MAYBE if you actually read a book you might learn WHY Muslims have such high need of FEMALE doctors. That is because female patients have to be seen by a female doctor or not at all. The statistic sounds so nice but underneath it is a regime of segregated care where QUALITY of care was of no importance whatsoever.
And 60% of doctors also tells you nothing of the total number of doctors available OR that women (childbirth) need doctors a LOT more then men.
Careful with your statistics young one, they can be tricky things and easily be used to fool you.
You are not looking out for those you look down up on in secret, the grand-parent was talking about AOL practice to keep people paying for dialup access when they already moved to broadband connections. So it is NOT for people who still use ONLY dialup, it is a scam operated by AOL to convince people that without their dialup service, broadband would not work or people would loose all their email, so people end up paying a high price for just their email account.
I wonder if YOU would be to hear that there WAS a lawsuit pretty much for that reason a Long long time ago...
Home and professional recording
One other major consequence of the Betamax technology's introduction to the U.S. was the lawsuit Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios (1984, the "Betamax case"), with the U.S. Supreme Court determining home videotaping to be legal in the United States, wherein home videotape cassette recorders were a legal technology since they had substantial noninfringing uses. This precedent was later invoked in MGM v. Grokster (2005), where the high court agreed that the same "substantial noninfringing uses" standard applies to authors and vendors of peer-to-peer file sharing software (notably excepting those who "actively induce" copyright infringement through "purposeful, culpable expression and conduct").
I could have just linked BUT I think that copying for personal use is rather appropriate in a story like this. See? A small unknown and rather likable company always looking out to protect the common man against big evil media companies, Sony, stood their ground and gave us the VCR and made it so that ungrateful snots like DJRumpy don't even remember that once the media he has been spoonfed since birth wanted to deny him this.
Mind you, all this is an old story that has to deal with one of those "everyone knows the social rule but nobody follows it because we are all special but others should follow it because they are not".
Fox has a point, oh my god I will go to hell for that, TV broadcasting gets it money by giving YOU TV and advertisters eyeballs to watch the commercials. It is pretty straight forward entertainment advertising. You watch the pretty girl strut her stuff, you take in that smoking might be good for you after all. Soaps made this very clear, "Women of the world, you like endless drama that never ever gets to a point? Well, we at your favority washing powder brand (and since we give you this lovely tv, surely we are) give you what you want, both on the TV and in the washing machine!".
Of course, this social contract sorta goes two ways. The advertiser actually has to put on a show. The girl has to be pretty, the TV for women absolutely devoid of any intelligence whatsoever. It is NOT part of the contract to completely saturate the viewer and remove any actual entertainment no matter how vapid from the stream. You shouldn't put the pretty girl completely inside the giant pack of smokes. The deal is, nice bits stick out to make it worth looking at her!
TV now has a cable cost, special channels cost extra subscription fees and in exchange for this, we get even MORE commercials!
It is NOT that people hate commercials, see the superbowl ads but it is that when you PUT them freaking everywhere and turn the super bowl into 3 hours of commercials and 15 minutes of action (actually, ain't it already that? Perhaps I should not have used the most boring sport in the world as an example) with the action overlaid and surrounded by ads people just get annoyed.
If you put on a production of a classical piece of theather say eh.... Hamlet ( I do know more then one piece, I assure you! I am not an American after all, no I don't have to proof it) and put up a message "this brought to you by Coca Cola" few would mind. You might even put a banner beside the stage for the brand. BUT if you start to go "To drink Coke or to drink a lesser known brand" people will start to get upset.
Soaps were okay to be interrupted every now and then, after all it gave the women sometime to do some actually bloody housework. It always struck me as odd how women can claim house work is so fucking hard when there is all this TV aimed at them during their supposed working hours. How many TV programs are on during the day aimed at men at work? ZERO! Men don't get to lay on the sofa and watch TV all day dammit! We got to mess around with that new sexy teen girl intern non-stop! How about my wife mess around with the intern and I lay on the
This is rather fundamental to the entire copyright debate when it starts to focus on artists being unable to make a living anymore.
Well, how is that different from ANY other profession being unable to make a living anymore? In Holland it has been decades since the coal mines closed and not because of lack of coal. How would you, or indeed any artist, support any law dictating the installation of gas networks to keep the demand for goal high?
It goes further. With printing and the translation of the bible came the possibility for the faithful to get their fairy tales from outside the church and my my did the church hate that and not just try to ban this but committed murder on a massive scale to stop this.
Tech, changes, the, WORLD. It is not just about you holding a computer in your pocket now more powerful then early spaceships BUT it is about our very society changing because of tech. Anything from the pill, to the automobile and the post office box (before the post office box, women could not post without everyone knowing about it, mail became a great liberator long before the Internet).
And that change isn't always good for everyone. Modern artists have taken the bread away from many of their predecessors. Recorded music? Took the place of live music. Once every movie theater had a small band playing and of course movies took the place of real life artists on the stage.
You can't stop tech, well you can, red flag in front of cars and all that but ultimately, tech will prevail because for the majority, the good outweighs the bad. The Internet will continue to be. You can't stop the digital age just because you don't like that bits can be copied at near zero cost and be distributed for only slightly more.
And if you argue different then why do you care about artist who make millions while ordinary factory workers are unable to feed their families because that same tech has outsourced all their jobs? When those same millionaire artists flee the country to tax heavens and buy foreign goods?
Oh sure, not all artists are like that, they just dream of being like that one day.
There is still a normal average salery to be made as an artist, you just got to work hard, just like everyone else and not hope people will just buy your 1 good song with ten crap ones for what amounts to several times minimum wage EVEN if you had to perform it live. 5 minutes 1 dollar == 12 dollars an hour wage. Takes more time to write it? Take me more then 8 hours to keep an 8 hour job to and I know who is in more danger of throwing in his back.
The world has changed, either change with it or get steamrolled. If the artists cared that much about it all, let them strike. I will happily they get the same treatment as the coal workers around the world.
And if I sound angry? In Holland we have a recession, so how does the leftist (elitist) green party react? Impose taxes on public transport reimbursement payed by employers so you can make art and antiques have a lower tax rate. FUCK THAT.
And you might think I am extreme but when I voice this in real life, you see people going... well I don't agree, sure I don't buy any music anymore either and I am totally untouched by any plea from the industry or artists... oh wait... I do sorta agree.
Once people loved artists and were fans of record labels. Now that is no longer true except for the future burger flipper generation.
And if you don't believe me... do you have adblocker installed? Yes? So it is okay to steal from websites but not artists?
See? Once the people have been pushed to far, they can stand by and see a group destroyed with no remorse whatsoever. Human beings ain't nice and the world does not owe you a living.
Samsung can answer the question "You and what army of killer robots". Apple can answer the question "You and what army of hipsters who are to worried about their lattes to ever make a stand for anything". I know which one I would be more afraid to anger.
People forget that Samsung is an old fashioned giant, it may not have as much cash but it has business in nearly everything under the sun. Anything from ships to military to the chips that Apple so desperately needs. Samsung could loose all its mobile income tomorrow and it easily survive on everything else with full backing of the Korean government and its US military customers. Apple would be bankrupt and torn to shreds by its share holders and nobody has any incentive to keep it going. The world needs Samsung as a supplier, Apple? Nah.
