"I mean, MANY innocent civies have been killed by Saddam and his regime and there's no reason to think that was going to stop.... a quick look at the political climate there should convince anyone that it wouldn't exactly be a peaceful transfer of power."
And which leads us to the question: so what? What you've said could apply to any of a dozen or more nation-states throughout Africa and the rest of the world. But for some reason we're not engaged in a war defending the citizenry in any of those other countries...
You've apparently drank the Bush Kool-Aid. First, we needed to invade Iraq because of presumed links to Al-Qaeda (false), then it was their nuclear ambitions and biologcal weapons programs (none), and then finally it came down to the fact that Saddam was a "bad" man and we needed to "protect" his people and bring the burning touch of democracy to them. With capitalism coming along for the ride.
Obtaining the rights to new oil blocks and clearing the way to restructing Iraq's Production Sharing Contracts to benefit US-based corporations had nothing to do with it, of course. Nor did the fact that we were in a slump and a nice little war always has a way of fueling the economy, while incidentally providing nice profits for those involved. Or the fact that Bush felt he needed to prove his manhood and the power of the US to others in the region, in the process accomplishing what his father failed to do in a previous little war.
Shock and awe, indeed.
A previous little war, one might also mention, that was also done in a noble effort to protect the nation of Kuwait from outside aggression. While also safeguarding a few oil fields, refineries, ports, and so on. Hardly worth mentioning, really.
"... understand and comprehend what it all means and how that might affect their behavior."
Which works both ways, I suppose. I mean, your behavior has an effect as well.
"I have not been buying CDs for about 8 or 9 years..."
So what would it take for you to legally buy music? Or are you using the unrealistic "I'm never buying until I can get a 512kbps Ogg track for a penny" rationalization?
If I buy a book and put it on a shelf in my home, and the shelf is labeled "shared", it that copy of the book now unauthorized? I mean, everyone in my house can read it.
"... your theoretically-better-and-can-be-used-for-everything-but-totally-pain-in-the-pass-to-work-with $FAVORITE_FRAMEWORK."
There you go, making assumptions again. I don't HAVE a favorite framework, or language, for that matter. I use what's appropriate for the task at hand, or, as more often the case, what the client mandates they want used for a specific job.
So you're setting up a "theoretically-better-and-can-be-used-for-everything-but-totally-pain-in-the-pass-to-work-with" straw man so you can try knocking him down with your RoR fanaticism.
"While theoretically you are correct, it doesn't apply to 99% of the web applications."
Is that related to the fact that 99% of all quoted facts are BS made up on the spot?
You're wrong, and you're guessing based on your own apparently very limited experience. Why not just admit that for "simple" CRUD applications ROR is great, for some it still works well, and that for other applications it may not be a good fit... or not work at all.
That's untrue. Plenty of people had second VCRs, or even bought el-cheapo two-slot versions at K-Mart, but stopped short of combing through the back pages of Popular Mechanics looking for a descrambler once MacroVision was released.
I've seen the numbers. MacroVision had a MAJOR impact on "casual copying", blank tape sales, and pre-recorded VHS tape sales.
Fine. But don't point to all of those problems and then go out on a Friday night, grab a beer, and then go to a movie. Or worse, tell me about all of those problems and then turn to see what you just downloaded off bittorrent.
Bit hypocritical, that.
(And I kind of doubt you're typing this on a $200 OLPC laptop during your spare time at an African CARE station.)
But at any rate, the point is that movies and films and books still cost money to make. Distribution costs aside, if we want them then we need to figure out have to cover the costs of creation and production.
Yeah, it's not like there are newspapers and forums and blogs and reviews and user commentary and friends and family and screenings and trailers and dozens of other ways to tell if a movie is any good beforehand...
The Kindle display is like reading text that's 75% black on a 25% gray screen. In other words, the contrast isn't that great. Use it under less-than-optimum lighting conditions, and readability is even worse.
So to compensate, one has to bump up the font size quite a bit, which gives you proportionally less text per page.
Now the iPhone has a brilliant high-contrast high-definition backlit display, with 100% black on 100% white. So you can easily read text on an iPhone that's quite a bit smaller than you can read comfortably on the Kindle, which in turn means that the differences in screen size aren't nearly as significant as they would seem at first glance.
