That observation doesn't seem out of line... he just didn't count on the hipster factor making it a fashion accessory, and the fact that people are apparently willing to pay double the price of equivalent offerings from other companies just for a color scheme and a scroll wheel. Technologically speaking, the iPod is not that great. Archos had video three years before Apple, Creative has better media support and a nicer on-screen interface...
Re:It's more then simply not liking it.
on
A Look at Google DRM
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· Score: 2, Insightful
This is why I have been reading more books and watching less television/movies for the last couple years.
In the long run, this won't stop me from ever buying digital media. What it WILL do is make me much more selective about what I buy, since I feel like I have to really REALLY like something in order to give up fair use in order to see it. It will also make me gravitate towards formats that are the most easily crackable, so I can make backups of the media like I'm legally allowed to do. How's that for the market at work?
I intend to someday be Supreme Emperor of Mars, but until that happens, we're left with Bill donating 2% of his fortune to charity. Never mind the fact that he certainly has investments that get better than that, so what he's really doing is taking interest (money he takes out of the market) and redistributing it to charities. Not that it's not good, but lets be honest about what's going on here.
Hey now... leave Mars Volta and Dredg out of this. Bright Eyes and Pantera can go fuck themselves and make little mutant babies together for all I care, though.
It may be getting difficult for the MS chief software architect himself to keep track of everything.
Isn't that still Bill? Last I heard he still "tried to code an hour or two a day in C#", which is a joke. I don't buy that he has anything more than a conversational familiarity with the internals of Windows anymore -- he's got more than enough strategy and market stuff to occupy his time and that of another 10 people.
I think the reasoning would be that PDF is slow as crap, while HTML-based pages are not. It may be just a difference in how much optimization has gone into which application, but I would lynch somebody before I let them take Firefox in favor of a pdf-based system.
If you're an evil, sociopathic motherfucker whose mother should've strangled you at birth, then yes, I guess that's true. Fortunately most people don't commit crimes because they think it's wrong, not because they fear retribution.
Riiight. Tell me another, grenade-boy. I assume your superior intellect (or access to explosives) is just too much for the average Joe to handle. Perhaps we should bow down before *you*.
I think you've mistaken a hypothetical situation for an actual desire on my part, and hyperbole to make a point for a realistic situation. Perhaps you should go back to high school and retake some classes dealing with reading comprehension.
So tell me, with your magical 2% of the population actually being sociopathic, why do we have way more than 2% of the population that commits crimes even today? You think if a guy holds up a couple people in a back alley, knowledge of a stricter punishment for actually pulling the trigger won't make him hesitate just a bit more than if there were no such law? You think that the average checkout clerk wouldn't be just a bit more likely to skim a bit out of the register if there were no laws against theft and the worst that could happen would be they lose their job?
It's true, laws and enforcement don't prevent all criminals from breaking the law at present. But what you're totally ignoring is that the existance of the laws and the likelihood of being caught and punished after the fact stops a good number of people from doing these things. If laws didn't exist, and the only thing stopping me from killing you and taking your stuff was the fact that you may have a weapon, I could just hurl a grenade through your bedroom window while you slept, then walk in and take your car and whatever else I wanted. There's not a damn thing you or your gun could do to stop me. However, the fact that there's a legal system and a trained police force waiting to hunt such a criminal down after the fact deters a lot of people who might otherwise not be so hesitant. It's a huge social pressure against that type of behavior which individual defense and vigilantism simply can't provide on their own. They need the force of a society-wide mechanism to back it up.
You're assuming that is it unsafe to live near one, which it isn't. In fact. I used to own a paintball field across the street from one of the biggest plants in the Midwest, and the cancer rates in that region are lower than the national average.
And you're ignoring the fact that "nuclear plants" in this discussion are being used as a standin for any hypothetical harmful industrial complex. It doesn't matter if a nuclear plant specifically is safe to live next to. Take your pick of any of the thousands of industrial production centers that aren't, and substitute it, then try answering the question instead of dodging it. What happens to the people who are too poor to move away from X, and too poor to buy "buffer land"?
