" Okay, good for you. Now consider all of the people who downloaded the music from YOU, who might not buy the CD as a result, and tell me you haven't done anything wrong."
Actually, I can honestly say that I haven't done anything wrong in that regard because I don't share when I use P2P. It eats up my bandwidth, looks suspicious to my school, and makes me a target for the RIAA. I know this isn't exactly morally right....but there are plenty of other people willing to risk their necks and I have no problem leeching off of them.
"One thing that he told me that I was very surprised to learn was how these games are specifically designed to be intensively psychologically addicting. (They are subscription-based games so they want you to keep on playing.) "
For all you psych buffs out there, all of the MMORPGs out there now, like EQ for example are designed on the psychological principle of the Skinner Box. For an EXCELLENT essay explaining how these games aare Skinner Boxes, check out the essay at the Norrathian Scrolls website. Truly eye-opening insight into an extremely successful albeit scummy business model.
Gillette thinks they were smart by selling the razor cheap and getting people hooked on the blade refills? This makes Gillette look like a lemonade-stand in terms of a business model.
"The monthly price is actually higher than the 10$ listed in the blurb. For a single month, you're paying nearly 15 bucks, though I believe you can knock it down to 12 bucks by paying a year at a time."
Is anybody else disgusted by this? Expect to see price-creep that will blow CD prices out of the water in terms of raping the customer. Its things like these that are now making me stay away from pay-to-play MMORPGs and go with games that are free, or go with a service that provides access to MANY games for about the same price as SWG.
Example? I wanted to play Planetside, but I'm not going to because of the price. So instead I bought BF1942, which has a large number of possible players per server (64, and this number will only rise in future FPS as tech gets better), tons of servers to choose from with different options of gameplay, and an INCREDIBLE mod community that are putting out mods that have so many servers they rival the original game now.
Kind of off-topic, I know...but this whole IP patenting shitstorm thats been going on lately has made me think. You know all those sci-fi stories where the world is run by a handful of megacorps? How did they gain as much power as they did? I believe it is through IP law. Once you own the rights to the technology/ideas/business models that a society becomes dependent on, you can pretty much do whatever the hell you want, and you collect money from everybody.
You think the corporations we have now are massive? Give it a couple decades. Consolidation and Corporate Darwinism will ensure that for the largest areas of business, we will have but a handful of truly MEGA corporations, that own every aspect of our lives.
I could just be extremely paranoid from reading too much cyberpunk...but I think the current trends of patenting IP are the beginning of the biggest 'snowball-effect' we'll ever see economically.
"if they move all their assets to India or other low-cost countries, they hit a double whammy : cheaper labour + no pattent fees."
Don't worry, once Bush realizes that all the money is in IP, he'll um...'liberate' the countries that are being used as safe havens for people who use other peoples IP.
I don't have one of these so I don't know the specifics...but if you have to do that everytime to do the 30 sec. skip...how cool would it be if someone released a remote control that was similar to those programmable gamepads...where you could program in the sequence of commands, and then set it to one button and that button would execute the commands macro style.
"What would it take to have a TiVo-like service for radio stations, that could be programmed to record all songs by a certain artist, or from an album, or one DJ'd by someone..."
"Let's say that lots of people, sites, companies, etc, start using this lovely, free Amazon data. Then Amazon turns around and tells the world in 3 years that people have to start paying for the data. Kind of a suck-you-in-seeming-"open"-but-not-really kind of trick."
If only the laws for 'bait-and-switch tactics' applied to this.
"Said m0rp3us, leader of the group "3y3 0f th3 d0g," "zero-click" will order various items automatically using already stored in a user's billing info."
I know you were only joking...but sadly Bezos can't patent this because its already been done, and was posted on slashdot Sunday the 22nd. Here's the link. Scary shit indeed.
"Given Amazon's track record I suggest you developers check the license daily."
No kidding...I can already see the next business method Amazon is going to patent:
1.Release your code to developers and let them do truly amazing things with it while letting them think they own it 2.Change licensing agreement once truly valuable software has been developed to state that you own it. 3.PROFIT!!!
""I don't see this as such a huge news story," Superintendent Mary Frances Callan "
Hmmmm, wanna show her one of the things that can happen when your personal information gets into lots of peoples hands? Someone wanna post her personal information and we'll commit the first ever physical Slashdotting of a school.
