't hear about Madonna, Linkin Park, etc., bitching about how DRM players are "killing the art" of the album?
..siding against the US, that has a long and distinguished record of crying "Subsidy!" when there isn't one, and turning around and providing it's own subsidies (agricultural, etc) and calling those fair.
Now, it may by that Hynix is being subsidized, it may not, but the US has cried wolf so many times, and has shown that it doesn't actually believe in the spirit of free trade (to say nothing of the letter) so often that those of us who have been on the receiving end of this treatment can't help but think "Sh'yeah right, buddy."
The US just likes to cry that Canada does so that they can put on illegal duties, and then illegally pass those duties (through the Byrd Amendment) off to the companies that asked for them in the first place.
The duties are supposed to be the end of the equalization process. Giving them to the domestic industries is an illegal subsidy of those companies, one which the American taxpayer foots the bill for when it comes time for the US to pay back what it took. (Because the Byrd Amendment does not require that the companies set aside the duties until the end of any rulings)
The US is known for screaming subsidies for just about anything.
They've tried three times on Canadian softwood lumber, and been shown to be talking out of their ass each time, with the fourth coming up in short order here.
They've accused Canada of illegally subsidizing its grain products nine times now. Each occurrence has resulted in Canada's practices being confirmed as fully legal and compliant.
Of course they say SK has been illegally subsidizing. They can't put a tarrif on without saying that. That doesn't make it any more true than Bush's WMD claims.
That's exactly what the US said about softwood lumber. Despite the fact they've said it three times before and have been proven wrong each time,and despite preliminary rulings coming down suggesting they'll be proven wrong yet again.
It's also exactly what the US said with respect to Canada's grain industry, despite the nine previous times they've said so, and being proven wrong each and every time.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay.. you got the PIII part for $120..
Now let's add the graphics and audio. Please remember that's 5.1 audio and the graphics ability is capable of micro-polygon support in the range of 300 M/sec, with TV-out.
Then lets add the (admittedly small amount of) RAM. We'll need at least 6.4G/sec bandwidth for that RAM, btw.
Now add the 4x DVD
Then the 8G hard drive
Then the game-controller
Then the power supply
Then the network card
Then the case
And do this all in a format that I can sit next to my TV, won't look like ass, and doesn't make a load of noise.
Then, just for shits and giggles, why don't you throw in two games?
When you've done all that for $180 or less, give me a call.
Excuse me? You seem to think there is some giant machine just eating money and churning away X-boxes, with no way for MS to stop it.
Let's take a look at the possibilities here.
1. You buy it to hack.
2. You don't, and nobody else buys it.
3. You don't and somebody buys it for its intended usage.
4. You don't and somebody else buys it to hack.
Case 4 is really the same as Case 1, just from a different POV.
Case 3 winds up as profit for MS in the game sales.
Case 2 winds up as a net loss for MS of $300.. except.. case 2 doesn't actually exist, because sooner or later someone is going to purchase it - either at that store, or, if they send it back, at some other store. Until it gets sold, that's one less X-box MS is producing. So your maximum loss is $300, and that's only if it goes into the landfill, unused - the odds of that?
So we come back to case 1. In Case 1, MS sees a loss of $100, but they don't know it's a loss at this point. It could be a successful sale (Case 3) in which case it behooves them to produce another one, in hopes of catching yet another case 3.
Which in the end means that only in case 1 (or case 4, which is the same thing) do we see that MS actually loses money, as otherwise, the sale of the machine becomes profit for them, and the non-sale of the machine eventually winds up as a sale simply because they don't have to produce any more until it's sold.
..for a college level paper, you should receive a C at most.
Anyway, to the flaws:
1. None of your quotes are cited properly (if at all). A rigorous marker (like myself) would return the paper at this point with a note along the lines of "Don't pull this stuff from your ass, show me where" though I'd probably phrase it more politely than that on the actual paper.
2. You haven't actually disproved the notion that file-sharing is the cause of lowered sales. You've provided a number of alternative explanations, all quite reasonable, but shown no evidence that any of your alternatives have any greater correlation to the sales drop than the record industries assertion of file-sharing.
3. You give no proof of the assertion that "the current downward trend in record sales would have to continue for 10 years for a loss of 4 billion dollars to occur." Nowhere in the paper have you stated a dollar amount of what the record industry actually lost. The only amount is the 4 billion they state which you dispute on the basis that you, personally, could not find corroborative evidence, in your vast research which encompassed.. let's see here.. eight citations all from the web. Bibliophobe, perhaps? Still, this is an English paper, so maybe we can let that slide.
