As you seem to have the answer to everything, I'd like to hear your take on this.
I spend a modest $10,000 to record an album, and sell it on the Internet for $5 per copy. It's selling pretty nicely, about 50 copies per day, until someone shares it on a P2P. The word goes out and sales go to a sudden halt, and now I'm selling a copy per week as the sharers in P2P grow at a good rate. I lost a whole lot of money.
What kind of business model do you suggest?
If you have two outlets distributing the same product, the other one giving it away for free and the other one, who spent the initial costs, charging money, what kind of business model do you suggest to the latter to compete with the first one?
you're a moron at running your business
Oh yeah, they just need to stop being morons at running their business. Well, that was easy.
Every other business in the world has considerations about marketing and ensuring product longevity
How am I supposed to compete with someone giving away copies of my work for free?
I speak of fairness, you speak of violence and degradation. Hopefully the laws will quit supporting people of your nature.
No, you speak of taking away my rights to my work. When I speak of violence, I speak of taking away some of yours.
Everyone has to grow up at some point.
I do that by defending my values and views, not stomping on other people's rights.
The world does not owe you magnificent profit just for running in circles.
The world owes me the right to decide who I work for and what kind of money. Yes, if you have a large enough crowd, it makes removing those rights easy. But it doesn't change the fact that it is wrong. In fact, there is a different flavor of it called "slavery."
My kid is starving, and you feel that it's somehow your god-given right to share my work with others. Why the hell should I give a damn about your rights, then? Being "a citizen" doesn't give you more rights than "a citizen working for a record company", or does it?
Please stop pissing in the gene pool.
Don't worry, I won't be having any more kids. You see, I have trouble feeding the current one, because for some reason the work I've been doing for living for the past 20 years (I work for a small indie record company) has suddenly lost all its value "because I made the information public".
Is there something inherently wrong with sharing? What did I miss.
That 90 % of what is being shared is done so without permission and therefore illegally. (Or your head up your ass, whichever you find more appropriate.)
If it were really that valuable and that important it would be safeguarded before being released. If it were really that valuable and that important it wouldn't be sold to any teenager with $15.
You sold it to me. Cope. You're a competent human being, right? Figure it out before the sale.
Are you telling me I shouldn't sell my music, because someone who bought it might share it?
What happens if I share it?
If I find it out, I'll hit you several times with a large iron bar and leave you lying in a puddle of your own blood and my urine.
Adjust the sale amount and the medium properly. When the sale amount becomes too large or the medium requires a proprietary player then we'll start to see just how important your product is. Maybe it'll be humbling for you. Again. Cope.
Because it is easy to tell how many copies an album will sell, beforehand.
Congrats, your post was the most unrespectful I've ever seen on Slashdot.
"How will the Monks make money then?! Answer me that, and I'll entertain your flights of fancy. But first, how, oh how, will the Monks make money?!?"
AFAIK no one ever denied monks the right to copy books. Something new came along that could do the same thing more efficiently.
With music, however, someone still needs to write, perform and record it. No P2P can remove those expenses from the equation. All those skills require years of education. Just being a serious musician is a full-time job. Now what is the motivation to spend years learning and honing a craft, if you are expected to do it for nothing?
I don't think most of my favorite artists couldn't have done it had they not been paid for their work.
Therein lies the problem.. Are all the hundreds of millions people on P2P your friends?
I see nothing wrong with a few copies between friends. But when over two thirds of current network traffic is people sharing stuff, I think it takes a tremendously selfish person to not see anything wrong with it.
If it's a web site, I'll also have it catch and forward them to my email.
This is ok for production systems, where you are accessing a database or something like that, but otherwise I'd just output debug info within <!-- --> pairs.
I don't really use assertions except that I write a lot of code to deal with unusual input in a non-fatal fashion.
You are really, really asking for trouble coding that way. Not only will it make your software unneccesarily slow, it will also mask problems on different levels of code.
I'm all for error-free code, though. I'm not a member of the "all software has bugs anyway" schoold of thought.
Science-believers have simply decided, based on what they have heard, that the scientists' explanation makes more sense than the others.
Proof also helps. Science has brought us things like medicine, TV's, computers, transportation etc. I don't need to be "top 1 % physicist" to see the benefits of science and scientific study.
However, there is a considerable lack of gorgeous blondes around be, my close relatives are dying, I'm penniless and life in general sucks, so I'm yet to be convinced about the power of prayer.
If there's one word that I hate more than "multimedia," it would have to be "methodology." Why make up new four-syllable words for things that already have proper words?
> (seriously -- each of those is a story posted by timothy on google in roughly the last 30 days.)