It is what happens when you outsource all your actual production, just in time delivery sounds nice, but it means your suppliers own you once they realize this themselves. GOOD just in time delivery makes certain that you have a choice of suppliers and that none of them can survive without your business. Samsung can EASILY survive without and in fact, if they stop shipping to Apple, they kill a major competitor to their own products.
And if you think Apple can just go to someone else... they are all asian giants to. All of who would be perfectly happy to see Apple die and take over its business.
A lot of business stability exists because the status quo is just easier to keep. But Apple upset that, when you stir the calm waters, the sharks surface.
So, the cops should not deal with crime in schools because there is crime on the streets? That is awfully specific. How about crimes on the side-walk? Is crime in the park alright?
Sounds like it was written by a church lady, someone who just wants to be outright at the indecency going on everywhere, even if she has to take a stepladder and binoculars around with her to find it.
The issue is rather simple, it is the insane privacy expectations of people where they are outraged if the police has any clearance to do their job and are equally outraged when the police has any clearance to do their job. "How dare you pull me over to test me for drink driving, why don't you shoot that guy with a laser guided missle because I think he might or might have had something to drink and I just don't like how he is driving". The British tabloids are REALLY good at this, whine about drink drivers in one article, then whine about the horrid effects of drunk drivers getting actually sentenced to anything at all. "Get them off our roads! You can't deny someone access to their car!"
And people wonder why politicians don't listen to the voter. The issue isn't that every voter has a different demand, it is that every single voter has multiple contradicting demands.
It was the devastated by war Soviet Union that launched the first satellite, the first man, the first space station, has the record for longest space presence AND is right now the only country of launching humans into space...
They were the first when they were poor and are the only now they are poor again. Something tells me that having a rich street full of day traders does not have much impact on a nations capacity to venture into space. It really isn't all that expensive either if you don't fluff you budget with pork.
Can Russia do it (again)? No idea, but being a backward 3rd world nation sure didn't stop them before. And the west is currently begging to use that 3rd world nations tech. And it is not Russia that right now is bankrupting itself with insane military spending.
The tech for setting up a moonbase exist, all it takes right now is will power. And in many ways, going into space is a lot easier then fixing the economy, or getting the banks under control etc etc. It is hard but managable task that more or less requires a leader who tells the rocket scientist to do it, and give them food, shelter and materials. Russian scientists are not spoiled, they farm their own food and launch rockets.
This is the BSA, not paying for their members software is PIRACY!!! And TREASON!!! And TERRORISM!!! And THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!
This is the BSA, they don't care about right or wrong, they care that you payed the maximum fee possible and don't you dare sell on licenses forced on you that you don't need. That would mean the terrorists have won!
As others have calculated, the valuation of Facebook if divided by the number of users is pretty damn high, especially since it isn't actually selling anything to their users. Rather it sells its users. To people who are used to buy in very large bulks to the tune of maybe a fraction of a cent per user.
You might THINK TV advertising is big and moves a lot of money, and you be right. It is BIG but so is the industry. TV's are everywhere and everywhere they sell Coca-Cola, yes even in places where people are dying of thirst. It is one of the funniest things you ever encounter, well, if your sense of humor is sick, that you can go within walking distance of people dying and being dead beside the road and see advertising for luxury products. That is why advertising is big, IT IS EVERYWHERE. It operates how on tiny amounts, just is massive bulk.
And Facebook, as alien as the thought might be to its fans, does NOT have bulk. Or rather, the one thing it has bulk off, nobody wants. LOTS OF SMALL GROUPS. The problem with advertising on the internet is that it is to specialist. There is an internet forum out there for furry, star trek, romney voting black hindu linebackers... but who on earth has a product to sell to them?
Facebook users are not a meaningful demographic. Precisely BECAUSE facebook knows so much about you, you loose value as a product for advertisers. If you are not their target, they don't want you. So from its not all that many users (compared to say viewers world-wide of a bond movie, or a Soccer championship, or the Olympics) only a very small subset is of interest to any particular advertiser. TV is much easier, they don't know who the fuck is watching their commercial but they know it is a lot so it is like shooting fish in a barrel with a needle, or something like that, they understand the metrics know how to play it.
Don't believe me? Fine, try this. DISCUSS, ANY single facebook advertising campaign that you talked about at work with a co-worker. Any? Even one? Okay... now name a DOZEN tv ads that you talked about with a co-worker. See?
BUT the people in Wall Street are desperate, they need SOMETHING to speculate in. Many were buying Facebook stock in the hope of the price immidiately going up and selling it as soon as possible. They were not investing, they were not looking at Facebook as a long term business, they just wanted to cash in quick on stock selling low and going up. And it didn't. Mostly because there were no long term investors so a lot of the buyers had no choice but to sell because they had bought with borrowed money.
But what else to speculate in? Real investing, putting your money down in a business in the hope it slowly grows over many years and then pays you back, that takes to fucking long and anyway, invest in what? Nobody is doing anything anymore, it is almost like all theother assholes with cast are just waiting to speculate or something!!!
So they saw Facebook, thought, this is going to go up because if they didn't, they would have nothing and so made up the scenario's in which Facebook would go up and they could all get rich quick and someone else would do the real investing in whatever Facebooks business plan happens to be.
This is what happens when you let gamblers run your economy.
This was done by the USSR, Jews wanted to leave for Israel? Not before you settled your debt which strangely non-jews just didn't seem to have.
Mind you, another version of it could be extremely radical. Any refugee from a country who goes back to that country on holiday, can stay there... instant end to economic refugee's.
This plan makes sense if you truly believe in the free market and capitalism. It is basically just one hotel saying that if you pay in another hotel, you can't sleep in their rooms. But who believes in the free market and capitalism anymore.
Yes I think it is a GREAT idea for YOUR company. And when your company completely screwed it up, your client will either pay my company to fix the mess OR be one less competitor for my clients.
Maybe next time you won't ask competitors for business advice.
I am not just being incredibly funny here (shut up), I have had many a request from the contacts of clients who came to me by reference with the question if I could put that last finishing touches on an outsourced project. Yes, yes I could, if you last finishing touches is another way of saying put the thing out of its misery.
I have seen web applications where EVERY page included EVERY bit of the code, not via includes, copy pasted. So that the menu code existed complete in over 40 or so files. If you don't catch the full horror because you can't imagine someone so stupid, yes, that meant changing a menu entry (of course they were hardcoded) meant changing 40 files. But don't worry,to keep you from getting bored, over time the menu code had changed so a simple search and replace would NOT do the trick.
I have seen web application meant for heavy concurrent usage where the ENTIRE user tabel was loaded into memory to then be filtered for the user attempting to login or perform any other action. Yes that was amazing to watch during beta with a dozen users. The plan was that at launch the userbase should be between 100k and 200k based on other sites developed inhouse. And what they were worry about was memory.... HOW ABOUT FRICKING LOAD TIMES. They could even grasp that even with just 1 concurrent user and 100k users in the DB, it would still not exactly be lightening fast.
There are far more stories and some which you just wouldn't believe if I told you. Mind you, it doesn't mean using a native IT company is any better. Major Dutch IT company that gets all the big contracts forgot to include any indexes on system used by a large temp agency, they only ever tested with 1-2 records in the database before the bug list was so big testing was stopped.
