What I find more interesting in this whole article is not how Le Guin is upset about the producers taking the mini-series away from her visions. I can understand and appreciate that. Although I'm not an author, I have done some writing on my own that I'm proud of (even if it likely is of horrible quality), and I can only imagine what my reaction would be if someone were to take creative control over it, using my name to promote it, and then take it in a different direction.
Still, though, what I find more interesting is Le Guin's attitude towards Caucasians. Just reading through the article I see phrases such as "petulant white kid", "honky", "lily-like", "whites...have the privilege of not caring". It's almost as though Le Guin is defensive about her own ethnicity.
I guess I take offense at being lumped into the generalizations that Le Guin makes. For example, when I read novels I do indeed tend to overlook the ethnicity of the protagonists, unless it is considered a major pushing point of the novel. When I enjoy well written novels, I enjoy the plot and the development of the character's personalities, and the motivations for their actions. I could care less whether the main characters are Caucasian, African-American, Native-American, Asianiac, and so forth. I was taught as a child by my family that a person's ethnicity should not give or take away from their value as a person - it is the quality of their character that is the important element in their person.
That's why I bristled a little when I read her reaction. I came away thinking that she put too much emphasis in the ethnicity of her characters. It's her prerogative, of course, and by her own admission it is a basis for her novels. In that sense, I imagine, she should be upset by how the story was changed. Of course, I seem to recall someone in a class I took once in creative writing telling the class that a sign of good writing was when you could take the characters and change their race, gender, ethnicity, etc, and the story would still be compelling and engaging. The point then was that you should focus on writing a strong story first, and use your characters to drive the story, not the other way around.
In any case, I'm more disturbed by how Le Guin "gets away" with using the term "honky", which is a derogatory term. (Ironically, it is a derogatory term that is likely derived from the African Wolof term honq) Although I haven't read every single response here on/., I don't notice anyone taking offense to her language. I guess I'm personally irritated by the double standard in society where a person of one ethnicity can be punished for using an ethnic slur against another race, but you can get away with saying a slur against your own race. (IE, it's alright for African-Americans to say "n****r", but not okay for anyone else, and it's alright for Le Guin to say "honky")
Oh, and in case anyone feels this is too off-topic, let me make one final observation. By Le Guin's own admission, one of the key factors in her decision to sell the group the option to the film rights was knowing Philippa Boyens was onboard as primary script writer. If that were true, she should have had it written into the contract that the rights were contingent upon Boyens' participation in the project. I've seen that happen many times, where an author won't let anyone but a certain script writer handle their stories. If you care about your stories that much, you will take that sort of care.
Although your statements are one of the most well-phrased ones I've read in this thread (which is a little sad, all things considered), I don't happen to agree with the logic behind them.
You make the first point I was going to make for me: there's a difference between registering a product, and requiring activation. I've registered nearly everything I've ever bought, for the same reason you did, namely to have product support. Warranty protection flows from the same reasoning. But I've never liked being forced to "activate" something I've already purchased, and that's the crux of the problem here.
Your point with respect to purchasing a car is a good one, but it's flawed in that it doesn't impact this situation. Needing to know personal information before purchasing a car is vital because of various unrelated issues, such as taxation, registration, license validation (ie, is your driver's license revoked), etc. These issues have no bearing when it comes to purchasing a computer game.
The reason people feel like this system treats them like criminals is because you need to look at the reasoning for the issue itself. You pointed out the difference with your car example. Did you suggest that the reason they require your personal information when you buy a car is to make sure you didn't steal the car? No, of course not. The shear fact that you're buying the car at the dealership establishes that you didn't steal the car that you are driving home with. Now, consider the copy of HL2 at EBGames in the mall. Why shouldn't the shear fact that you're buying the package in the store establish that you didn't steal the game? Valve's purpose in using this system is because, by their admission of intent, they are trying to keep illegal copies from working. In other words, the a priori intent is to consider any copy to be illegal until proven otherwise. Thus, people feel like their being treated like criminals. (It's that whole "innocent until proven guilty" thing...the impetus should be on Valve to prove I warezed the copy I'm using rather than me proving I didn't.)
I'm intrigued that you feel that we are at a stage where the trend is towards high cost console gaming? How is that substantiated? The reality (and I've worked in toy store retail for nearly 6 years) is just the opposite: console gaming has become very nearly monotonically decreasing. Seriously, consider it. The price tag on inital console units from 5+ years ago was well over $200, whereas new unit costs now are lower. New cost of cartridge based media (ie, N64) was easily $49.99-$59.99, whereas many new titles now debut at $39.99. Last, but not least, look at recent moves such as ESPN Sports' titles debuting at the $19.99 mark, and now EA Sports' titles coming in around $39.99. If anything, it seems consoles are becoming less expensive as time goes on.
And to answer your question, if I invested $40mil on a project, I'd darn well want to protect my investment. Of course, I question why the frell ANY game needed to have $40mil invested to come to fruition. I mean, seriously folks, $40mil for 5 years of development literally boils down to paying 80 employees salaries of $100K/year. Do you really think every single poor sucker on that project was being paid $100K/yr?
In any case, this is a means of "investment protection" that does nothing of the sort, and that's the point everyone has made. At the best, it holds off crackers and warez demons for maybe a handful of days; at the worse, it inconveniences the people who have already spent their money (and thus profitted Valve) to the point where they can't play until the authentication servers are not/.'d (basically) and let their copy get in to the server. This sort of authentication will always be cracked at some point, basically because there's always a copy of the game in a computer memory somewhere that's vulnerable to deep memory scans/comparisons/etc.
And lastly, you echo a sentiment that is all too dangerous
Well, one thing I've noticed is that most people are not complaining that Valve have chosen to use the Steam system as a means of secure, digital distribution of their products. I believe that it's a fantastic way of selling products, and provided you have the internet pipe to handle that much data transfer, more power to you - saves a trip to the store. That's not what the complaining is about at all.
What the complaining really is about is the way that the online validation is required for B&M purchases. (I don't know enough to know if there's truth to having to validate online every single time you want to play SP or not, seems many people say you don't have to, just the first time only.) If you go down to your local store and pay your money for the product, you should be able to play it without having to go online and [hopefully] get through to a server somewhere to prove you bought it.
I applaud your desire to reward Valve by purchasing a copy even though you'd gotten a free copy via a videocard purchase. Of course, there's a good chance they got some money already from the videocard company in that deal (depends on the terms of the agreement; in this case, since it's obvious that HL2 was a compelling reason to buy the videocard, I'll bet the terms were in Valve's favor and not vice versa...) The only concern I have (especially after reading about the recent EA programmer's issues) is whether or not the money is truly going to benefit the programmers who tirelessly slaved away for the 5 years to make HL2.
