I'm not justifying piracy, I'm saying the problem is not about piracy, it's about overpriced, out-of-date products.
Your problem isn't about piracy. Oddly enough, the studios consider it to be so. And if you consider their products overpriced and out of date...don't buy them. That's your option.
Did you actually read my posting, or are you simply attempting to divert my argument back to the wedge issue that I clearly identified?
Sure did.
So long as Hollywood tries to force people to pay over the top for movies, there will be pirates.
So long as Ford tries to force people to pay over the top for cars, there will be carjackers. See how ridiculous that is? The business model does not justify the illegal act. There will always be criminals, but it doesn't make it OK.
As for boycotts, I'm serious. Rosa Parks started a boycott that lasted almost a year. It was the only way that the community could fight against an oppressive regime.
And I'm saying that assocating trivial problems like not getting to see movies when you want for the price you want with real problems like racism cheapens such analogies.
And yes, this is about civil rights. Maybe you've missed this, but over the last decade the pendulum has started to swing towards a regime in which all content is property, and all unauthorised access is a crime.
THat's not civil rights. Getting the right to vote is civil rights. Getting the right to go to school is civil rights. And works less than a year old have always been protected by copyright, so don't give me this "last 10 years" crap. If you want to be civilly disobedient, go download Citizen Kane, not Star Wars III.
But heck, interpret this as a vote for piracy if you want to!
Are you using that lame-assed argument as an excuse to pirate movies, or do you maintain the moral high ground by not doing so?
Unfortunately, I fear that educating the american public about this issue would garner a response that would only foster the opinions held by other nations for supporting a division of control. Let the news give a little "now you know..." segment before hand, and everyone would be screaming that 'We made it, we should keep it!' which doesn't really make us look any better the rest of the world.
See, I am educated about the issue, I *still* say we should keep it, and I don't care a lick what the bulk of the "rest of the world" thinks with regard to US policy. Especially in a situation like this which isn't about maintaining effectiveness of the internet but rather playing politics. If it ain't broke...
The point of calling it stealing is to make it sound morally wrong
And I assume the converse is as well, namely that pointing out that it's *not* stealing is to sound morally OK.
Legality isn't morality. I don't feel like I've sinned when I go five over the speed limit, I don't feel like I've sinned when I copy one song from a Smashing Pumpkins album that I would never buy, and I don't feel like I've sinned when I violate the DMCA to watch a DVD under Linux.
Whatever helps you sleep better at night. Psychologists call it "rationalization." Speeding truly is victimless *if* it doesn't result in increased danger to others. Copyright violation, on the other hand, isn't victimless. If you want something, buy it. If you can't afford it, don't take it. And there's a big difference between DMCA violation violation of copyright as it previously stood.
No, it matters a lot. It covers different areas of the law. If you equate it to stealing, you have a totally different area of law and application to deal with. If you call it what it really is, copyright infringement, you have a different area to tackle. Using the wrong word for something matters.
Which is relevant when you become either 1) a lawyer, or 2) a defendant. Otherwise, they're both illegal, so it doesn't much matter.
It is a false issue, and anyone discussing whether "piracy is right or wrong" is falling into the trap.
What most people actually are for is a better way of getting content. We don't like thieves. We don't like stealing. But we find paying $50-$100 to take the family to the movies unjustly expensive.
Uh huh. You don't connect the dots there, but it sounds a lot like you're justifying piracy on the basis that movies are too expensive. You say we want a "better way to get content" without mentioning a distribution method, but you do go on to mention cost. So it sounds like your "better way" is a "cheaper way." Well guess what? That still doesn't give you the right to rip it off. Know what I do when I can't afford something? I don't buy it. Besides, if you wait, the movie will cost $4 to rent, and even the poorest of us can afford that. The "cost as justification" argument isn't going to work.
And the simple solution, by the way, is to boycott Holywood, and boycott the record labels that sponsor the RIAA.
That's true. But such a boycott kind of loses the message if you rip off what you're boycotting. Otherwise, you're just boycotting *paying* for movies, and that's probably not the message we want to send. So if we're going to boycott Hollywood, let's also make sure not to watch their movies.
as Rosa Parks demonstrated - even the most humble of us can refuse to give our money to those that would mistreat us.
