I understand, and although I probably would have told the story a little differently--you probably could have guessed you'd get that reaction--I had a similar experience a while back.
I was visiting Japan, and I was walking through an area of Tokyo where there were not many other gaijin, and I saw someone, probably a quarter mile away, who clearly looked more like me than anyone else. He was about 6' tall, like me, light brown hair, like me, and a full beard, like me.
Right then, seeing him standing out against hundreds of locals who were--for the most part--shorter, with darker hair and little or no facial hair, I thought, "Gee; I really stick out like a sore thumb here, don't I?"
Of course, the quote doesn't say that the laws are legitimate; only the perspective. It's perfectly fine for me to say, I want you to work for me for $0.02/hour, and it's legitimate for you to say, no, a fair wage is $30/hour for what your doing.
Of course--and I think this is what you are getting at--when one side has the power to buy laws to enforce their desires over less-well-enfranchised parties, then the making of those laws should not be considered legitimate.
Very good comment. One additional point to throw in about the RIAA's desires is that they want to be sure that all music has some cost (and therefore, value) associated with it. If all of a sudden, the best selling albums and singles become public domain, the record companies will have to work 10x as hard to compete against freely available music which is arguably of better quality than the tripe they're serving up.
It reminds me of the scene in the Grapes of Wrath where poor, starving farm workers tried to take some imperfect (i.e. not good enough for market, but totally edible) fruits from a farm's dump and they called in the national guard. If they can eat my garbage for free, the thought was, why would they ever pay for the "market quality" stuff?
So let's play this out a little bit. Let's say we drop the copyrights on everything over 17 years old. All of a sudden, everything older than Third Eye Blind is free. The majority of Metallica music. U2, Madonna, Pink Floyd, Paula Abdul... Jefferson Starship, Beatles, the list goes on. Anything recorded by Casals, most of Pavarotti's records... How many people would say, "I've got a lifetime of music to wade through that's free. Why would I buy this top-40 crap for even a dollar?"
Unless, of course, they actually turn out some product that's better than Britney. I'm not saying that there's no good music these days, but I'm saying that most of the pop stuff they put out now would have a hard time competing against a practically infinite supply of free music.
I've heard that 3M corporation does this to an even greater degree. Each time a division is successful enough that it grows past 200, they break up that division's product lines into two subsets, so that they can break up the division into two sub-150 groups. The idea is that for the great majority of human evolution, we've lived in groups smaller than 150, so our brains are pretty well equipped to know and trust and work with that volume of people.
Get much larger than that and you'll start getting weird political BS. Not because people are bad, but because they need short cuts to help them deal with the overwhelming number of personalities they have to interact with to get their jobs done.
The methodology--i.e. random users--is not necessarily ideal, though. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a "labs" option in the browser so you could volunteer to be a guinnea pig? Then maybe after the early adopters, feed out the updates at a rate of 10% a day to hoi polloi.
Further, if Google's smart-app running on the phones do this right, you'll be able to seamlessly transfer a call that you answered on you cell on your desk (plus all the other features).
You can actually do this. Say you have your cell, home and office phones listed in your account. If you're on a GVoice call on your cell, when you get to one of the other phones, you can hit * (I think) and it causes the other phones to ring. Pick it up and you can hang up the cell phone and keep going where you left off.
Again, you can pick it apart if you wish, and I agree that they haven't re-invented the phone system. But interface makes a big difference; you know, like the iPod which was widely derided as nothing new when it first appeared on SlashDot.
I guess my first question to you remains: what's your point? Nobody said they invented everything they do here, but putting it all together and making it available for free in a convenient, easy-to-use interface has made a difference, in some cases a significant difference, in how people manager their phone communications. Must you shit on it because they weren't there when Alexander Graham Bell made his first call?
There is no revenue yet. My thinking is that Google is doing the same thing with this that they do with YouTube, which is the following:
They need the tool themselves, and once it's implemented on a scale that suits their internal needs, the cost for giving free access to it to the outside world is incremental.
They use the tool to give fodder to their engineers who always need interesting data to play with or another playground for exploring new ideas.
There may be other things they are doing, like selling aggregate statistics about calling patterns, and they may also be collecting some tariffs for call completion--though I think that would be a wash with their model--but I think, primarily, what they get out of it is data.