If you manufacture such a car, and a car dealer buys and sells it, neither will be in business for very long -- the free market provides for this.
And you have blatantly ignored the rest of the question. Hooray for selective reading. How is it okay that quite a few people will die in the process of finding out that the product is unsafe? How is it fair that people have to do extensive research every time they make a purchase just to be sure the product won't fatally injure them? Last time I checked, that was the entire reason we had an FDA and federally mandated automotive safety tests and such; the citizens can't reasonably do that depth of research on every product they buy, so we've delegated the responsibility to a central authority who we trust to keep unsafe products from being available in the first place.
No, socialists and mercantilists love these laws. Capitalists HATE these laws -- a capitalism is merely another word for mutually-profitable cooperation. Don't confuse capitalism for mercantilism.
No, socialists do not love these laws. And I think you need to go read some definitions before you go spouting off about how capitalists hate IP laws. By your definitions that may be true, but the rest of the english speaking world does not agree with you.
223 W. Erie, 7th floor, Chicago, IL.
Come visit, with a weapon. I guarantee they won't find you. I've defending one of my retail stores twice with a weapon. I only wish the thief took the time to threaten me rather than run off. My wife is hot, and she also has an impeccable aim. She took down a guy 3 times her size at a party who was violating her space. The right to self defense is inherent - God-given if you believe that term.
So you're such a free-wheelin' cowboy type that you'd rather have an armed shootout in your home at 3 am than have a society that establishes laws which by-and-large prevent people from coming into your home trying to kill you and take your stuff? Something I'll never understand about anarchists is your ability to ignore the fact that human society started out as anarchy, and evolved legal systems because people WANTED some standardized, enforceable code of conduct. Yes, the current legal system has gotten a bit unweildy, but that doesn't mean national law is inherently a useless concept.
Mutual cooperation. Read Mises.
Golly. Mutual cooperation, you say? And here I was, thinking that's what the legal system was for all along.
No, you just have spent zero time researching my opinions -- while I have spent years researching yours to find them false. I'm an anarchocapitalist and we have a solution about nuclear waste and toxic waste: if it enters my land, it is trespass, and the trespasser violated my property rights. Also, I can protect myself by not living near a toxic waste manufacturer or a nuclear power plant. I can buy enough property to protect myself that way, as well.
Which of course ignores those people who are too poor to move away from nuclear plants, or too poor to buy up "buffer property" as you seem to be suggesting. And then there's the fact that your larger assertion, that companies have no responsibility for their products once it leaves their store, is ridiculous. Can I sell a $5 car that explodes if it so much as lightly taps a stationary object? How many people have to die before the general public figures out that my product isn't safe? What about people who don't happen upon the news that my cars are death traps, but just buy it because it's cheap? They have some responsibility for their choices, yes, but that doesn't mean I should be allowed to kill people by selling shoddy products. There are certain standards that society expects manufacturers to adhere to, and they're there for a good reason.
You're right -- anyone who voting for the government that allowed them to sue in this way is responsible. Monsanto merely took advantage of the law that socialists so admire. I am against these laws 100% -- in my "perfect world" Monsanto was the violator as they trespassed on another person's land.
Socialists admine IP laws? That's a new one. Last I checked, the laws protecting intangibles like copyright and patent were much more popular among capitalists, such as yourself.
I don't believe in laws, as they are the use of force against an unwilling party. Your desire to create laws only ends up controlling you.
You know, you're right. I don't really believe in laws either. What's your address? I'd like to pay you a visit some night with an automatic weapon. Is your wife hot? If so, I may take her captive and have some fun with her before I sell her to a Japanese businessman to take back overseas.
Yeah, laws are totally worthless. How do you expect all these property rights you keep going on about to work without laws?