"Are you saying that if I didn't download that song, the artist would get paid? "
You know, this is a point that gets next to nothing in terms of media attention, in fact, i can only recall it being said on slashdot. If I did not download music, I would not buy it, period. As a college student who cannot afford to spend money on CDs, if I have money to spend, there is a long list of things ahead of buying CDs that my money would go to. However, at some point I WILL have money that will eventually be able to be spent on CDs, if I decide to. At that point, how will I know what CDs to buy? I don't like the crap music that is being forced on us and is played on 99.9% of the radio stations because of Clear Channel. Since I have the songs on my computer now, I have grown to like many of them and would buy them instantly if I had the money. But guess what, that wouldn't be the case if I couldn't have downloaded them, listened to them whenever and wherever I wanted at my convenience, and gotten them for free.
The media really needs to make public the point that "A downloaded song does NOT necessarily equal a lost purchase."
"If we all boycott RIAA members products (yes downloads too), we can hurt them."
Can you say Reality Check? Not to flame ya...but seriously...there is no feasible way to stop every person (or even a really significant number) to stop buying CDs and/or downloading music at this point. It is
A. Too damned easy B.Not risky enough to do yet (safety in numbers and what not) C.Too good of a price.
While that is a great idea in theory...its not a very well thought out theory that in practice, would get a handful of people to stop...out of the MILLIONS (wonder when it'll hit the billions) of current people who buy/download music.
"I've heard talk that once the RIAA starts suing the general public, that's when there will be a huge public complaint against them. "
You might want to think about it like this...lets say you're out camping with your friends. You are the RIAA in this case. You see a bee (a bee being a file sharer) and it stings you (the sting being the bad press from suing a kid, assuming they can't twist it to good press). One sting won't kill most people, and wouldn't be noticed.
Now, lets say you see that a beehive is in the tree directly above your picnic table and the bees are starting to steal your food en masse. You decide "hey, i'm gonna just take out the whole hive at once". You hit it with a stick several times, and all the bees get pissed and sting you. In many cases, this could KILL you.
Now, I know this is a horribly complex analogy...but hopefully it illuminates the PR side of the story.
"Funny that, isn't it? Even though the RIAA and MPAA are claming that p2p sharing is killing their business, you never hear the adult industry complaining about p2p."
Yeah, funny thing that.....Its amazing how the porn industry is not only on the forefront of new technology, but also on the forefront of adapting their business to that technology. Of all the industries, I think you'll be hard pressed to find one more versatile and flexible in the way it conducts business. Hell, they can do anal, oral, vaginal, three way, midget, bestiality, you name it;)
But in all seriousness, I'd trust a porn company more than i'd trust a label any day.
"The Push To Talk function takes a perfectly good full-duplex cell phone and turns it into a half-duplex walkie-talkie. They even give you a thicker and heavier phone to keep up the illusion!"
Yeah, and then there's the ghetto people who use REGULAR cellphones like a walkie talkie...holding them in front of their face to talk and then to their ear to listen....maybe this was just marketing towards that audience.
"As product designers we are at a cross roads where we are only now starting to understand which services and abilities people want grouped together in a single appliance."
But at some point I think we'll get to a stage where we have a bunch of technologies, sufficiently miniaturized, and at that point I think it WILL be time to put them into one device. Can you say 'tricorder'? Many people preach about how things shouldn't be grouped together under one item, but at a certain point you have too many features you need to use, and to damned many accessories that are designed to ONLY perform one or two functions. Its really just a question of when the convergence happens, not if it should or not.
"For example, when I press the on button, I want it to turn on. Instantly. I don't want to have to wait several minutes for it to "warm up" like the old TVs used to. And when I press the off button, I want it to turn off. Instantly. And if I press the on button again, I want to see the same stuff on the screen as when I last switched it off. And that's just the functionality of the on-off button!"
If I am still up-to-date on my knowledge of this..it is currently feasible with our technology, although a new type of RAM in development (Magnetic-RAM or MRAM) would change that and enable you to do EXACTLY what you want in terms of an on/off switch. I'm not so sure about the taking forever to bootup part, but the problem with today's RAM is that once it loses power, all the data is wiped from it, with MRAM, the memory retains its values without power so it can resume from there next time power is on.
"The medium and presentation greatly affect the content in most situations, which make machine interpretation of whats "interesting" extremely difficult."
Yeah, especially once the owner of some website (probably the same person who came up with the bright idea to give misleading subject headers in spam) "hey, if I label my website as what the viewers WANT to see, instead of what it actually is, I can generate more hits."
"My personal opinion is that 3G will fail to take off until the vendors drop all pretense of it being some sort of mini-web device and actually recognise that people do not want to watch a postage stamp sized weather report video."
Speak for yourself, now when someone tries to make fun of me and says "You need a magnifying glass to masturbate" I can whip out my phone and say "Yes, in order to see the money shot clearly."