This whole issue with Steam reminds me too much of the DirecTV Tivo issues that are just as interesting. For those who don't know, DirecTV Tivo units require you to keep your units plugged into your phone lines in order for your service to continue without "issues". For example, if your unit doesn't make its daily calls, eventually your ability to order PPVs through the unit is disabled (though you still can order online/phone). So the bottom line there is, you paid for the unit, you pay your subscription bills every month on time, but you're still forced to make a daily phone call that has no literal bearing on how your service works on your TV. (Even tv guide data is pulled from the satellite dish, not the phone).
This is the same exact issue. People paid for a product legitimately, but can't use it until their "phone" (ie, internet client) makes a "call" (ie, authentication) to a central server. Yes, it may be inconvenient and easy to do quickly, but the question is really, "Should it be done?"
Those complaining about Steam aren't expecting special privileges without paying the dues necessary for getting them. (IE, wanting SD equivalent from HD providers without paying for HD.) People paid their money and expect to be able to use it without delay of any sort. It would be much like buying a new home (with an electronic keycode necessary to open the locks), paying in cash for it, and when you go to move in, you have to wait on the phone for an operator to be available to verify your paperwork and send you the keycodes to open the door. It's not unreasonable, if you think about it for a minute, to be upset that you've paid for something and still can't use it until you get someone to "believe you", which is basically what Valve/Steam is doing. You paid $50 for it, but until their computers "believe you" (authentication), you still can't use it.
I think the point is being missed. Our country is a representative form of government, and more importantly, the United States is just that: a collection of united states. (50 of them, in fact, plus disputedly the District of Columbia, which should just be made a state and be done with it.)
In any case, I totally disagree with your comment "If a state only has 1 million people, their vote is more valuable than a state that has 10 million."No state's vote should be more valuable than any other.
Since what point have people forgotten that we are a collection of independant states that work together as a whole to form a country? That's why we have state governments, with state constitutions, state courts, and so forth. We're NOT a unified country, although we often work together for a common goal. Thus, when we elect a president, we are electing someone who will execute the Constitution of the United States, not the will of the people, per se.
Thus, Alaska should be just as important as California when it comes to electoral votes. Why not? Just because people don't choose to live there en masse, does not devalue their importance as one of the 50 states of our union. They have an equal voice in our country, and deservedly so.
The problem is the electoral college system has become unbalanced in its purpose. It was intended to give each state a voice, but when it became tied to populations, it lost it's whole value. What should be done is simple: make each state have 1 electoral vote. A president will win when they claim a majority of electoral votes. Each state's electoral vote will be decided by the winner of the state's popular vote. In the case of a national tie in electoral votes, rely upon the national popular vote to break the tie.
In this way, every single state is important to deciding the presidency, which is the way it should have been all along. How insulting is it to live in a state like Alaska, where your livelihood is made or broken in Washington, but candidates will skip you like a hopscotch board to concentrate on a "rich" state like California with it's 55 votes? Why do you think the Senate is designed with 2 candidates from each state? To make it even to all, that's part of the checks and balances. It is unfair to regard the popular vote as the only decider, for the simple reason that our country is a collection of states, not population, and that's the key difference. We might wish to feel otherwise, but the reality is that it's the states that are represented in government, not the people directly - we just serve to decide who will represent our state's interests in the government. That being the case, let the popular vote decide who the states vote for, not the president directly.
As an interesting aside to this idea, this concept of elections would have kept the same election result all the way back to the 1976 national election, and it would have given Gerald Ford the win, as he had won 27 states to Carter's 24. An interesting thing to contemplate.
Just in case anyone is interested, the patents in question are 5,206,951, 5,421,012, and 5,226,161.
The patents appear to be mostly related to object data technologies, so they don't seem to apply to things like BASIC or any Unix shells.
They DO seem to handle object oriented systems, like Java,.NET, etc.
Question now is, given the dates of the patents, how do they apply to Java, and is there prior art?
Actually, since I had to suffer through a college course on the early history of Mathematics, I tend to disagree just slightly with your statement that the Arab mathematicians "invented" algebra.
Although it's true that algebra gets its name from al-Jabr, and it's also true that some of the great Arab mathematicians (including al-Khwarizmi) codified many algebraic structures and practices that are now common (al-Khwarizmi essentially worked out the "Completing the Square" method of solving quadratic equations), it's a bit of a stretch to attribute everything to the Arabs.
The Chinese were one of the first pioneers in mathematics to lay down many of the standard practices we use in algebra today. They were one of the first major groups to adopt and accept negative numbers, drawing them in red and putting slashes through the last digits to indicate negative quantities (when it took Leonardo de Pisa [Fibonacci] a thousand years later to look at negative numbers in financial problems as losses - he still did not accept negative roots of quadratics). The Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art, the earliest known work of Chinese mathematicians, dates from around 200BC, and illustrates 246 practical math problems on surveying, conversions, etc. You could argue that these basic math methods of solving equations is a good basis for algebra.
Not to mention that the Babylonians, around 2000BC, began the first major study and work of mathematics in the world. They used a fairly sophisticated positional Base 60 system, showed knowledge of the quadratic formula (the first known civilization to do so), and even looked at (though couldn't derive a solution to) cubic equations as well.
Lastly, one very common misconception: although we refer to our numeral system as the Arabic Numeral system, the actual "figures" we use to draw the numbers 1, 2, 3, etc, were brought to the Western world from India, not from the Arabian peninsula. Many attribute the adoption of the Indian Numeral system to al-Khwarizmi, but it may have been earlier than that. Regardless, they were the ones to give us that number system (including the use of 0 to hold a space in positional number systems), not the Arabs.
I don't mean to belittle the great works done by early Arabian mathematicians - they easily were one of the most influential and driving forces in bringing the mathematical knowledge of the Far East to the Western world, especially when the "dark ages" of mathematical learning dawned when the Greek & Alexandrian schools of learning faded away. They were the greatest preservers of the ancient Greek writings, and quite often the only copies we have today of some of the Greek works of Euclid, Thales, Pythagoras, and others is an English translation of a Latin translation of an Arabic translation of the original Greek. Still, some of the basic practices of algebraic solving existed quite before the great Arabic mathematicians -- they tend to get the "credit" of inventing algebra because they were the main ones to gather, collect, comment, and extend most of that early work.
Oh, and as to the contention that the Arabs were highly developed in astronomy since most of the stars visible to the naked eye have Arabic names, that is a bit misleading. Consider what I mentioned about the "Arabic Numeral" system. Just because something is named in a way doesn't indicate anything about its creators. Many now believe that Pythagoras did not "invent" the Pythagorean Theorem. It is now commonly attributed to an anonymous student of the Pythagorean School of Learning, not to mention how the Babylonians a thousand years before had cuneiform tablets with the same triangle work done on them. It was actually the great Greek astronomer Hipparchus who catalogued thousands of stars and their positions in the 2nd century BC, and whom Ptolemy recorded much of the work. Once again, we owe a great debt to the great Arabic astronomers for preserving and expanding on those earlier works of the Greeks and others - but reali
To the best of my knowledge, I don't think there is any exclusivity contract between Sony and EA over their online sports line. I think it only is exclusive right now in the sense that "you can only play online with Sony because you can't play online with anyone else", not "you can only play online with Sony."