Personally, I think that's a fantastic idea. There's this expectation in our society that everything should be traceable, but as far as I know (IANAL) it's not based on any solid legal ground. The hypothetical ISP you describe would probably still be required to provide FBI wiretapping capabilities, but if their structure is such that they themselves don't know their users identities, they might get away with it.
I got the impression that the show so far (miniseries through ep 10 of 2nd season) had taken a total span of MAYBE 7 or 8 months, if not less. And Apollo stood up to the military overthrow... Starbuck stood up to Adama, and then made up with him... Baltar found religion, and stood up to Crashdown, not to mention a ton of other stuff for all the characters. What more do you want?
Just because the show uses handheld cameras and a rougher style doesn't mean it's amateur. It's done on purpose, because it gives a greater sense of presence and immediacy to the presentation. If you really find it annoying, it's because you've decided to fixate on things you hate. If you would just sit down and watch it and let yourself relax and get into the characters, I promise, you won't notice the camera style at all (except to occasionally say "wow, that's some great camera work").
No offense, but movies filmed before the seventies or so almost universally had pretty piss-poor acting. There are a couple exceptions, but most of the "greats" (Wells, Bogart, etc) were pretty damn terrible. Yeah, they were experimenting, and we owe a lot to them, but what they did was not the pinacle of dramatic portrayal.
Plenty of soaps, yes, but only one show that has high-quality characters who actually display some depth, as opposed to the one-dimensional "characters" on most other shows...
Fix it and make it like what? Aside from Law and Order, and House, there are precious few shows on the air that have the quality of acting that BG shows every week. If you can point at an example that you think is better, please do.
The guy who said "camp" is completely right. Both Stargates have degenerated into a kind of goofy 50's pulp serial style of cowboy space exploration. Yeah, they're entertaining, and the fact that SG-1 has gone from "4 people go through the gate to face an unstopable enemy" each week to Earth establishing a primitive space fleet and winning some major victories is really cool. But remember the episode last season where whasername had a really bad case of the hiccups? And then her expression when she realized that they were gone? That's a perfect example of Stargate writing characters that act the way no real person would ever act. Ever. It's cheesy as hell. That's why Stargate is crap compared to BG.
> Nominated for 2006, GRAVITY!!!!
you joke, but if that project that's supposed to detect gravity waves or particles or whatever it turns out to be actually works, you may well be right.
Just because I'm not a parent doesn't mean I have no idea how to raise children. I once was a child. My parents didn't buy me every little piece of crap I yelled for in the store. Hell, we didn't even have a television until I was 10 years old, despite the fact that I loved playing NES when I was at friends houses. Now I'm a happy and materially-non-obsessed adult, who's not addicted to Must See Thursday, and who doesn't need the latest GBA/PSX/WTFBBQ or random gizmo to make me happy. I don't think it's a coincidence.
Exactly. This only works on the sick individuals that buy their kids things in an effort to make them happy (or shut them up). Granted, I don't have kids myself, but I like to think that my reaction would be to not take them down that aisle anymore, or else try to teach them that you don't need shiny things to be happy, rather than cave in to this twisted capitalistic crap.
Possible... I was assuming that at some point, you would be required to provide identification to get a component with this ID crap on it, whether you pay by cash or not.
You could basically even do this today. Most pieces of your system will not be labeled. Presumably it's just the CPU and/or Motherboard that have this ID crap in them. If it's just the motherboard, you can swap that out for $70 every couple months, and anything but top-shelf CPUs aren't that much more expensive.
The truly ridiculous thing about this is, it doesn't even put a dent in the cybercrime it's supposed to prevent. If you can get your system without giving up your identity (steal it or buy it through someone who "loses" records), and don't report your identity truthfully to anybody while using it, you're still just as anonymous as now. And if they come to get you, you just have to thermite one specific spot on the mainboard as well as the hard drive like you would today. Bam, all evidence gone. And until that day, you're free to molest six year olds and use stolen credit cards to your heart's content.
