Everybody thinks they're unique. Really though, the range of human behaviour isn't all that wide. You can think of groups of people like circles in a venn diagram...Even very different people can have a great deal of overlap.
Yea, because all the people who already pay a cable bill that's probably 50 bucks at least are going to refuse to pay some trivial fee to use foxnews.com, if they use it at all.
Don't treat it like asking for any money is a recipe for sure disaster. No one has made it work yet, but, arguably, no one has ever tried hard. And, unlike the last time they tried to charge, now everyone knows what's available online, and there will be people who will be willing to pay.
Moreover, from a different revenue standpoint, they can use the pay barrier to justify raising the costs for their advertisements, because they'll have a much better demographic picture of who is and isn't visiting their site.
Yea, sounds like amazon is trying to prevent him from pitching directly to his customers.
This is a serious issue for internet business: old school news media has a shocking amount of manpower compared to what internet business is used to, so they're perfectly capable of approaching all those people with offers for extra services outside of Amazon's channel, or, more likely, using that geo-demographic data to pitch subscriptions to those areas. They already have the resources they'd need to do that.
Remember, this is the WSJ, among others, that they're talking about. That paper does home delivery all over the country. Selling e-subscriptions is trivial by comparison.
Adoption rates are still pathetic, and the texts and features available for e-readers are few and over-priced. When your print quality is less than newspaper print quality, there is a problem.
Frankly, the newspaper industry is perfectly poised to offer it's products on that medium. Where I work we've had a digital product suitable for a Kindle (or similar) since 2005.
So that's not going to be a problem for them in the way that news on the internet, for example, is. If everyone bought a Kindle, they'd be much better off than if everyone bought a netbook.
It's not cheap, actually, but the majority of the costs right now are attached to the print business: printing, delivery, sales and support staff. Those things cost dramatically more than a bunch of journalists making less than the national average salary.
Mind you, print costs alone aren't the problem. Hiring a few dozen staff members who do nothing but write is still extremely expensive, and that assumes no lawsuits, no hotel bills, no mileage, no FOIA printing charges, etc.
I think the print news model will likely stablize on a payment model; some kind of microtransaction thing, or a very modest subscription cost. People say, "No one will ever pay for what they can get now, for free" but that same argument would have doomed cable television, and cable is alive and well.
Murdoch, as big a prick as he is, is doing the industry a favor by bringing this up. Eventually the "all free" thing is going to ebb away. Too many services, popular services, are bringing in massive traffic, and still unable to make a profit. It's going to have to change.
Nah, it's only been like 7 years since they released Warcraft III.
Seriously. This is Blizzard; they annoy me sometimes, but they're noted for their relatively bug-free releases...The "buggiest" game they ever released was WoW, and the "bug" there was that a zillion people wanted to play, and repeatedly crashed all the servers.
I wish I could say it was a surprise. Blizzard never releases games on time. I try not to look forward to them.
Of course, this could all just be a marketing scam. They announce the game, wait 18 months, give a delivery date 9 months in the future, and then push it back 3 months at a time until people are frothing with the need for the game, and then release it.
I mean hell, they announced Diablo 3 more than a year ago, and they haven't even bothered to put up the first, tentative, never-to-be-kept release date yet.
They claim it's 5-6 times as thermally conductive. There is no way they could make an actual claim about cooling because that completely depends on the case/fans/cpu/etc.
The point you're missing is that this stuff is 99% boring crap. It's stories about military base closures, and housing problems, and a whole host of other day to day happenings...Chances are the reporter won't even remember that they wrote the article a month later.
The big sexy articles very seldom get released to the AP, unless they're Features (human interest), and those are generally passed on complete, including the byline of the reporter and of the newspaper for which they write.
Meh. They're a cheap lay, so even though they blow up and freak out every couple of years, it's cheaper to pay 'em off than it is to invade or deal with an attempted invasion.
Having a million troops is meaningless...That just shows they're still in the WW1/WW2 mentality of having large masses of men run at each other with guns.
Modern warfare simply does not work that way. If we got in a shooting war with N. Korea, our superior experience, equipment, and training would make the war short and brutal.
What copyright? If I pay you to write me some news copy, and you do it, do you think you can turn around and claim rights over that? I paid you to create it, it belongs to me.