There are some REAL screw-ups in IT but at least with locals you can get them in the office and laugh at them. When it is another culture on another continent in a totally different timezone. That becomes a bit harder. And maybe there are bright Indians and Chinese people. Maybe... but maybe the bright ones got better options then work in a coding sweatshop where the only criteria is low price? Maybe the bright ones are working on their own stuff for their own companies?
Basically outsourcing means going for the lowest bidder. It all sounds very attractive but ultimately the problem with outsourcing is this, your coders motives are NOT inline with that of your company.
An internal employee should care about your company... well same goes for the outsourced guy, he cares, about HIS company. Every problem you have just is more money for them.
About the only outsourcing that works is when a company basically buys a product from an other company, the way you outsource your car needs to a garage etc etc. And there is a reason large fleet owners have their own garages. Just think about that for a sec.
This is NOT about AI, this is a bunch of whankers whanking.
READ the chat logs, it is not a human trying to see if an AI can hold a realistic conversation but rather to see if it can trip a human/ai up. This is like trying to proof cats can't see color by poking its eyes out and then saying "AHA! See it can't see color". Or me proving you are a lousy at playing catch by shooting you in the head then mocking your mother for bearing such a clumsy child.
Hell, read the chat logs and try to tell who the humans are. It is sad to say that AI chat programs are still not that much more advanced then Lisa or whatever the name was but whats the point in trying to test if chat AI can respond to insane questioning? Congrats, you are now the winner of the bot best capable of holding a conversation with an insane person. WHOO!
Don't let these people near the flying car concept, their test track would include surface to air missles because you know, that is a good test of a flying car.
Please god tell me you are not my bus driver. Or work on intensive care. Or a nuclear plant. Well, pretty much anywhere. Please tell me you are sitting in your mothers basement with nothing more dangerous around you then a tool to access all the knowledge in the world and a unhinged mind... OH FUCK!
I mean, how dare a Dutch jeweller put up high quality camera's so the two gentlemen who merely came here to seek someone elses fortune be caught on camera red handed AND still the mother of one claims it wasn't one of them and they never did anything because to a certain type of people, getting hold of a weapon in a country were guns are restricted is perfectly normal.
Can you guess the skin color of these mis understood individuals who are so pitiful for being so scared by an unarmed man they had to shoot him multiple times at close range. And then were so remorseful they rather succesfully managed to flee except that thanks to high-def images everyone knew who they were so the few family members who didn't do anything to stop them getting weapons convinced them to turn them in.
When profiling certain races doesn't lead to a 99% success rate in finding criminals, racial profiling will stop. I had a rather nice view of some bleeding hearts results at profiling at Weesp train station today, a check for tickets atthe exit. Gosh, whites, asians even a few blacks. And two middle eastern type. Fat, heads shaved at the back... gosh... they didn't have tickets. HOW suprising! But no racial profiling. Everyone has to show tickets, just to catch two. That is efficient, else they might feel picked on... Maybe if just ONCE these types bought a ticket, the only they got one if they got access to a free one.
Oh, it is not everyone with a brown skin, but with clothing, hairstyles, attitude, it is just to easy to pick them out.
But oh no, that is racist. No it fucking isn't. It is culturist. It is the simple knowledge that certain cultures lack morals. Mod me down all you want, that is what they done in Belgium, anyone who dared to be anti-PC was ignored... and the resentment just grew and grew. Right now the issue can the still be solved, another decade or two and someone somewhere with charisma and nasty ideas will build a powerbase on that resentment and then every bleeding heart will ask "how could this happen".
Geez, dude, go against the flow! What a way to be mainstream, buy the most produced MP3 player in the world. Some people just have to conform I guess. Me, I like to be different!
Sometimes you read stories about people who think you can swim under continents or that USA is the only country or Jesus spoke English or whatever other subject someone found to show how stupid people can be. The person who wrote the Icon article is so stupid he went and wrote an article on himself about stupid people.
Does this person think that a box with an arrow out of the bottom indicated a trap door up ahead? I certainly wouldn't be looking for a trapdoor for a way out of a building, no telling what you might fall into. Mind you, the entrance is even worse! Why is there no sign to the stairs so I can get on top of the building so I can drop down into it?
Ages ago, Seinfeld did a routine in which he ridiculed how airplanes have to fly a certain speed as if there are speed limits up there around airports or something... well yes you stupid moronic idiot, how can anyone be so fucking retarded as to think that airplanes lining up for approach one behind the other can fly whatever speed they want. Since he did this early on, I never caught the Seinfeld craze, to me he was always just a really stupid retard who made jokes for stupid people. Real humor is done by really smart people who point out the funny stuff in life, not how ignorant they are of the in ability for aircraft to fly through each other while landing.
Cars used to come with keys and these keys were inserted into the ignition and then turned to start the car and turned again to turn the car off. This was so common that everyone just assumed this was the way things are done. Cue some retarded engineer who thought he could do things differently, added a start button that then has to be hold for 5-30 seconds depending on how insane the engineer is. Cue people dying because they can't figure out in a panic how to turn the engine off. We use icons and standardized methods because people know them so they can use them without having to think.
Another famous example is for web developers, the humble shopping cart icon. Some designers think it is funny to mess with this and voila, people can't find it. Your business might have a basket like product that is oh so funny to use as a shopping cart but your customers don't make the connection because they don't do their shopping in a dog-sled. (Example from some UI design book).
And gosh, do you know how can tell a true idiot who tries to look clever by pointing out where he doesn't get how the world works? He totally fails to think through his own complaints and solutions.
The Floppy disk icon for saving. First off, I checked. Not a SINGLE application I use actually has such an icon. Not a one. Most use simple text in a menu and are designed for people who use CTRL-S. Some other idiot above wonders why you even need to save manually when you exit an application. BECAUSE YOU FREAKING WASTE OF SPACE, THE FUCKING APPLICATION CAN'T READ THE DISEASED ROTTING MASS YOU CALL A BRAIN. You might NOT want to save the waste of bits you call work. God knows nobody else does.
The brainiacs suggestion as an alternative? A cloud icon. WHOOO! Because what if I am not saving to the cloud? Anyway, from Amazon's robust performance I am not entirely convinced they are not saving their files to a big stack of floppies.
Next up, radio buttons... does he think they are icons? Apparently... how the fuck is a user dumb enough not to know single select buttons in physical form going to know these UI elements are called radio buttons? Or indeed care, such a person is to busy trying to convince rent-o-kill to come fix his mouse problem.
Clipboards... he shows exactly where almost everyone will still see these in daily use. He doesn't even bother coming up with an alternative, because no alternative would make sense. What next, a pair of scissors for cut is wrong to? WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU SUGGEST INSTEAD?
I will skip a few because my rage level is getting out of control.
The world's most advanced phones include an icon that looks like a phone handset that you haven't touched i
Do these companies even hire a PR expert anymore? EA/Bioware recently made a big mistake as well. With their MMO SWTOR they have been having some small problems. The game is boring all around and end-game is non-existent. So... they came up with an idea. How about we give everyone, regardless of how long they played a free month... BUT only if they reached level 50...
Reaching level 50 since launch isn't that hard to be honest HOWEVER it is not how some PAYING customers play MMO's. Especially since one you are there, there is nothing to do. Some play lots of alts, some play very infrequent. BOTH these groups PAY. But customers with an account a month old who grinded to 50 got a free month, customer who subscribed since launch did not.
