Staying up to date is part of doing business. Would you use a cab that still used horses? Get on a steam train with open box carts?
While progress for progress sake can be overrated the simple fact is that we learn from mistakes and improve on the stuff we make. There comes a time when being conservative turns you into a technical ludite and as a tech company you got to ask yourself, is this worth it?
Is there a business in supplying coal for instance? Some people still heat their houses with it, but does that mean YOU as a business man have to run a business to supply them?
Ask yourself, how much time does it cost you to keep the people happy who want PHP4 and how much that same time could have earned you in business from PHP5 customers.
Go into your local shopping district and you can probably find stores that still cater to people who haven't moved on, who still do their shopping at the corner store. It is quit fun actually, but who would you rather be. The owner of a corner store struggling each day to pay the bills, or the founder of Albery Heyn, the corner store that made it big?
The hardest thing a good business man has to learn is to learn which customers to let go.
The sad thing is that there really isn't all the much information in the world.
Two recent dutch events occured. One a crash of an airplane near Amsterdam, claimed by twitter to be reported first by a twit, and turned it wasn't. Radio reported it first. NOT even news radio, just a music station that got SEVERAL call from listeners and when they had multiple sources, they aired it. BEFORE any twitter feed.
Even more recently, an attack supposdly on our queen by someone driving their car through a crowd and missing the tour bus but killing 6 people and wounding several. Again what were the twitters supposed to do? Regular news was there, the twits could report nothing, no more details and no faster then the regular media.
The biggest problem is that twitter by its nature is SLOWER then regular reporting. Why? Because regular news media have spend ages optimising the flow of information so it can be pass on as quickly as possible. But say some twit sends a message, how are you supposed to know about it? You can read them all, there is no pre-set labelling to make it possible to get accurate info on what messages might intrest you. By its size and speed it becomes impossible to monitor.
And so we get the common effect of people swithing to their twitter feed when the regular media have told them something is going on, desperate for info they are unlikely to get any sooner then the trained journalist are.
Twitter has a place, but it is just another way of communicating with plenty of shortcomings. About the only "big thing" it got is that you can easily send a whole lot of people in the same channel a message. It is an email mailing list made a easy. A mass SMS for subscribers only. Whoopie!
Amazing. People really can get used to anything. How an OS that needs a FULL CD when it doesn't actually CONTAIN anything can not be called bloatware I shall never understand. Don't link to linux images, those contain a full suit of software not just simple editor, a basic media player with no codec support.
They are very careful to avoid actually saying that the items are artifacts.
Anyway, what are you going to do, tell the police you bought an item you thought was illegal and it turned out it wasn't? Go ahead, cops deserve a laugh now and then. I am sure they will drop all the murder and rape cases and jump right on top of it. Just like cops jump on copy right infringement (note that the police doesn't, only prosecutors looking for a lucrative job after their public service).
How can I pay a small amount for a vid when there is no existing world-wide service to pay a small amount without it costing me a fortune?
1 dollar (iTune cost) for a vid? Like hell. That is way to much and already in that case the costs of the actual transaction makes up an insane part. Imagine if your shopping for a new coat cost 50 bucks to pay with your bank card.
That is the reason micro-payments have not caught on. It is not that people would mind paying a a nickle, it is that paying a nickle costs 25 cents.
Perhaps google should go in the banking business to break through this. The banks sure as hell aren't going to. In the netherlands we got the cheapest pay system (PIN) and that is being replaced in the future because.... well because a working reliable secure cheap system just ain't good enough. We got to get the unreliable, not working expensive system everyone else uses.
I had the job ages ago of invesitgating complaints about a large dutch ISP's servers and user accounts content. If you send a mail that on our network there was inappropriate content, then I investigated and took appropriate action.
Do not think this inappropriate content is restricted to some David Hamilton pics ("this content is legal with in the jurisdiction of the account it is hosted from")or even the early ancestors of "two girls and a cup" ("No laws are broken").
Times might have changed a bit. The internet is a bit less of a wild west zone and facebook might not attract the very worsed of content as it is by its nature linked to your indentity but then, so was your IP to your account in my time.
I quit after a few months despite a fairly high salary because there is only so much child porn, dead bodies or both you can look at.
That idea only works if you take the accountant view to running a business. But accounts don't run businesses. Entrepeneurs do.
What would be the cost to google of NOT having youtube. Shareholders make lousy businessmen even worse then accountants. At least accountants care about the bottom line at the end of the year, not the next quarter.