Google has made no secret that their mission is to help organize and distribute the world's data. Before, they were limited to text and images. Then came video, now they've got phone conversations.
I'm in the "Google's not sinister" camp, although I don't believe it's exactly altruism. I think they do this stuff because they can, because it's cool, because they get value out of using it themselves, and because it helps further their mission.
They may find a way to monetize it further with premium features, but for the moment, because they can afford to do so, I'd be surprised if anything like that came out of the gate.
Well, considering there are a number of apps written to control GVoice accounts, I'd be willing to bet that this could be done. I think they publish the web API, so if you are or if you know someone who is handy with the codestuffs, you could probably write a GVoice gadget to do just that.
Not exactly innovative. Verizon gave me that at my apartment in 2002.
What exactly is your point? The service as a whole is very useful, and somewhat innovative. There are precedents for many--if not all--of the features, but many of them would have required a staffed calling center not that long ago.
So here's an example of what I like. I can always route my parents to my home number, and my friends to my office during the day, my cell phone at night. I can route colleagues to my office by day, direct to voice mail at night. If I'm going on vacation and staying at a cabin where cell signal is bad, and I want to be reached by one particular friend, I can route their calls to the cabin's land-line before I leave.
And then beyond all that, when people leave a voice mail, GVoice automatically transcribes it. It's not perfect, but it's often faster to get the idea of what they called about without having to listen to a long, rambling VM.
That's the cool thing. You can set up profiles and automatically direct some people to only a specific phone, or right into voice mail. You can even set up personalized ring-back tones and VM outgoing messages so that if your father calls you, the VM says, "Hi Dad, sorry you didn't make it past the screen!"
My office is situated such that I can only get cell phone signal if I'm standing at the window. I've got my GVoice set up to send all calls to my office phone during the day, and to both home and cell phone in the evenings and weekends.
There are a lot of reasons why one might want to take calls directly on a different line than their cell phone.
I've already registered mine on the DNC list, but additionally, you can also do fun things like push all unknown callers directly to voice mail. Then you can quickly review and delete your VM's on their web site.
This isn't a net phone, per se; it's a phone abstraction. A number that lives out there in the phone cloud, which you point to whatever number(s) you wish to receive calls at.
You can still dial directly out from your cell phone, home phone, office phone, whatever. 911 is based on the number you're calling from. However, if you want your GVoice number to show up on caller ID, you would instead initiate the call from the GVoice web site or the android/iphone app.
In other words, as long as you've got a working phone, you've got 911. The use of GVoice doesn't change that at all.
You know what burns me most about the DRM stuff? That it gives the **AA the right to wast millions of person hours every day. I'm not going to steal their film; why should I be forced to sit through the legal warnings? The people who are going to steal it won't pay attention when they're ripping it.
The way I see it, if an average lifetime is 75 years, then that's 39.4 million minutes. Assuming that any DVDs that are sold are watched at least twice, then any movie that sells 20 million copies has wasted an entire human life with these stupid warnings.
Maybe it wouldn't annoy me so much if the warnings actually did anything, but it's so clear they do not. It's just a huge freaking waste.
There is a real life analogy. You know when one kid repeats everything another kid is saying? The repeatee always gets upset, and y'know what? It's really freaking annoying.
I'll bet they could get people to sympathize somewhat if they just had some ad showing a kid trying to say something meaningful and then 1, 2, 10, 100, 1000000 other kids all imitating that kid. It could end with, "Now do you see why we're upset?" in print, and after it's on the screen for a second, the first of the million repeaters saying it aloud, in his most annoying, taunting voice.
This is absolutely correct. I'd go one step further to say that as SSD and traditional hard drives continue to shrink in size, we're more likely to see two-disk set-ups as a standard, even in laptops, so the most heavily accessed (read-only) stuff goes on SSD, and other stuff--either archival or often-changed--will go on a traditional hard drive.
In fact, now that I think of it, there's no reason to think that the two couldn't be combined with some sort of smart interface to let the drive itself decide what to put where. I can't believe that nobody else has thought of this, so there must be some sort of hybrid (SSD+platter) drive out there...
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Did you mean this cat and keyboard?
Of course, so would be taxing pot smokers.
Does it cause the user to submit long rambling posts which include no white space?
Nor you, apparently. Nor me.