4. Your blanket assertion that the DMCA is unconstitutional is on shaky grounds at best. If Lessig's argument that retroactive extensions applied directly to copyright are unconstitutional was not accepted, how will a law that says nothing about copyright terms at all likely be seen? If anything, this is more open, because there is nothing in the law that says companies cannot release some sort of "master key" that works once copyright is expired - and until they fail to do this once the copyright is expired, we can't say that the DMCA has prevented "limited times" from being expressed.
5. Again, you assert something about the record industry (namely the terms of their contracts) without providing any type of citation as to where exactly you drew the material from.
6. Don't piss around with numbers. If you're going to try and use numbers to back up your argument, you better be comparing apples to apples. So comparing a record contract that has various costs applied to it to a bar gig without also noting the various hidden costs there (transportation, accomodation, road-managers, merchandise costs, etc) is not exactly fair. Now, I'll readily admit that bands probably do make more, but by missing the details, you haven't shown it.
That's some of the basic flaws with specifics.
Looking at the whole thesis, the question immediately arises: What is the unjust law you are drawing attention to by your actions? Which law, specifically, does your downloading music protest? Have you informed those who might punish you for breaking the law that you are doing so, because if you haven't, it strikes that you are not willing to go by the words of MLK and accept the punishment. In fact, MLK was quite specific about that, it's not the act of breaking the law that's the protest, it's suffering the enforcement of it to draw attention to the injustice of the law.
Until you do that, you're not some moral crusader, so stop pretending. Leave the moral crusades for those, like MLK Jr, who had the guts to go through with it.
Uh-huh.. ..and how much music have you actually bought from the 'net lately?
On the other hand, there were stories about how the artists would occasionally score a victory. I think it was Dean Martin, beholden to his label for seven more albums, who showed up, dropped seven albums worth of shit tracks on the desk, and said "Ciao!"
You only get away with crap like that once.
I hear the standard boilerplate has now evolved to the point where it's the label that gets to decide what counts as a "marketable album" and they base your contract on a certain number of "marketable album".
Hence the whole Prince thing. He wanted to go more experimental, but the record companies weren't having it, and his contract prevented him from putting out anything for anybody else until they got what they wanted.
So much for the "creativity" that the RIAA purports to protect.
Of course, this does nothing to solve the problem that if you spread the work around for free, there is no incentive for people to pay.
No incentive for people to pay means a lot less people have the time to be creative because they're busy schleppin' away at McDonalds to make ends meet.
What we really need is for people who allow other artists music to be copied (it's not sharing, nor is it stealing) without the artists' permission to realize that it actually does wind up hurting artists and creativity, and as such, society as a whole.
Should the RIAA and the middlemen be removed? Mostly, yes. (though some of them do provide the valuable service of screening out the worst of the crap) Should we be spreading around what the artists have made without the artists permission? I'm emphatically on the "No" side about that. It's just disrespectful to the artist.
In November 2002, following an appeal and several court hearings, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia issued a judgment in the Massachusetts case prohibiting Microsoft from continuing certain unlawful conduct.
Talk about a meaningless injunction. "You broke the law! Now we have to pass another law saying you can't break the law!" Uhh.. yeah. Sure.
..than monetary gain.
Obviously you gain something from allowing other people to copy an artist's music from you, whether that's just an ego boost or a sense of self-worth and doing good for the community.
In this case, you are profiting in a non-monetary way from someone else's hard work and creativity without that person's permission.
Shouldn't that also be illegal?
..but you don't share it. Sharing implies you put the music on and both of you listen to it at the same time. What you're doing is letting them copy it, and I guess you could even say you're selling it at a price point of an ego boost or some such.
..then we'd call it Windows.
Think critical mass. Think organization against the laws.
..they definitely don't have the latter.
Druggies may not have the first..
..why the hell we call them "editors"?
I mean, "minature"? In the title, no less?
Come on.
..why you think anything must have changed.
MS has reached pretty close to a market plateau here. One of the problems with having a monopoly is it means once you've saturated your market, there's really no competition to grow from.
MS is reaching saturation, plus facing additional challenges via Linux etc.
Or, to put it another way, since the stock doesn't have a ton of room to grow anymore, they better do something else to keep its value up. If MS stock value drops then the stock options, which they use to keep the employees happy at what would otherwise be mediocre wages, become much less valuable, and MS starts to lose employees to competitors. (Which in turn precipitates a faster stock-fall, etc.)
