It never seems to work that way though. Ever notice how easy it is to group things into Genres? How easy it is to group music in to periods and influences and styles?
This remixing has been going on for a long time; something new appears, everyone jumps on the wagon, they ride the wagon for all its worth until it gets stale, then some person or group who is bored with the status quo does something original, and the whole thing starts over, but pointing in a different direction.
If you step back, you can see this sort of phenomenon everywhere in the world, in everything that people do.
Heh. I learned that lesson a long time ago. I wrote for this college newspaper, pretty radical, and we had this huge "Fuck the Police" issue in which I had the cover story (excessive use of force, yadda yadda yadda, I was very indignant), and in which I ranted and raved like a preacher in a whorehouse.
About 2 months later I was working late in the office, and a silent alarm tripped elsewhere in the building. So the cops show up, and who is the only person around? Me, sitting in a office with a full stack of 500 anti-cop newspapers sitting on a desk beside me.
Bad Scene. But a very good lesson in the value of discression and circumspection, as well as the value of never ever having any illegal substances in your car, office, or clothes.
Depends on what they do with it. If they sit on it forever, no, we don't.
If they release it into the world, the whole thing changes. It starts influencing things, people build around it, teach it to their kids. It becomes our thing, rather than their thing. So it is only fitting that they lose the right to control it after a suitable time.
If all ideas belonged forever to their originator, it would be a pathetic world. Can you imagine science where you'd have to license every idea you built on in order to publish your own work? Music where every instrument, every note, every muscial style was copyrighted to death, and completely unavailable? Literature where all plots are copyrighted? Can you imagine computer science where, in order to write code, you have to first buy a license to use a programming language?
That's what you're advocating. That's apparently what you want, so you can horde the tiny part of the world that you originated, which is based entirely on the works of everyone who went before.
Pretty much, yea. Everyone hates capitalism (when they're not on the top of the food chain), but it is by far the most efficient way to allocate limited resources. Not saying efficient==good, because it often doesn't, which is why we have copyrights (etc) in the first place.
Anytime you add a central authority into a system with diverse individual authorities, you exponentiate its inefficiency. You also open the door for corruption, and give people the incentive to try and circumvent the process, both of which add yet more ineffeciency.
PPPoE is stupidly easy to configure, and it's been around forever which doesn't bode well for your "DSL unsupported" comment.
Though I remember my cable company told me the same thing. Apparently they thought that DHCP was a Windows only service, or maybe that I was going to install their crappy connection utility. I ditched 'em later...they were a buncha Cox.
RPM based distros aren't that bad for non-pro users.
There are so many tools out there to help you manage repositories...Fedora's up2date, which has a nice GUI and a simple command line, YUM, Synaptic the apt-get frontend.
I just installed Stentz (Fedora Core 4) on a brand new high end box, and it looks beautiful, runs fast, everything autoconfigured fine. I had to do some work on it, because I need a non-standard apache compile and some other junk like that, but for your average user its fine. Comes with Firefox preinstalled.
If Linspire runs better than that, then I don't see how anyone could complain about anything except the usual whiny "Waaa it doesn't look quite the same" crap.
I should mention at this point, I've got a BA in English. Just ended up with one, because I needed something to do while I wasn't studying CS. So I have a pretty good idea of what I'm talking about.
That being said, a lot of "classics" are crap, and if I could unread some of them I would. You pick things no one disagrees with, and fail to mention things like 17 different works of Trollope, the miserable dregs of Steinbeck and Hawthorne (included because they're Steingbeck and Hawthorn) that no one would read if they knew any better, and Ulysses which routinely tops the list regardless of whether it is a "best" list or a "worst" list. 12 Books by D.H Lawrence, who should be dug up and shot for inventing the word "Demi-virge".
Add to that hundreds of volumes of ancient commentary and philosophy from Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, et al, which, while undeniably cool, is completely inaccessable to a layman. The freaking Satyricon is on that list; it's not the kind of book you can just pick up and read.