Except the folks that spent $50-$200 million dollars or so producing said movie in the first place. You know, those people?
"Infinite supply -> No cost."
Seems to me that there's not an infinite number of people willing to spend their own time and money creating and producing work for nothing. Sooner ofr later they have to eat.
So, production costs of $100,000,000 + distribution costs of $0 still equals production costs of $100,000,000.
Ditto. The goal isn't to stop everyone. They can't. But even just dropping piracy levels would be a major win.
Best comparison is when Hollywood added MacroVision to VHS and stopped the average Joe from engaging in casual copying. Yes, you could get a box to break the protection, but 99% of the people out there never did. Too much hassle.
"With a download they have nothing in it and can just delete it if it sucks."
If all of the movies sucked people would stop downloading them and spend their time doing anything else worthwhile. Guess what? They keep downloading movies and demanding something for nothing.
As such, I have to say your comment is just another rationalization.
"I opened this story ready to comment about encryption... and bang! It was the first reply!"
Which is kind of sad, actually. Are there that many people out there who think they're automatically entitled to free music, movies, books, games, and software?
"The only thing their minds are capable of is greed."
Since the primary identifying characteristics of a pirate is NOT paying for content, and in the process keeping as much of their own money as possible, I'd say that "greed" works both ways.
"A similar decision will have to be made by Verizon Wireless, which this week applied ITS reality distortion field to trying to make us believe the second-largest U.S. mobile operator actually intends to open its wireless network to non-Verizon devices and services. Yeah, right.
Verizon's move is straight from the playbook of the old AT&T back in the 1970s, when that company was trying to keep third-party telephone handsets from being connected to its network. If you are old enough you may remember AT&T expressed great fear back then that telephones not from its Western Electric subsidiary (now Alcatel-Lucent) would somehow "damage" the telephone network. It was the same excuse used to keep old guys like me from wearing jeans in high school.
We will, no doubt, see similar behavior from Verizon as it slowly releases network interface specifications then embarks on a certification program that will surprisingly reject as incompatible a lot of perfectly fine mobile phones. But this is months or even years away. The company's intent right now is to show the appearance of motion."
Or in other words, saying it is one thing. Doing it is something else...
Actually, I've seen a bit of analysis recently that says that Google DOESN'T want to win the spectrum auction. Presumably, they're just in it so the bidding goes high enough to keep the "allow any software and any device" clause alive and kicking.
Besides the fact that Google's CEO Schmidt is on Apple's board, and that Apple and Google have a few things going on together, and bidding against Google would strain relations a bit, why would Apple go up against Google? Several things can happen:
1) Google bids, Google wins. Google allows any software and any device as per the rules. Apple can put an iPhone or iPad or whatever on it WITHOUT spending billions on spectrum or infrastructure.
2) Google bids up the price, someone else wins. Same net result for Apple. Wholesale access to 700 MHz, without spending billions.
3) Apple bids and loses to Google or someone else. Functionally the same end result as 1 and 2.
4) Apple bids, wins, and now has spends billions on spectrum and building out a nationwide service. And all just so they can now allow competitors to buy access at wholesale prices?
I think some industry types are overestimating just how much the public follows the off-hand comments of a CEO at a luncheon.
Besides, the fact that a 3G phone is coming isn't even a secret. If you wanted an iPhone for Christmas, you wanted one, and despite knowing full well that another one was coming next year. Heck, I bought one in June, knowing full well that Apple could easily introduce a newer version in November. I'd even figured out who'd get the old one if it happened.
And Cringely was right about one thing. Google announced that they were bidding today. But the press release also made another thing quite clear: their application does not include any partners.
So. No partners means no Apple partnership, which means that there was nothing for AT&T's CEO to find out. Which in turn means that his comments were relatively innocent, and not "a $1 billion message to Apple CEO Steve Jobs." By my watch, it took less than ten hours for Cringely's consipracy theory to be shot down. Could be a new record.
Of course, you could spin it that Jobs, quaking in his boots at all of the iPhone sales he's already lost, called up Schmidt, pulled out of a planned multi-billion dollar deal, and Google obligingly issued the press release to cover his tracks. Yeah, right.
"... is also denying the student the choice of maintaining their privacy."
Ah... don't use it? Or just use it for whatever campus-specific courseware that requires it.