"Seriously, less than a few hours ago I met a guy (in person) who helps another guy spam overseas."
And you didn't inflict bodily harm?
"I wanted to choke the guy!"
Thinking about it is nice...but seriously people, the problem isn't the few people responding to spam that makes it viable...its the people who have met spammers in person or who know people who do work for spammers and don't hunt them down, tie them up, give them many papercuts on their eyeballs, drip acid onto their genitals, launch porcupines at them from a high-velocity cannon, hang heavy weights from their nipples, ears, and remains of their genitalia, and finally have them killed by public stoning.
Seriously...sometimes I feel Slashdot is all talk and no action.
"I do not have a criminal mind. I'm prolly going to die poor:("
Well, cheers to you, and while I share the sentiment that just because you hate your company, you shouldn't take it out on the customers of that company...there are MANY people in IT who could care less, especially if it gets them a couple hundred bucks above their measely salary.
While sweeping generalizations are bad to make...I think it's pretty safe to say that the lower your income, the less morals will play a role in your decision to make a few quick bucks, and more to do with how risky it is that you'll be caught.
"Imagine having something like a pen, that you pull a display out of, now that's the real future!"
That would completely rock, however once pulled out I would hope it would become stiff so that I could hold it in one hand and input data with my other, otherwise you'd have to either put it down, or just not input anything and use it solely as a display, which wouldn't be entirely bad for large digital gps map.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I can honestly say that I haven't done anything wrong in that regard because I don't share when I use P2P. It eats up my bandwidth, looks suspicious to my school, and makes me a target for the RIAA. I know this isn't exactly morally right....but there are plenty of other people willing to risk their necks and I have no problem leeching off of them.
For all you psych buffs out there, all of the MMORPGs out there now, like EQ for example are designed on the psychological principle of the Skinner Box. For an EXCELLENT essay explaining how these games aare Skinner Boxes, check out the essay at the Norrathian Scrolls website. Truly eye-opening insight into an extremely successful albeit scummy business model.
Gillette thinks they were smart by selling the razor cheap and getting people hooked on the blade refills? This makes Gillette look like a lemonade-stand in terms of a business model.
Is anybody else disgusted by this? Expect to see price-creep that will blow CD prices out of the water in terms of raping the customer. Its things like these that are now making me stay away from pay-to-play MMORPGs and go with games that are free, or go with a service that provides access to MANY games for about the same price as SWG.
Example? I wanted to play Planetside, but I'm not going to because of the price. So instead I bought BF1942, which has a large number of possible players per server (64, and this number will only rise in future FPS as tech gets better), tons of servers to choose from with different options of gameplay, and an INCREDIBLE mod community that are putting out mods that have so many servers they rival the original game now.
You think the corporations we have now are massive? Give it a couple decades. Consolidation and Corporate Darwinism will ensure that for the largest areas of business, we will have but a handful of truly MEGA corporations, that own every aspect of our lives.
I could just be extremely paranoid from reading too much cyberpunk...but I think the current trends of patenting IP are the beginning of the biggest 'snowball-effect' we'll ever see economically.
Don't worry, once Bush realizes that all the money is in IP, he'll um...'liberate' the countries that are being used as safe havens for people who use other peoples IP.
I don't have one of these so I don't know the specifics...but if you have to do that everytime to do the 30 sec. skip...how cool would it be if someone released a remote control that was similar to those programmable gamepads...where you could program in the sequence of commands, and then set it to one button and that button would execute the commands macro style.
Songs on the radio that are worth recording?
If only the laws for 'bait-and-switch tactics' applied to this.
I know you were only joking...but sadly Bezos can't patent this because its already been done, and was posted on slashdot Sunday the 22nd. Here's the link. Scary shit indeed.
No kidding...I can already see the next business method Amazon is going to patent:
1.Release your code to developers and let them do truly amazing things with it while letting them think they own it
2.Change licensing agreement once truly valuable software has been developed to state that you own it.
3.PROFIT!!!
Hmmmm, wanna show her one of the things that can happen when your personal information gets into lots of peoples hands? Someone wanna post her personal information and we'll commit the first ever physical Slashdotting of a school.
Yes, I have, and yeah it hurt, but it did not incapacitate me and ruin my camping trip. I put a bandaid on it, bitched a bit, then carried on.