You get Ian Flemming, and you get E.M Forrester...And you get TEN books of Freud! TEN! Doesn't say you'll chop off your own penis after reading just five, but there you are.
The last thing I need is an apologist who didn't even bother to get the degree, but who is oh-so respectful of the snotty english profs I grew to detest, telling me that _I_ need a more balanced perspective. The bastards pulled the Shakespeare requirment the year after I got my degree. They PULLED the SHAKESPEARE requirement FROM the ENGLISH degree.
These are the last people who should be allowed to decide what is and isn't a classic.
If you can't be bothered to figure out for yourself which books you "ought" to read to get a good grasp of western literature, are you going to read the books some people at Amazon think you "ought" to read if they just end up on your shelves? (While lightening your wallet of money better spent on hardware).
I read a lot, and the idea of this is pretty distasteful to me. Sure, you'll get some of the good books, but you'll also get the awful crap that snotty english types swear is "fine literature".
180 days isn't always enough. Someone asks me, "How does X work on windows 2003?" and all I can say is, "I don't know, I haven't been able to use it since Q2 2003." Doesn't really cut it. But there is zero point in my buying a license; other than deploying it to other people its useless to me. Most of my work is OSS.
Yea, people will suddenly stop making music, movies, and software, just because the current compensation scheme is broken.
Because, of course, no other compensation scheme is possible; so say you and the RIAA, and Doubleclick, and you guys are all much smarter than me, so I must be completely wrong.
I'm going right now to go out and get a lobotomy and have my creative gene sugically removed. What a fool I have been to even speak of a hypothetical alternative to the current system.
Oh, and asswipe, read the sig, and UNDERSTAND IT. I put it there for morons like you.
Shrug. I occasionally pirate software, but I generally view it as beneficial for the company in question.
If I download (as an example) Windows 2003, use it, learn its ins and outs, and then reccommend that my clients switch to it, MS loses the value of one liscense, and gains the value of 200. If I pirated Office (which I never have), and used it to make Access databases which I sold to people, would this be good or bad for Microsoft?
On the one hand, I view this as the most blatant form of piracy...Using an illegitimate copy to make money for yourself. On the other hand, the person I sell it to needs a license for every person using the database. So one license stolen by me, makes for hundreds of licenses bought by other people.
I don't pirate games; even ones I code expansions for, I don't think its ethical, and I don't look at it as an evil empire making money off an artist (unless its an EA game).
But definitely in terms of the RIAA, I can see where the system is unfair enough that the issue becomes blurry. I'd really rather not give them my money, but I'm a music buff.
Your black supreme court justice votes against affirmative action.
And since you obviously don't know anything about congress, let me educate you.
25 Hispanics in congress. 20 are dems. 39 African Americans in congress. 39 are dems. 7 Asian/Native Hawaians/Philipinos 7 are dems.
What promises has the democratic party delivered to blacks? How about "representation"? Republicans like to wave the flag, but it is no accident that democrats are viewed as the party most friendly to minorities.
Blah blah blah. The reason people don't see it as equal to theft is because it isn't. It's copyright violation. Arguably the masses choice to disobey this law could be construed as a protest. An extremely LARGE protest.
The question is, how will it fall out? I think the current model is done. We need a better model to take its place.
It costs (pure operating expenses), 2,429,190.00 dollars to print ~50,000 papers a day for 3 months.
It costs ~12.00 (11.95) a month to get the paper, which works out to 1,800,000 in the same period, not counting deadbeats and single copy no sales.
So, for a full year, at 12.00 a month, the profit for the paper would be: 7,200,000 - 9,716,760 = -2,516,760
Those are figures from a relatively small paper, in an area where average salaries aren't all that high, and while $15 dollars an issue is clearly a laugh for us, it's probably about right for the New York Times. It's pretty clear that with zero ad revenue we'd have to increase subscriptions by 30% to make any profit at all.