Think about it, the economy is just starting to turn around, so by doing this large dividend now, they work to stop their employees getting twitchy as the market recovers.
I'd be willing to bet you'd be able to expect substantial dividends from MS so long as the economy doesn't look to be slowing down. Once that happens, the dividends will drop because the employees will have fewer options.
We do indeed pay a levy on each CD-R (and that's a levy, not a tax as our government is so quick to inform us.. I guess along the same lines as: floats like a duck, weighs the same as a duck, probably a witch.)
And the benefit is that it is entirely legal for Canadians to copy/download any music at all. It is not, however, legal for us to upload this music and make it available for others. The fun part is that the RIAA doesn't like this legislation either, because it opens them up on several fronts such as when they try Digital Restriction Mechanisms on CDs, and because they haven't seen a cent of the money yet.
The money from these levy's so far has all been going to pay the lawyers of the lobby that got this little deal worked out.
Friggin' classic.
..how are they screwing people over?
You don't want it, don't buy it.
You want it, well hey, they certainly should be allowed to profit off of that by providing it.
Personally, I won't be purchasing this but only because I don't have a console system. Now if they released it for PC, I'd be dropping my money on this collection in a heartbeat.
Yeah, I can get all the MAME's, but that's not the point. The point is using your dollar to encourage quality.
Your knowledge is just wrong then.
I'm not sure about the native OS, but the latest Windows(R) definitely has some speech recognition in it. It snot bad. Though yule-log fence wear that it wood be better without it.
..President George Bush has recently announced that the CIA and FBI have received "reliable information" from Microsoft and the RIAA indicating that Saddam Hussein has relocated to Brazil, hotbed of godless Communism and Linux supporters, where he is currently setting up WMD factories with funding from Osama Bin Laden, who is expected to be arriving there shortly to personally oversee the distribution.
The President has announced that he is specifically not taking the nuclear option off the table, though he declined to comment further on what exactly he meant by this.
Obviously, John wasn't intending to break into someone elses house, and may not have intended to "break into" anything, but he could get caught by the police anyway. The question isn't how do we protect people like John, it's why would we want to protect people from taking responsibility for their own actions?
..at least.. if you're in Canada anyway. We pay levies on all our blank media to ensure this.
The latest Blur CD, Think Tank is, like many techno CD's, seamless. All the songs are meant to flow into each other with no breaks.
..except.. the damn player inserts 1 second pauses between tracks. Since the album is supposed to be seamless, these pauses are jarring to say the least.
That is.. until you put the thing into your computer. Whereupon the Digital Restrictions Management loads it's little mickey mouse player (mickey mouse both for its power and the DRM associations) to play the CD for you..
So what I want to know is, how come we don't hear about Madonna, Linkin Park, etc., bitching about how DRM players are "killing the art" of the album?
..siding against the US, that has a long and distinguished record of crying "Subsidy!" when there isn't one, and turning around and providing it's own subsidies (agricultural, etc) and calling those fair.
Now, it may by that Hynix is being subsidized, it may not, but the US has cried wolf so many times, and has shown that it doesn't actually believe in the spirit of free trade (to say nothing of the letter) so often that those of us who have been on the receiving end of this treatment can't help but think "Sh'yeah right, buddy."
..Canada hasn't broke the contract.
The US just likes to cry that Canada does so that they can put on illegal duties, and then illegally pass those duties (through the Byrd Amendment) off to the companies that asked for them in the first place.
The duties are supposed to be the end of the equalization process. Giving them to the domestic industries is an illegal subsidy of those companies, one which the American taxpayer foots the bill for when it comes time for the US to pay back what it took. (Because the Byrd Amendment does not require that the companies set aside the duties until the end of any rulings)
The US is known for screaming subsidies for just about anything.
They've tried three times on Canadian softwood lumber, and been shown to be talking out of their ass each time, with the fourth coming up in short order here.
They've accused Canada of illegally subsidizing its grain products nine times now. Each occurrence has resulted in Canada's practices being confirmed as fully legal and compliant.
Of course they say SK has been illegally subsidizing. They can't put a tarrif on without saying that. That doesn't make it any more true than Bush's WMD claims.
That's exactly what the US said about softwood lumber. Despite the fact they've said it three times before and have been proven wrong each time,and despite preliminary rulings coming down suggesting they'll be proven wrong yet again.
It's also exactly what the US said with respect to Canada's grain industry, despite the nine previous times they've said so, and being proven wrong each and every time.
So you'll excuse me if I don't believe the US BS.
..of course that gravity propagates slower than c.