There are so many easier ways of preventing these problems than to try to force an ID on everybody. Make one-time disposable credit card numbers a mandatory feature. Consumers will use it because it saves them the hassle of cleaning their credit report after fraud. Hey, look! We can cut down on fraud by creating MORE anonymity, rather than less. Or how about the banks making websites that enforce strong password standards? How about ANYthing except a system that's even MORE transparent to the end user, and thus easier to crack?
Why should they not sell mp3s online? You can already go to the store and buy a CD, and rip those files to non-drmed mp3s in about a half hour. All they're doing by not selling them online is losing customers by making the purchase less convenient.
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That observation doesn't seem out of line... he just didn't count on the hipster factor making it a fashion accessory, and the fact that people are apparently willing to pay double the price of equivalent offerings from other companies just for a color scheme and a scroll wheel. Technologically speaking, the iPod is not that great. Archos had video three years before Apple, Creative has better media support and a nicer on-screen interface...
This is why I have been reading more books and watching less television/movies for the last couple years.
In the long run, this won't stop me from ever buying digital media. What it WILL do is make me much more selective about what I buy, since I feel like I have to really REALLY like something in order to give up fair use in order to see it. It will also make me gravitate towards formats that are the most easily crackable, so I can make backups of the media like I'm legally allowed to do. How's that for the market at work?
I intend to someday be Supreme Emperor of Mars, but until that happens, we're left with Bill donating 2% of his fortune to charity. Never mind the fact that he certainly has investments that get better than that, so what he's really doing is taking interest (money he takes out of the market) and redistributing it to charities. Not that it's not good, but lets be honest about what's going on here.
Hey now... leave Mars Volta and Dredg out of this. Bright Eyes and Pantera can go fuck themselves and make little mutant babies together for all I care, though.
I think the reasoning would be that PDF is slow as crap, while HTML-based pages are not. It may be just a difference in how much optimization has gone into which application, but I would lynch somebody before I let them take Firefox in favor of a pdf-based system.
hey now...
;-)
most of the space on his server is probably tied up with porn
So tell me, with your magical 2% of the population actually being sociopathic, why do we have way more than 2% of the population that commits crimes even today? You think if a guy holds up a couple people in a back alley, knowledge of a stricter punishment for actually pulling the trigger won't make him hesitate just a bit more than if there were no such law? You think that the average checkout clerk wouldn't be just a bit more likely to skim a bit out of the register if there were no laws against theft and the worst that could happen would be they lose their job?
It's true, laws and enforcement don't prevent all criminals from breaking the law at present. But what you're totally ignoring is that the existance of the laws and the likelihood of being caught and punished after the fact stops a good number of people from doing these things. If laws didn't exist, and the only thing stopping me from killing you and taking your stuff was the fact that you may have a weapon, I could just hurl a grenade through your bedroom window while you slept, then walk in and take your car and whatever else I wanted. There's not a damn thing you or your gun could do to stop me. However, the fact that there's a legal system and a trained police force waiting to hunt such a criminal down after the fact deters a lot of people who might otherwise not be so hesitant. It's a huge social pressure against that type of behavior which individual defense and vigilantism simply can't provide on their own. They need the force of a society-wide mechanism to back it up.
Yeah, laws are totally worthless. How do you expect all these property rights you keep going on about to work without laws?
Personally, I think that's a fantastic idea. There's this expectation in our society that everything should be traceable, but as far as I know (IANAL) it's not based on any solid legal ground. The hypothetical ISP you describe would probably still be required to provide FBI wiretapping capabilities, but if their structure is such that they themselves don't know their users identities, they might get away with it.
I got the impression that the show so far (miniseries through ep 10 of 2nd season) had taken a total span of MAYBE 7 or 8 months, if not less. And Apollo stood up to the military overthrow... Starbuck stood up to Adama, and then made up with him... Baltar found religion, and stood up to Crashdown, not to mention a ton of other stuff for all the characters. What more do you want?