But seriously, any student who thinks their email is private (third-party or not) is in serious denial. Heck, just connecting to the school's network pretty much compromises any non-encrypted request or transmission...
"Seems like it would be heavier, more sensitive to water/rain/mist/fog, harder to see in bright sunlight..."
Easier to read in sunlight, wants bright light. Lighter than your average NYT bestselling hardback. And I take it you've never had a collection of books mildew?
"There is still nothing like curling up with a good book."
You're just acclimated to it. No doubt the people who were brought up reading scrolls bitched long and hard about the new "book" thingamajig. "Why, they even CUT the paper. You can't just keep reading, but actually have to stop and turn each and every page!"
"Well if you see the DRM on the Kindle as a selling point..."
I don't, but I'm sure it had a lot to do with convincing the content-types to come on board. No mainstream content, no mainstream device.
"... still make a healthy profit as BAEN books seem to do."
That topic is open for debate. Baen releases a lot of books for free in electronic form in order to generate print sales. This works because, currently, there isn't really a good solution for reading ebooks and as such most people will pay for the printed versions if they think they like the story or author.
But will that model continue to work as we transition into a reader-based world?
Let's say we go a generation or five down the road and have a slim, light, long-lasting, durable affordable reader with a nice bright high-resolution high-contrast screen (OLED?) that can be read under any lighting conditions. Instant downloads of content, magazines, and so on. Which, in turn makes reading ebooks such a pleasure that the market starts transitioning more and more towards that format.
So in that case, do you still give away your content for free when there's no "print" version to buy?
Remember the early digital camera market? Electronic book readers are currently at the 1981 Sony Mavica digital camera stage , where everyone looks at it and says, "Why on earth would you use that and not film?" Now, just a couple of decades down the road, how hard to you have to look to find a film camera at Best Buy?
And in many cases it's still not because digital is better, quality-wise, than film. But it's definitely good enough for most purposes, and it wins hands-down in the convenience category.
And then the content for this amazing device comes from where, exactly?
Amazon was able to line up a significant number of publishers for the Kindle, much like Apple with the iPod. And I imagine that DRM was a deal-breaker for a great many of them, not wanting to see revenues from the latest NYT bestseller go down in flames when everyone and his kid brother emails a free copy to his friends.
Unlike music, there isn't a better quality version of a typical novel or non-fiction book. Text is text. Like movies, a great many are seen or read just once. And unlike music, there are no concerts to attend, t-shirts to buy, or none of the other junk that's supposed to be purchased instead to justify "free" sharing of music.
Miss out on enough publishers, and you have Apple and the Apple TV in the video market. Or perhaps even Blu-Ray/HD DVD. Not enough content to justify owning the device.
"Last time I checked, I believe it's said that in 10,000 years all of the material of which speak so alarmingly would still be radioactive. Well, at least as radioactive as the raw ore from which it came. You know, like rocks? Which we've had buried in the ground unshielded, leaking dangerous trace amounts of radioactively into our groundwater supplies for a few billion years or so. I tell you, someone should DO something!
Not to belittle this, but we've had two major, ultimately worst-case radiological events occur: Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And yet, both of those sites are habitable today. Millions of people live there, work there, play there. Let's repeat that. Two atomic BOMBS.
And you [the other poster] want to bitch about the "dangers" of a material fused into glass, tucked behind shields, and buried in a mountain?"
"... we will need to take a long hard look at what the long term effects will be..."
I have to disagree. We already know the dangers and the solutions. Sitting around and rehashing the same old tired arguments only serves the purposes of those who'd be perfectly happy if all we did was sit around and rehash the same old tired arguments. Why do you think that the opponents to a bill in Congress are only too happy to send it off to a committee?
Slashdot Mirror
"I mean, MANY innocent civies have been killed by Saddam and his regime and there's no reason to think that was going to stop. ... a quick look at the political climate there should convince anyone that it wouldn't exactly be a peaceful transfer of power."
And which leads us to the question: so what? What you've said could apply to any of a dozen or more nation-states throughout Africa and the rest of the world. But for some reason we're not engaged in a war defending the citizenry in any of those other countries...