I don't know where to start on that one. Rosa did pay to get on the bus, she just didn't sit in the back. And please, don't cheapen what she did by putting it in the same class as movie piracy, because civil rights is just slightly more important. I also hope you're not saying that piracy is civil disobedience, because it's not. It's just taking what you want without paying for it. Doesn't make you an inspirational leader, just makes you a criminal.
rpm2tgz for Slackers and alien for...er... Debbers.
Seriously. Anyone using either of those distros who wasn't familiar with that little tidbit...well, let's just say we should all pitch in and get them some copies of Mandrivel. Maybe Linspire.
Part of the problem with your theory is that metal oxides don't exist in the sun in any way you might think
Actually, I'll help you out here a little, as the guy is even dumber than you think. Metal oxides don't exist in the sun *at all*, because molecules can't exist in the sun. In fact, neither do atoms. The sun is a plasma - a bunch of nuclei and a sea of unbound electrons. So you have metal nuclei, oxygen nuclei, and electrons, but no metal oxides.
The thing is, and here's where media coverage is biased, Steve Jobs is charismatic. The reality distortion field is nothing more than that. He's a strong and interesting leader that can make people feel the way he wants them to feel. He's a skilled orator.
Bill Gates, on the other hand... Isn't. He's dull, both to look at and to listen to.
Pretty and interesting people get more coverage in the media because they "give good face." Steve Jobs is probably the most stylish tech personality there is. That's why the media listens to him.
So they're...sheep who suck at their jobs, which is ostensibly objective news reporting?
He is, you know. Apple keynotes given by Jobs actually get reported on the mainstream news in the UK. Frankly, Apple's still newsworthy because they're still one of the biggest computer manufacturers around, despite the market share of their system vs Windows. And, of course, iPod is the biggest product BY FAR in the neo-Walkman market.
I'm hoping you're aware of the circularity of that argument, given that the subject is media bias towards Apple?
Hey, guess what, the media covers celebrities way more than non-celebrities too. If Gates does something interesting, that deserves coverage, but majority != coverage when it comes to media darlings.
Hate to tell you this, but for the rest of the world, Jobs isn't a celebrity.
If I wanted to know how Vista was doing I'd become a platnium gold sponsored MSDN subscriber and read about it in my the newsletter from Balmer himself.
Does the same apply to the latest weekly Ubuntu release or Mac speed bump, or do you have sliding standards for different products?
That's true of a lot of chemicals. The "nano" isn't the issue. Seriously, there's nothing magical about nano-anything. Chemistry is inherently nanotech - molecules are pretty damned small. Anyone who lumps all of "nanotech" together and speaks about it as some cohesive unit doesn't know what the hell they're talking about. Any material needs to be tested, whether it's considered "nano" or not.
The Powerbooks didn't get a whole lot of anything this time around. Better resolution and a dual layer dvd appear to be the only real changes. The processor speed is the same. The max ram is the same. The hard drive is 20MB larger, but it's also slower (5400rpm vs. the 7200rpm drive in my Rev-D 17"). Certainly not worth upgrading. I suspect they did this only to push inventory.
I bought my powerbook a year and a half ago, and on a clock speed comparison it's 75% as fast as these new ones (1.25 vs 1.67). That's really not very impressive as far as improvement goes. I must say I have some buyer's remorse after getting my iPod mini in early August (Doh!), but I'm smiling a lot more than the people who've been waiting for G5 Powerbooks all this time.
if many contributors, even those ignorant about a particular aspect of knowledge, try to self edit and get the details right, over time the result will be so positive that conductive breakdown will occur and lightning will happen.
The question is where the additional correct knowledge comes from. People willing to write down demonstrably false unreferenced crap once are more likely to simply repeat it when it's deleted than anything. Certainly there are people on wiki who go to primary sources of actual knowledge and reference things - this is not the norm. For the others, what you're describing is still 10^6 monkeys, it's just that you believe they somehow gain knowledge from interacting with each other on wiki. I don't.