If you write code for a company, who owns the code? If an actor acts in a movie, who owns the movie? This should not be news to you.
In this case, the newspaper owns the copyright, and they share that copyrighted information with the AP as per their contract.
That is actually not true except in rare cases where a reporter is working directly for the AP, but without actually WORKING for the AP.
The AP is made up of thousands of news organizations who all pay people to create news content. They then give that content to the AP, and the AP gives them other peoples content in return. There is no licensing. The reporter sure as hell doesn't see any royalties! They get an hourly wage or a lump sum, and neither of these is substantial.
Actually, they do. In fact, they pay to submit those articles.
The reporters are paid by member newspapers, who submit their articles (if they're deemed noteworthy) for the AP to distribute. The AP can then do whatever the hell they want to with them. A good portion of the time some overworked schmuck at the AP office goes through and rips out all the local quotes, and locally relevant text (so as to make it more applicable across the country) and, having changed the story more than, say, 20%, they pull the original reporters byline off of it, thus producing a story that was written by Mr. Associated Press.
The newspapers and reporters don't care because their paper gets to use this article however THEY see fit, adding in their own local color and whatever, and then (if they've added enough) replacing the AP byline with their own byline and adding "from the ap", or "ap contributing", or whatever, to the bottom of the article.
The problem is that, now, everyone and their mother is reprinting this stuff without putting any money or original content back in the system. So they're pissed off, and charging the freeloaders a fee.
It's like economics. The priority of all individuals is financial stability/prosperity. The priority of society aligns itself with that.
The priority of all individuals is survival. There is no guarantee that that priority will ever align itself to species survival. You're asking me to believe, that, in absence of any immediate threat, that people are going to make, for themselves and for their children, an extreme sacrifice in order to send out some kind of genetic care package to the stars?
I don't know. It really depends on stuff we discover here. FTL or efficient fusion power or immortality, that might kick off a push to colonize the solar system, and the Oort cloud. But pushing to another star? That's a whole different game.
It's that big dark space between the stars. That alone would be a massive undertaking...Even if it shut down for the trip, after that long shut down there is no guarantee that it would ever start again.
Humans last, in ideal conditions, what 120 years? Maybe they produce 25 offspring, if they're in the offspring producing (female) half of the population. And they travel how far? Through what conditions?
Now try and design a machine that can do even what little we can do. We view the mars rovers as a magnificent achievement, and they're what, 5 years old? Can't reproduce, haven't even traveled 5 miles yet, can't think for themselves, etc, etc.
So don't pretend like this is some easy achievement, like we just have to want to do it and they'll be blasting off tomorrow. This is so far outside our experience that we have no idea if it can even BE done, more less know how to do it.
Travel at near light is a huge if. Accelerating some kind of gigantic people carrying ship to near light is an even larger if.
A ship carrying robots, tools, and genetic material would be small, and have practically no need for life support. Very modest energy requirements.
A ship carrying a viable population of adult humans (say 2000) would be massive, it would require huge amounts of energy, huge amounts of life support. Spare parts and consumables would be obscene.
Either way it's impractical. Seedships...The whole idea of seedships, is based around this idea of magical self-replicating, self-repairing technology that can work without supervision for millions of years.
I think entropy would doom the whole concept. The facile notion that all you'd have to do is build one, exponentially replicating machine to colonize the galaxy? Come on.
Look, we can't send people. We'll probably never be able to send people. Fermi is based on sending out seed probes to auto-grow people on the spot. The religious types would probably go NUTS if someone proposed doing that, because it's a very unbiblical way of raising kids.
Imagine the average bible bangers reaction to being told that their kids were going to be raised by robots. If this sort of thing ever happened, it'd be a secular endeavor, and, as you said, secular societies don't tend to work that way.
Slashdot Mirror
Everybody thinks they're unique. Really though, the range of human behaviour isn't all that wide. You can think of groups of people like circles in a venn diagram...Even very different people can have a great deal of overlap.
Yea, because all the people who already pay a cable bill that's probably 50 bucks at least are going to refuse to pay some trivial fee to use foxnews.com, if they use it at all.
Don't treat it like asking for any money is a recipe for sure disaster. No one has made it work yet, but, arguably, no one has ever tried hard. And, unlike the last time they tried to charge, now everyone knows what's available online, and there will be people who will be willing to pay.