I think the biggest roadblock is a major revenue/royalty beef between EA and Microsoft. Microsoft expects to receive compensation from EA for allowing the use of their servers and XBox Live network in order to play EA Sports online. EA, on the other hand, feels that their EA Sports branding and license is powerful and lucrative enough to warrant receiving compensation from Microsoft for all the sales of XBox Live subscriptions that people will be buying [and renewing] because of their presence on XBox Live. As a bigwig in EA said in a web site interview I saw somewhere, "HBO wouldn't let their hit shows air on public TV without compensation, so why should EA allow their hit games on other systems without some sort of compensation?"
If they can get onto their own servers, it takes one aspect off the table. If they can reach an agreement on the other issues, we probably will see games on XBox Live this year. I think the decision would have to have been made by now, though. Usually sports games come out right in the midst of preseason time, and developers will need a good amount of time to get the quirks out of the system before it goes to beta test. Since EA hasn't worked with the XBox networking system yet, I imagine they'll want to make sure they get it right - so time is clearly of the essence. If they're going on Live, we should hear something soon....
I call shenanigans on that interview answer! If Microsoft was intently honest in allowing their league "api" to be accessible to all, they would have sent out the basic public access hooks to the developers so they could have implemented it in their titles.
He implies (no, states outright) that Sega didn't put the league ability in because they didn't feel they had enough time to react to the api. Hrm, maybe my memory is toast, but if I recall correctly, NFL Fever 2004 was released on August 26, 2003 (according to XBox's retailer website). ESPN NFL Football shipped out to stores on September 3, 2003 (according to Sega's website).
If XSN was ready to roll for NFL Fever 2004 (it was the launch of XSN), and that game came out a week ahead of ESPN, that whole reason is hogwash, by my book. Clearly Microsoft held back on the information on how to implement access to the backbone so they could use it exclusively that year - or at the least, made sure they delivered the specs so late in the development stage that ESPN was already in the beta testing stage and past the point of installing "feature code". Now, maybe, they are out of the XSN software business, so it's suddenly open architecture for everyone to use and it just happened to be a shame that ESPN couldn't have used it last year.
I don't mind the way they are doing things, but they should call a spade a spade. They could say they tried to do XSN with their own sports titles, but that their quality didn't measure up, and now they're happy to work with ESPN & EA by offering the use of their XSN network to make the XBox the best console for sports ever. But then we get back to the whole royalties issue between EA & Microsoft: EA thinks that their very logo = $$$$, and that anybody playing their game should pay them a royalty for the use of their logo. Microsoft would want, naturally, EA to pay them for the use of their XSN network. Ne'er the twain shall meet....
I really have to think there's more behind the scenes than this announcement by Microsoft.
I mean, they pushed into a market that would otherwise have been their own slaughter: EA and Sega have been doing sports titles (especially football) since the Joe Montana Sportstalk Football and Bird vs. Jordan Basketball days. They knew what they were up against. And even though the XSN line is only about 70% the quality of this year's EA/Sega lineups, they had innovation that gave them a chance: XSN network.
Given the contractual disagreements over royalties between EA and Microsoft, and the branding issues involved, I figured there'd be no hope for EA/Microsoft to make up and get EA online. Now, I'm not so sure. I recall (can't find the link) an interview with someone in the XBox team who was saying that there would be an exciting annoucement "soon" regarding EA and Microsoft, but wouldn't elaborate. I also recall an interview with EA CEO Larry Probst where he stated in December 2003 that "...we're moving closer and closer together in terms of a business model that we think is palatable. I think we'll eventually get there."
I have a feeling something is up. This seems a lot to me like a 3rd Party Political candidate situation: the Democrat/Republican (Sega/ESPN) wins the online "election" because the Republican/Democrat (EA) doesn't have enough "votes" because the Reform/Green candidate (XSN) has just enough voter appeal to keep them out of the picture. I wouldn't be surprised if EA dropped their royalties demand in exchange for Microsoft killing the XSN product line so that EA can take on Sega directly - perhaps they even won an agreement to have their product tied into the existing framework for the XSN network. If Microsoft agreed to tie in the EA line with the virtual tournaments, leagues, etc they had built up for the XSN network, EA knows they could make millions by making nice with Microsoft. Microsoft would have to know that they would potentially make millions by having EA online games on their platform - if not profit in console sales (there's no profit there), then in follow-up 1st party sales (like Halo 2, hrm?) or in market penetration in time for XBox-2 (timed with today's $149.99 price drop too....)
I mean, when have we ever really seen Microsoft just up and quit on something that had miserable quality when they had a chance to snag and retain market share? Heck, the XBox itself is an example of that statement: they were bleeding money like mad to sell the consoles at the price they were, yet they kept doing so because they want market penetration. Why suddenly cancel a product line that has at least sold copies (maybe not to the level of EA)? Always look for the deeper reason....
It's been true enough in the world of sports for quite some time already. If you ever watch old replays on ESPN Classic, you can see the gradual intrusion of advertising into the sports arena.
It used to be the Sugar Bowl. Now it's the Nokia Sugar Bowl. Was the Fiesta Bowl. Now it's the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl. Don't ask fans of the old Candlestick Park what they think of the arena's "new" name. That's just the tip of the iceberg there. What about NASCAR? Is there anyone watching NASCAR who doesn't feel off-kilter when they can't say "Winston Cup" anymore? Does anybody remember that, rather than the name of an award/trophy, they are talking about a vendor when they say that?
Media advertising has been with us for some time, lurking in the shadows of consciousness. The seminal symbol of sports events, the Goodyear Blimp, is itself a giant advertising billboard flying from one sporting/concert event to another. Watch any televised World Cup soccer match, where instead of commercial breaks people may take a trip to the bathroom or kitchen during (and miss), you are now subconciously enticed into viewing an advertising logo every 12.5 seconds when you peer at the score or time remaining. Need I now point out the even more incredibly intrusive AOL yellow "dude" that runs onto the football field to display the first down yellow line? (That one killed me the first time I saw it...talk about marketing)
The more DVRs like ReplayTV and Tivo make the rounds, the more this sort of advertising will integrate itself into the programming itself. If not in some blatant smack of product placement ("Vote for the next American Idol by sending VOTE with your AT&T Wireless cell phone"), then certainly by some subtle logo or "bug" placed in such a way that you can't exclude the logo with any technological means without severly impacting the watchability of the programming itself.
I wouldn't be surprised if you don't see television programming deriving someday to the "watch-per-view" format that many premium websites go lately which require you to sit and watch a 30sec commercial before proceeding to the next page/download/etc. With the convergence of digital media and control devices (remotes, etc), it's not unlikely you'd get some method where you must watch a commercial and key a code on your remote to continue with the show. Incredibly invasive -- yes -- effective to force people to watch a commercial -- absolutely. How many people could they force to sit through mandatory commercials to watch the Friends finale in May?