Consider this. When Hardy saw Ramanujan's for the first time, he figured that "a single look at them is enough to show that they could only be written down by a mathematician of the highest class. They must be true, for if they were not true, no one would have had the imagination to invent them"
So your point is that wiki is so brilliant and imaginative that it must be...what...factually correct? That's easily disproven by counterexample. And the "contributors" to wiki aren't Ramanujan.
Similarly, Wikipedia info is no joke - there are so many serious articles that people put enormous effort into. This should encourage anyone who really cares about any shortcoming to put some work into making the marginal improvements that ultimately benefit us all.
That's great for them, but then my cat puts enormous effort into licking its ass. The results, I have to say, have been mixed. People who don't know what they're talking about don't get smarter by trying real hard.
If someone edits your work, that's supposed to be a good thing, as long as you maintain the attitude of writing with higher and higher quality.
A polished turd is still a turd. I don't care how *nice* it is, the problem is that far too much of the shit on Wiki is either wrong, conjecture, or opinion.
Nobody else was capable of producing aluminum as cheaply as Alcoa. Even the judge basically chastised them for being too good at what they did. They were never found guilty of any wrongdoing other than preemptively outdoing their competitors at every opportunity.
That certainly may be true - but that's not evidence to support the claim that they were selling below market value. If they're the monopoly, whatever they sell it for is market value, and there's no evidence they're "leaving money on the table" by not maximizing profit.
ALCOA kept aluminum prices below market level so that the consumer benefitted. Granted this kept anybody from having the ability to enter the market but it provided the best benefit to the consumer.
And what's the market price? If there's only one seller, what justification do you have for determining that price? Even if you're right, how do you know that prices wouldn't be even lower given real competition?
Those of us who still work in the airline, banking, or insurance industries know that most of the current mainframe systems aren't going anywhere. They run on Big Iron for a reason.
But, since the whole point of this thread is sales, how many of those systems are being replaced? And how quickly? And is that enough to prevent the general demise of so-called "Big Iron" from a sales perspective?
My guesses are not many, slowly, and no, respectively. There will always be niches for everything (even COBOL, God love it), but that doesn't mean it's not nearly dead for non-legacy applications.
1) People learn by doing. 2) Being violent in a video game trains kids to be violent. 3) Repeatedly being violent in a game lowers the barrier to committing real violence. Ergo, play violence in games is more harmful than seeing violence in books, movies, or newspapers in which the kid is not an active participant.
DISCLAIMER: Before anyone bothers, yes, I'm aware there are tons of counterarguments and that the line of reasoning above is largely unfounded. In fact, I'd agree. Just summarizing the general theory that many people are throwing out there as justification for censorship.
No. They. Haven't.
No-one seriously wants to run a bank on a Beowulf cluster.
Nor do they want to spend 100x the cost of a Beowulf cluster on a single big iron machine that has less processing power. Which is why companies like those in the story are bridging the gap by speeding up the latency of multiprocessor computations. So you use commodity chips, get great performance, lower prices, and don't deal with clusters.
Despite your assertions, the days of classic big iron are over. DEC got bought and rebought years ago. SGI and Cray are both penny stocks, that's how well their markets are doing. IBM's essentially out of that market completely.
These days, "big iron" generally means a rack full of blades. The market for overpriced machines from the likes of Cray is dead. And putting periods at the end of every word in your sentence doesn't change that.
So this makes your browser crash, obviously they have never been treated to an infinite loop of javascript alerts on MSIE.
My friends hated me for doing that to them... It was worth it.
Slashdot Mirror
Your problem isn't about piracy. Oddly enough, the studios consider it to be so. And if you consider their products overpriced and out of date...don't buy them. That's your option.
Did you actually read my posting, or are you simply attempting to divert my argument back to the wedge issue that I clearly identified?
Sure did.
So long as Hollywood tries to force people to pay over the top for movies, there will be pirates.
So long as Ford tries to force people to pay over the top for cars, there will be carjackers. See how ridiculous that is? The business model does not justify the illegal act. There will always be criminals, but it doesn't make it OK.
As for boycotts, I'm serious. Rosa Parks started a boycott that lasted almost a year. It was the only way that the community could fight against an oppressive regime.