You've apparently drank the Bush Kool-Aid. First, we needed to invade Iraq because of presumed links to Al-Qaeda (false), then it was their nuclear ambitions and biologcal weapons programs (none), and then finally it came down to the fact that Saddam was a "bad" man and we needed to "protect" his people and bring the burning touch of democracy to them. With capitalism coming along for the ride.
Obtaining the rights to new oil blocks and clearing the way to restructing Iraq's Production Sharing Contracts to benefit US-based corporations had nothing to do with it, of course. Nor did the fact that we were in a slump and a nice little war always has a way of fueling the economy, while incidentally providing nice profits for those involved. Or the fact that Bush felt he needed to prove his manhood and the power of the US to others in the region, in the process accomplishing what his father failed to do in a previous little war.
Shock and awe, indeed.
A previous little war, one might also mention, that was also done in a noble effort to protect the nation of Kuwait from outside aggression. While also safeguarding a few oil fields, refineries, ports, and so on. Hardly worth mentioning, really.
Or to translate: It's the oil, stupid.
"... understand and comprehend what it all means and how that might affect their behavior."
Which works both ways, I suppose. I mean, your behavior has an effect as well.
"I have not been buying CDs for about 8 or 9 years..."
So what would it take for you to legally buy music? Or are you using the unrealistic "I'm never buying until I can get a 512kbps Ogg track for a penny" rationalization?
"The moment you share it, it is unauthorized."
If I buy a book and put it on a shelf in my home, and the shelf is labeled "shared", it that copy of the book now unauthorized? I mean, everyone in my house can read it.
"A cd or track? $1 per track, or $0.33 / minute."
Wow. You only listen to a CD once, then throw it away? Are you one of those guys that only wears a pair of underwear one time before pitching it too?
Listen to a song 100 times as background music--which is pretty easy to do--and it's now $0.0033 / minute.
But it's nice to know that regardless of the facts, you've found your rationalization...
"... your theoretically-better-and-can-be-used-for-everything-but-totally-pain-in-the-pass-to-work-with $FAVORITE_FRAMEWORK."
There you go, making assumptions again. I don't HAVE a favorite framework, or language, for that matter. I use what's appropriate for the task at hand, or, as more often the case, what the client mandates they want used for a specific job.
So you're setting up a "theoretically-better-and-can-be-used-for-everything-but-totally-pain-in-the-pass-to-work-with" straw man so you can try knocking him down with your RoR fanaticism.
"While theoretically you are correct, it doesn't apply to 99% of the web applications."
Is that related to the fact that 99% of all quoted facts are BS made up on the spot?
You're wrong, and you're guessing based on your own apparently very limited experience. Why not just admit that for "simple" CRUD applications ROR is great, for some it still works well, and that for other applications it may not be a good fit... or not work at all.
That's untrue. Plenty of people had second VCRs, or even bought el-cheapo two-slot versions at K-Mart, but stopped short of combing through the back pages of Popular Mechanics looking for a descrambler once MacroVision was released.
I've seen the numbers. MacroVision had a MAJOR impact on "casual copying", blank tape sales, and pre-recorded VHS tape sales.
Fine. But don't point to all of those problems and then go out on a Friday night, grab a beer, and then go to a movie. Or worse, tell me about all of those problems and then turn to see what you just downloaded off bittorrent.
Bit hypocritical, that.
(And I kind of doubt you're typing this on a $200 OLPC laptop during your spare time at an African CARE station.)
But at any rate, the point is that movies and films and books still cost money to make. Distribution costs aside, if we want them then we need to figure out have to cover the costs of creation and production.
Yeah, it's not like there are newspapers and forums and blogs and reviews and user commentary and friends and family and screenings and trailers and dozens of other ways to tell if a movie is any good beforehand...
Think of the opportunity!
The Kindle display is like reading text that's 75% black on a 25% gray screen. In other words, the contrast isn't that great. Use it under less-than-optimum lighting conditions, and readability is even worse.
So to compensate, one has to bump up the font size quite a bit, which gives you proportionally less text per page.
Now the iPhone has a brilliant high-contrast high-definition backlit display, with 100% black on 100% white. So you can easily read text on an iPhone that's quite a bit smaller than you can read comfortably on the Kindle, which in turn means that the differences in screen size aren't nearly as significant as they would seem at first glance.
"Everybody benefits."