I just don't see BW compatibility as being all "that". I've worked in videogame retail for nearly 6 years, so I've had the luck to be in on most of the recent big launches, and I also was around for the end of some of the stinkers (Saturn, anyone?).
Admittedly I am in a middle-sized town in Florida (Lakeland), but we get a fair share of business, so I've seen and spoken to many a gamer over those 6 years. When PS2 launched, very few people were interested in the fact that it could play PS1 games. The closest consideration I repeatedly saw was that some parents were buying one because that way they could put their old PS1 in the kid's room to get the kids out of their hair.;-) Seriously, time and time again they were far more impressed with the graphical leap they saw than they were in the software compatibility. Once we got done giving the customer the usual rundown on the memory card incompatibility and the analog-button PS1 incompatibility, most of the guests concluded they were buying a 60% standalone unit and were happy with that.
Even now, with all 3 consoles firmly on their last sprints, BWC just isn't the buzz for selling a PS2 over an XBox or GC. In fact, 80% of the time in my store it isn't a factor. At this stage, it is game selection almost all the time. It is either generalized software selection (lack of online EA sports games on XBox, lack of Mario on PS2, lack of "M" games on GC) or niche accessories (EyeToy is selling a number of PS2s in our store, believe it or not...a $49.99 accessory triggering a $179.99 console sale...the XBox Live system triggering XBox sales...GBA connectivity selling GCs).
I also don't think the PS2 BWC was the defining reason for the PS2's profound success in the market, either. Consider that the PS2 had a nice marketplace leadtime over the other two, giving it time to build a console library. Not only that, but each of the XBox and GC has been crippled to some degree by various issues. To whit, the XBox "fails" for the following reasons: Overabundance of "M"/"T" based on desired audience market (lack of "E"/Disney/etc), sterile launch selection (many sports, fighting games, little platforming), unknown market "grasp" (new contender). The GC "fails" for the following reasons: Overabundance of "E"/Disney/etc (too many games are "cutesy" to teenage/adult gamers), baffling lack of any online gaming titles (other than Phantasy Star Online series), lack of BWC in GC.
Now, note if you've read carefully that I indicate a lack of BWC as a failure of the GC. That wasn't a mistype. I believe that BWC does not necessarily increase sales of a console, but in some ways, not having BWC will decrease sales of a console. The two aren't the same thing. Clearly the attractive price of the GC this last holiday season helped Nintendo unload a ton of GCs, regardless of their lack of BWC. Yet, in the early weeks of the GC launch, I can't tell you how many people boycotted the GC out of principle because it wouldn't support the N64. For some reason, I heard many vehement complaints about that lack of BWC. I think people were still smarting over the $49.99 or higher prices of N64 cartridges (rather than the $39.99 or less PS1 cds), and then to not be able to use them was insult to injury. People weren't buying PS2 in my store because they could play PS1, they were not buying GCs because they couldn't play N64. Go figure.
As for this next round, people are more jaded now. They fully expect no compatibility, unless it's by Sony. Anything else will be a bonus. This next round, to my opinion, will easily have PS3/PS2 BWC, possible GC2/GC BWC, and there's still a chance for XB2/XB BWC. (I still see a chance because: Black/white button could be emulated somehow [they aren't used all that often], hard drive memory saves could be handled by some form of high capacity 512mb or gb+ flash memory cards [using internal XB2 APIs to redirect old software hard drive calls to the new medi
Perhaps I wasn't clear in my response. I was discussing it from the PoV of the producer. You're just not seeing the discussion.
Explain to me how a producer is losing a sale when a used copy is purchased. Again, the physical copies of the software sitting on every shelf were already purchased by the retailers from the producers. Whether or not you purchase the new shrinkwrapped copy or not, that piece of software on the shelf was already paid for. Now, if you try to claim a causality chain, such that if I buy a used copy then a new copy sits on the shelf and thus an order for a replacement copy wouldn't take place, then that's not the case either.
The bottom line is there are some people who won't pay full retail regardless of whether or not used copies exist. They might be kids on allowance, they might be adults on a budget, whatever. If no used copies existed, they would simply wait until the game was out long enough to normally drop in price (say NFL 2002, down to $19.99 from $49.99). If they then bought that copy, it's so far out of the normal product lifecycle that the store could not even buy another new copy to replace it since it's out of print! Thus, again, the producer's rewards weren't impacted, or at least were impacted in the exact same manner used copies impact their rewards: a sale did not occur at full retail. Bottom line.
I would ask you another question: do you shop at Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Target, Kohl's, or any grocery store? I would imagine that you do. Now, does every single item you buy from those retailers come from the retailer themself, such as Wal-Mart generic branded medicine or soda? If not, if even a single item you buy in a store could be bought directly from a manufacturer via phone/mail/internet, then you are in ethical distress by your own contention. Why? Because Wal-Mart (and others) buy their items from the producer at cost, and if you buy from them, you aren't paying the full retail directly to the producer, but rather to Wal-Mart, who takes their cut off the top. All of retail is the resale of used goods, economically speaking, since you aren't the first buyer of those products. That's how retail works: I pay a producer a lower price negotiated by us in the hopes of getting a consumer to pay me a higher price so I can make money.
Here's a good example: In my hands is a novel I bought at Wal-Mart. It's Prey by Michael Crichton, by Avon Books. I paid $5.97 for it. Now, in the back of the book is a page with an order sheet where I can buy this same book from Avon Books directly for $7.99. Thus, I am ethically distressed, by your admission. I bought this copy new (not used!), yet I paid $5.97 to Wal-Mart when I could have paid $7.99 to the publisher themself. Thus, the producer was "cheated" out of at least $2.03 by my buying it from Wal-Mart instead of them ($7.99 retail - $5.96 minimum cost Wal-Mart paid to publisher for copy of book).
Thus, if we as citizens of Earth buy anything from anyone other than the original maker/producer, we are ethically wrong. That is a surprisingly and dangerously narrow vision of the world. I won't even get into the ethical morass that would result in forcing schools to always buy new textbooks each year for each new grade of students, regardless of whether or not they could reuse them. We wouldn't want to be ethically distressed. Of course, the cost of education would then exponentiate overnight, and we couldn't handle the burden in society for this cost. Is that ethically right or wrong? I wonder....
I think the difference in opinion is that people, myself included, don't consider there to be a moral or ethical dilemma in selling or purchasing used goods.
I work in retail, and have done so for over 6 years. I cannot begin to count the number of pieces of product I have been forced to see destroyed because of lack of sales. You might be inclined to say that is because of piracy, because of secondhand sales, or some other causitive reason.
Regardless of the reason, the bottom line is that the producer of that item was paid cost for each copy that is sitting on the shelf in my store. It becomes a financial loss for our business if we fail to sell that item. As time passes, we will mark down our pricing until it moves, or until we "buy it out" and destroy it. In none of those cases was the producer out any money. With only rare exceptions are software sold on consignment; 99% of the time if a box of software sits on a shelf in a local store, it's because the store paid the producer for that physical copy.