Oh yea. The front page today had 1358 words on it, from four articles and some teasers, and all of the articles continued on other pages. 80 words in barely enough for a brief, and if your local paper routinely has stories that length, either they suck BAD, they're Gannett(same diff), or they aren't putting their full content online(which is really common).
Trust me, it costs a mint. Subscriptions and single copy sales don't cover the cost of printing, more less all the salaries and production equipment involved.
The reason you can get away with it with a paperback is that a) they cost a hell of a lot more, and b) it takes only a handful of people to put one together.
When was the last time you saw a paperback, or hell, even a hardcover, that was printed even partly in color? Only the covers are colored, and you know what? A lot of those covers are printed by newspapers, whose equipment costs so much to operate that it absolutely has to be working all the time.
A printed paperback is revised maybe once or twice a decade. Newspapers often print multiple editions on the same day. A book is generally written by one or two people, and edited by maybe two more; even a small newspaper is written by dozens of people, filled with photos by a staff of photographers, illustrated by a staff of graphic artists, overseen by dozens of editors, and copy editors.
If a book sold a million copies in a year, it'd be a best seller. If a newspaper sold a million copies in a year, it'd 1/4 the size of the paper I ran in COLLEGE, serving a town containing fewer people than most highschool basketball stadiums.
If you bought a paperback a week, you'd spend more than ten times as much as a newspaper subscription would cost, but the amount of content would be at least equal, just in terms of pure text, without counting pictures or ads.
You so clearly have no fucking clue what you're talking about.
In a perfect world, maybe. But everything in the world we live in is driven by conflict and competition, not the betterment of our fellow man, not the betterment of our world, not even the betterment of ourselves.
Until that changes, war is indeed a creator of value, because it's unlikely that many of those advances would have been made otherwise. All we know of space exploration is founded on advances that were originally made to kill people. Nuclear power came after nuclear weapons.
It's nice to imagine a world where there is o conflict and there is no competition. That world is probably also without technology, however.
I think eventually a lot of people will move to a sort of thin client software application environment, that they pay for on a monthly basis.
All the most current software, all the most secure systems, all their data stored in a safe place, and all their hardware provided by the company (who can afford it because it's just a thin client).
The problem is, who do we trust enough to keep our data safe? Microsoft would LOOOOVE to be that guy, but I can't see it happening. Google seems to be moving that way a bit, with their "Never delete anything again" email. I admit I've stored encrypted things on gmail, because I've got faith that they're a) not going to break my encryption (or even try, really), and b) going to have better backup redundancy than I have, unfortunately.
No, but fish who survive repeated cold snaps, and pass that ability down to their offspring, will, in time, produce a subspecies of fish more tolerant to extreme cold.
Heh. You know what immediately popped into my mind? That damn movie, Independance Day. Because, you know that's why the aliens could be hacked by an overtall jew and a rap star...their hive-oriented culture precluded the sort of internal conflicts that make ours strong, though extremely disfunctional.
"You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won't believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!"
Do I look like a moron? I couldn't make up a line like that. You may think they're all super competent...You sound like you work there...but in my experience BB techs are a fricking nightmare, and I'd let Jack the Ripper operate on my mom before I'd let one of those jokers touch any of my hardware.
And, oh yea, if you've got carpet, and they're not using a static strap, they're incompetent jokers. Not to mention the fact that, if you work for Dell, assembling their computers, they will FIRE YOU if you touch one without a static strap.
I'm going to have to go with the, "You are a moron option." Thank you very much for playing.
Slashdot Mirror
It never seems to work that way though. Ever notice how easy it is to group things into Genres? How easy it is to group music in to periods and influences and styles?
This remixing has been going on for a long time; something new appears, everyone jumps on the wagon, they ride the wagon for all its worth until it gets stale, then some person or group who is bored with the status quo does something original, and the whole thing starts over, but pointing in a different direction.
