The main one is the well-known fact that they throttle disk delivery.
Yeah, there was a lawsuit over that, as I remember... they lost.
But I have Netflix too, and I agree with you: the GP is either full of it or just had extremely bad luck. I've had them for only six months or so, but have never failed to have the next three movies in the queue show up. Once they were about four days late, but that's not too bad (I mean, we're just talking about movies here not prescription meds or something like that.) The rest of the time it's about three days from when I drop the discs off and get the next ones.
The debate worth having, as always, is how "we" get the people who download music and don't pay for it to become paying customers.
Look, this particular debate, in one form or another, has been taking place since the birth of the Industrial Revolution. The new continually displaces the old (usually a rather painful process for the old, to be sure) but it is inevitable. It's about history, about change being the only constant. The studios are in the same position that untold thousands of businesses have found themselves when the mantle of obsolescence has settled around them. They fight, they scream, they go to court... but ultimately, if the new way of doing things is sufficiently better than the old (and who can argue that the Internet is better than, well, every communications medium that has ever existed) it will become the standard. The Internet is here to stay, whether they like it or not: classic example of Guilder's Law when you get right down to it. It no longer matters what the old-line media corporations want... they aren't powerful enough to reverse the technological progress of the past thirty years.
I think, in the final analysis, peer-to-peer is not the greatest threat to the existing studio system. Their own inability to acknowledge that anyone but themselves have a right to our money is what is going to kill them, because their ever-increasing appetite for control led them to limit our choices, restrict access to our best creative minds. That approach worked for a long time, it's true, but it was inevitable that something would come along and shatter that comfortable hegemony. If they'd had any foresight, any vision (and their past record shows very clearly that they do not) they would have prepared for this eventuality, would have thoroughly preempted Napster and owned the online market for music. Instead they were, once again, caught flatfooted.
Well, you can slam the Feds for a lot of things, but I'd say the U.S. government managed things quite well up until ICANN came into existence. That's because the folks that originally operated the domain name system were left to do their jobs without too much politicizing. I often wonder how things might have gone if Jon Postel were still running IANA... he didn't suffer fools gladly, and he was usually right. Too bad he died.
Maybe if a lot of people hadn't pushed so hard to "internationalize" DNS management and just left well enough alone, we'd not be having these problems. When the original architects of a key subsystem of the global network are taken off the job and replaced with ineffective bureaucrats, well, you should expect to have problems.
Dude, fingered means arrested. What you mean is, you're interested in the number of successful convictions that result from the use of a given law enforcement program or technology. That interests me as well, because if such programs don't work the only way to know is if they give us that number. Of course, that's the rub: law enforcement absolutely does not want such transparency, and fights to keep that information from us. Otherwise we might demand that such programs be terminated with extreme prejudice.
Anyway, regarding the GP's concern about false positives, it's apparent that you don't understand what the justice system is like. It's a world apart, normal rules don't apply, and being "fingered" means one thing: law enforcement thinks there's a significant chance you committed a crime. Doesn't matter, at that point, if you did or not, but it's assumed that you did and they operate from that assumption. What it does mean is that they haul you in, interrogate you, investigate you, disrupt your life and that of everyone you know, basically put you through the wringer until they decide to charge you or let you go. If you're a normal, law-abiding citizen you really really really don't want that to happen to you.
So yeah, being "fingered" is damned close to being "falsely accused", so far as what happens to you immediately afterward is concerned. Whether the cops ultimately decide to file charges against you or not, you've still been put through a rough time. It's not something to be taken lightly, it really isn't, and any system that is too heavy on the false positives needs to be fixed or scrapped. Period. What's getting really scary about America's present law enforcement climate is that it now has multiple high-tech but functionally defective methodologies that regularly finger innocent people, who then have no recourse because the system is so opaque.
I'd be inclined to say that most "rappists" are criminals, and that their criminal behavior starts with they call their "music." And you're right... the recidivism rate among rappists (particularly those in the so-called "gangsta" group) is very high. Tragic, really. Someone should do something about it.
What is the difference between a cop shooting a kid with a toy gun by accident, a soldier shooting an unarmed civilian in Iraq because of language barrier, a man executed by the state who was actually innocent of murder, and a wife killing an abusive husband who also happened to be a pedophile?