Shell recently said it would no longer concetrate on alternative energy. Smart short term move. VERY short term. The world is changing and you never know when you need to be ready to diversify. When Shell invested in alternative energy it cost them money but it was considered to be worth it because IF alternative energies became more important it would stop Shell from becoming UN-important.
Google didn't buy youtube because it thought youtube made money, it bought it because it saw a future there and wanted to be part of it. What better way to search through online video then to be the one hosting it. You may not like youtube searching but compare it to googles image search. Why do you think the first is more reliable? IF youtube had remained a 3rd party or even worse, had become MULTIPLE small time third parties, might another search engine take over if it became more capable of vinding the vids people wanted?
Wether google is right in this logic, or has another reason remains to be seen. Maybe they saw a huge future in ads in front of the vids. That means they need to control the vids. No ads in front of vids they don't control. if the ad market comes back or video ads become better, they are to late if they have no way to get them connected.
So, yes, right now Youtube costs money, but that is called investment. It is what shareholders were supposed to be for.
Existing IP was an original creation as well at one point. How do you tell a bad movie/book? When it doesn't even respect its own IP from before the break/previous chapter. We call them plotholes.
Whenever you create a world, which is really what any writer does, the visitor is going to expect at least some kind of continuety. That the middle follows the beginning and the end connects to both. If you start the journey with "A long time ago..." you don't expect space ships do you? That would be silly.
Lotro has us expecting certain things. There should be elves, a force of evil, dwarves (only male) and hobbits. Lotro provides that. But how far do you go? Some people complain about the new Rune-keeper class, which fills the role of a glass cannon which Lotro really didn't have. Fans claim the game was fine without a glass cannon and breaking the lore to add a class just to appeal to WoW players is a bad idea. The problem is the entire game breaks the lore.
Females, in battle. OOPS!
Hobbits, fighting. No no.
Dwarves, out of the mines.
Elves, fighting on the front in numbers.
All races being roughly equal while according to Lore, Elves would be the absolute top, dwarves second, man (Aragon is NOT a man), a distant third and hobbits trailing way behind.
Elves starting story line being several hundred years before anyone else, yet when you emerge in the game world proper, you are the same level as a young human.
All of the above is "needed" to make Lotro a game. You can't have Elves be real elves because they would be impossible to balance. People are going to want to play dwarves so screw them being holed up in their mines. Hobbits not leaving the Shire? It is a beautifull area of the game but you could hardly expect people to spend 2+ years there.
But with all the problems, using existing IP has a HUGE advantage.
As a player you don't have to sit through a huge amount of drivel as the creator tries to explain the world to you. Ever tried an Asian free MMORPG? Apart from the simplistic gameplay I am often turned off by trying to understand what the fuck is going on and why I should care. Each race, each class has some kind of really bad Sci-Fi wannabe tearjerker background and after having been introduced to new words for everything I just can't keep up. Existing IP gets rid of that. Somebody else established the currency, the political make up, the names of races and classes. You no longer need to do that.
Do you know why existing franchises keep on ticking? Because creating a new world is insanely hard. Only a few can do it. Gene Roddenberry, father of the biggest franchise of them all, only created 1 succesfull one, despite several other tries. An existing backstory allows a new story to get right down to business. No new star wars needs to explain about hyperdrive, the force or the sith. We know them and you can just skip to the good bits. The ewok songs!... what? Why are you looking at me like that.
A bit of intresting trivia. Ever wonder why some action figures of real people don't look all the real? Because they don't want to be. Look to much like the real person and you got to pay for the right to use their face. So, the commitment you mention is not actually always there. So now you know why some action figures are minitature statues and others all have the same face, men, women and aliens.
Sony, the VCR company. Sony, the music company. Sony, Portable Music Player Company. Sony, the DRM making copying to other formats impossible company.
Seems Apple has fallen into the same trap, to many divisions, to many competing ideologies.
iTunes sells music and it would be silly to exclude a popular band. iPhone sells apps and apparently wants them censored. For whatever reason they seem to think it is more important to keep the iPhone market appearing wholesome then it is to offer the customer what they want.
Just wait till you see the sidesplit that occurs when Apple realizes that their MP3 players with the biggest storage (which they make a huge profit on) are the ones filled with the least music bought through iTunes (do the math, who has the money to fill 30+gb through iTunes?).