There was much outrage and Bioware/EA relented and made the condition level 10 legacy which is still forcing you to play for level but doesn't require you to play an account till level 50 but one to (25 or something when legacy points start counting) and then you can play as many alts (on a single server) as you want.
IT IS STILL A FUCKING STUPID bit of logic but far few people didn't qualify because of it.
And all this? A promotion campaign to keep paying customers from leaving a game that is considered unfinished (what is there works, there just isn't a lot there, it is one of the most bare-boned MMO's I ever seen. Blizzard refined Sony's Everquest and made it into WoW. Bioware put WoW through a filter and published it as SWTOR sadly all the taste was left behind in the filter. It is a very smooth drink, but then so is a glass of water. But I ordered Whiskey!) and so why the qualification of how many XP points of whatever kind a player accumilated. PAYED subscribers are the ones you hope to keep, so, let the qualifier be, payed subscribers.
No, I am not just going off topic, basic PR is like basic laywer advice. SHUT THE FUCK UP. In any case, your lawyer will tell you to keep your fucking mouth shut. Let your lawyer speak for you and even then, 9 times out of 10 the best thing to say is NOTHING.
Neither of these fuckup's should have gotten past PR, there is no way anyone with a brain could not see the shit storm these announcements would raise while accomplishing NOTHING. I do not use Photoshop and I wasn't unhappy with SWTOR... BOTH these PR goofballs made my blood boil with nerd rage and you can find me ranting my impotent rage on the net...
Someone somewhere could have done cost benefit analysis and reasoned out that simply fixing the bug and simply giving all accounts of say 2 months a free month would have cost far less and would have given them POSITIVE feedback rather then now it costing MORE and leaving a NEGATIVE impression.
PR isn't about spinning things, it is about effective communication with the public (as said, I am not a Adobe customer) so that what you do, benefits you. Some beancounter might do some sums but if the most economic sum ends up raising a storm of protest so you have to do the more expensive solution anyway, you not only wasted time on two approaches, you now have to pay extra for negative publicity.
If you EVER have to deal with the public, just keep this in mind. If there is a change the cheap plan is going to cause protest, go with the more expensive one. It will be cheaper in the long run.
Just run both examples here with the more expensive plan from the start.
Adobe announces patches for its popular Photoshop product free for all version still in use.
Bioware rewards long standing customers with a free month as thanks for their support.
Hoora's all around, what good chaps these megacorps really are.
PR, it is really simple once you stop listening to the beancounters.
The Olympics are a vile joke, they always have been and always will be. Didn't the nazi's hosting it? It simply going on after Munich because not a single jock wanted to give up their chance at a bit of fame? The boycots by the USSR and the USA in turn show this clearly already?
It is only held so the rich can show off on tax-payers money they don't pay any of themselves while bankrupting a nation. Not a single event has actually helped the economy. Goes for all such events. For god sakes, the South African Soccer laugh off had the hookers hoping for extra profits. THINK about it, the average WHITE soccer fan, is he looking for a BLACK hooker? Not all soccer fans as racist hooligans you say? Indeed, so you are saying that there are nice respectable soccer fans... going to hookers?
Brits will be paying the price for this rich men show off for decades, just as all the other nations before and new nations are lining up to pay for work shy rich boy athletes to show how they fail in modern society. Nobody without free money can afford to take part and the sports are all the sports nobody cares about. Really, stick throwing? How wonderful.
The simplest proof how unwanted the olympics are is to ban all subsidy. Let the origanisers build their own buildings, pay rent to the nation it is hosted in, pay for their own security etc etc. They couldn't even hold it for one hour on a commercial basis. So instead it is a tax payers event for the rich while the poor have to evicted from their houses and put up with months of congestion, construction and invasion of privacy and reduction of liberty.
The BBC had a show about a lawyer in the days of slavery fighting for justice... except the justice of the day was something different. Is a judge and jury who believe slavery is the right normal and correct thing to do, ruling in favor of a slaver, corrupt? Often, society is split and the other side can seem to be malicious, insane, corrupt, just interested in their own goals, hypocrites and downright evil. But the other side thinks exactly the same of you. There are few people in the world who do "evil" thinking they are doing evil.
Even lawyers get themselves being able to sleep at night by telling themselves that "everyone has the right to a fair trial" means "I should do anything to get my client of regardless of the facts".
We are at a crossroad, once again, in western society. Copyright has always been changing when tech changed the world, it came into being because of new tech and it will change. But the powers that be want things to remain the same because to them, that is how it has always been and the new situation offers no benefits. Copyright as we know it now was NOT introduced to benefit artists but to protect publishers from the demands of artists to be payed. But over the years, things settled down, slowly and with many lawsuits and up-heaving all that again, that is not going to happen quietly.
The Pirate Bay is used by some artists to promote themselves, you can find artists claiming this themselves. But they don't fit in the traditional media worldview. Even today, most bands dream is to be discovered and to get a record deal... they might or might not have read about the lousy deal most bands who don't become the absolute top get but the dream is still there.
It will have to change, you can't stop tech. Content can be so easily distributed now it would like trying to ban book printing (which was tried for centuries over and over again) and is STILL being proposed right now in Germany by making it economically impossible to print the rantings of an pathetic german painter again. And do you think this stops his diseased followers? Hardly.
There are so many P2P methods and so many versions of each method that all this anti piratebay activity shows is just how silly it is to fight it. if nothing else, the only effect I have seen is that more and more people know that there are alternatives to paying for content. Google "thepiratebay mirror" and endless informative results that work perfectly.
Granted, Brein has openly stated that they know this to have no effect and that it is just so they can lay the foundation for more radical approaches. You didn't think they were going to give up did you?
But the genie is out of the bag. Not only does the public know about it, PRO-piracy is now enough to get you elected into government. Don't forget the green parties started much the same. The Dutch Socialist Party SP, started out as a protest party to far left of the labour party. They are now twice the size and tied for 1st/2nd place with the VVD (Corruption party).
And if the left wing parties don't change their tune (the trade union FNV is making itself a target of mockery for coming out in favor of copyright on behalve of its non-existant artist members) they will be replaced just as the older parties were replaced before them.
But while change is happening, the battles are nasty, ugly and seemingly without end. This is one of the battles. The outcome eventually is without doubt, you cannot put the cat back in the bag, but that doesn't mean there won't be a fight that must be fought. And if history has anything to say about it, blood will be shed.
By your logic, since a restaurant is in the business of selling food, if it actually sold any food, it would reduce the demand for food and be hurting its own business.
In general, if you try to sell something, people want to see you can deliver. This is especially true in the anti-piracy business where there are a lot of shouters who claim they can protect your stuff but none that are able to deliver. thepiratebay.se is proof of that.
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MAYBE if you actually read a book you might learn WHY Muslims have such high need of FEMALE doctors. That is because female patients have to be seen by a female doctor or not at all. The statistic sounds so nice but underneath it is a regime of segregated care where QUALITY of care was of no importance whatsoever.
And 60% of doctors also tells you nothing of the total number of doctors available OR that women (childbirth) need doctors a LOT more then men.
Careful with your statistics young one, they can be tricky things and easily be used to fool you.