The first three are tragedies (or in the third case, a travesty) and in the fourth... well, that might just be justifiable homicide. Hard to say: one can never know all the facts and judgments can be difficult. And you're right, the issues are complex, which is why justice does not move swiftly in this country. Better to let the guilty man go free than imprison the innocent one, right?
At any rate, that's how it used to be in the U.S, other countries handle things differently.
Because many of them have far higher re-offending rates.
I understand that, but you should understand that unduly harsh sentences are meant to serve as a deterrent to specific criminal activities, not necessarily to provide justice for individual criminals. Matter of fact, it probably does a disservice to people who are made into examples: they get punished more severely than their actions warrant. Is that worth a potential reduction in crime rates? I don't know. What do you think?
In any event, that's really about all the law can do, until we come up with some way of stopping people before they commit crimes (like in Tom Cruise's Minority Report.) The problem is that not all crimes are premeditated: many are spontaneous, off-the-cuff, and people in those situations generally aren't thinking about consequence, so stiffening penalties won't really do much to stop them. Other people just don't care about the consequences, they just don't, so it doesn't matter how harsh the law.
Getting tough on crime by increasing jail time hasn't really had the positive effect that lawmakers were hoping it would... then again, I suppose that could be said about most laws.
They'll take COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) equipment, throw it in a ruggedized casing,
I recently bought a surplus 2.4 kW DC-to-AC inverter that was from the Navy COTS program. COTS it may be, but it was still built like a brick outhouse.
I think this case just shows that criminals can be integrated into society
Sure... that's happening every day with illegal immigration. Whether that's a good thing is another issue entirely.
So far as murder is concerned, the problem is all other crimes don't permanently remove the victim's rights. Murder does, because the victim is dead. Consequently the law has always maintained harsher discipline for murderers because we want those sentences to serve as a deterrent. Kill someone? You're going down, and really that's how it should be. A better question would be why so many much-less-heinous crimes are receiving punishments similar to murder.
I haven't bought any music since 1984 or so. Well, I mean new music. That was about the time I began to realize just what a bunch of jerks the studios are, and decided not to give them any more of my money. I still liked music, however, so I just switched to buying used discs. That meant I couldn't get the latest-greatest hits right away, but since my tastes run more towards classical or older pop/rock that didn't matter. They haven't gotten a penny out of me in decades, and given their more recent behavior I'm actually proud of that.
We'll let you have it this time, but in the future please remember that you must claim "frist psot" if you want to be properly recognized for your achievement.
Of course, YMMV and also it does depend on what one chooses to d/l...
I have the funny feeling it may depend more on how competitive your area is, broadband-wise. Where I happen to live, I can get DSL from a number of providers, Comcast of course, and some other wireless solutions. Consequently, Comcast sees fit to leave me alone, because if I got too much grief I'd just get my connectivity elsewhere. If I were living in a one-horse town it might very well be a different story.
I believe it's the legal definition of a "data service" which is distinct from telephone service. As I understand it, their data services are not subject to common carrier regulations.
Just out of curiosity (and I know this is completely off-topic) but just how far does our economy have to crash, how small must our middle class become, how many outright poor people must live here before I'll be able to stop reading comments like that? There are fat rich assholes everywhere on the planet you know. I might add the bulk of Slashdot readers are American, so slights aren't the way to gain credence for your commentary.
More to the point, there's obviously a limit to how cheap you can make a product. Even if you manage to fully automate your production facilities and eliminate your personnel costs, an $80 computer isn't going to be very capable. For that matter, this $200 PC is probably being sold for a few bucks over manufacturing cost, and given that this is Wal-Mart quite likely the manufacturer isn't making much profit out of it, if any. This is just a loss-leader, something to drive customers to the store where they'll pick up lots of higher-margin items.
Checks and balances again. The courts are involved because Congress, once again, dropped the goddamn ball.
You know, when dogs get rabies, becoming irrational and dangerous to humans, they are taken out and shot. Congress may or may not have rabies (although some its members often act like they do) but they have certainly become irrational and dangerous. What are we going to do about them? Shoot votes at them?