In a way, it's an interesting quandary of ethics, and I'll pose it this way: Determine which is ethically "worse". Is it worse to buy a used copy of an item, thereby infusing the economy with money, purchasing a legally owned copy, or is it worse to force individuals into always buying at full retail, thus relegating all previously owned copies to landfills when their owners no longer desire to possess them? Furthermore, when consumers are spending more money per item, they are likely to purchase less items per annum (due to reduced funds), thus causing a ripple effect in the economy.
In fact, by being able to purchase used titles, consumers are more often able to afford and discover games that might otherwise have never been purchased in the first place. In those instances, they may find something appealing, and then look for other titles by that publisher/creator, possibly generating more revenue for the producers -- not less, as you seem to imply in your ethical concern. In fact, whether a consumer buys a new copy in my store, or a used copy down the street, that physical box in their hand (plus the one in my store) were both already bought from the producer. He has the money, has already invested it, and his shareholders are already happy.
As an example, consider companies like Nintendo who advertise 500,000 Gameboy Advance SP sales in a week at launch. That figure is only how many they have sold to retailers worldwide for resale, not necessarily how many consumers bought. Does Nintendo care? No -- they've received their money from the retailers. By your contention, the producers have been rewarded.
The bottom line is there is a serious and definable line both legally, morally, and ethically between piracy and the secondhand market. In a secondhand market a sold item generates revenue multiple times: the producer gets full cost for the first time it is sold to a store for retail sales; a consumer gets revenue when they sell the copy to a store that buys used games; a consumer who thus sells a used copy to a store will very often reinvest that profit into another game, quite often a game at full retail (trade in 2 games and get XXXX for only $10!); the used copy will generate revenue again when sold to someone purchasing the used copy; in some cases, the used copy will generate revenue for the producer should a warranty issue come to play, since the producer will charge a fee for assistance/replacement due to the out-of-warranty condition of the copy.
Piracy, however, generates revenue only once: a producer gets revenue for selling a copy to a store. That's it.
To me, I see no ethical challenge or dilemma. If you can establish beyond doubt that every single copy of a used game sold directly causes the immediate loss of a sale at full price for the same title, then I might concede there is a feduciary concern -- not ethical. In any case, the producers were always rewarded, which was the point you kept raising. It's really the retailers who w
Actually, I remember tons of prerelease paperwork for NFL Fever 2003 (I think) for the XBox that claimed exactly that - if you had your XBox set up on XBox Live, you would get actual weather for the games you were playing. They were trying to hype up the reality angle pretty heavy. Too bad when the game came out, that "feature" got ignored...
What about getting a little more sophisticated and taking certain scenes and adding a handful of extra frames to it? Make some screeners have maybe an extra second in one scene, some others have a second less in a different scene, and so forth.
I'm not sure if that would work, but I would think that most MPG compressors would likely keep those frames, and release groups wouldn't know which scene should have frames removed (or added). That would be different than putting a serial on the print that could be erased out, and it wouldn't ruin the print by putting the brown dots we were talking about earlier.
I have to risk being similarly flamed for replying to your excellent post, but I share the same sentiment that you do.
I began working in the retail industry over 6 years ago, and have gone from being a part-time sales associate to [now] a full-time sales manager. I work for a nationwide toy retailer. During that span of time, I've been witness to the constant evolution of return policies that our company has gone through.
Five years ago, our policy was extremely liberal, to the extent that, open or not, so long as you had a receipt, you could return the item. We were even liberal enough that we would even exchange an item for the same item even without a receipt. Clearly, our customers were thrilled with the relative freedom that policy allowed.
Sadly, it did not take long to see the net result of that leniance: piles upon piles of software (both console and PC) that was returned opened. Naturally, for legal reasons alone, that software could not be resold as new condition, regardless of whether or not it was used, or was out of the store for a day or a week. We still had to rewrap it, which meant time and energy wasted on rewrapping items, then marking them down in price so we could sell them as used, then merchandising them in a way that customers would [hopefully] notice the cheaper, previously opened copy, and lastly spending the time and energy to encourage a customer to actually purchase the product.
I daresay that 90% of the time, we were forced to mark such games so low in price that we would take a loss on the game. Admittedly, as anyone in videogame retail knows, the profit is made on software, not on hardware. However, when you are faced with the decision on how much to mark down a title that is open so that a customer will actually purchase it, you are forced to make that choice: mark it too low to make money but to get rid of it, or mark it to the point that you'll still make money if you sell it, but risk having it waste shelf space until someone finally "bites" (which invariably becomes the last week before Christmas).
It's a difficult choice, and after much prolonged difficulty dealing with it, about 2 years ago my company switched its policy to a stringent one as well. We now will generally not accept any returns on opened software at all. We will exchange for the exact same title with a receipt. Without a receipt, we do nothing. Lest those who would try to use the system for their own purposes, even when we exchange a bad disc for a new one, we will open the new package to ensure the open-box policy will apply to that copy as well.
Since I have lived on both sides of the issue, my perspective is more generalized. When I was in college, I was the one faced with rationing out my funds to decide which games I would purchase. Did I ever buy titles that were absolutely abominable? Absolutely. Did I return them to the stores I bought them in? Occassionally, yes. That was back about 10 or more years ago, and I can commiserate with those who [now] argue that policies should be more open than they are.
Having now evolved into a sales manager, where my career, salary, and daily job status depends entirely on the viability of our store's business, I have a far different perspective. I have to monitor daily margins, profits, payroll expenses, and other financial considerations. Quite frankly, I've had my share over the last 3 years of management dealing with this sort of return policy issue. I've had to deal with the mountains of returns that come in from those who clearly impulse purchased a game, only to find its not up to their expectations.
I will offer an excellent case-in-point: Madden 2004/NFL Fever 2004. With Madden and Fever being release nearly simulataneously, there were many who chose to take home Fever simply due to its online XBox support, which Madden does not offer. As it turns out, many of those people were not satisfied with the overall quality of the title. If I were given a cash bonus for each title of Fever that a customer tried
First off, let me start by saying that I believe this patent to be invalid, for various reasons as stated by numerous others.
However, I'm not sure I agree with the assessment that the half billion penalty was egregious. First off, you have to consider the scope of the patent infringement as alleged (and upheld).
According to Google.com, right now they are searching 3,307,998,701 web pages. That's over 3 billion, with a "b". Now, given the ridiculous profusion of media-based content on websites that require the use of plugins as covered by the patent, you could argue that even as little as.1% of those websites contain such material. (It's likely higher than that.) That figure converts the web page count to 3,307,998 pages. That's at the current point in time.
Now, keep in mind that this patent was filed in 1994, if I recall correctly, which was 9 years ago. How many web pages have been created, and subsequently viewed, by people during that intervening time? Again, millions.