You are not looking out for those you look down up on in secret, the grand-parent was talking about AOL practice to keep people paying for dialup access when they already moved to broadband connections. So it is NOT for people who still use ONLY dialup, it is a scam operated by AOL to convince people that without their dialup service, broadband would not work or people would loose all their email, so people end up paying a high price for just their email account.
Nice. We shall free the slaves! But not by actually telling them they are free, that way we avoid to much hassle.
I wonder if YOU would be to hear that there WAS a lawsuit pretty much for that reason a Long long time ago...
Home and professional recording
One other major consequence of the Betamax technology's introduction to the U.S. was the lawsuit Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios (1984, the "Betamax case"), with the U.S. Supreme Court determining home videotaping to be legal in the United States, wherein home videotape cassette recorders were a legal technology since they had substantial noninfringing uses. This precedent was later invoked in MGM v. Grokster (2005), where the high court agreed that the same "substantial noninfringing uses" standard applies to authors and vendors of peer-to-peer file sharing software (notably excepting those who "actively induce" copyright infringement through "purposeful, culpable expression and conduct").
I could have just linked BUT I think that copying for personal use is rather appropriate in a story like this. See? A small unknown and rather likable company always looking out to protect the common man against big evil media companies, Sony, stood their ground and gave us the VCR and made it so that ungrateful snots like DJRumpy don't even remember that once the media he has been spoonfed since birth wanted to deny him this.
Mind you, all this is an old story that has to deal with one of those "everyone knows the social rule but nobody follows it because we are all special but others should follow it because they are not".
Fox has a point, oh my god I will go to hell for that, TV broadcasting gets it money by giving YOU TV and advertisters eyeballs to watch the commercials. It is pretty straight forward entertainment advertising. You watch the pretty girl strut her stuff, you take in that smoking might be good for you after all. Soaps made this very clear, "Women of the world, you like endless drama that never ever gets to a point? Well, we at your favority washing powder brand (and since we give you this lovely tv, surely we are) give you what you want, both on the TV and in the washing machine!".
Of course, this social contract sorta goes two ways. The advertiser actually has to put on a show. The girl has to be pretty, the TV for women absolutely devoid of any intelligence whatsoever. It is NOT part of the contract to completely saturate the viewer and remove any actual entertainment no matter how vapid from the stream. You shouldn't put the pretty girl completely inside the giant pack of smokes. The deal is, nice bits stick out to make it worth looking at her!
TV now has a cable cost, special channels cost extra subscription fees and in exchange for this, we get even MORE commercials!
It is NOT that people hate commercials, see the superbowl ads but it is that when you PUT them freaking everywhere and turn the super bowl into 3 hours of commercials and 15 minutes of action (actually, ain't it already that? Perhaps I should not have used the most boring sport in the world as an example) with the action overlaid and surrounded by ads people just get annoyed.
If you put on a production of a classical piece of theather say eh.... Hamlet ( I do know more then one piece, I assure you! I am not an American after all, no I don't have to proof it) and put up a message "this brought to you by Coca Cola" few would mind. You might even put a banner beside the stage for the brand. BUT if you start to go "To drink Coke or to drink a lesser known brand" people will start to get upset.
Soaps were okay to be interrupted every now and then, after all it gave the women sometime to do some actually bloody housework. It always struck me as odd how women can claim house work is so fucking hard when there is all this TV aimed at them during their supposed working hours. How many TV programs are on during the day aimed at men at work? ZERO! Men don't get to lay on the sofa and watch TV all day dammit! We got to mess around with that new sexy teen girl intern non-stop! How about my wife mess around with the intern and I lay on the
This is rather fundamental to the entire copyright debate when it starts to focus on artists being unable to make a living anymore.
Well, how is that different from ANY other profession being unable to make a living anymore? In Holland it has been decades since the coal mines closed and not because of lack of coal. How would you, or indeed any artist, support any law dictating the installation of gas networks to keep the demand for goal high?
It goes further. With printing and the translation of the bible came the possibility for the faithful to get their fairy tales from outside the church and my my did the church hate that and not just try to ban this but committed murder on a massive scale to stop this.
Tech, changes, the, WORLD. It is not just about you holding a computer in your pocket now more powerful then early spaceships BUT it is about our very society changing because of tech. Anything from the pill, to the automobile and the post office box (before the post office box, women could not post without everyone knowing about it, mail became a great liberator long before the Internet).
And that change isn't always good for everyone. Modern artists have taken the bread away from many of their predecessors. Recorded music? Took the place of live music. Once every movie theater had a small band playing and of course movies took the place of real life artists on the stage.
You can't stop tech, well you can, red flag in front of cars and all that but ultimately, tech will prevail because for the majority, the good outweighs the bad. The Internet will continue to be. You can't stop the digital age just because you don't like that bits can be copied at near zero cost and be distributed for only slightly more.
And if you argue different then why do you care about artist who make millions while ordinary factory workers are unable to feed their families because that same tech has outsourced all their jobs? When those same millionaire artists flee the country to tax heavens and buy foreign goods?
Oh sure, not all artists are like that, they just dream of being like that one day.
There is still a normal average salery to be made as an artist, you just got to work hard, just like everyone else and not hope people will just buy your 1 good song with ten crap ones for what amounts to several times minimum wage EVEN if you had to perform it live. 5 minutes 1 dollar == 12 dollars an hour wage. Takes more time to write it? Take me more then 8 hours to keep an 8 hour job to and I know who is in more danger of throwing in his back.
The world has changed, either change with it or get steamrolled. If the artists cared that much about it all, let them strike. I will happily they get the same treatment as the coal workers around the world.
And if I sound angry? In Holland we have a recession, so how does the leftist (elitist) green party react? Impose taxes on public transport reimbursement payed by employers so you can make art and antiques have a lower tax rate. FUCK THAT.
And you might think I am extreme but when I voice this in real life, you see people going... well I don't agree, sure I don't buy any music anymore either and I am totally untouched by any plea from the industry or artists... oh wait... I do sorta agree.
Once people loved artists and were fans of record labels. Now that is no longer true except for the future burger flipper generation.
And if you don't believe me... do you have adblocker installed? Yes? So it is okay to steal from websites but not artists?
See? Once the people have been pushed to far, they can stand by and see a group destroyed with no remorse whatsoever. Human beings ain't nice and the world does not owe you a living.
Samsung can answer the question "You and what army of killer robots". Apple can answer the question "You and what army of hipsters who are to worried about their lattes to ever make a stand for anything". I know which one I would be more afraid to anger.
People forget that Samsung is an old fashioned giant, it may not have as much cash but it has business in nearly everything under the sun. Anything from ships to military to the chips that Apple so desperately needs. Samsung could loose all its mobile income tomorrow and it easily survive on everything else with full backing of the Korean government and its US military customers. Apple would be bankrupt and torn to shreds by its share holders and nobody has any incentive to keep it going. The world needs Samsung as a supplier, Apple? Nah.
It is what happens when you outsource all your actual production, just in time delivery sounds nice, but it means your suppliers own you once they realize this themselves. GOOD just in time delivery makes certain that you have a choice of suppliers and that none of them can survive without your business. Samsung can EASILY survive without and in fact, if they stop shipping to Apple, they kill a major competitor to their own products.