Well, in the movie Under Siege II: Dark Territory, the mercenary leader Penn gets a faceful of the stuff. He then proceeds to take the canister away from the female prisoner... and use it for breath spray.
Yes, and he's probably dead on. I know I dropped Comcast cable TV a couple years ago (too damned expensive for what little I got, and the "digital" picture was horrible.) They kept jacking the price up to the point where I said "forget it." I had their phone service as well... they cranked that up to $86 for two lines! Screw that... switched over to AT&T's VoIP offering and I'm very happy with it: about half the price of Comcast's service. I used to have satellite: half the price of Comcast cable and an actual usable PVR. But then I moved and now I can't get a dish.
So at one point Comcast had me for phone, Internet and television. Then the quality kept going down and the price kept going up, and that forced me to look for alternatives. With the savings I got from dumping the phone and TV, I now pay Comcast for their fastest Internet tier, and I torrent the few TV shows I watch (substantially better image quality and no commercials.) This is yet another example of being able to get better results from non-mainstream sources (how's that for a euphemism.)
I mean, how hard would it be for Comcast to set up a torrent tracker on their own network and let me download AVIs to my computer, and then bill me for them? That would keep their Internet customers from using expensive bandwidth from outside the Comcast backbone, and make them extra money they'd otherwise never see. Hell, at that point they probably wouldn't care about bandwidth hogs anymore. I'd cheerfully pay a buck an episode to download quality, commercial-free videos. Not that Comcast could long resist commercial inserts: sooner or later I'd be back on mininova.
The point is, Comcast would love to be able to keep me from using competing VoIP service, and getting my TV shows from somewhere else to force me to pay them for the privilege. But you know what? If they'd not jerked me around on price and provided quality services they'd still be getting my money.
Slashdot Mirror
So anyway, I would argue that the music industry *is* getting a few pennies out of you, however indirectly.
... but better a few pennies than a few dollars.
And I'd agree
I think this is more "bigger is always eviller" rhetoric.
The main one is the well-known fact that they throttle disk delivery.
... they lost.
Yeah, there was a lawsuit over that, as I remember
But I have Netflix too, and I agree with you: the GP is either full of it or just had extremely bad luck. I've had them for only six months or so, but have never failed to have the next three movies in the queue show up. Once they were about four days late, but that's not too bad (I mean, we're just talking about movies here not prescription meds or something like that.) The rest of the time it's about three days from when I drop the discs off and get the next ones.
The debate worth having, as always, is how "we" get the people who download music and don't pay for it to become paying customers.
... but ultimately, if the new way of doing things is sufficiently better than the old (and who can argue that the Internet is better than, well, every communications medium that has ever existed) it will become the standard. The Internet is here to stay, whether they like it or not: classic example of Guilder's Law when you get right down to it. It no longer matters what the old-line media corporations want ... they aren't powerful enough to reverse the technological progress of the past thirty years.
Look, this particular debate, in one form or another, has been taking place since the birth of the Industrial Revolution. The new continually displaces the old (usually a rather painful process for the old, to be sure) but it is inevitable. It's about history, about change being the only constant. The studios are in the same position that untold thousands of businesses have found themselves when the mantle of obsolescence has settled around them. They fight, they scream, they go to court
I think, in the final analysis, peer-to-peer is not the greatest threat to the existing studio system. Their own inability to acknowledge that anyone but themselves have a right to our money is what is going to kill them, because their ever-increasing appetite for control led them to limit our choices, restrict access to our best creative minds. That approach worked for a long time, it's true, but it was inevitable that something would come along and shatter that comfortable hegemony. If they'd had any foresight, any vision (and their past record shows very clearly that they do not) they would have prepared for this eventuality, would have thoroughly preempted Napster and owned the online market for music. Instead they were, once again, caught flatfooted.
No surprise there.
Well, you can slam the Feds for a lot of things, but I'd say the U.S. government managed things quite well up until ICANN came into existence. That's because the folks that originally operated the domain name system were left to do their jobs without too much politicizing. I often wonder how things might have gone if Jon Postel were still running IANA ... he didn't suffer fools gladly, and he was usually right. Too bad he died.