And I'm saying that assocating trivial problems like not getting to see movies when you want for the price you want with real problems like racism cheapens such analogies.
And yes, this is about civil rights. Maybe you've missed this, but over the last decade the pendulum has started to swing towards a regime in which all content is property, and all unauthorised access is a crime.
THat's not civil rights. Getting the right to vote is civil rights. Getting the right to go to school is civil rights. And works less than a year old have always been protected by copyright, so don't give me this "last 10 years" crap. If you want to be civilly disobedient, go download Citizen Kane, not Star Wars III.
But heck, interpret this as a vote for piracy if you want to!
Are you using that lame-assed argument as an excuse to pirate movies, or do you maintain the moral high ground by not doing so?
See, I am educated about the issue, I *still* say we should keep it, and I don't care a lick what the bulk of the "rest of the world" thinks with regard to US policy. Especially in a situation like this which isn't about maintaining effectiveness of the internet but rather playing politics. If it ain't broke...
And I assume the converse is as well, namely that pointing out that it's *not* stealing is to sound morally OK.
Legality isn't morality. I don't feel like I've sinned when I go five over the speed limit, I don't feel like I've sinned when I copy one song from a Smashing Pumpkins album that I would never buy, and I don't feel like I've sinned when I violate the DMCA to watch a DVD under Linux.
Whatever helps you sleep better at night. Psychologists call it "rationalization." Speeding truly is victimless *if* it doesn't result in increased danger to others. Copyright violation, on the other hand, isn't victimless. If you want something, buy it. If you can't afford it, don't take it. And there's a big difference between DMCA violation violation of copyright as it previously stood.
Which is relevant when you become either 1) a lawyer, or 2) a defendant. Otherwise, they're both illegal, so it doesn't much matter.
Uh huh. You don't connect the dots there, but it sounds a lot like you're justifying piracy on the basis that movies are too expensive. You say we want a "better way to get content" without mentioning a distribution method, but you do go on to mention cost. So it sounds like your "better way" is a "cheaper way." Well guess what? That still doesn't give you the right to rip it off. Know what I do when I can't afford something? I don't buy it. Besides, if you wait, the movie will cost $4 to rent, and even the poorest of us can afford that. The "cost as justification" argument isn't going to work.
And the simple solution, by the way, is to boycott Holywood, and boycott the record labels that sponsor the RIAA.
That's true. But such a boycott kind of loses the message if you rip off what you're boycotting. Otherwise, you're just boycotting *paying* for movies, and that's probably not the message we want to send. So if we're going to boycott Hollywood, let's also make sure not to watch their movies.
as Rosa Parks demonstrated - even the most humble of us can refuse to give our money to those that would mistreat us.
I don't know where to start on that one. Rosa did pay to get on the bus, she just didn't sit in the back. And please, don't cheapen what she did by putting it in the same class as movie piracy, because civil rights is just slightly more important. I also hope you're not saying that piracy is civil disobedience, because it's not. It's just taking what you want without paying for it. Doesn't make you an inspirational leader, just makes you a criminal.
Just as many times as people point out this "correction" as if it really mattered - it's illegal either way, regardless of what you call it.
Seriously. Anyone using either of those distros who wasn't familiar with that little tidbit...well, let's just say we should all pitch in and get them some copies of Mandrivel. Maybe Linspire.
Actually, I'll help you out here a little, as the guy is even dumber than you think. Metal oxides don't exist in the sun *at all*, because molecules can't exist in the sun. In fact, neither do atoms. The sun is a plasma - a bunch of nuclei and a sea of unbound electrons. So you have metal nuclei, oxygen nuclei, and electrons, but no metal oxides.
Right, I'll fall back on my Apple example, since the Mac community is the biggest bunch of rumormongers known to man. (Appleinsider, Macrumors, etc).
So they're...sheep who suck at their jobs, which is ostensibly objective news reporting?
I'm hoping you're aware of the circularity of that argument, given that the subject is media bias towards Apple?
Hate to tell you this, but for the rest of the world, Jobs isn't a celebrity.
Does the same apply to the latest weekly Ubuntu release or Mac speed bump, or do you have sliding standards for different products?