And if you think Apple can just go to someone else... they are all asian giants to. All of who would be perfectly happy to see Apple die and take over its business.
A lot of business stability exists because the status quo is just easier to keep. But Apple upset that, when you stir the calm waters, the sharks surface.
And THIS people is why you don't outsource or have 18 year olds make ANY decisions.
A product name means nothing so the only thing you got to do is make sure there are NO negative associations.
Associations with WW2, the nazi's, the holocaust and general nastyness... not the most brilliant marketing move.
Why not label your new black paint as Nigger and be done with it.
Mind you, this is an American company, only Americans would name military hardware after races wiped out by that same military.
So, the cops should not deal with crime in schools because there is crime on the streets? That is awfully specific. How about crimes on the side-walk? Is crime in the park alright?
Sounds like it was written by a church lady, someone who just wants to be outright at the indecency going on everywhere, even if she has to take a stepladder and binoculars around with her to find it.
The issue is rather simple, it is the insane privacy expectations of people where they are outraged if the police has any clearance to do their job and are equally outraged when the police has any clearance to do their job. "How dare you pull me over to test me for drink driving, why don't you shoot that guy with a laser guided missle because I think he might or might have had something to drink and I just don't like how he is driving". The British tabloids are REALLY good at this, whine about drink drivers in one article, then whine about the horrid effects of drunk drivers getting actually sentenced to anything at all. "Get them off our roads! You can't deny someone access to their car!"
And people wonder why politicians don't listen to the voter. The issue isn't that every voter has a different demand, it is that every single voter has multiple contradicting demands.
MS switching to an opensource codec on a closed DRM machine to get around software patents...
You are FUNNY!
It was the devastated by war Soviet Union that launched the first satellite, the first man, the first space station, has the record for longest space presence AND is right now the only country of launching humans into space...
They were the first when they were poor and are the only now they are poor again. Something tells me that having a rich street full of day traders does not have much impact on a nations capacity to venture into space. It really isn't all that expensive either if you don't fluff you budget with pork.
Can Russia do it (again)? No idea, but being a backward 3rd world nation sure didn't stop them before. And the west is currently begging to use that 3rd world nations tech. And it is not Russia that right now is bankrupting itself with insane military spending.
The tech for setting up a moonbase exist, all it takes right now is will power. And in many ways, going into space is a lot easier then fixing the economy, or getting the banks under control etc etc. It is hard but managable task that more or less requires a leader who tells the rocket scientist to do it, and give them food, shelter and materials. Russian scientists are not spoiled, they farm their own food and launch rockets.
This is the BSA, not paying for their members software is PIRACY!!! And TREASON!!! And TERRORISM!!! And THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!
This is the BSA, they don't care about right or wrong, they care that you payed the maximum fee possible and don't you dare sell on licenses forced on you that you don't need. That would mean the terrorists have won!
As others have calculated, the valuation of Facebook if divided by the number of users is pretty damn high, especially since it isn't actually selling anything to their users. Rather it sells its users. To people who are used to buy in very large bulks to the tune of maybe a fraction of a cent per user.
You might THINK TV advertising is big and moves a lot of money, and you be right. It is BIG but so is the industry. TV's are everywhere and everywhere they sell Coca-Cola, yes even in places where people are dying of thirst. It is one of the funniest things you ever encounter, well, if your sense of humor is sick, that you can go within walking distance of people dying and being dead beside the road and see advertising for luxury products. That is why advertising is big, IT IS EVERYWHERE. It operates how on tiny amounts, just is massive bulk.
And Facebook, as alien as the thought might be to its fans, does NOT have bulk. Or rather, the one thing it has bulk off, nobody wants. LOTS OF SMALL GROUPS. The problem with advertising on the internet is that it is to specialist. There is an internet forum out there for furry, star trek, romney voting black hindu linebackers... but who on earth has a product to sell to them?
Facebook users are not a meaningful demographic. Precisely BECAUSE facebook knows so much about you, you loose value as a product for advertisers. If you are not their target, they don't want you. So from its not all that many users (compared to say viewers world-wide of a bond movie, or a Soccer championship, or the Olympics) only a very small subset is of interest to any particular advertiser. TV is much easier, they don't know who the fuck is watching their commercial but they know it is a lot so it is like shooting fish in a barrel with a needle, or something like that, they understand the metrics know how to play it.
Don't believe me? Fine, try this. DISCUSS, ANY single facebook advertising campaign that you talked about at work with a co-worker. Any? Even one? Okay... now name a DOZEN tv ads that you talked about with a co-worker. See?
BUT the people in Wall Street are desperate, they need SOMETHING to speculate in. Many were buying Facebook stock in the hope of the price immidiately going up and selling it as soon as possible. They were not investing, they were not looking at Facebook as a long term business, they just wanted to cash in quick on stock selling low and going up. And it didn't. Mostly because there were no long term investors so a lot of the buyers had no choice but to sell because they had bought with borrowed money.
But what else to speculate in? Real investing, putting your money down in a business in the hope it slowly grows over many years and then pays you back, that takes to fucking long and anyway, invest in what? Nobody is doing anything anymore, it is almost like all theother assholes with cast are just waiting to speculate or something!!!
So they saw Facebook, thought, this is going to go up because if they didn't, they would have nothing and so made up the scenario's in which Facebook would go up and they could all get rich quick and someone else would do the real investing in whatever Facebooks business plan happens to be.
This is what happens when you let gamblers run your economy.
This was done by the USSR, Jews wanted to leave for Israel? Not before you settled your debt which strangely non-jews just didn't seem to have.
Mind you, another version of it could be extremely radical. Any refugee from a country who goes back to that country on holiday, can stay there... instant end to economic refugee's.
This plan makes sense if you truly believe in the free market and capitalism. It is basically just one hotel saying that if you pay in another hotel, you can't sleep in their rooms. But who believes in the free market and capitalism anymore.
Yes I think it is a GREAT idea for YOUR company. And when your company completely screwed it up, your client will either pay my company to fix the mess OR be one less competitor for my clients.
Maybe next time you won't ask competitors for business advice.
I am not just being incredibly funny here (shut up), I have had many a request from the contacts of clients who came to me by reference with the question if I could put that last finishing touches on an outsourced project. Yes, yes I could, if you last finishing touches is another way of saying put the thing out of its misery.
I have seen web applications where EVERY page included EVERY bit of the code, not via includes, copy pasted. So that the menu code existed complete in over 40 or so files. If you don't catch the full horror because you can't imagine someone so stupid, yes, that meant changing a menu entry (of course they were hardcoded) meant changing 40 files. But don't worry,to keep you from getting bored, over time the menu code had changed so a simple search and replace would NOT do the trick.
I have seen web application meant for heavy concurrent usage where the ENTIRE user tabel was loaded into memory to then be filtered for the user attempting to login or perform any other action. Yes that was amazing to watch during beta with a dozen users. The plan was that at launch the userbase should be between 100k and 200k based on other sites developed inhouse. And what they were worry about was memory.... HOW ABOUT FRICKING LOAD TIMES. They could even grasp that even with just 1 concurrent user and 100k users in the DB, it would still not exactly be lightening fast.