If you were to impose a fine on Microsoft for each violation of the patent that they knowingly allowed, you could argue that they should be fined for every time a web page containing such media was viewed by a user of the web browser. That's not entirely unreasonable, if there's enough proof that Microsoft was made aware of their infringment of the patent and continued to develop and release updates of the browser that still infringed.
So, how much is enough of a fine? Millions upon millions of web pages, viewed on browsers millions upon millions of times over. Just for fun, if you assume a 50 cent fine for each time a page is viewed on the Microsoft browser, forcing the use of a plugin in violation of the patent, you come up with around 304,000 viewings a day. Yes, that's a little high, but it's not terribly unreasonable when you consider that is worldwide.
I'm just tossing numbers around for the sake of doing so, but I can see why the high dollar amount is there. I'm not sure if punitive damages (per se) are applicable in such cases as they are in other court cases. If so, you could see even more the high dollar amount - a per use fine, plus a pure $$$ fine.
I'm not surprised in the least by the unfortunate circumstances that the subject of the article is involved in. His problems are symptomatic of a wider issue involving immigration, foreign labor, and other similar concerns that have been growing in the US for a number of years.
Growing up in South Florida, I've spent 30 years watching the influx of immigrants, both legal and illegal, spread and increase. The ratio of those of foreign origin to native origin in the southern portion of the state has boomed, with areas such as Miami now being nearly evenly split, if not more foreign. I watched news stories begin in a small trickle, then a river, and nowadays a flood where people lose their jobs to those willing to work for a cheaper labor rate. Often (not always, but often) they lose their jobs to foreigners who don't expect fair wages (perhaps out of gratitude for living in the US, or out of fear of being reported for being illegal). It's nothing new in South Florida.
How often have we seen the same problem in areas of the Southwest, where the large exodus of illegal aliens from Mexico has led to a changeover of jobs from native born workers to those of foreign origin? Most of the time, these foreigners are being exploited by the employers because of their status, which is a problem in and of itself.
Now we're seeing the 21st century version of this same problem, where employers are outsourcing vital job opportunities to foreign businesses or individuals. This is a decade where businesses fail at any moment because of the ripple effect felt by lack of consumer confidence, unsteady stock prices, and often unethical & illegal corporate business practices. In order to survive, these businesses will try to cut to the bone wherever they can, and rather than pay the average rate to an American employee, they will go where they can to save what they can.
Will laws help solve the problem? Probably not. They may stop the flow for awhile, but it won't succeed in the long run. We already have corporations move their corporate headquarters offshore in order to escape tax brackets and regulations. We have auto companies move major manufacturing plants to Mexico so that they can hire lower cost labor and make a higher margin on their vehicle sales. If states such as California pass some law that restricts the hiring of foreign employees, the only result I can foresee for the future is an exodus of companies from California to states that allow it, or to countries other than the US.
It almost makes me glad that I abandoned Computer Science in college in favor of Education. I don't have to compete with foreign labor for cheaper wage rates - as a teacher cheap wage rates are already built into the system!
This matter of the RIAA lawsuit against the 12 year old girl is disturbingly similar the the same strong-arm tactics being employed by SCO in their ongoing beef with Linux.
In both their cases, they have used intimidation to practically extort large sums of money, not necessarily from those who are in the wrong, but from those who cannot [afford to] defend themselves. Once again, our country's established legal system, which purports that you are innocent until proven guilty, has displayed itself as a system that is unavailable to those without sufficient funds to protect oneself under those same laws.
The parallels are amazing, when one thinks about it. In each case, we have a large entity that is more concerned with using scare tactics and intimidation than with the pursuit of honest, open discourse. In the case of the RIAA, they happen to have the law on their side, although their means are reprehensible and beyond contempt. In the case of SCO, they are in a gray area as to whether their claims are legitimate, but again, if they are, they are using essentially the same copyright laws to lean on those who use Linux to try and generate cashflow by forcing them into paying licensing fees.
Ironically, in neither case have we really seen the large entity step forward with a definitive example or proof of the guilt of those they are suing. Has the RIAA produced a lengthy list of filenames, dates, IP addresses, and so forth for any of the 261 people they've sued? To my knowledge they haven't, and they aren't even obligated to do so at this point since no one they've "chosen" to sue has the resources to force such a disclosure in a courtroom.
And for anyone who continues to live under the false pretention that the RIAA's sole consideration in pursuing these lawsuits is the trueness of their cause, consider what the most recent AP update about the 12 year old has noted:
The RIAA said this week it already had negotiated $3,000 settlements with fewer than 10 Internet users who learned they might be sued after the RIAA sent copyright subpoenas to their Internet providers. But lawyers negotiated those settlements before the latest round of lawsuits, and the RIAA had said any further settlements would cost defendants more than $3,000.
In other words, now that they see that they are winning their extortion war, they are raising the prices. If I recall, I believe the low end limit on copyright infringement penalty was $150 per case -- if so, why did they feel the need to punish a 12 year old and her mother by laying down a $2000 settlement? They clearly already had their press exposure, and could have turned a potentially damaging PR nightmare to their side by dropping the fine to the minimum allowed by law. The fact that they didn't points to their true motivation.
In case you haven't seen the news yet, the mother and daughter have already caved in to the RIAA.
They rapidly announced today that they've agreed to a $2000 settlement, and went so far as to make a nice little public apology and promise to never do it again.
It's just a shame that the family couldn't get help from a high powered lawyer who wanted to make a name for himself in this case. The publicity alone would have been phenomenal. Oh well. The RIAA has won yet another round on their campaign to step all over people.
Slashdot Mirror
Still, though, what I find more interesting is Le Guin's attitude towards Caucasians. Just reading through the article I see phrases such as "petulant white kid", "honky", "lily-like", "whites...have the privilege of not caring". It's almost as though Le Guin is defensive about her own ethnicity.
I guess I take offense at being lumped into the generalizations that Le Guin makes. For example, when I read novels I do indeed tend to overlook the ethnicity of the protagonists, unless it is considered a major pushing point of the novel. When I enjoy well written novels, I enjoy the plot and the development of the character's personalities, and the motivations for their actions. I could care less whether the main characters are Caucasian, African-American, Native-American, Asianiac, and so forth. I was taught as a child by my family that a person's ethnicity should not give or take away from their value as a person - it is the quality of their character that is the important element in their person.
That's why I bristled a little when I read her reaction. I came away thinking that she put too much emphasis in the ethnicity of her characters. It's her prerogative, of course, and by her own admission it is a basis for her novels. In that sense, I imagine, she should be upset by how the story was changed. Of course, I seem to recall someone in a class I took once in creative writing telling the class that a sign of good writing was when you could take the characters and change their race, gender, ethnicity, etc, and the story would still be compelling and engaging. The point then was that you should focus on writing a strong story first, and use your characters to drive the story, not the other way around.