There is a reason Philips sold its music division. To much conflict of intrest. If you just produce the hardware, you got no reason to limit it. Just look at those ISP's who have forgone the idea of having their own portal and selling content. They are HAPPY to advertise their fastest connections as the best and cheapest way to download music and movies. I very much doubt they are reffering to iTunes and the like for their customers.
Remember that little crisis we are in. No not the war on terror. No not swine-flu. Or the bird-flu. No not the high oil-price that one is over. No it ain't the low oil price either. The credit CRISIS! Geez pay attention will you!
Anyway, the cause of it all is big american companies who got so big they also fell under EU regulation convincing the EU that the US regulation was though enough. The EU swallowed that ONCE and look what happened. Dead, misery, war, starvation!... well okay, a suicide, some fat cats moaning, just the same old wars as before and call girls making less money (newsoutlets in holland are so desperate for a desperate story they are now running how the sex industry is collapsing... in germany. Because all the ones in holland say they are doing fine, just a bit less trade because fewer americans are visiting (and doesn't that just say a lot about the good old US of A)).
Anyway, US has no regulation and won't be having any either. That is what you get when you elect between Wall Street Front guy #1 and Wall Street Front guy #2. You only pick really is wether they are more strongly tied to the hollywood lobby or the gun lobby.
Subject says it all but since it is so funny, insightful and shows how amazing a human being I am in 5 little words (and because the lameness filter forces me to showing that slashdot coders are silly and not worthy of kissing my furry butt, I will repeat here).
It is well known that Michael Schumacher is NOT much of a car nut when it comes to the mechanics. How many world championships did he win? Oh, more then ANYONE ELSE?
You need to know about the network stack if it is your job to know about the network stack. If it isn't, you don't need to know about it. What good is it for someone who writes an music codec to know about the network? Parallell programming notepad?
You can still WALK if the taxicab grinds to a halt. You can hail one from another company, beg a ride from someone else who owns a car.
A better anology would be to have ONLY privatly owned cars and no public transport of any sorts, no bicycles, no footpads. How much power do you think big oil would have then?
The problem with having your data in the cloud is NOT just that your data is out there, but the way you use it is as well. If gmail fails I only not only use my emails themselves, but all my settings. What settings? Oh okay, but imagine a spreadsheet, you can copy out the data, but for complex spreadsheets the setup/layout/whatever is often more valuable then the data. If I loose that because I can't run the computations myself, then I am in deep shit. That is what he is warning about.
In fact, there is one sector we have seen this very clearly. MMORPG's. Kill the server, kill the client. Star Wars Galaxies New Game Experiency upgrade was widely resented by its users but because they don't control the server or the software on the server they had no choice but to swallow the bitter pill or loose all the value they had put into it.
When I take a cab, I am not committed, when I use cloud services, I shouldn't be either.
What exactly is the crime? Worse, think VERY carefully about what the consequences of it becoming a crime could be.
NO MORE OUTSIDE INVESTIGATION OF ACCIDENTS!
Take another famous series of "snuff" pictures, the JFK shooting. How many times have these been shown as part of "investigations" into the shooting? Would you really want a world in which such images become secret and can therefor not be examined outside the legal authorities?
While it might seem easy to say, "there ought to be a law" what people forget to think about is what the end result would be. Would every image taken of an accident suddenly be secret? What does that mean? All TV's on black during the 9/11 attacks, all recordings confiscated because they showed people dying?
Showing disturbing images of car wrecks HAS been part of official programs to serve as a wake-up call to drivers. Especially (would-be) drunk drivers have been shown the results of drink driving in graphic detail.
So, it has been deemed that the public HAS a need to know. There is no need for me, a civilian to see the results of the recent dutch aircrash. There is a need for pilots who think they can land on autopilot when vital instruments are broken to see the results.
The officers involved claim they used the pictures to warn others of the dangers of the girl's behaviour. Stupid perhaps, but not without official precedent.
Slashdot Mirror
Staying up to date is part of doing business. Would you use a cab that still used horses? Get on a steam train with open box carts?
While progress for progress sake can be overrated the simple fact is that we learn from mistakes and improve on the stuff we make. There comes a time when being conservative turns you into a technical ludite and as a tech company you got to ask yourself, is this worth it?
Is there a business in supplying coal for instance? Some people still heat their houses with it, but does that mean YOU as a business man have to run a business to supply them?
Ask yourself, how much time does it cost you to keep the people happy who want PHP4 and how much that same time could have earned you in business from PHP5 customers.