Google is one of the fastest-growing and thus interesting IT companies, and also easily the most popular search engine in the world. Slashdot is news for nerds. Do the math.
...who is funded by Exxon. He's part of the same gang as Soon, Baliunas, LeGates et al either funded by Bush administration, American Petroleum Institute, the coal industry or whatever...
On the other hand, there are literally hundreds of thousands of real scientists (not just people dubbing themselves 'doctor' or 'climatologist' or whatever), who all seem to agree that yes, the globe is warming at an alarming rate and that it's pretty much too late now. It doesn't mean we shouldn't cut our losses, however.
I am wondering why this is news?!? M$ does this crap all the time from little deals that arent heard about to crap like this. So why is it on slashdot?
Yeah, they're just extorting a FRIGGIN' COUNTRY! Please tell me you tried to funny.... Pretty please?
Such high penalties for copyright infringement exist due to people potentially profiting due to redistribution of copyrighted material.
It's also about scale. At any given moment, there are millions and millions of people downloading films, music, porn whatnot. Participating in huge organized activity is completely different from stealing ONE copy.
"they started off the day with a financials presentation, which was actually quite interesting. of course, i understand that they obviously will put a positive spin on everything, but
the weight of the raw numbers is undeniable. both google's profits and revenue are growing at an unprecedented rate even while they are increasing their expenditures on capital and human resources. not to mention that google has been primarily focused on the u.s. market and is now turning their full attention to the global marketplace.
so after the interesting financials, the products team gave presentations reviewing product performance in 2004 and giving sneak peeks of the products we'll unveil in 2005. if you guys thought g**il and google groups were cool, you ain't seen nothing yet!"
Now, Google is a public company. This is the kind of information you do not publish. You just don't. I can't even start to imagine what kind of an idiot it takes not to realize this. It has nothing to do with free speech and everything to do with this potentially getting very expensive to Google. People have landed in jail for leaking exactly this kind of inside information, for chrissakes!
He posted strategic information about Google's direction and general insider information about profits and revenue. That's stuff that can get you in trouble with the SEC.
LOTS of trouble. VERY expensive trouble.
Plus the detailed information about all the benefits packages and signing bonuses is very valuable information to other companies competing over the same people.
When the onboard fails, you're pretty-well screwed.
I've been using PC's since the 80286 (my first one actually had a 8088 in it, but it was old by then). I don't even want to start counting how many PC's I've owned since then. Suffice to say that currently I have six Windows machines and a dual G4 Mac.
FWIW, with the exception of hard disks, never ever have I had only one component fail on me. And believe me, after 20 years and god-knows how many systems later I've had my fair share of failures. Last time some broke, I lost a mobo, a processor, two network cards, a hard drive and a video card. I have no idea which one went first, they were all fried.
Slashdot Mirror
As you seem to have the answer to everything, I'd like to hear your take on this.
I spend a modest $10,000 to record an album, and sell it on the Internet for $5 per copy. It's selling pretty nicely, about 50 copies per day, until someone shares it on a P2P. The word goes out and sales go to a sudden halt, and now I'm selling a copy per week as the sharers in P2P grow at a good rate. I lost a whole lot of money.
What kind of business model do you suggest?
If you have two outlets distributing the same product, the other one giving it away for free and the other one, who spent the initial costs, charging money, what kind of business model do you suggest to the latter to compete with the first one?
you're a moron at running your business
Oh yeah, they just need to stop being morons at running their business. Well, that was easy.
How am I supposed to compete with someone giving away copies of my work for free?
I speak of fairness, you speak of violence and degradation. Hopefully the laws will quit supporting people of your nature.
No, you speak of taking away my rights to my work. When I speak of violence, I speak of taking away some of yours.
Everyone has to grow up at some point.
I do that by defending my values and views, not stomping on other people's rights.
The world does not owe you magnificent profit just for running in circles.
The world owes me the right to decide who I work for and what kind of money. Yes, if you have a large enough crowd, it makes removing those rights easy. But it doesn't change the fact that it is wrong. In fact, there is a different flavor of it called "slavery."
Nothing, apparently.
Ah, so you are a murderer. Self confessed.
My kid is starving, and you feel that it's somehow your god-given right to share my work with others. Why the hell should I give a damn about your rights, then? Being "a citizen" doesn't give you more rights than "a citizen working for a record company", or does it?
Please stop pissing in the gene pool.
Don't worry, I won't be having any more kids. You see, I have trouble feeding the current one, because for some reason the work I've been doing for living for the past 20 years (I work for a small indie record company) has suddenly lost all its value "because I made the information public".
