They have established rules that define what is encyclopedic.
For 14 year-olds who have never set foot inside a library, maybe. These "rules" were established way before Jimbo Wales ever plugged in a modem by organizations that actually adhere to them.
I would wager that in the past year they are more linked to than any other domain on Slashdot. Their Google rankings reflect this.
Wait, you think that Google rankings are based on actual pageviews? okaaay...
But rather than coders focusing on a "fast adaptive resampler tailored for transformations which mostly downsample," they'd have been better served by a "Summer of Marketing" and maybe some kid could come up with a better name than "GIMP" or a logo better than that stupid weasel, or whatever the hell it is.
Dude was a bad guy. FBI's job is to catch bad guys. FBI uses technology to catch bad guy. I'm not feeling the outrage here...
In a related story, local law enforcement shot a criminal who tried to hold up a 7-11 when he resisted arrest and brandished a knife. Reports say police used their "gun" technology to do this.
Point being, we know the FBI has the tech to do this stuff. It's only really a rights issue when they use it against non-criminals, or suspected criminals.
Apparently they see some magic gain in *not* making their product available in *preferred* distribution channels.
It's not magic, it's real money. Follow the entertainment trades like "Variety" and you will see that the studios are selling nice lump-sum deals for some movies into broadcast and cable distribution windows even before they hit the theaters. The domestic and foreign TV distribution channels are not going to pay this big money if the movie is widely distributed in one form or another prior to their contracted window of distribution. The studio *must* restrict online distribution -- or at least make a big show that it is trying to. It's part of their contractual obligations.
When a studio gets confident that the money it can make via "easy early global online" distribution will be enough to off-set the reduced fees it can charge its "old school" distribution partners, believe me, they'll pull the trigger on it. But the old school guys pay big bucks, and, currently, the new skool online direct-to-consumer model is, literally, pennies.
Just because the wrong word has been used wrong for a long time doesn't make it right.
Uh, that's *exactly* what makes it right. I am old enough to remember when "hacker" used to mean "computer enthusiast," and did not have any pejorative connotations. I am even so old as to remember when "hacker" meant "a bad golfer," before the word was co-opted by computer use entirely.
Seriously, "Piracy" now equals "Copyright Infringement." Stop fighting it, you're embarrassing the rest of us.
Like it or not, media influences language, and it's completely legit. If you want a fascinating and telling lesson in the process, look up the history of the word "geek."
And that information wants to be "Free," I suppose...?
That's fine. Of course, if all TPB was "link people to information," they would not be in this mess. What they did, was link people to *entertainment*, which I understand wants to be paid for, more times than not.
They are distinct (or should be, on any project larger than a local church site) from the graphic designer and the "DB Guy."
I've seen all sorts of crazy titles on their resumes, and that's fine, self-esteem and all that, but "HTML Guy" is how we refer to them.
Now, gather 'round and have some peppermints: Back in the Day, 1992-93, when I project-managed my first website, we were paying "Web Guys" six figure salaries, cuz basically Corporate needed it yesterday and it was all a big mystery. Had something to do with computers, they said, so the Web Guys came out of the IT Departments, bringing their blink tags with them. Within a very short time, it became clear that it was the Art and Content that mattered, and that's where the money went. (Best Analogy: On Broadway, nobody pays to watch the Stage Crew, essential though they may be.) The smart art and design people learned what they needed to hang out a Web shingle, and the HTML-only guys were sent back to the server room. Some of them became "designers" (they're usually the ones singing the praises of "neat" and "clean" designs; translation: they'll electrocute themselves if they try to open PhotoShop), but the smarter ones moved over to the Web DB side of things.
What do we call the "HTML-Only Guys" today? How about: "hungry"
The EFF always slips into high melodrama mode when they need to raise funds. Slashdot has served as one of their principal PR platforms perennially. It's pathetic and smarmy, but it's nothing new.
It should be no mystery why CCP would help a fan who was taking the game's back story seriously. Eve's back story makes that of Magic: The Gathering look like "The Brothers Karamazov."
Now, I'm a huge Eve fan -- huge -- but the whole set-up, like that of the great tabletop space opera game that preceded it, "Battletech," is merely a balsa wood framework designed to prop up as many reasons for different races to be at war with each other as possible. Eve is to Science Fiction what Everquest is to fantasy.
The OP was defending file-sharers with the pompous pretense that the poor, poor students who couldn't afford to download media on iTunes were somehow being culturally deprived. He was confusing -- either disingenuously or because he's an idiot -- culture and entertainment.