Just because the show uses handheld cameras and a rougher style doesn't mean it's amateur. It's done on purpose, because it gives a greater sense of presence and immediacy to the presentation. If you really find it annoying, it's because you've decided to fixate on things you hate. If you would just sit down and watch it and let yourself relax and get into the characters, I promise, you won't notice the camera style at all (except to occasionally say "wow, that's some great camera work").
No offense, but movies filmed before the seventies or so almost universally had pretty piss-poor acting. There are a couple exceptions, but most of the "greats" (Wells, Bogart, etc) were pretty damn terrible. Yeah, they were experimenting, and we owe a lot to them, but what they did was not the pinacle of dramatic portrayal.
Plenty of soaps, yes, but only one show that has high-quality characters who actually display some depth, as opposed to the one-dimensional "characters" on most other shows...
Fix it and make it like what? Aside from Law and Order, and House, there are precious few shows on the air that have the quality of acting that BG shows every week. If you can point at an example that you think is better, please do.
The guy who said "camp" is completely right. Both Stargates have degenerated into a kind of goofy 50's pulp serial style of cowboy space exploration. Yeah, they're entertaining, and the fact that SG-1 has gone from "4 people go through the gate to face an unstopable enemy" each week to Earth establishing a primitive space fleet and winning some major victories is really cool. But remember the episode last season where whasername had a really bad case of the hiccups? And then her expression when she realized that they were gone? That's a perfect example of Stargate writing characters that act the way no real person would ever act. Ever. It's cheesy as hell. That's why Stargate is crap compared to BG.
> Nominated for 2006, GRAVITY!!!! you joke, but if that project that's supposed to detect gravity waves or particles or whatever it turns out to be actually works, you may well be right.
Still gone? Then what is newnova, exactly? Did someone just get a copy of all the sourcecode and images?
Just because I'm not a parent doesn't mean I have no idea how to raise children. I once was a child. My parents didn't buy me every little piece of crap I yelled for in the store. Hell, we didn't even have a television until I was 10 years old, despite the fact that I loved playing NES when I was at friends houses. Now I'm a happy and materially-non-obsessed adult, who's not addicted to Must See Thursday, and who doesn't need the latest GBA/PSX/WTFBBQ or random gizmo to make me happy. I don't think it's a coincidence.
Exactly. This only works on the sick individuals that buy their kids things in an effort to make them happy (or shut them up). Granted, I don't have kids myself, but I like to think that my reaction would be to not take them down that aisle anymore, or else try to teach them that you don't need shiny things to be happy, rather than cave in to this twisted capitalistic crap.
Possible... I was assuming that at some point, you would be required to provide identification to get a component with this ID crap on it, whether you pay by cash or not.
You could basically even do this today. Most pieces of your system will not be labeled. Presumably it's just the CPU and/or Motherboard that have this ID crap in them. If it's just the motherboard, you can swap that out for $70 every couple months, and anything but top-shelf CPUs aren't that much more expensive.
The truly ridiculous thing about this is, it doesn't even put a dent in the cybercrime it's supposed to prevent. If you can get your system without giving up your identity (steal it or buy it through someone who "loses" records), and don't report your identity truthfully to anybody while using it, you're still just as anonymous as now. And if they come to get you, you just have to thermite one specific spot on the mainboard as well as the hard drive like you would today. Bam, all evidence gone. And until that day, you're free to molest six year olds and use stolen credit cards to your heart's content.
There are so many easier ways of preventing these problems than to try to force an ID on everybody. Make one-time disposable credit card numbers a mandatory feature. Consumers will use it because it saves them the hassle of cleaning their credit report after fraud. Hey, look! We can cut down on fraud by creating MORE anonymity, rather than less. Or how about the banks making websites that enforce strong password standards? How about ANYthing except a system that's even MORE transparent to the end user, and thus easier to crack?
Why should they not sell mp3s online? You can already go to the store and buy a CD, and rip those files to non-drmed mp3s in about a half hour. All they're doing by not selling them online is losing customers by making the purchase less convenient.