Go into your local shopping district and you can probably find stores that still cater to people who haven't moved on, who still do their shopping at the corner store. It is quit fun actually, but who would you rather be. The owner of a corner store struggling each day to pay the bills, or the founder of Albery Heyn, the corner store that made it big?
The hardest thing a good business man has to learn is to learn which customers to let go.
The sad thing is that there really isn't all the much information in the world.
Two recent dutch events occured. One a crash of an airplane near Amsterdam, claimed by twitter to be reported first by a twit, and turned it wasn't. Radio reported it first. NOT even news radio, just a music station that got SEVERAL call from listeners and when they had multiple sources, they aired it. BEFORE any twitter feed.
Even more recently, an attack supposdly on our queen by someone driving their car through a crowd and missing the tour bus but killing 6 people and wounding several. Again what were the twitters supposed to do? Regular news was there, the twits could report nothing, no more details and no faster then the regular media.
The biggest problem is that twitter by its nature is SLOWER then regular reporting. Why? Because regular news media have spend ages optimising the flow of information so it can be pass on as quickly as possible. But say some twit sends a message, how are you supposed to know about it? You can read them all, there is no pre-set labelling to make it possible to get accurate info on what messages might intrest you. By its size and speed it becomes impossible to monitor.
And so we get the common effect of people swithing to their twitter feed when the regular media have told them something is going on, desperate for info they are unlikely to get any sooner then the trained journalist are.
Twitter has a place, but it is just another way of communicating with plenty of shortcomings. About the only "big thing" it got is that you can easily send a whole lot of people in the same channel a message. It is an email mailing list made a easy. A mass SMS for subscribers only. Whoopie!
Would you eat lawyers and CEO's?
XP isn't bloatware.
...
Amazing. People really can get used to anything. How an OS that needs a FULL CD when it doesn't actually CONTAIN anything can not be called bloatware I shall never understand. Don't link to linux images, those contain a full suit of software not just simple editor, a basic media player with no codec support.
I hope your defence is that you are just young.
They are very careful to avoid actually saying that the items are artifacts.
Anyway, what are you going to do, tell the police you bought an item you thought was illegal and it turned out it wasn't? Go ahead, cops deserve a laugh now and then. I am sure they will drop all the murder and rape cases and jump right on top of it. Just like cops jump on copy right infringement (note that the police doesn't, only prosecutors looking for a lucrative job after their public service).
Why think so small?
How can I pay a small amount for a vid when there is no existing world-wide service to pay a small amount without it costing me a fortune?
1 dollar (iTune cost) for a vid? Like hell. That is way to much and already in that case the costs of the actual transaction makes up an insane part. Imagine if your shopping for a new coat cost 50 bucks to pay with your bank card.
That is the reason micro-payments have not caught on. It is not that people would mind paying a a nickle, it is that paying a nickle costs 25 cents.
Perhaps google should go in the banking business to break through this. The banks sure as hell aren't going to. In the netherlands we got the cheapest pay system (PIN) and that is being replaced in the future because .... well because a working reliable secure cheap system just ain't good enough. We got to get the unreliable, not working expensive system everyone else uses.
I had the job ages ago of invesitgating complaints about a large dutch ISP's servers and user accounts content. If you send a mail that on our network there was inappropriate content, then I investigated and took appropriate action.
Do not think this inappropriate content is restricted to some David Hamilton pics ("this content is legal with in the jurisdiction of the account it is hosted from")or even the early ancestors of "two girls and a cup" ("No laws are broken").
Times might have changed a bit. The internet is a bit less of a wild west zone and facebook might not attract the very worsed of content as it is by its nature linked to your indentity but then, so was your IP to your account in my time.
I quit after a few months despite a fairly high salary because there is only so much child porn, dead bodies or both you can look at.
That idea only works if you take the accountant view to running a business. But accounts don't run businesses. Entrepeneurs do.
What would be the cost to google of NOT having youtube. Shareholders make lousy businessmen even worse then accountants. At least accountants care about the bottom line at the end of the year, not the next quarter.
Shell recently said it would no longer concetrate on alternative energy. Smart short term move. VERY short term. The world is changing and you never know when you need to be ready to diversify. When Shell invested in alternative energy it cost them money but it was considered to be worth it because IF alternative energies became more important it would stop Shell from becoming UN-important.