Europe doesn't import culture. It's got its own, and it's an old and lovely one, to be sure. What it does import from America is entertainment, which is a product of the American entertainment industry. No one is granting Hulu international distribution rights to their stuff currently because it runs counter to both existing contracts with overseas distributors as well as business plans that promise more revenue if the entertainment is distributed regionally. I know plenty of producers who just about break even with their costs via what they sell their domestic distribution rights for, and make all their profit on the international side.
THE BIRTH OF BABYLON 5 (the original notes from 1988)
Ya like B5? Do you think JMS could have made the same show if whoever was footing the bill could not count on X amount revenue from international distribution?
Entertainment is not culture. You know how I know this? Because I have a God-given right to my culture.
If people are going into debt to sustain the entertainment industry, something's wrong.
I agree. If they're such pop culture addicts, they should be getting their fix from the Public Library, getting the most from their tax dollars.
But it has nothing to do with the prices set by the entertainment industry for its wares. If Jobs had set iTunes downloads at $5.99 per song, it would have failed. He set it at $0.99/song, and it's a raging success. That's the price that the majority of people were willing to pay, and that's how markets work.
Worse - we are often forced to buy the same damn thing twice, such as when a standard changes (VHS to DVD)
No one is forcing you to do anything, sweetpea! My VHS machines still work fine. You upgrade consumer technology because you *want* to, not because you are forced to.
or because of draconian DRM that blocks us from moving our Cassettes/CDs to our Ipods/computers.
There's DRM on your cassettes and CDs!?! Wow, sounds rough on your world. See, here on earth, nothing prevents us from moving music from tape or CD onto our computers. Again, my condolences.
unless you prefer lossless CDs like I do, then you'll be spending a whole lot more OK, so you're an audiophile. It's always been an expensive hobby, even thirty years ago in the "analog age." Presumably you enjoy it, so God bless. But I'm sure you recognize that any audio encoded above 128 kps is targeted to a niche audience, and that elite hobbyist crowd should expect to pay a premium for the privilege.
Very few file-sharers have the capacity to buy the stuff they download, they are just tagging along in what is a part of their culture, a culture which the media conglomerate has built very effectively.
A dollar a song, Bunky. Or less. Two bucks for a video. There's your pop culture, reasonably priced. Listen to music for free on Pandora, or watch TV for free on Hulu. Your culture's all covered, Ace.
Oh, wait, you want PhotoShop and Dreamweaver for free? And free development tools are part of your culture... how again? Besides, your "culture" has already kicked out a response to this, it's called "Open Source Alternatives." Are they as good as the professional closed source originals? Usually not, but they're close, and they're free. Want better? Get a job.
I forget... what was your argument again? Oh, yeah: So, the choice is to be left out of the loop on everyday culture or pirate. And the funny thing about that is, wait until you have kids: you'll be praying to God every night that they somehow manage to avoid the "everyday culture."
Now, for international observers, perhaps your TV host is famous in the US, but US is not the world.
You would be the "international observer," Bunky. Slashdot is a US site which maintains a US perspective.
Stephen Colbert is an American satirist who frequently pokes fun at the French for their pompousness, lack of humor, and nationalism. So, mer-see bow-coo for reminding us how much truth there is in his parodies...
Oh, dear. I'm afraid your contribution violates our site's policy regarding Neutral Point of View and Verifiability. As a punishment, your account will be suspended for thirty days and you must wash my car.
I'm getting bloody sick of his internet vandalism.
And the rest of us continue to be amused by the notion that there are still people who think that a user-generated encyclopedia can ever be anything except a punchline.
Now, shoo! Run! Your jimmy-phone is ringing: somebody just changed a link in your Monty Python Filmography to a Rick Astley video, and only *YOU* can save us!
Wow. How can I find this wonderful world of make-believe? Will I find Candy Mountain? Oh please, oh please!
That's easy enough. Create something. Write a novel, perform some music. Simple, right?
What I would like, my "Candy Mountain," is where I can call in sick to work, not do anything for a whole day, and still get paid as if I did something productive.
Slashdot Mirror
They have had to balance quality with quantity.
They peddle information. Quality matters more.
They have established rules that define what is encyclopedic.
For 14 year-olds who have never set foot inside a library, maybe. These "rules" were established way before Jimbo Wales ever plugged in a modem by organizations that actually adhere to them.
I would wager that in the past year they are more linked to than any other domain on Slashdot. Their Google rankings reflect this.
Wait, you think that Google rankings are based on actual pageviews? okaaay...
Man oh man, does it get any better than this? I'm gonna go pop some corn...