In any case, I'm more disturbed by how Le Guin "gets away" with using the term "honky", which is a derogatory term. (Ironically, it is a derogatory term that is likely derived from the African Wolof term honq) Although I haven't read every single response here on /., I don't notice anyone taking offense to her language. I guess I'm personally irritated by the double standard in society where a person of one ethnicity can be punished for using an ethnic slur against another race, but you can get away with saying a slur against your own race. (IE, it's alright for African-Americans to say "n****r", but not okay for anyone else, and it's alright for Le Guin to say "honky")
Oh, and in case anyone feels this is too off-topic, let me make one final observation. By Le Guin's own admission, one of the key factors in her decision to sell the group the option to the film rights was knowing Philippa Boyens was onboard as primary script writer. If that were true, she should have had it written into the contract that the rights were contingent upon Boyens' participation in the project. I've seen that happen many times, where an author won't let anyone but a certain script writer handle their stories. If you care about your stories that much, you will take that sort of care.
Although your statements are one of the most well-phrased ones I've read in this thread (which is a little sad, all things considered), I don't happen to agree with the logic behind them.
You make the first point I was going to make for me: there's a difference between registering a product, and requiring activation. I've registered nearly everything I've ever bought, for the same reason you did, namely to have product support. Warranty protection flows from the same reasoning. But I've never liked being forced to "activate" something I've already purchased, and that's the crux of the problem here.
Your point with respect to purchasing a car is a good one, but it's flawed in that it doesn't impact this situation. Needing to know personal information before purchasing a car is vital because of various unrelated issues, such as taxation, registration, license validation (ie, is your driver's license revoked), etc. These issues have no bearing when it comes to purchasing a computer game.
The reason people feel like this system treats them like criminals is because you need to look at the reasoning for the issue itself. You pointed out the difference with your car example. Did you suggest that the reason they require your personal information when you buy a car is to make sure you didn't steal the car? No, of course not. The shear fact that you're buying the car at the dealership establishes that you didn't steal the car that you are driving home with. Now, consider the copy of HL2 at EBGames in the mall. Why shouldn't the shear fact that you're buying the package in the store establish that you didn't steal the game? Valve's purpose in using this system is because, by their admission of intent, they are trying to keep illegal copies from working. In other words, the a priori intent is to consider any copy to be illegal until proven otherwise. Thus, people feel like their being treated like criminals. (It's that whole "innocent until proven guilty" thing...the impetus should be on Valve to prove I warezed the copy I'm using rather than me proving I didn't.)
I'm intrigued that you feel that we are at a stage where the trend is towards high cost console gaming? How is that substantiated? The reality (and I've worked in toy store retail for nearly 6 years) is just the opposite: console gaming has become very nearly monotonically decreasing. Seriously, consider it. The price tag on inital console units from 5+ years ago was well over $200, whereas new unit costs now are lower. New cost of cartridge based media (ie, N64) was easily $49.99-$59.99, whereas many new titles now debut at $39.99. Last, but not least, look at recent moves such as ESPN Sports' titles debuting at the $19.99 mark, and now EA Sports' titles coming in around $39.99. If anything, it seems consoles are becoming less expensive as time goes on.
And to answer your question, if I invested $40mil on a project, I'd darn well want to protect my investment. Of course, I question why the frell ANY game needed to have $40mil invested to come to fruition. I mean, seriously folks, $40mil for 5 years of development literally boils down to paying 80 employees salaries of $100K/year. Do you really think every single poor sucker on that project was being paid $100K/yr?
In any case, this is a means of "investment protection" that does nothing of the sort, and that's the point everyone has made. At the best, it holds off crackers and warez demons for maybe a handful of days; at the worse, it inconveniences the people who have already spent their money (and thus profitted Valve) to the point where they can't play until the authentication servers are not /.'d (basically) and let their copy get in to the server. This sort of authentication will always be cracked at some point, basically because there's always a copy of the game in a computer memory somewhere that's vulnerable to deep memory scans/comparisons/etc.
And lastly, you echo a sentiment that is all too dangerous
Well, one thing I've noticed is that most people are not complaining that Valve have chosen to use the Steam system as a means of secure, digital distribution of their products. I believe that it's a fantastic way of selling products, and provided you have the internet pipe to handle that much data transfer, more power to you - saves a trip to the store. That's not what the complaining is about at all.
What the complaining really is about is the way that the online validation is required for B&M purchases. (I don't know enough to know if there's truth to having to validate online every single time you want to play SP or not, seems many people say you don't have to, just the first time only.) If you go down to your local store and pay your money for the product, you should be able to play it without having to go online and [hopefully] get through to a server somewhere to prove you bought it.
I applaud your desire to reward Valve by purchasing a copy even though you'd gotten a free copy via a videocard purchase. Of course, there's a good chance they got some money already from the videocard company in that deal (depends on the terms of the agreement; in this case, since it's obvious that HL2 was a compelling reason to buy the videocard, I'll bet the terms were in Valve's favor and not vice versa...) The only concern I have (especially after reading about the recent EA programmer's issues) is whether or not the money is truly going to benefit the programmers who tirelessly slaved away for the 5 years to make HL2.
This whole issue with Steam reminds me too much of the DirecTV Tivo issues that are just as interesting. For those who don't know, DirecTV Tivo units require you to keep your units plugged into your phone lines in order for your service to continue without "issues". For example, if your unit doesn't make its daily calls, eventually your ability to order PPVs through the unit is disabled (though you still can order online/phone). So the bottom line there is, you paid for the unit, you pay your subscription bills every month on time, but you're still forced to make a daily phone call that has no literal bearing on how your service works on your TV. (Even tv guide data is pulled from the satellite dish, not the phone).
This is the same exact issue. People paid for a product legitimately, but can't use it until their "phone" (ie, internet client) makes a "call" (ie, authentication) to a central server. Yes, it may be inconvenient and easy to do quickly, but the question is really, "Should it be done?"
Those complaining about Steam aren't expecting special privileges without paying the dues necessary for getting them. (IE, wanting SD equivalent from HD providers without paying for HD.) People paid their money and expect to be able to use it without delay of any sort. It would be much like buying a new home (with an electronic keycode necessary to open the locks), paying in cash for it, and when you go to move in, you have to wait on the phone for an operator to be available to verify your paperwork and send you the keycodes to open the door. It's not unreasonable, if you think about it for a minute, to be upset that you've paid for something and still can't use it until you get someone to "believe you", which is basically what Valve/Steam is doing. You paid $50 for it, but until their computers "believe you" (authentication), you still can't use it.
Londovir
I think the point is being missed. Our country is a representative form of government, and more importantly, the United States is just that: a collection of united states. (50 of them, in fact, plus disputedly the District of Columbia, which should just be made a state and be done with it.)
In any case, I totally disagree with your comment "If a state only has 1 million people, their vote is more valuable than a state that has 10 million." No state's vote should be more valuable than any other.
Since what point have people forgotten that we are a collection of independant states that work together as a whole to form a country? That's why we have state governments, with state constitutions, state courts, and so forth. We're NOT a unified country, although we often work together for a common goal. Thus, when we elect a president, we are electing someone who will execute the Constitution of the United States, not the will of the people, per se.