I understand, and although I probably would have told the story a little differently--you probably could have guessed you'd get that reaction--I had a similar experience a while back.
I was visiting Japan, and I was walking through an area of Tokyo where there were not many other gaijin, and I saw someone, probably a quarter mile away, who clearly looked more like me than anyone else. He was about 6' tall, like me, light brown hair, like me, and a full beard, like me.
Right then, seeing him standing out against hundreds of locals who were--for the most part--shorter, with darker hair and little or no facial hair, I thought, "Gee; I really stick out like a sore thumb here, don't I?"
If I compose a piece of music, how can I determine whether this piece of music is original?
Don't use the same three chords the spin doctors did.
And use what to promote it to listeners in vehicles? The major labels have FM radio.
Ah! Now I understand why it took Apple so long to add an FM radio to the iPod. They wanted to maximize the promotional clout of iTMS.
Of course, the quote doesn't say that the laws are legitimate; only the perspective. It's perfectly fine for me to say, I want you to work for me for $0.02/hour, and it's legitimate for you to say, no, a fair wage is $30/hour for what your doing.
Of course--and I think this is what you are getting at--when one side has the power to buy laws to enforce their desires over less-well-enfranchised parties, then the making of those laws should not be considered legitimate.
Very good comment. One additional point to throw in about the RIAA's desires is that they want to be sure that all music has some cost (and therefore, value) associated with it. If all of a sudden, the best selling albums and singles become public domain, the record companies will have to work 10x as hard to compete against freely available music which is arguably of better quality than the tripe they're serving up.
It reminds me of the scene in the Grapes of Wrath where poor, starving farm workers tried to take some imperfect (i.e. not good enough for market, but totally edible) fruits from a farm's dump and they called in the national guard. If they can eat my garbage for free, the thought was, why would they ever pay for the "market quality" stuff?
So let's play this out a little bit. Let's say we drop the copyrights on everything over 17 years old. All of a sudden, everything older than Third Eye Blind is free. The majority of Metallica music. U2, Madonna, Pink Floyd, Paula Abdul... Jefferson Starship, Beatles, the list goes on. Anything recorded by Casals, most of Pavarotti's records... How many people would say, "I've got a lifetime of music to wade through that's free. Why would I buy this top-40 crap for even a dollar?"
Unless, of course, they actually turn out some product that's better than Britney. I'm not saying that there's no good music these days, but I'm saying that most of the pop stuff they put out now would have a hard time competing against a practically infinite supply of free music.
they're the ones who completely ignored Ron Paul's existence
Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel, too.
No no, that was everybody.
I've heard that 3M corporation does this to an even greater degree. Each time a division is successful enough that it grows past 200, they break up that division's product lines into two subsets, so that they can break up the division into two sub-150 groups. The idea is that for the great majority of human evolution, we've lived in groups smaller than 150, so our brains are pretty well equipped to know and trust and work with that volume of people.
Get much larger than that and you'll start getting weird political BS. Not because people are bad, but because they need short cuts to help them deal with the overwhelming number of personalities they have to interact with to get their jobs done.
The methodology--i.e. random users--is not necessarily ideal, though. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a "labs" option in the browser so you could volunteer to be a guinnea pig? Then maybe after the early adopters, feed out the updates at a rate of 10% a day to hoi polloi.
Further, if Google's smart-app running on the phones do this right, you'll be able to seamlessly transfer a call that you answered on you cell on your desk (plus all the other features).
You can actually do this. Say you have your cell, home and office phones listed in your account. If you're on a GVoice call on your cell, when you get to one of the other phones, you can hit * (I think) and it causes the other phones to ring. Pick it up and you can hang up the cell phone and keep going where you left off.
Again, you can pick it apart if you wish, and I agree that they haven't re-invented the phone system. But interface makes a big difference; you know, like the iPod which was widely derided as nothing new when it first appeared on SlashDot.
I guess my first question to you remains: what's your point? Nobody said they invented everything they do here, but putting it all together and making it available for free in a convenient, easy-to-use interface has made a difference, in some cases a significant difference, in how people manager their phone communications. Must you shit on it because they weren't there when Alexander Graham Bell made his first call?
That's right; that feature didn't work under Grand Central, and I always forget about it. Thanks for the reminder!