If you step back, you can see this sort of phenomenon everywhere in the world, in everything that people do.
Worked for W.
Heh. I learned that lesson a long time ago. I wrote for this college newspaper, pretty radical, and we had this huge "Fuck the Police" issue in which I had the cover story (excessive use of force, yadda yadda yadda, I was very indignant), and in which I ranted and raved like a preacher in a whorehouse.
About 2 months later I was working late in the office, and a silent alarm tripped elsewhere in the building. So the cops show up, and who is the only person around? Me, sitting in a office with a full stack of 500 anti-cop newspapers sitting on a desk beside me.
Bad Scene. But a very good lesson in the value of discression and circumspection, as well as the value of never ever having any illegal substances in your car, office, or clothes.
Depends on what they do with it. If they sit on it forever, no, we don't.
If they release it into the world, the whole thing changes. It starts influencing things, people build around it, teach it to their kids. It becomes our thing, rather than their thing. So it is only fitting that they lose the right to control it after a suitable time.
If all ideas belonged forever to their originator, it would be a pathetic world. Can you imagine science where you'd have to license every idea you built on in order to publish your own work? Music where every instrument, every note, every muscial style was copyrighted to death, and completely unavailable? Literature where all plots are copyrighted? Can you imagine computer science where, in order to write code, you have to first buy a license to use a programming language?
That's what you're advocating. That's apparently what you want, so you can horde the tiny part of the world that you originated, which is based entirely on the works of everyone who went before.
Just be glad they didn't feel the same way.
Pretty much, yea. Everyone hates capitalism (when they're not on the top of the food chain), but it is by far the most efficient way to allocate limited resources. Not saying efficient==good, because it often doesn't, which is why we have copyrights (etc) in the first place.
Anytime you add a central authority into a system with diverse individual authorities, you exponentiate its inefficiency. You also open the door for corruption, and give people the incentive to try and circumvent the process, both of which add yet more ineffeciency.
just a bad idea.
PPPoE is stupidly easy to configure, and it's been around forever which doesn't bode well for your "DSL unsupported" comment.
Though I remember my cable company told me the same thing. Apparently they thought that DHCP was a Windows only service, or maybe that I was going to install their crappy connection utility. I ditched 'em later...they were a buncha Cox.
RPM based distros aren't that bad for non-pro users.
There are so many tools out there to help you manage repositories...Fedora's up2date, which has a nice GUI and a simple command line, YUM, Synaptic the apt-get frontend.
I just installed Stentz (Fedora Core 4) on a brand new high end box, and it looks beautiful, runs fast, everything autoconfigured fine. I had to do some work on it, because I need a non-standard apache compile and some other junk like that, but for your average user its fine. Comes with Firefox preinstalled.
If Linspire runs better than that, then I don't see how anyone could complain about anything except the usual whiny "Waaa it doesn't look quite the same" crap.
Super. Monkey. Ball.
All I got to say.
I should mention at this point, I've got a BA in English. Just ended up with one, because I needed something to do while I wasn't studying CS. So I have a pretty good idea of what I'm talking about.
That being said, a lot of "classics" are crap, and if I could unread some of them I would. You pick things no one disagrees with, and fail to mention things like 17 different works of Trollope, the miserable dregs of Steinbeck and Hawthorne (included because they're Steingbeck and Hawthorn) that no one would read if they knew any better, and Ulysses which routinely tops the list regardless of whether it is a "best" list or a "worst" list. 12 Books by D.H Lawrence, who should be dug up and shot for inventing the word "Demi-virge".
Add to that hundreds of volumes of ancient commentary and philosophy from Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, et al, which, while undeniably cool, is completely inaccessable to a layman. The freaking Satyricon is on that list; it's not the kind of book you can just pick up and read.