Moreover, from a different revenue standpoint, they can use the pay barrier to justify raising the costs for their advertisements, because they'll have a much better demographic picture of who is and isn't visiting their site.
Yea, sounds like amazon is trying to prevent him from pitching directly to his customers.
This is a serious issue for internet business: old school news media has a shocking amount of manpower compared to what internet business is used to, so they're perfectly capable of approaching all those people with offers for extra services outside of Amazon's channel, or, more likely, using that geo-demographic data to pitch subscriptions to those areas. They already have the resources they'd need to do that.
Remember, this is the WSJ, among others, that they're talking about. That paper does home delivery all over the country. Selling e-subscriptions is trivial by comparison.
Adoption rates are still pathetic, and the texts and features available for e-readers are few and over-priced. When your print quality is less than newspaper print quality, there is a problem.
Frankly, the newspaper industry is perfectly poised to offer it's products on that medium. Where I work we've had a digital product suitable for a Kindle (or similar) since 2005.
So that's not going to be a problem for them in the way that news on the internet, for example, is. If everyone bought a Kindle, they'd be much better off than if everyone bought a netbook.
It's not cheap, actually, but the majority of the costs right now are attached to the print business: printing, delivery, sales and support staff. Those things cost dramatically more than a bunch of journalists making less than the national average salary.
Mind you, print costs alone aren't the problem. Hiring a few dozen staff members who do nothing but write is still extremely expensive, and that assumes no lawsuits, no hotel bills, no mileage, no FOIA printing charges, etc.
I think the print news model will likely stablize on a payment model; some kind of microtransaction thing, or a very modest subscription cost. People say, "No one will ever pay for what they can get now, for free" but that same argument would have doomed cable television, and cable is alive and well.
Murdoch, as big a prick as he is, is doing the industry a favor by bringing this up. Eventually the "all free" thing is going to ebb away. Too many services, popular services, are bringing in massive traffic, and still unable to make a profit. It's going to have to change.
It's funny how other industries dying during a recession is perfectly normal, but for newspapers it's TEH END.
They've still got a good 10 years of churning out pulp before the real DEATH OF NEWSPAPERS kicks in.
/Works for a newspaper corporation.
//Back in the black this fiscal quarter for the first time in 18 months.
Good luck on that. They announced SCII in may 2007, and it's still a minimum of 4 months out.
They didn't announce D3 until July '08...I'd be surprised if they started looking for Diablo beta testers before the end of the year.
Nah, it's only been like 7 years since they released Warcraft III.
Seriously. This is Blizzard; they annoy me sometimes, but they're noted for their relatively bug-free releases...The "buggiest" game they ever released was WoW, and the "bug" there was that a zillion people wanted to play, and repeatedly crashed all the servers.
I wish I could say it was a surprise. Blizzard never releases games on time. I try not to look forward to them.
Of course, this could all just be a marketing scam. They announce the game, wait 18 months, give a delivery date 9 months in the future, and then push it back 3 months at a time until people are frothing with the need for the game, and then release it.
I mean hell, they announced Diablo 3 more than a year ago, and they haven't even bothered to put up the first, tentative, never-to-be-kept release date yet.
They claim it's 5-6 times as thermally conductive. There is no way they could make an actual claim about cooling because that completely depends on the case/fans/cpu/etc.
That is absolutely correct.
The point you're missing is that this stuff is 99% boring crap. It's stories about military base closures, and housing problems, and a whole host of other day to day happenings...Chances are the reporter won't even remember that they wrote the article a month later.
The big sexy articles very seldom get released to the AP, unless they're Features (human interest), and those are generally passed on complete, including the byline of the reporter and of the newspaper for which they write.
Meh. They're a cheap lay, so even though they blow up and freak out every couple of years, it's cheaper to pay 'em off than it is to invade or deal with an attempted invasion.
Having a million troops is meaningless...That just shows they're still in the WW1/WW2 mentality of having large masses of men run at each other with guns.
Modern warfare simply does not work that way. If we got in a shooting war with N. Korea, our superior experience, equipment, and training would make the war short and brutal.
Yea, yea, all the bloggers are going to fill the massive hole left by professional news organizations...And after that, free unicorns for everyone!