Google didn't buy youtube because it thought youtube made money, it bought it because it saw a future there and wanted to be part of it. What better way to search through online video then to be the one hosting it. You may not like youtube searching but compare it to googles image search. Why do you think the first is more reliable? IF youtube had remained a 3rd party or even worse, had become MULTIPLE small time third parties, might another search engine take over if it became more capable of vinding the vids people wanted?
Wether google is right in this logic, or has another reason remains to be seen. Maybe they saw a huge future in ads in front of the vids. That means they need to control the vids. No ads in front of vids they don't control. if the ad market comes back or video ads become better, they are to late if they have no way to get them connected.
So, yes, right now Youtube costs money, but that is called investment. It is what shareholders were supposed to be for.
Existing IP was an original creation as well at one point. How do you tell a bad movie/book? When it doesn't even respect its own IP from before the break/previous chapter. We call them plotholes.
Whenever you create a world, which is really what any writer does, the visitor is going to expect at least some kind of continuety. That the middle follows the beginning and the end connects to both. If you start the journey with "A long time ago..." you don't expect space ships do you? That would be silly.
Lotro has us expecting certain things. There should be elves, a force of evil, dwarves (only male) and hobbits. Lotro provides that. But how far do you go? Some people complain about the new Rune-keeper class, which fills the role of a glass cannon which Lotro really didn't have. Fans claim the game was fine without a glass cannon and breaking the lore to add a class just to appeal to WoW players is a bad idea. The problem is the entire game breaks the lore.
Females, in battle. OOPS!
Hobbits, fighting. No no.
Dwarves, out of the mines.
Elves, fighting on the front in numbers.
All races being roughly equal while according to Lore, Elves would be the absolute top, dwarves second, man (Aragon is NOT a man), a distant third and hobbits trailing way behind.
Elves starting story line being several hundred years before anyone else, yet when you emerge in the game world proper, you are the same level as a young human.
All of the above is "needed" to make Lotro a game. You can't have Elves be real elves because they would be impossible to balance. People are going to want to play dwarves so screw them being holed up in their mines. Hobbits not leaving the Shire? It is a beautifull area of the game but you could hardly expect people to spend 2+ years there.
But with all the problems, using existing IP has a HUGE advantage.
As a player you don't have to sit through a huge amount of drivel as the creator tries to explain the world to you. Ever tried an Asian free MMORPG? Apart from the simplistic gameplay I am often turned off by trying to understand what the fuck is going on and why I should care. Each race, each class has some kind of really bad Sci-Fi wannabe tearjerker background and after having been introduced to new words for everything I just can't keep up. Existing IP gets rid of that. Somebody else established the currency, the political make up, the names of races and classes. You no longer need to do that.
Do you know why existing franchises keep on ticking? Because creating a new world is insanely hard. Only a few can do it. Gene Roddenberry, father of the biggest franchise of them all, only created 1 succesfull one, despite several other tries. An existing backstory allows a new story to get right down to business. No new star wars needs to explain about hyperdrive, the force or the sith. We know them and you can just skip to the good bits. The ewok songs!... what? Why are you looking at me like that.
A bit of intresting trivia. Ever wonder why some action figures of real people don't look all the real? Because they don't want to be. Look to much like the real person and you got to pay for the right to use their face. So, the commitment you mention is not actually always there. So now you know why some action figures are minitature statues and others all have the same face, men, women and aliens.
Sony, the VCR company. Sony, the music company. Sony, Portable Music Player Company. Sony, the DRM making copying to other formats impossible company.
Seems Apple has fallen into the same trap, to many divisions, to many competing ideologies.
iTunes sells music and it would be silly to exclude a popular band. iPhone sells apps and apparently wants them censored. For whatever reason they seem to think it is more important to keep the iPhone market appearing wholesome then it is to offer the customer what they want.
Just wait till you see the sidesplit that occurs when Apple realizes that their MP3 players with the biggest storage (which they make a huge profit on) are the ones filled with the least music bought through iTunes (do the math, who has the money to fill 30+gb through iTunes?).
There is a reason Philips sold its music division. To much conflict of intrest. If you just produce the hardware, you got no reason to limit it. Just look at those ISP's who have forgone the idea of having their own portal and selling content. They are HAPPY to advertise their fastest connections as the best and cheapest way to download music and movies. I very much doubt they are reffering to iTunes and the like for their customers.
If you start worrying about the side effects of everything, you wouldn't even dare to breath. And stop that living! It is the major cause of death!