Except the folks that spent $50-$200 million dollars or so producing said movie in the first place. You know, those people?
"Infinite supply -> No cost."
Seems to me that there's not an infinite number of people willing to spend their own time and money creating and producing work for nothing. Sooner ofr later they have to eat.
So, production costs of $100,000,000 + distribution costs of $0 still equals production costs of $100,000,000.
Take that, and write a thesis on it.
Ditto. The goal isn't to stop everyone. They can't. But even just dropping piracy levels would be a major win.
Best comparison is when Hollywood added MacroVision to VHS and stopped the average Joe from engaging in casual copying. Yes, you could get a box to break the protection, but 99% of the people out there never did. Too much hassle.
Same applies here.
"With a download they have nothing in it and can just delete it if it sucks."
If all of the movies sucked people would stop downloading them and spend their time doing anything else worthwhile. Guess what? They keep downloading movies and demanding something for nothing.
As such, I have to say your comment is just another rationalization.
"I opened this story ready to comment about encryption... and bang! It was the first reply!"
Which is kind of sad, actually. Are there that many people out there who think they're automatically entitled to free music, movies, books, games, and software?
"The only thing their minds are capable of is greed."
Since the primary identifying characteristics of a pirate is NOT paying for content, and in the process keeping as much of their own money as possible, I'd say that "greed" works both ways.
I'll just quote from the same article:
"A similar decision will have to be made by Verizon Wireless, which this week applied ITS reality distortion field to trying to make us believe the second-largest U.S. mobile operator actually intends to open its wireless network to non-Verizon devices and services. Yeah, right.
Verizon's move is straight from the playbook of the old AT&T back in the 1970s, when that company was trying to keep third-party telephone handsets from being connected to its network. If you are old enough you may remember AT&T expressed great fear back then that telephones not from its Western Electric subsidiary (now Alcatel-Lucent) would somehow "damage" the telephone network. It was the same excuse used to keep old guys like me from wearing jeans in high school.
We will, no doubt, see similar behavior from Verizon as it slowly releases network interface specifications then embarks on a certification program that will surprisingly reject as incompatible a lot of perfectly fine mobile phones. But this is months or even years away. The company's intent right now is to show the appearance of motion."
Or in other words, saying it is one thing. Doing it is something else...
Actually, I've seen a bit of analysis recently that says that Google DOESN'T want to win the spectrum auction. Presumably, they're just in it so the bidding goes high enough to keep the "allow any software and any device" clause alive and kicking.
Besides the fact that Google's CEO Schmidt is on Apple's board, and that Apple and Google have a few things going on together, and bidding against Google would strain relations a bit, why would Apple go up against Google? Several things can happen:
1) Google bids, Google wins. Google allows any software and any device as per the rules. Apple can put an iPhone or iPad or whatever on it WITHOUT spending billions on spectrum or infrastructure.
2) Google bids up the price, someone else wins. Same net result for Apple. Wholesale access to 700 MHz, without spending billions.
3) Apple bids and loses to Google or someone else. Functionally the same end result as 1 and 2.
4) Apple bids, wins, and now has spends billions on spectrum and building out a nationwide service. And all just so they can now allow competitors to buy access at wholesale prices?
Sorry, not buying it.
I think some industry types are overestimating just how much the public follows the off-hand comments of a CEO at a luncheon.
Besides, the fact that a 3G phone is coming isn't even a secret. If you wanted an iPhone for Christmas, you wanted one, and despite knowing full well that another one was coming next year. Heck, I bought one in June, knowing full well that Apple could easily introduce a newer version in November. I'd even figured out who'd get the old one if it happened.
Net effect on Apple? Zip.
And Cringely was right about one thing. Google announced that they were bidding today. But the press release also made another thing quite clear: their application does not include any partners.
So. No partners means no Apple partnership, which means that there was nothing for AT&T's CEO to find out. Which in turn means that his comments were relatively innocent, and not "a $1 billion message to Apple CEO Steve Jobs." By my watch, it took less than ten hours for Cringely's consipracy theory to be shot down. Could be a new record.
Of course, you could spin it that Jobs, quaking in his boots at all of the iPhone sales he's already lost, called up Schmidt, pulled out of a planned multi-billion dollar deal, and Google obligingly issued the press release to cover his tracks. Yeah, right.