Maybe if a lot of people hadn't pushed so hard to "internationalize" DNS management and just left well enough alone, we'd not be having these problems. When the original architects of a key subsystem of the global network are taken off the job and replaced with ineffective bureaucrats, well, you should expect to have problems.
Dude, fingered means arrested. What you mean is, you're interested in the number of successful convictions that result from the use of a given law enforcement program or technology. That interests me as well, because if such programs don't work the only way to know is if they give us that number. Of course, that's the rub: law enforcement absolutely does not want such transparency, and fights to keep that information from us. Otherwise we might demand that such programs be terminated with extreme prejudice.
Anyway, regarding the GP's concern about false positives, it's apparent that you don't understand what the justice system is like. It's a world apart, normal rules don't apply, and being "fingered" means one thing: law enforcement thinks there's a significant chance you committed a crime. Doesn't matter, at that point, if you did or not, but it's assumed that you did and they operate from that assumption. What it does mean is that they haul you in, interrogate you, investigate you, disrupt your life and that of everyone you know, basically put you through the wringer until they decide to charge you or let you go. If you're a normal, law-abiding citizen you really really really don't want that to happen to you.
So yeah, being "fingered" is damned close to being "falsely accused", so far as what happens to you immediately afterward is concerned. Whether the cops ultimately decide to file charges against you or not, you've still been put through a rough time. It's not something to be taken lightly, it really isn't, and any system that is too heavy on the false positives needs to be fixed or scrapped. Period. What's getting really scary about America's present law enforcement climate is that it now has multiple high-tech but functionally defective methodologies that regularly finger innocent people, who then have no recourse because the system is so opaque.
That needs to change, and soon.
I'd be inclined to say that most "rappists" are criminals, and that their criminal behavior starts with they call their "music." And you're right ... the recidivism rate among rappists (particularly those in the so-called "gangsta" group) is very high. Tragic, really. Someone should do something about it.
I suppose ... it's pretty obvious that she didn't want to go back.
What is the difference between a cop shooting a kid with a toy gun by accident, a soldier shooting an unarmed civilian in Iraq because of language barrier, a man executed by the state who was actually innocent of murder, and a wife killing an abusive husband who also happened to be a pedophile?
... well, that might just be justifiable homicide. Hard to say: one can never know all the facts and judgments can be difficult. And you're right, the issues are complex, which is why justice does not move swiftly in this country. Better to let the guilty man go free than imprison the innocent one, right?
At any rate, that's how it used to be in the U.S, other countries handle things differently.
The first three are tragedies (or in the third case, a travesty) and in the fourth
Because many of them have far higher re-offending rates.
... then again, I suppose that could be said about most laws.
I understand that, but you should understand that unduly harsh sentences are meant to serve as a deterrent to specific criminal activities, not necessarily to provide justice for individual criminals. Matter of fact, it probably does a disservice to people who are made into examples: they get punished more severely than their actions warrant. Is that worth a potential reduction in crime rates? I don't know. What do you think?
In any event, that's really about all the law can do, until we come up with some way of stopping people before they commit crimes (like in Tom Cruise's Minority Report.) The problem is that not all crimes are premeditated: many are spontaneous, off-the-cuff, and people in those situations generally aren't thinking about consequence, so stiffening penalties won't really do much to stop them. Other people just don't care about the consequences, they just don't, so it doesn't matter how harsh the law.
Getting tough on crime by increasing jail time hasn't really had the positive effect that lawmakers were hoping it would
They'll take COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) equipment, throw it in a ruggedized casing,
I recently bought a surplus 2.4 kW DC-to-AC inverter that was from the Navy COTS program. COTS it may be, but it was still built like a brick outhouse.
I think this case just shows that criminals can be integrated into society
... that's happening every day with illegal immigration. Whether that's a good thing is another issue entirely.
Sure
So far as murder is concerned, the problem is all other crimes don't permanently remove the victim's rights. Murder does, because the victim is dead. Consequently the law has always maintained harsher discipline for murderers because we want those sentences to serve as a deterrent. Kill someone? You're going down, and really that's how it should be. A better question would be why so many much-less-heinous crimes are receiving punishments similar to murder.