But rather than coders focusing on a "fast adaptive resampler tailored for transformations which mostly downsample," they'd have been better served by a "Summer of Marketing" and maybe some kid could come up with a better name than "GIMP" or a logo better than that stupid weasel, or whatever the hell it is.
Dude was a bad guy. FBI's job is to catch bad guys. FBI uses technology to catch bad guy. I'm not feeling the outrage here...
In a related story, local law enforcement shot a criminal who tried to hold up a 7-11 when he resisted arrest and brandished a knife. Reports say police used their "gun" technology to do this.
Point being, we know the FBI has the tech to do this stuff. It's only really a rights issue when they use it against non-criminals, or suspected criminals.
Apparently they see some magic gain in *not* making their product available in *preferred* distribution channels.
It's not magic, it's real money. Follow the entertainment trades like "Variety" and you will see that the studios are selling nice lump-sum deals for some movies into broadcast and cable distribution windows even before they hit the theaters. The domestic and foreign TV distribution channels are not going to pay this big money if the movie is widely distributed in one form or another prior to their contracted window of distribution. The studio *must* restrict online distribution -- or at least make a big show that it is trying to. It's part of their contractual obligations.
When a studio gets confident that the money it can make via "easy early global online" distribution will be enough to off-set the reduced fees it can charge its "old school" distribution partners, believe me, they'll pull the trigger on it. But the old school guys pay big bucks, and, currently, the new skool online direct-to-consumer model is, literally, pennies.
Just because the wrong word has been used wrong for a long time doesn't make it right.
Uh, that's *exactly* what makes it right. I am old enough to remember when "hacker" used to mean "computer enthusiast," and did not have any pejorative connotations. I am even so old as to remember when "hacker" meant "a bad golfer," before the word was co-opted by computer use entirely.
Seriously, "Piracy" now equals "Copyright Infringement." Stop fighting it, you're embarrassing the rest of us.
Like it or not, media influences language, and it's completely legit. If you want a fascinating and telling lesson in the process, look up the history of the word "geek."
And that information wants to be "Free," I suppose...?
That's fine. Of course, if all TPB was "link people to information," they would not be in this mess. What they did, was link people to *entertainment*, which I understand wants to be paid for, more times than not.
Psycho-Sociologists refer to it as "The Ayn Rand Phase."
No, really.
They are distinct (or should be, on any project larger than a local church site) from the graphic designer and the "DB Guy."
I've seen all sorts of crazy titles on their resumes, and that's fine, self-esteem and all that, but "HTML Guy" is how we refer to them.
Now, gather 'round and have some peppermints: Back in the Day, 1992-93, when I project-managed my first website, we were paying "Web Guys" six figure salaries, cuz basically Corporate needed it yesterday and it was all a big mystery. Had something to do with computers, they said, so the Web Guys came out of the IT Departments, bringing their blink tags with them. Within a very short time, it became clear that it was the Art and Content that mattered, and that's where the money went. (Best Analogy: On Broadway, nobody pays to watch the Stage Crew, essential though they may be.) The smart art and design people learned what they needed to hang out a Web shingle, and the HTML-only guys were sent back to the server room. Some of them became "designers" (they're usually the ones singing the praises of "neat" and "clean" designs; translation: they'll electrocute themselves if they try to open PhotoShop), but the smarter ones moved over to the Web DB side of things.
What do we call the "HTML-Only Guys" today? How about: "hungry"
I don't recall being asked to allow my edits to be re-licensed later.
Think of your edits as free promotion for your concerts, and figure to make your money on T-Shirt sales.
...is there a more stupid faux-tech-neo-nerd-speak expression than "Jailbroken?"
The EFF always slips into high melodrama mode when they need to raise funds. Slashdot has served as one of their principal PR platforms perennially. It's pathetic and smarmy, but it's nothing new.
Do we get reparations for the warming being caused by the USA (they use 25% of the world's energy with their excessive behaviour).
No, but here's a cookie.
See, the problem you guys have is you think showering regularly is "excessive behavior."
The Global Warming Cult is going to be using my tax dollars to build this high-tech altar? Doesn't seem kosher to me...
spending 20 minutes of a computer analysts time to put a proper robots.txt file up
HTML jockeys are calling themselves "computer analysts" now? Christ!
Next thing I know, people are going to start referring to Cascading Style Sheets as "code."
It should be no mystery why CCP would help a fan who was taking the game's back story seriously. Eve's back story makes that of Magic: The Gathering look like "The Brothers Karamazov."
Now, I'm a huge Eve fan -- huge -- but the whole set-up, like that of the great tabletop space opera game that preceded it, "Battletech," is merely a balsa wood framework designed to prop up as many reasons for different races to be at war with each other as possible. Eve is to Science Fiction what Everquest is to fantasy.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
You've missed the point of the original argument.