That's exactly how SJ would handle it.
"... is also denying the student the choice of maintaining their privacy."
Ah... don't use it? Or just use it for whatever campus-specific courseware that requires it.
But seriously, any student who thinks their email is private (third-party or not) is in serious denial. Heck, just connecting to the school's network pretty much compromises any non-encrypted request or transmission...
"... due to having lower production costs."
You mean, like having some guy sitting around doing nothing but writing for a year or so?
"Seems like it would be heavier, more sensitive to water/rain/mist/fog, harder to see in bright sunlight..."
Easier to read in sunlight, wants bright light. Lighter than your average NYT bestselling hardback. And I take it you've never had a collection of books mildew?
"What am I missing?"
Sounds like pretty much everything.
"There is still nothing like curling up with a good book."
You're just acclimated to it. No doubt the people who were brought up reading scrolls bitched long and hard about the new "book" thingamajig. "Why, they even CUT the paper. You can't just keep reading, but actually have to stop and turn each and every page!"
"Well if you see the DRM on the Kindle as a selling point..."
I don't, but I'm sure it had a lot to do with convincing the content-types to come on board. No mainstream content, no mainstream device.
"... still make a healthy profit as BAEN books seem to do."
That topic is open for debate. Baen releases a lot of books for free in electronic form in order to generate print sales. This works because, currently, there isn't really a good solution for reading ebooks and as such most people will pay for the printed versions if they think they like the story or author.
But will that model continue to work as we transition into a reader-based world?
Let's say we go a generation or five down the road and have a slim, light, long-lasting, durable affordable reader with a nice bright high-resolution high-contrast screen (OLED?) that can be read under any lighting conditions. Instant downloads of content, magazines, and so on. Which, in turn makes reading ebooks such a pleasure that the market starts transitioning more and more towards that format.
So in that case, do you still give away your content for free when there's no "print" version to buy?
Remember the early digital camera market? Electronic book readers are currently at the 1981 Sony Mavica digital camera stage , where everyone looks at it and says, "Why on earth would you use that and not film?" Now, just a couple of decades down the road, how hard to you have to look to find a film camera at Best Buy?
And in many cases it's still not because digital is better, quality-wise, than film. But it's definitely good enough for most purposes, and it wins hands-down in the convenience category.
And then the content for this amazing device comes from where, exactly?
Amazon was able to line up a significant number of publishers for the Kindle, much like Apple with the iPod. And I imagine that DRM was a deal-breaker for a great many of them, not wanting to see revenues from the latest NYT bestseller go down in flames when everyone and his kid brother emails a free copy to his friends.
Unlike music, there isn't a better quality version of a typical novel or non-fiction book. Text is text. Like movies, a great many are seen or read just once. And unlike music, there are no concerts to attend, t-shirts to buy, or none of the other junk that's supposed to be purchased instead to justify "free" sharing of music.
Miss out on enough publishers, and you have Apple and the Apple TV in the video market. Or perhaps even Blu-Ray/HD DVD. Not enough content to justify owning the device.
"But old people tend to prefer warmer climes like Florida or Arizona."
You don't live in Colorado, do you? We have more sunny days than California. (Ah, don't tell anyone, okay?)
This applies, so I'll cross-post:
"Last time I checked, I believe it's said that in 10,000 years all of the material of which speak so alarmingly would still be radioactive. Well, at least as radioactive as the raw ore from which it came. You know, like rocks? Which we've had buried in the ground unshielded, leaking dangerous trace amounts of radioactively into our groundwater supplies for a few billion years or so. I tell you, someone should DO something!
Not to belittle this, but we've had two major, ultimately worst-case radiological events occur: Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And yet, both of those sites are habitable today. Millions of people live there, work there, play there. Let's repeat that. Two atomic BOMBS.
And you [the other poster] want to bitch about the "dangers" of a material fused into glass, tucked behind shields, and buried in a mountain?"
"... we will need to take a long hard look at what the long term effects will be..."
I have to disagree. We already know the dangers and the solutions. Sitting around and rehashing the same old tired arguments only serves the purposes of those who'd be perfectly happy if all we did was sit around and rehash the same old tired arguments. Why do you think that the opponents to a bill in Congress are only too happy to send it off to a committee?
Inaction equals no action.