In slow motion I turn to you, as 40 metric tons of metallic lithium tumble down into the national reservoir, "you mean this might be a bad thing"?
A book, you should read it.
After all, does the poster you respond to think that Intel abused its position to give the world cheaper chips? HA!
Remember that little crisis we are in. No not the war on terror. No not swine-flu. Or the bird-flu. No not the high oil-price that one is over. No it ain't the low oil price either. The credit CRISIS! Geez pay attention will you!
Anyway, the cause of it all is big american companies who got so big they also fell under EU regulation convincing the EU that the US regulation was though enough. The EU swallowed that ONCE and look what happened. Dead, misery, war, starvation!... well okay, a suicide, some fat cats moaning, just the same old wars as before and call girls making less money (newsoutlets in holland are so desperate for a desperate story they are now running how the sex industry is collapsing... in germany. Because all the ones in holland say they are doing fine, just a bit less trade because fewer americans are visiting (and doesn't that just say a lot about the good old US of A)).
Anyway, US has no regulation and won't be having any either. That is what you get when you elect between Wall Street Front guy #1 and Wall Street Front guy #2. You only pick really is wether they are more strongly tied to the hollywood lobby or the gun lobby.
Subject says it all but since it is so funny, insightful and shows how amazing a human being I am in 5 little words (and because the lameness filter forces me to showing that slashdot coders are silly and not worthy of kissing my furry butt, I will repeat here).
Think-tank, where thinking tanks.
You counter his argument that it is not free by pointing out it is MERELY 250 bucks a year...
Who would have thought FREE would become such a complex concept to some people.
Free == 0 bucks. No money. Nada. Zip. Zero.
If MSDN required a postal stamp it would NOT be free.
Mind you, I am not sure this RC requires a subscription in any case so you might both be blowing smoke.
It is the law. The law of physics. You got to come to a complete stop before you can backup and run them over again!
What? Like you never did it!
It is well known that Michael Schumacher is NOT much of a car nut when it comes to the mechanics. How many world championships did he win? Oh, more then ANYONE ELSE?
You need to know about the network stack if it is your job to know about the network stack. If it isn't, you don't need to know about it. What good is it for someone who writes an music codec to know about the network? Parallell programming notepad?
You can still WALK if the taxicab grinds to a halt. You can hail one from another company, beg a ride from someone else who owns a car.
A better anology would be to have ONLY privatly owned cars and no public transport of any sorts, no bicycles, no footpads. How much power do you think big oil would have then?
The problem with having your data in the cloud is NOT just that your data is out there, but the way you use it is as well. If gmail fails I only not only use my emails themselves, but all my settings. What settings? Oh okay, but imagine a spreadsheet, you can copy out the data, but for complex spreadsheets the setup/layout/whatever is often more valuable then the data. If I loose that because I can't run the computations myself, then I am in deep shit. That is what he is warning about.
In fact, there is one sector we have seen this very clearly. MMORPG's. Kill the server, kill the client. Star Wars Galaxies New Game Experiency upgrade was widely resented by its users but because they don't control the server or the software on the server they had no choice but to swallow the bitter pill or loose all the value they had put into it.
When I take a cab, I am not committed, when I use cloud services, I shouldn't be either.
Because a PS2 retails for about 90 euro over here, so I was wondering where they got 250 from. And I thought dutch sales tax of 19% was high.
What exactly is the crime? Worse, think VERY carefully about what the consequences of it becoming a crime could be.
NO MORE OUTSIDE INVESTIGATION OF ACCIDENTS!
Take another famous series of "snuff" pictures, the JFK shooting. How many times have these been shown as part of "investigations" into the shooting? Would you really want a world in which such images become secret and can therefor not be examined outside the legal authorities?
While it might seem easy to say, "there ought to be a law" what people forget to think about is what the end result would be. Would every image taken of an accident suddenly be secret? What does that mean? All TV's on black during the 9/11 attacks, all recordings confiscated because they showed people dying?
Be careful what you wish for, you might get it.
Showing disturbing images of car wrecks HAS been part of official programs to serve as a wake-up call to drivers. Especially (would-be) drunk drivers have been shown the results of drink driving in graphic detail.
So, it has been deemed that the public HAS a need to know. There is no need for me, a civilian to see the results of the recent dutch aircrash. There is a need for pilots who think they can land on autopilot when vital instruments are broken to see the results.
The officers involved claim they used the pictures to warn others of the dangers of the girl's behaviour. Stupid perhaps, but not without official precedent.