You get Ian Flemming, and you get E.M Forrester...And you get TEN books of Freud! TEN! Doesn't say you'll chop off your own penis after reading just five, but there you are.
The last thing I need is an apologist who didn't even bother to get the degree, but who is oh-so respectful of the snotty english profs I grew to detest, telling me that _I_ need a more balanced perspective. The bastards pulled the Shakespeare requirment the year after I got my degree. They PULLED the SHAKESPEARE requirement FROM the ENGLISH degree.
These are the last people who should be allowed to decide what is and isn't a classic.
If you can't be bothered to figure out for yourself which books you "ought" to read to get a good grasp of western literature, are you going to read the books some people at Amazon think you "ought" to read if they just end up on your shelves? (While lightening your wallet of money better spent on hardware).
I read a lot, and the idea of this is pretty distasteful to me. Sure, you'll get some of the good books, but you'll also get the awful crap that snotty english types swear is "fine literature".
If you want to get pissed off about something, buy it. Otherwise don't.
Is it published by Microsoft?
180 days isn't always enough. Someone asks me, "How does X work on windows 2003?" and all I can say is, "I don't know, I haven't been able to use it since Q2 2003." Doesn't really cut it. But there is zero point in my buying a license; other than deploying it to other people its useless to me. Most of my work is OSS.
Yea, people will suddenly stop making music, movies, and software, just because the current compensation scheme is broken.
Because, of course, no other compensation scheme is possible; so say you and the RIAA, and Doubleclick, and you guys are all much smarter than me, so I must be completely wrong.
I'm going right now to go out and get a lobotomy and have my creative gene sugically removed. What a fool I have been to even speak of a hypothetical alternative to the current system.
Oh, and asswipe, read the sig, and UNDERSTAND IT. I put it there for morons like you.
Shrug. I occasionally pirate software, but I generally view it as beneficial for the company in question.
If I download (as an example) Windows 2003, use it, learn its ins and outs, and then reccommend that my clients switch to it, MS loses the value of one liscense, and gains the value of 200. If I pirated Office (which I never have), and used it to make Access databases which I sold to people, would this be good or bad for Microsoft?
On the one hand, I view this as the most blatant form of piracy...Using an illegitimate copy to make money for yourself. On the other hand, the person I sell it to needs a license for every person using the database. So one license stolen by me, makes for hundreds of licenses bought by other people.
I don't pirate games; even ones I code expansions for, I don't think its ethical, and I don't look at it as an evil empire making money off an artist (unless its an EA game).
But definitely in terms of the RIAA, I can see where the system is unfair enough that the issue becomes blurry. I'd really rather not give them my money, but I'm a music buff.
Your black supreme court justice votes against affirmative action.
And since you obviously don't know anything about congress, let me educate you.
25 Hispanics in congress. 20 are dems.
39 African Americans in congress. 39 are dems.
7 Asian/Native Hawaians/Philipinos 7 are dems.
What promises has the democratic party delivered to blacks? How about "representation"? Republicans like to wave the flag, but it is no accident that democrats are viewed as the party most friendly to minorities.
Blah blah blah. The reason people don't see it as equal to theft is because it isn't. It's copyright violation. Arguably the masses choice to disobey this law could be construed as a protest. An extremely LARGE protest.
The question is, how will it fall out? I think the current model is done. We need a better model to take its place.
Okay. Hard numbers.
It costs (pure operating expenses), 2,429,190.00 dollars to print ~50,000 papers a day for 3 months.
It costs ~12.00 (11.95) a month to get the paper, which works out to 1,800,000 in the same period, not counting deadbeats and single copy no sales.
So, for a full year, at 12.00 a month, the profit for the paper would be: 7,200,000 - 9,716,760 = -2,516,760
Those are figures from a relatively small paper, in an area where average salaries aren't all that high, and while $15 dollars an issue is clearly a laugh for us, it's probably about right for the New York Times. It's pretty clear that with zero ad revenue we'd have to increase subscriptions by 30% to make any profit at all.