There are far more stories and some which you just wouldn't believe if I told you. Mind you, it doesn't mean using a native IT company is any better. Major Dutch IT company that gets all the big contracts forgot to include any indexes on system used by a large temp agency, they only ever tested with 1-2 records in the database before the bug list was so big testing was stopped.
There are some REAL screw-ups in IT but at least with locals you can get them in the office and laugh at them. When it is another culture on another continent in a totally different timezone. That becomes a bit harder. And maybe there are bright Indians and Chinese people. Maybe... but maybe the bright ones got better options then work in a coding sweatshop where the only criteria is low price? Maybe the bright ones are working on their own stuff for their own companies?
Basically outsourcing means going for the lowest bidder. It all sounds very attractive but ultimately the problem with outsourcing is this, your coders motives are NOT inline with that of your company.
An internal employee should care about your company... well same goes for the outsourced guy, he cares, about HIS company. Every problem you have just is more money for them.
About the only outsourcing that works is when a company basically buys a product from an other company, the way you outsource your car needs to a garage etc etc. And there is a reason large fleet owners have their own garages. Just think about that for a sec.
This is NOT about AI, this is a bunch of whankers whanking.
READ the chat logs, it is not a human trying to see if an AI can hold a realistic conversation but rather to see if it can trip a human/ai up. This is like trying to proof cats can't see color by poking its eyes out and then saying "AHA! See it can't see color". Or me proving you are a lousy at playing catch by shooting you in the head then mocking your mother for bearing such a clumsy child.
Hell, read the chat logs and try to tell who the humans are. It is sad to say that AI chat programs are still not that much more advanced then Lisa or whatever the name was but whats the point in trying to test if chat AI can respond to insane questioning? Congrats, you are now the winner of the bot best capable of holding a conversation with an insane person. WHOO!
Don't let these people near the flying car concept, their test track would include surface to air missles because you know, that is a good test of a flying car.
The Shuttle only stayed up for a few days, the Russians had permanent presence for year after year.
Oh and launches? The Russians never stopped their and still going. The Americans are begging for rides.
Steve Jobs did not have a reality distortion field, he was just an American in America.
You are going to HATE Windows 8. Then again, who isn't.
Please god tell me you are not my bus driver. Or work on intensive care. Or a nuclear plant. Well, pretty much anywhere. Please tell me you are sitting in your mothers basement with nothing more dangerous around you then a tool to access all the knowledge in the world and a unhinged mind... OH FUCK!
I mean, how dare a Dutch jeweller put up high quality camera's so the two gentlemen who merely came here to seek someone elses fortune be caught on camera red handed AND still the mother of one claims it wasn't one of them and they never did anything because to a certain type of people, getting hold of a weapon in a country were guns are restricted is perfectly normal.
Can you guess the skin color of these mis understood individuals who are so pitiful for being so scared by an unarmed man they had to shoot him multiple times at close range. And then were so remorseful they rather succesfully managed to flee except that thanks to high-def images everyone knew who they were so the few family members who didn't do anything to stop them getting weapons convinced them to turn them in.
When profiling certain races doesn't lead to a 99% success rate in finding criminals, racial profiling will stop. I had a rather nice view of some bleeding hearts results at profiling at Weesp train station today, a check for tickets atthe exit. Gosh, whites, asians even a few blacks. And two middle eastern type. Fat, heads shaved at the back... gosh... they didn't have tickets. HOW suprising! But no racial profiling. Everyone has to show tickets, just to catch two. That is efficient, else they might feel picked on... Maybe if just ONCE these types bought a ticket, the only they got one if they got access to a free one.
Oh, it is not everyone with a brown skin, but with clothing, hairstyles, attitude, it is just to easy to pick them out.
But oh no, that is racist. No it fucking isn't. It is culturist. It is the simple knowledge that certain cultures lack morals. Mod me down all you want, that is what they done in Belgium, anyone who dared to be anti-PC was ignored... and the resentment just grew and grew. Right now the issue can the still be solved, another decade or two and someone somewhere with charisma and nasty ideas will build a powerbase on that resentment and then every bleeding heart will ask "how could this happen".
Geez, dude, go against the flow! What a way to be mainstream, buy the most produced MP3 player in the world. Some people just have to conform I guess. Me, I like to be different!
Sometimes you read stories about people who think you can swim under continents or that USA is the only country or Jesus spoke English or whatever other subject someone found to show how stupid people can be. The person who wrote the Icon article is so stupid he went and wrote an article on himself about stupid people.
Does this person think that a box with an arrow out of the bottom indicated a trap door up ahead? I certainly wouldn't be looking for a trapdoor for a way out of a building, no telling what you might fall into. Mind you, the entrance is even worse! Why is there no sign to the stairs so I can get on top of the building so I can drop down into it?
Ages ago, Seinfeld did a routine in which he ridiculed how airplanes have to fly a certain speed as if there are speed limits up there around airports or something... well yes you stupid moronic idiot, how can anyone be so fucking retarded as to think that airplanes lining up for approach one behind the other can fly whatever speed they want. Since he did this early on, I never caught the Seinfeld craze, to me he was always just a really stupid retard who made jokes for stupid people. Real humor is done by really smart people who point out the funny stuff in life, not how ignorant they are of the in ability for aircraft to fly through each other while landing.
Cars used to come with keys and these keys were inserted into the ignition and then turned to start the car and turned again to turn the car off. This was so common that everyone just assumed this was the way things are done. Cue some retarded engineer who thought he could do things differently, added a start button that then has to be hold for 5-30 seconds depending on how insane the engineer is. Cue people dying because they can't figure out in a panic how to turn the engine off. We use icons and standardized methods because people know them so they can use them without having to think.
Another famous example is for web developers, the humble shopping cart icon. Some designers think it is funny to mess with this and voila, people can't find it. Your business might have a basket like product that is oh so funny to use as a shopping cart but your customers don't make the connection because they don't do their shopping in a dog-sled. (Example from some UI design book).
And gosh, do you know how can tell a true idiot who tries to look clever by pointing out where he doesn't get how the world works? He totally fails to think through his own complaints and solutions.
The Floppy disk icon for saving. First off, I checked. Not a SINGLE application I use actually has such an icon. Not a one. Most use simple text in a menu and are designed for people who use CTRL-S. Some other idiot above wonders why you even need to save manually when you exit an application. BECAUSE YOU FREAKING WASTE OF SPACE, THE FUCKING APPLICATION CAN'T READ THE DISEASED ROTTING MASS YOU CALL A BRAIN. You might NOT want to save the waste of bits you call work. God knows nobody else does.
The brainiacs suggestion as an alternative? A cloud icon. WHOOO! Because what if I am not saving to the cloud? Anyway, from Amazon's robust performance I am not entirely convinced they are not saving their files to a big stack of floppies.
Next up, radio buttons... does he think they are icons? Apparently... how the fuck is a user dumb enough not to know single select buttons in physical form going to know these UI elements are called radio buttons? Or indeed care, such a person is to busy trying to convince rent-o-kill to come fix his mouse problem.
Clipboards... he shows exactly where almost everyone will still see these in daily use. He doesn't even bother coming up with an alternative, because no alternative would make sense. What next, a pair of scissors for cut is wrong to? WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU SUGGEST INSTEAD?
I will skip a few because my rage level is getting out of control.