That's true of a lot of chemicals. The "nano" isn't the issue. Seriously, there's nothing magical about nano-anything. Chemistry is inherently nanotech - molecules are pretty damned small. Anyone who lumps all of "nanotech" together and speaks about it as some cohesive unit doesn't know what the hell they're talking about. Any material needs to be tested, whether it's considered "nano" or not.
I bought my powerbook a year and a half ago, and on a clock speed comparison it's 75% as fast as these new ones (1.25 vs 1.67). That's really not very impressive as far as improvement goes. I must say I have some buyer's remorse after getting my iPod mini in early August (Doh!), but I'm smiling a lot more than the people who've been waiting for G5 Powerbooks all this time.
Wow, what would we ever do without you around? Truely, all communication would grind to a halt.
Two possible reasons:
1) They choose to reward a fantastic troll with positive karma.
2) They're morons
The question is where the additional correct knowledge comes from. People willing to write down demonstrably false unreferenced crap once are more likely to simply repeat it when it's deleted than anything. Certainly there are people on wiki who go to primary sources of actual knowledge and reference things - this is not the norm. For the others, what you're describing is still 10^6 monkeys, it's just that you believe they somehow gain knowledge from interacting with each other on wiki. I don't.
Consider this. When Hardy saw Ramanujan's for the first time, he figured that "a single look at them is enough to show that they could only be written down by a mathematician of the highest class. They must be true, for if they were not true, no one would have had the imagination to invent them"
So your point is that wiki is so brilliant and imaginative that it must be...what...factually correct? That's easily disproven by counterexample. And the "contributors" to wiki aren't Ramanujan.
Similarly, Wikipedia info is no joke - there are so many serious articles that people put enormous effort into. This should encourage anyone who really cares about any shortcoming to put some work into making the marginal improvements that ultimately benefit us all.
That's great for them, but then my cat puts enormous effort into licking its ass. The results, I have to say, have been mixed. People who don't know what they're talking about don't get smarter by trying real hard.
If someone edits your work, that's supposed to be a good thing, as long as you maintain the attitude of writing with higher and higher quality.
A polished turd is still a turd. I don't care how *nice* it is, the problem is that far too much of the shit on Wiki is either wrong, conjecture, or opinion.
That certainly may be true - but that's not evidence to support the claim that they were selling below market value. If they're the monopoly, whatever they sell it for is market value, and there's no evidence they're "leaving money on the table" by not maximizing profit.
And what's the market price? If there's only one seller, what justification do you have for determining that price? Even if you're right, how do you know that prices wouldn't be even lower given real competition?
But, since the whole point of this thread is sales, how many of those systems are being replaced? And how quickly? And is that enough to prevent the general demise of so-called "Big Iron" from a sales perspective?
My guesses are not many, slowly, and no, respectively. There will always be niches for everything (even COBOL, God love it), but that doesn't mean it's not nearly dead for non-legacy applications.
1) People learn by doing. 2) Being violent in a video game trains kids to be violent. 3) Repeatedly being violent in a game lowers the barrier to committing real violence. Ergo, play violence in games is more harmful than seeing violence in books, movies, or newspapers in which the kid is not an active participant.
DISCLAIMER: Before anyone bothers, yes, I'm aware there are tons of counterarguments and that the line of reasoning above is largely unfounded. In fact, I'd agree. Just summarizing the general theory that many people are throwing out there as justification for censorship.
Nor do they want to spend 100x the cost of a Beowulf cluster on a single big iron machine that has less processing power. Which is why companies like those in the story are bridging the gap by speeding up the latency of multiprocessor computations. So you use commodity chips, get great performance, lower prices, and don't deal with clusters.
Despite your assertions, the days of classic big iron are over. DEC got bought and rebought years ago. SGI and Cray are both penny stocks, that's how well their markets are doing. IBM's essentially out of that market completely.
These days, "big iron" generally means a rack full of blades. The market for overpriced machines from the likes of Cray is dead. And putting periods at the end of every word in your sentence doesn't change that.
I think somebody (ie, you) is confusing what big iron *is* for what it *was*. Things have changed in the days of the Beowulf cluster.
Well, aren't you teh kewl little script kiddie?