I haven't bought any music since 1984 or so. Well, I mean new music. That was about the time I began to realize just what a bunch of jerks the studios are, and decided not to give them any more of my money. I still liked music, however, so I just switched to buying used discs. That meant I couldn't get the latest-greatest hits right away, but since my tastes run more towards classical or older pop/rock that didn't matter. They haven't gotten a penny out of me in decades, and given their more recent behavior I'm actually proud of that.
Nah ... they killed off the one-armed man in the final episode, if I am remembering correctly.
We'll let you have it this time, but in the future please remember that you must claim "frist psot" if you want to be properly recognized for your achievement.
Personally, I think that President Bush is a prototype AI that got hit by lightning.
Of course, YMMV and also it does depend on what one chooses to d/l...
I have the funny feeling it may depend more on how competitive your area is, broadband-wise. Where I happen to live, I can get DSL from a number of providers, Comcast of course, and some other wireless solutions. Consequently, Comcast sees fit to leave me alone, because if I got too much grief I'd just get my connectivity elsewhere. If I were living in a one-horse town it might very well be a different story.
I believe it's the legal definition of a "data service" which is distinct from telephone service. As I understand it, their data services are not subject to common carrier regulations.
... or fat rich American
Just out of curiosity (and I know this is completely off-topic) but just how far does our economy have to crash, how small must our middle class become, how many outright poor people must live here before I'll be able to stop reading comments like that? There are fat rich assholes everywhere on the planet you know. I might add the bulk of Slashdot readers are American, so slights aren't the way to gain credence for your commentary.
More to the point, there's obviously a limit to how cheap you can make a product. Even if you manage to fully automate your production facilities and eliminate your personnel costs, an $80 computer isn't going to be very capable. For that matter, this $200 PC is probably being sold for a few bucks over manufacturing cost, and given that this is Wal-Mart quite likely the manufacturer isn't making much profit out of it, if any. This is just a loss-leader, something to drive customers to the store where they'll pick up lots of higher-margin items.
I would think they probably don't. Isn't it a trade secret, much like the formula for Coca Cola?
I think the article is wrong: we're not hardwired for numbers ... we're hardwired for numerology.
Why oh Why are the courts involved at all?
Checks and balances again. The courts are involved because Congress, once again, dropped the goddamn ball.
You know, when dogs get rabies, becoming irrational and dangerous to humans, they are taken out and shot. Congress may or may not have rabies (although some its members often act like they do) but they have certainly become irrational and dangerous. What are we going to do about them? Shoot votes at them?
Don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen.
Well, in the movie Under Siege II: Dark Territory, the mercenary leader Penn gets a faceful of the stuff. He then proceeds to take the canister away from the female prisoner ... and use it for breath spray.
That's an interesting take on it.
... they cranked that up to $86 for two lines! Screw that ... switched over to AT&T's VoIP offering and I'm very happy with it: about half the price of Comcast's service. I used to have satellite: half the price of Comcast cable and an actual usable PVR. But then I moved and now I can't get a dish.
Yes, and he's probably dead on. I know I dropped Comcast cable TV a couple years ago (too damned expensive for what little I got, and the "digital" picture was horrible.) They kept jacking the price up to the point where I said "forget it." I had their phone service as well
So at one point Comcast had me for phone, Internet and television. Then the quality kept going down and the price kept going up, and that forced me to look for alternatives. With the savings I got from dumping the phone and TV, I now pay Comcast for their fastest Internet tier, and I torrent the few TV shows I watch (substantially better image quality and no commercials.) This is yet another example of being able to get better results from non-mainstream sources (how's that for a euphemism.)
I mean, how hard would it be for Comcast to set up a torrent tracker on their own network and let me download AVIs to my computer, and then bill me for them? That would keep their Internet customers from using expensive bandwidth from outside the Comcast backbone, and make them extra money they'd otherwise never see. Hell, at that point they probably wouldn't care about bandwidth hogs anymore. I'd cheerfully pay a buck an episode to download quality, commercial-free videos. Not that Comcast could long resist commercial inserts: sooner or later I'd be back on mininova.
The point is, Comcast would love to be able to keep me from using competing VoIP service, and getting my TV shows from somewhere else to force me to pay them for the privilege. But you know what? If they'd not jerked me around on price and provided quality services they'd still be getting my money.