The OP was defending file-sharers with the pompous pretense that the poor, poor students who couldn't afford to download media on iTunes were somehow being culturally deprived. He was confusing -- either disingenuously or because he's an idiot -- culture and entertainment.
Europe doesn't import culture. It's got its own, and it's an old and lovely one, to be sure. What it does import from America is entertainment, which is a product of the American entertainment industry. No one is granting Hulu international distribution rights to their stuff currently because it runs counter to both existing contracts with overseas distributors as well as business plans that promise more revenue if the entertainment is distributed regionally. I know plenty of producers who just about break even with their costs via what they sell their domestic distribution rights for, and make all their profit on the international side.
THE BIRTH OF BABYLON 5 (the original notes from 1988)
Ya like B5? Do you think JMS could have made the same show if whoever was footing the bill could not count on X amount revenue from international distribution?
Entertainment is not culture. You know how I know this? Because I have a God-given right to my culture.
If people are going into debt to sustain the entertainment industry, something's wrong.
I agree. If they're such pop culture addicts, they should be getting their fix from the Public Library, getting the most from their tax dollars.
But it has nothing to do with the prices set by the entertainment industry for its wares. If Jobs had set iTunes downloads at $5.99 per song, it would have failed. He set it at $0.99/song, and it's a raging success. That's the price that the majority of people were willing to pay, and that's how markets work.
Worse - we are often forced to buy the same damn thing twice, such as when a standard changes (VHS to DVD)
No one is forcing you to do anything, sweetpea! My VHS machines still work fine. You upgrade consumer technology because you *want* to, not because you are forced to.
or because of draconian DRM that blocks us from moving our Cassettes/CDs to our Ipods/computers.
There's DRM on your cassettes and CDs!?! Wow, sounds rough on your world. See, here on earth, nothing prevents us from moving music from tape or CD onto our computers. Again, my condolences.
unless you prefer lossless CDs like I do, then you'll be spending a whole lot more OK, so you're an audiophile. It's always been an expensive hobby, even thirty years ago in the "analog age." Presumably you enjoy it, so God bless. But I'm sure you recognize that any audio encoded above 128 kps is targeted to a niche audience, and that elite hobbyist crowd should expect to pay a premium for the privilege.
I cannot for a moment imagine -- and would be embarrassed to admit to -- living in a country where I had to import my *culture* from overseas.
No, clearly, YOU fail. And you have my deepest sympathies.
Very few file-sharers have the capacity to buy the stuff they download, they are just tagging along in what is a part of their culture, a culture which the media conglomerate has built very effectively.
A dollar a song, Bunky. Or less. Two bucks for a video. There's your pop culture, reasonably priced. Listen to music for free on Pandora, or watch TV for free on Hulu. Your culture's all covered, Ace.
Oh, wait, you want PhotoShop and Dreamweaver for free? And free development tools are part of your culture... how again? Besides, your "culture" has already kicked out a response to this, it's called "Open Source Alternatives." Are they as good as the professional closed source originals? Usually not, but they're close, and they're free. Want better? Get a job.
I forget... what was your argument again? Oh, yeah: So, the choice is to be left out of the loop on everyday culture or pirate. And the funny thing about that is, wait until you have kids: you'll be praying to God every night that they somehow manage to avoid the "everyday culture."
Now, for international observers, perhaps your TV host is famous in the US, but US is not the world.
You would be the "international observer," Bunky. Slashdot is a US site which maintains a US perspective.
Stephen Colbert is an American satirist who frequently pokes fun at the French for their pompousness, lack of humor, and nationalism. So, mer-see bow-coo for reminding us how much truth there is in his parodies...
You are retarded.
Oh, dear. I'm afraid your contribution violates our site's policy regarding Neutral Point of View and Verifiability. As a punishment, your account will be suspended for thirty days and you must wash my car.
I'm getting bloody sick of his internet vandalism.
And the rest of us continue to be amused by the notion that there are still people who think that a user-generated encyclopedia can ever be anything except a punchline.
Now, shoo! Run! Your jimmy-phone is ringing: somebody just changed a link in your Monty Python Filmography to a Rick Astley video, and only *YOU* can save us!
I've just stopped going to America.
Our plan is working.
Wow. How can I find this wonderful world of make-believe? Will I find Candy Mountain? Oh please, oh please!
That's easy enough. Create something. Write a novel, perform some music. Simple, right?
What I would like, my "Candy Mountain," is where I can call in sick to work, not do anything for a whole day, and still get paid as if I did something productive.