What copyright? If I pay you to write me some news copy, and you do it, do you think you can turn around and claim rights over that? I paid you to create it, it belongs to me.
If you write code for a company, who owns the code? If an actor acts in a movie, who owns the movie? This should not be news to you.
In this case, the newspaper owns the copyright, and they share that copyrighted information with the AP as per their contract.
I don't know how else you think they're planning on enforcing it? Basically its: pay us to use our IP, or, if we catch you, we'll sue you.
That's how all copyright law works.
That is actually not true except in rare cases where a reporter is working directly for the AP, but without actually WORKING for the AP.
The AP is made up of thousands of news organizations who all pay people to create news content. They then give that content to the AP, and the AP gives them other peoples content in return. There is no licensing. The reporter sure as hell doesn't see any royalties! They get an hourly wage or a lump sum, and neither of these is substantial.
Actually, they do. In fact, they pay to submit those articles.
The reporters are paid by member newspapers, who submit their articles (if they're deemed noteworthy) for the AP to distribute. The AP can then do whatever the hell they want to with them. A good portion of the time some overworked schmuck at the AP office goes through and rips out all the local quotes, and locally relevant text (so as to make it more applicable across the country) and, having changed the story more than, say, 20%, they pull the original reporters byline off of it, thus producing a story that was written by Mr. Associated Press.
The newspapers and reporters don't care because their paper gets to use this article however THEY see fit, adding in their own local color and whatever, and then (if they've added enough) replacing the AP byline with their own byline and adding "from the ap", or "ap contributing", or whatever, to the bottom of the article.
The problem is that, now, everyone and their mother is reprinting this stuff without putting any money or original content back in the system. So they're pissed off, and charging the freeloaders a fee.
It's like economics. The priority of all individuals is financial stability/prosperity. The priority of society aligns itself with that.
The priority of all individuals is survival. There is no guarantee that that priority will ever align itself to species survival. You're asking me to believe, that, in absence of any immediate threat, that people are going to make, for themselves and for their children, an extreme sacrifice in order to send out some kind of genetic care package to the stars?
I don't know. It really depends on stuff we discover here. FTL or efficient fusion power or immortality, that might kick off a push to colonize the solar system, and the Oort cloud. But pushing to another star? That's a whole different game.
It's that big dark space between the stars. That alone would be a massive undertaking...Even if it shut down for the trip, after that long shut down there is no guarantee that it would ever start again.
Facile bullshit answer.
Humans last, in ideal conditions, what 120 years? Maybe they produce 25 offspring, if they're in the offspring producing (female) half of the population. And they travel how far? Through what conditions?
Now try and design a machine that can do even what little we can do. We view the mars rovers as a magnificent achievement, and they're what, 5 years old? Can't reproduce, haven't even traveled 5 miles yet, can't think for themselves, etc, etc.
So don't pretend like this is some easy achievement, like we just have to want to do it and they'll be blasting off tomorrow. This is so far outside our experience that we have no idea if it can even BE done, more less know how to do it.
Travel at near light is a huge if. Accelerating some kind of gigantic people carrying ship to near light is an even larger if.
A ship carrying robots, tools, and genetic material would be small, and have practically no need for life support. Very modest energy requirements.
A ship carrying a viable population of adult humans (say 2000) would be massive, it would require huge amounts of energy, huge amounts of life support. Spare parts and consumables would be obscene.
I just don't see it as likely without FTL.
Either way it's impractical. Seedships...The whole idea of seedships, is based around this idea of magical self-replicating, self-repairing technology that can work without supervision for millions of years.
I think entropy would doom the whole concept. The facile notion that all you'd have to do is build one, exponentially replicating machine to colonize the galaxy? Come on.
Yes...But no.
Look, we can't send people. We'll probably never be able to send people. Fermi is based on sending out seed probes to auto-grow people on the spot. The religious types would probably go NUTS if someone proposed doing that, because it's a very unbiblical way of raising kids.
Imagine the average bible bangers reaction to being told that their kids were going to be raised by robots. If this sort of thing ever happened, it'd be a secular endeavor, and, as you said, secular societies don't tend to work that way.
Well, the fastest speed humans have so far achieved is ~168,000mph ( Helios II ). The speed of light in mph is ~670,616,629.
Do the math. 1/10th of light speed is absurdly fast.