We tried that for a few millenia and it didn't work. People started selling other people's work as their own.
people will pay *voluntarily*
I'll applaud the day when car dealers introduce that system. I'm sure it will work.
That 90 % of what is being shared is done so without permission and therefore illegally. (Or your head up your ass, whichever you find more appropriate.)
If it were really that valuable and that important it would be safeguarded before being released. If it were really that valuable and that important it wouldn't be sold to any teenager with $15.
Why?
Are you telling me I shouldn't sell my music, because someone who bought it might share it?
What happens if I share it?
If I find it out, I'll hit you several times with a large iron bar and leave you lying in a puddle of your own blood and my urine.
Adjust the sale amount and the medium properly. When the sale amount becomes too large or the medium requires a proprietary player then we'll start to see just how important your product is. Maybe it'll be humbling for you. Again. Cope.
Because it is easy to tell how many copies an album will sell, beforehand.
Congrats, your post was the most unrespectful I've ever seen on Slashdot.
AFAIK no one ever denied monks the right to copy books. Something new came along that could do the same thing more efficiently.
With music, however, someone still needs to write, perform and record it. No P2P can remove those expenses from the equation. All those skills require years of education. Just being a serious musician is a full-time job. Now what is the motivation to spend years learning and honing a craft, if you are expected to do it for nothing?
I don't think most of my favorite artists couldn't have done it had they not been paid for their work.
Therein lies the problem.. Are all the hundreds of millions people on P2P your friends? I see nothing wrong with a few copies between friends. But when over two thirds of current network traffic is people sharing stuff, I think it takes a tremendously selfish person to not see anything wrong with it.
If you buy one of my albums and share it with 100,000,000 of your friends, and I find out, would you want to meet me in a dark alley?
No, the correct way to do it is to test all your functions/methods/subroutines/whatever enough so that this kind of shit never happens.
This is ok for production systems, where you are accessing a database or something like that, but otherwise I'd just output debug info within <!-- --> pairs.
I don't really use assertions except that I write a lot of code to deal with unusual input in a non-fatal fashion.
You are really, really asking for trouble coding that way. Not only will it make your software unneccesarily slow, it will also mask problems on different levels of code.
I'm all for error-free code, though. I'm not a member of the "all software has bugs anyway" schoold of thought.
Proof also helps. Science has brought us things like medicine, TV's, computers, transportation etc. I don't need to be "top 1 % physicist" to see the benefits of science and scientific study.
However, there is a considerable lack of gorgeous blondes around be, my close relatives are dying, I'm penniless and life in general sucks, so I'm yet to be convinced about the power of prayer.
(Yes, I know they're both quite old but anyway.)
Google is one of the fastest-growing and thus interesting IT companies, and also easily the most popular search engine in the world. Slashdot is news for nerds. Do the math.
Not as long as people who are in bed with the oil industry are running the country.
Stephen McInthyre
On the other hand, there are literally hundreds of thousands of real scientists (not just people dubbing themselves 'doctor' or 'climatologist' or whatever), who all seem to agree that yes, the globe is warming at an alarming rate and that it's pretty much too late now. It doesn't mean we shouldn't cut our losses, however.
Yeah, they're just extorting a FRIGGIN' COUNTRY! Please tell me you tried to funny.... Pretty please?
It's also about scale. At any given moment, there are millions and millions of people downloading films, music, porn whatnot. Participating in huge organized activity is completely different from stealing ONE copy.
Have you ever done any writing? Composing? Design work? Art? Can I come and erase all of it?
It isn't. This one was before he removed it when it was way too late.
Here is what was removed from the blog:
Now, Google is a public company. This is the kind of information you do not publish. You just don't. I can't even start to imagine what kind of an idiot it takes not to realize this. It has nothing to do with free speech and everything to do with this potentially getting very expensive to Google. People have landed in jail for leaking exactly this kind of inside information, for chrissakes!
LOTS of trouble. VERY expensive trouble.
Plus the detailed information about all the benefits packages and signing bonuses is very valuable information to other companies competing over the same people.
No, it isn't if you bother to do 5 minutes of Googling and realize you'd better shell a few extra bucks for quality.
Do you mean the $3.400.000.000 profit they made in the last quarter of 2004?
I've been using PC's since the 80286 (my first one actually had a 8088 in it, but it was old by then). I don't even want to start counting how many PC's I've owned since then. Suffice to say that currently I have six Windows machines and a dual G4 Mac.
FWIW, with the exception of hard disks, never ever have I had only one component fail on me. And believe me, after 20 years and god-knows how many systems later I've had my fair share of failures. Last time some broke, I lost a mobo, a processor, two network cards, a hard drive and a video card. I have no idea which one went first, they were all fried.