The world's most advanced phones include an icon that looks like a phone handset that you haven't touched i
Do these companies even hire a PR expert anymore? EA/Bioware recently made a big mistake as well. With their MMO SWTOR they have been having some small problems. The game is boring all around and end-game is non-existent. So... they came up with an idea. How about we give everyone, regardless of how long they played a free month... BUT only if they reached level 50...
Reaching level 50 since launch isn't that hard to be honest HOWEVER it is not how some PAYING customers play MMO's. Especially since one you are there, there is nothing to do. Some play lots of alts, some play very infrequent. BOTH these groups PAY. But customers with an account a month old who grinded to 50 got a free month, customer who subscribed since launch did not.
There was much outrage and Bioware/EA relented and made the condition level 10 legacy which is still forcing you to play for level but doesn't require you to play an account till level 50 but one to (25 or something when legacy points start counting) and then you can play as many alts (on a single server) as you want.
IT IS STILL A FUCKING STUPID bit of logic but far few people didn't qualify because of it.
And all this? A promotion campaign to keep paying customers from leaving a game that is considered unfinished (what is there works, there just isn't a lot there, it is one of the most bare-boned MMO's I ever seen. Blizzard refined Sony's Everquest and made it into WoW. Bioware put WoW through a filter and published it as SWTOR sadly all the taste was left behind in the filter. It is a very smooth drink, but then so is a glass of water. But I ordered Whiskey!) and so why the qualification of how many XP points of whatever kind a player accumilated. PAYED subscribers are the ones you hope to keep, so, let the qualifier be, payed subscribers.
No, I am not just going off topic, basic PR is like basic laywer advice. SHUT THE FUCK UP. In any case, your lawyer will tell you to keep your fucking mouth shut. Let your lawyer speak for you and even then, 9 times out of 10 the best thing to say is NOTHING.
Neither of these fuckup's should have gotten past PR, there is no way anyone with a brain could not see the shit storm these announcements would raise while accomplishing NOTHING. I do not use Photoshop and I wasn't unhappy with SWTOR... BOTH these PR goofballs made my blood boil with nerd rage and you can find me ranting my impotent rage on the net...
Someone somewhere could have done cost benefit analysis and reasoned out that simply fixing the bug and simply giving all accounts of say 2 months a free month would have cost far less and would have given them POSITIVE feedback rather then now it costing MORE and leaving a NEGATIVE impression.
PR isn't about spinning things, it is about effective communication with the public (as said, I am not a Adobe customer) so that what you do, benefits you. Some beancounter might do some sums but if the most economic sum ends up raising a storm of protest so you have to do the more expensive solution anyway, you not only wasted time on two approaches, you now have to pay extra for negative publicity.
If you EVER have to deal with the public, just keep this in mind. If there is a change the cheap plan is going to cause protest, go with the more expensive one. It will be cheaper in the long run.
Just run both examples here with the more expensive plan from the start.
Adobe announces patches for its popular Photoshop product free for all version still in use.
Bioware rewards long standing customers with a free month as thanks for their support.
Hoora's all around, what good chaps these megacorps really are.
PR, it is really simple once you stop listening to the beancounters.
The Olympics are a vile joke, they always have been and always will be. Didn't the nazi's hosting it? It simply going on after Munich because not a single jock wanted to give up their chance at a bit of fame? The boycots by the USSR and the USA in turn show this clearly already?
It is only held so the rich can show off on tax-payers money they don't pay any of themselves while bankrupting a nation. Not a single event has actually helped the economy. Goes for all such events. For god sakes, the South African Soccer laugh off had the hookers hoping for extra profits. THINK about it, the average WHITE soccer fan, is he looking for a BLACK hooker? Not all soccer fans as racist hooligans you say? Indeed, so you are saying that there are nice respectable soccer fans... going to hookers?
Brits will be paying the price for this rich men show off for decades, just as all the other nations before and new nations are lining up to pay for work shy rich boy athletes to show how they fail in modern society. Nobody without free money can afford to take part and the sports are all the sports nobody cares about. Really, stick throwing? How wonderful.
The simplest proof how unwanted the olympics are is to ban all subsidy. Let the origanisers build their own buildings, pay rent to the nation it is hosted in, pay for their own security etc etc. They couldn't even hold it for one hour on a commercial basis. So instead it is a tax payers event for the rich while the poor have to evicted from their houses and put up with months of congestion, construction and invasion of privacy and reduction of liberty.
Nice.
The BBC had a show about a lawyer in the days of slavery fighting for justice... except the justice of the day was something different. Is a judge and jury who believe slavery is the right normal and correct thing to do, ruling in favor of a slaver, corrupt? Often, society is split and the other side can seem to be malicious, insane, corrupt, just interested in their own goals, hypocrites and downright evil. But the other side thinks exactly the same of you. There are few people in the world who do "evil" thinking they are doing evil.
Even lawyers get themselves being able to sleep at night by telling themselves that "everyone has the right to a fair trial" means "I should do anything to get my client of regardless of the facts".
We are at a crossroad, once again, in western society. Copyright has always been changing when tech changed the world, it came into being because of new tech and it will change. But the powers that be want things to remain the same because to them, that is how it has always been and the new situation offers no benefits. Copyright as we know it now was NOT introduced to benefit artists but to protect publishers from the demands of artists to be payed. But over the years, things settled down, slowly and with many lawsuits and up-heaving all that again, that is not going to happen quietly.
The Pirate Bay is used by some artists to promote themselves, you can find artists claiming this themselves. But they don't fit in the traditional media worldview. Even today, most bands dream is to be discovered and to get a record deal... they might or might not have read about the lousy deal most bands who don't become the absolute top get but the dream is still there.
It will have to change, you can't stop tech. Content can be so easily distributed now it would like trying to ban book printing (which was tried for centuries over and over again) and is STILL being proposed right now in Germany by making it economically impossible to print the rantings of an pathetic german painter again. And do you think this stops his diseased followers? Hardly.
There are so many P2P methods and so many versions of each method that all this anti piratebay activity shows is just how silly it is to fight it. if nothing else, the only effect I have seen is that more and more people know that there are alternatives to paying for content. Google "thepiratebay mirror" and endless informative results that work perfectly.
Granted, Brein has openly stated that they know this to have no effect and that it is just so they can lay the foundation for more radical approaches. You didn't think they were going to give up did you?
But the genie is out of the bag. Not only does the public know about it, PRO-piracy is now enough to get you elected into government. Don't forget the green parties started much the same. The Dutch Socialist Party SP, started out as a protest party to far left of the labour party. They are now twice the size and tied for 1st/2nd place with the VVD (Corruption party).
And if the left wing parties don't change their tune (the trade union FNV is making itself a target of mockery for coming out in favor of copyright on behalve of its non-existant artist members) they will be replaced just as the older parties were replaced before them.
But while change is happening, the battles are nasty, ugly and seemingly without end. This is one of the battles. The outcome eventually is without doubt, you cannot put the cat back in the bag, but that doesn't mean there won't be a fight that must be fought. And if history has anything to say about it, blood will be shed.
By your logic, since a restaurant is in the business of selling food, if it actually sold any food, it would reduce the demand for food and be hurting its own business.
In general, if you try to sell something, people want to see you can deliver. This is especially true in the anti-piracy business where there are a lot of shouters who claim they can protect your stuff but none that are able to deliver. thepiratebay.se is proof of that.