There may be other things they are doing, like selling aggregate statistics about calling patterns, and they may also be collecting some tariffs for call completion--though I think that would be a wash with their model--but I think, primarily, what they get out of it is data.
Google has made no secret that their mission is to help organize and distribute the world's data. Before, they were limited to text and images. Then came video, now they've got phone conversations.
I'm in the "Google's not sinister" camp, although I don't believe it's exactly altruism. I think they do this stuff because they can, because it's cool, because they get value out of using it themselves, and because it helps further their mission.
They may find a way to monetize it further with premium features, but for the moment, because they can afford to do so, I'd be surprised if anything like that came out of the gate.
Well, considering there are a number of apps written to control GVoice accounts, I'd be willing to bet that this could be done. I think they publish the web API, so if you are or if you know someone who is handy with the codestuffs, you could probably write a GVoice gadget to do just that.
Not exactly innovative. Verizon gave me that at my apartment in 2002.
What exactly is your point? The service as a whole is very useful, and somewhat innovative. There are precedents for many--if not all--of the features, but many of them would have required a staffed calling center not that long ago.
So here's an example of what I like. I can always route my parents to my home number, and my friends to my office during the day, my cell phone at night. I can route colleagues to my office by day, direct to voice mail at night. If I'm going on vacation and staying at a cabin where cell signal is bad, and I want to be reached by one particular friend, I can route their calls to the cabin's land-line before I leave.
And then beyond all that, when people leave a voice mail, GVoice automatically transcribes it. It's not perfect, but it's often faster to get the idea of what they called about without having to listen to a long, rambling VM.
That's the cool thing. You can set up profiles and automatically direct some people to only a specific phone, or right into voice mail. You can even set up personalized ring-back tones and VM outgoing messages so that if your father calls you, the VM says, "Hi Dad, sorry you didn't make it past the screen!"
My office is situated such that I can only get cell phone signal if I'm standing at the window. I've got my GVoice set up to send all calls to my office phone during the day, and to both home and cell phone in the evenings and weekends.
There are a lot of reasons why one might want to take calls directly on a different line than their cell phone.
I've already registered mine on the DNC list, but additionally, you can also do fun things like push all unknown callers directly to voice mail. Then you can quickly review and delete your VM's on their web site.
This isn't a net phone, per se; it's a phone abstraction. A number that lives out there in the phone cloud, which you point to whatever number(s) you wish to receive calls at. You can still dial directly out from your cell phone, home phone, office phone, whatever. 911 is based on the number you're calling from. However, if you want your GVoice number to show up on caller ID, you would instead initiate the call from the GVoice web site or the android/iphone app. In other words, as long as you've got a working phone, you've got 911. The use of GVoice doesn't change that at all.
Oh yeah, it's 867-530-niiiiiii-eeee-iii-een.
You know what burns me most about the DRM stuff? That it gives the **AA the right to wast millions of person hours every day. I'm not going to steal their film; why should I be forced to sit through the legal warnings? The people who are going to steal it won't pay attention when they're ripping it.
The way I see it, if an average lifetime is 75 years, then that's 39.4 million minutes. Assuming that any DVDs that are sold are watched at least twice, then any movie that sells 20 million copies has wasted an entire human life with these stupid warnings.
Maybe it wouldn't annoy me so much if the warnings actually did anything, but it's so clear they do not. It's just a huge freaking waste.
There is a real life analogy. You know when one kid repeats everything another kid is saying? The repeatee always gets upset, and y'know what? It's really freaking annoying.
I'll bet they could get people to sympathize somewhat if they just had some ad showing a kid trying to say something meaningful and then 1, 2, 10, 100, 1000000 other kids all imitating that kid. It could end with, "Now do you see why we're upset?" in print, and after it's on the screen for a second, the first of the million repeaters saying it aloud, in his most annoying, taunting voice.
This is absolutely correct. I'd go one step further to say that as SSD and traditional hard drives continue to shrink in size, we're more likely to see two-disk set-ups as a standard, even in laptops, so the most heavily accessed (read-only) stuff goes on SSD, and other stuff--either archival or often-changed--will go on a traditional hard drive.
In fact, now that I think of it, there's no reason to think that the two couldn't be combined with some sort of smart interface to let the drive itself decide what to put where. I can't believe that nobody else has thought of this, so there must be some sort of hybrid (SSD+platter) drive out there...