Oh yea. The front page today had 1358 words on it, from four articles and some teasers, and all of the articles continued on other pages. 80 words in barely enough for a brief, and if your local paper routinely has stories that length, either they suck BAD, they're Gannett(same diff), or they aren't putting their full content online(which is really common).
Trust me, it costs a mint. Subscriptions and single copy sales don't cover the cost of printing, more less all the salaries and production equipment involved.
The reason you can get away with it with a paperback is that a) they cost a hell of a lot more, and b) it takes only a handful of people to put one together.
When was the last time you saw a paperback, or hell, even a hardcover, that was printed even partly in color? Only the covers are colored, and you know what? A lot of those covers are printed by newspapers, whose equipment costs so much to operate that it absolutely has to be working all the time.
A printed paperback is revised maybe once or twice a decade. Newspapers often print multiple editions on the same day. A book is generally written by one or two people, and edited by maybe two more; even a small newspaper is written by dozens of people, filled with photos by a staff of photographers, illustrated by a staff of graphic artists, overseen by dozens of editors, and copy editors.
If a book sold a million copies in a year, it'd be a best seller. If a newspaper sold a million copies in a year, it'd 1/4 the size of the paper I ran in COLLEGE, serving a town containing fewer people than most highschool basketball stadiums.
If you bought a paperback a week, you'd spend more than ten times as much as a newspaper subscription would cost, but the amount of content would be at least equal, just in terms of pure text, without counting pictures or ads.
You so clearly have no fucking clue what you're talking about.
In a perfect world, maybe. But everything in the world we live in is driven by conflict and competition, not the betterment of our fellow man, not the betterment of our world, not even the betterment of ourselves.
Until that changes, war is indeed a creator of value, because it's unlikely that many of those advances would have been made otherwise. All we know of space exploration is founded on advances that were originally made to kill people. Nuclear power came after nuclear weapons.
It's nice to imagine a world where there is o conflict and there is no competition. That world is probably also without technology, however.
I think eventually a lot of people will move to a sort of thin client software application environment, that they pay for on a monthly basis.
All the most current software, all the most secure systems, all their data stored in a safe place, and all their hardware provided by the company (who can afford it because it's just a thin client).
The problem is, who do we trust enough to keep our data safe? Microsoft would LOOOOVE to be that guy, but I can't see it happening. Google seems to be moving that way a bit, with their "Never delete anything again" email. I admit I've stored encrypted things on gmail, because I've got faith that they're a) not going to break my encryption (or even try, really), and b) going to have better backup redundancy than I have, unfortunately.
It'll be interesting to see.
No, but fish who survive repeated cold snaps, and pass that ability down to their offspring, will, in time, produce a subspecies of fish more tolerant to extreme cold.
Heh. You know what immediately popped into my mind? That damn movie, Independance Day. Because, you know that's why the aliens could be hacked by an overtall jew and a rap star...their hive-oriented culture precluded the sort of internal conflicts that make ours strong, though extremely disfunctional.
That's not how it works.
You insure it for 4 million, at a premium of 4 million, and when it crashes they give you the 4 million, and keep the interest.
Their profits come from two sources: Things that were insured against that don't happen, and interest made on money taken in as premiums.
"You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won't believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!"
--Richard Feynman
Durr, yea, give me da wireless static strap.
Do I look like a moron? I couldn't make up a line like that. You may think they're all super competent...You sound like you work there...but in my experience BB techs are a fricking nightmare, and I'd let Jack the Ripper operate on my mom before I'd let one of those jokers touch any of my hardware.
And, oh yea, if you've got carpet, and they're not using a static strap, they're incompetent jokers. Not to mention the fact that, if you work for Dell, assembling their computers, they will FIRE YOU if you touch one without a static strap.
I'm going to have to go with the, "You are a moron option." Thank you very much for playing.