You know, this is a point that gets next to nothing in terms of media attention, in fact, i can only recall it being said on slashdot. If I did not download music, I would not buy it, period. As a college student who cannot afford to spend money on CDs, if I have money to spend, there is a long list of things ahead of buying CDs that my money would go to. However, at some point I WILL have money that will eventually be able to be spent on CDs, if I decide to. At that point, how will I know what CDs to buy? I don't like the crap music that is being forced on us and is played on 99.9% of the radio stations because of Clear Channel. Since I have the songs on my computer now, I have grown to like many of them and would buy them instantly if I had the money. But guess what, that wouldn't be the case if I couldn't have downloaded them, listened to them whenever and wherever I wanted at my convenience, and gotten them for free.
The media really needs to make public the point that "A downloaded song does NOT necessarily equal a lost purchase."
"If we all boycott RIAA members products (yes downloads too), we can hurt them."
Can you say Reality Check? Not to flame ya...but seriously...there is no feasible way to stop every person (or even a really significant number) to stop buying CDs and/or downloading music at this point. It is
A. Too damned easy
B.Not risky enough to do yet (safety in numbers and what not)
C.Too good of a price.
While that is a great idea in theory...its not a very well thought out theory that in practice, would get a handful of people to stop...out of the MILLIONS (wonder when it'll hit the billions) of current people who buy/download music.
You might want to think about it like this...lets say you're out camping with your friends. You are the RIAA in this case. You see a bee (a bee being a file sharer) and it stings you (the sting being the bad press from suing a kid, assuming they can't twist it to good press). One sting won't kill most people, and wouldn't be noticed.
Now, lets say you see that a beehive is in the tree directly above your picnic table and the bees are starting to steal your food en masse. You decide "hey, i'm gonna just take out the whole hive at once". You hit it with a stick several times, and all the bees get pissed and sting you. In many cases, this could KILL you.
Now, I know this is a horribly complex analogy...but hopefully it illuminates the PR side of the story.
Yeah, funny thing that.....Its amazing how the porn industry is not only on the forefront of new technology, but also on the forefront of adapting their business to that technology. Of all the industries, I think you'll be hard pressed to find one more versatile and flexible in the way it conducts business. Hell, they can do anal, oral, vaginal, three way, midget, bestiality, you name it ;)
But in all seriousness, I'd trust a porn company more than i'd trust a label any day.
Yeah, and then there's the ghetto people who use REGULAR cellphones like a walkie talkie...holding them in front of their face to talk and then to their ear to listen....maybe this was just marketing towards that audience.
But at some point I think we'll get to a stage where we have a bunch of technologies, sufficiently miniaturized, and at that point I think it WILL be time to put them into one device. Can you say 'tricorder'? Many people preach about how things shouldn't be grouped together under one item, but at a certain point you have too many features you need to use, and to damned many accessories that are designed to ONLY perform one or two functions. Its really just a question of when the convergence happens, not if it should or not.
If I am still up-to-date on my knowledge of this..it is currently feasible with our technology, although a new type of RAM in development (Magnetic-RAM or MRAM) would change that and enable you to do EXACTLY what you want in terms of an on/off switch. I'm not so sure about the taking forever to bootup part, but the problem with today's RAM is that once it loses power, all the data is wiped from it, with MRAM, the memory retains its values without power so it can resume from there next time power is on.
Yeah, especially once the owner of some website (probably the same person who came up with the bright idea to give misleading subject headers in spam) "hey, if I label my website as what the viewers WANT to see, instead of what it actually is, I can generate more hits."
Speak for yourself, now when someone tries to make fun of me and says "You need a magnifying glass to masturbate" I can whip out my phone and say "Yes, in order to see the money shot clearly."
And you didn't inflict bodily harm?
"I wanted to choke the guy!"
Thinking about it is nice...but seriously people, the problem isn't the few people responding to spam that makes it viable...its the people who have met spammers in person or who know people who do work for spammers and don't hunt them down, tie them up, give them many papercuts on their eyeballs, drip acid onto their genitals, launch porcupines at them from a high-velocity cannon, hang heavy weights from their nipples, ears, and remains of their genitalia, and finally have them killed by public stoning.
Seriously...sometimes I feel Slashdot is all talk and no action.
"I do not have a criminal mind. I'm prolly going to die poor :("
Well, cheers to you, and while I share the sentiment that just because you hate your company, you shouldn't take it out on the customers of that company...there are MANY people in IT who could care less, especially if it gets them a couple hundred bucks above their measely salary.
While sweeping generalizations are bad to make...I think it's pretty safe to say that the lower your income, the less morals will play a role in your decision to make a few quick bucks, and more to do with how risky it is that you'll be caught.
That would completely rock, however once pulled out I would hope it would become stiff so that I could hold it in one hand and input data with my other, otherwise you'd have to either put it down, or just not input anything and use it solely as a display, which wouldn't be entirely bad for large digital gps map.