Thus, Alaska should be just as important as California when it comes to electoral votes. Why not? Just because people don't choose to live there en masse, does not devalue their importance as one of the 50 states of our union. They have an equal voice in our country, and deservedly so.
The problem is the electoral college system has become unbalanced in its purpose. It was intended to give each state a voice, but when it became tied to populations, it lost it's whole value. What should be done is simple: make each state have 1 electoral vote. A president will win when they claim a majority of electoral votes. Each state's electoral vote will be decided by the winner of the state's popular vote. In the case of a national tie in electoral votes, rely upon the national popular vote to break the tie.
In this way, every single state is important to deciding the presidency, which is the way it should have been all along. How insulting is it to live in a state like Alaska, where your livelihood is made or broken in Washington, but candidates will skip you like a hopscotch board to concentrate on a "rich" state like California with it's 55 votes? Why do you think the Senate is designed with 2 candidates from each state? To make it even to all, that's part of the checks and balances. It is unfair to regard the popular vote as the only decider, for the simple reason that our country is a collection of states, not population, and that's the key difference. We might wish to feel otherwise, but the reality is that it's the states that are represented in government, not the people directly - we just serve to decide who will represent our state's interests in the government. That being the case, let the popular vote decide who the states vote for, not the president directly.
As an interesting aside to this idea, this concept of elections would have kept the same election result all the way back to the 1976 national election, and it would have given Gerald Ford the win, as he had won 27 states to Carter's 24. An interesting thing to contemplate.
Londovir
Just in case anyone is interested, the patents in question are 5,206,951, 5,421,012, and 5,226,161. The patents appear to be mostly related to object data technologies, so they don't seem to apply to things like BASIC or any Unix shells.
They DO seem to handle object oriented systems, like Java, .NET, etc.
Question now is, given the dates of the patents, how do they apply to Java, and is there prior art?
LondovirAlthough it's true that algebra gets its name from al-Jabr, and it's also true that some of the great Arab mathematicians (including al-Khwarizmi) codified many algebraic structures and practices that are now common (al-Khwarizmi essentially worked out the "Completing the Square" method of solving quadratic equations), it's a bit of a stretch to attribute everything to the Arabs.
The Chinese were one of the first pioneers in mathematics to lay down many of the standard practices we use in algebra today. They were one of the first major groups to adopt and accept negative numbers, drawing them in red and putting slashes through the last digits to indicate negative quantities (when it took Leonardo de Pisa [Fibonacci] a thousand years later to look at negative numbers in financial problems as losses - he still did not accept negative roots of quadratics). The Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art, the earliest known work of Chinese mathematicians, dates from around 200BC, and illustrates 246 practical math problems on surveying, conversions, etc. You could argue that these basic math methods of solving equations is a good basis for algebra.
Not to mention that the Babylonians, around 2000BC, began the first major study and work of mathematics in the world. They used a fairly sophisticated positional Base 60 system, showed knowledge of the quadratic formula (the first known civilization to do so), and even looked at (though couldn't derive a solution to) cubic equations as well.
Lastly, one very common misconception: although we refer to our numeral system as the Arabic Numeral system, the actual "figures" we use to draw the numbers 1, 2, 3, etc, were brought to the Western world from India, not from the Arabian peninsula. Many attribute the adoption of the Indian Numeral system to al-Khwarizmi, but it may have been earlier than that. Regardless, they were the ones to give us that number system (including the use of 0 to hold a space in positional number systems), not the Arabs.
I don't mean to belittle the great works done by early Arabian mathematicians - they easily were one of the most influential and driving forces in bringing the mathematical knowledge of the Far East to the Western world, especially when the "dark ages" of mathematical learning dawned when the Greek & Alexandrian schools of learning faded away. They were the greatest preservers of the ancient Greek writings, and quite often the only copies we have today of some of the Greek works of Euclid, Thales, Pythagoras, and others is an English translation of a Latin translation of an Arabic translation of the original Greek. Still, some of the basic practices of algebraic solving existed quite before the great Arabic mathematicians -- they tend to get the "credit" of inventing algebra because they were the main ones to gather, collect, comment, and extend most of that early work.
Oh, and as to the contention that the Arabs were highly developed in astronomy since most of the stars visible to the naked eye have Arabic names, that is a bit misleading. Consider what I mentioned about the "Arabic Numeral" system. Just because something is named in a way doesn't indicate anything about its creators. Many now believe that Pythagoras did not "invent" the Pythagorean Theorem. It is now commonly attributed to an anonymous student of the Pythagorean School of Learning, not to mention how the Babylonians a thousand years before had cuneiform tablets with the same triangle work done on them. It was actually the great Greek astronomer Hipparchus who catalogued thousands of stars and their positions in the 2nd century BC, and whom Ptolemy recorded much of the work. Once again, we owe a great debt to the great Arabic astronomers for preserving and expanding on those earlier works of the Greeks and others - but reali
To the best of my knowledge, I don't think there is any exclusivity contract between Sony and EA over their online sports line. I think it only is exclusive right now in the sense that "you can only play online with Sony because you can't play online with anyone else", not "you can only play online with Sony."
I think the biggest roadblock is a major revenue/royalty beef between EA and Microsoft. Microsoft expects to receive compensation from EA for allowing the use of their servers and XBox Live network in order to play EA Sports online. EA, on the other hand, feels that their EA Sports branding and license is powerful and lucrative enough to warrant receiving compensation from Microsoft for all the sales of XBox Live subscriptions that people will be buying [and renewing] because of their presence on XBox Live. As a bigwig in EA said in a web site interview I saw somewhere, "HBO wouldn't let their hit shows air on public TV without compensation, so why should EA allow their hit games on other systems without some sort of compensation?"
If they can get onto their own servers, it takes one aspect off the table. If they can reach an agreement on the other issues, we probably will see games on XBox Live this year. I think the decision would have to have been made by now, though. Usually sports games come out right in the midst of preseason time, and developers will need a good amount of time to get the quirks out of the system before it goes to beta test. Since EA hasn't worked with the XBox networking system yet, I imagine they'll want to make sure they get it right - so time is clearly of the essence. If they're going on Live, we should hear something soon....
I call shenanigans on that interview answer! If Microsoft was intently honest in allowing their league "api" to be accessible to all, they would have sent out the basic public access hooks to the developers so they could have implemented it in their titles.
He implies (no, states outright) that Sega didn't put the league ability in because they didn't feel they had enough time to react to the api. Hrm, maybe my memory is toast, but if I recall correctly, NFL Fever 2004 was released on August 26, 2003 (according to XBox's retailer website). ESPN NFL Football shipped out to stores on September 3, 2003 (according to Sega's website).
If XSN was ready to roll for NFL Fever 2004 (it was the launch of XSN), and that game came out a week ahead of ESPN, that whole reason is hogwash, by my book. Clearly Microsoft held back on the information on how to implement access to the backbone so they could use it exclusively that year - or at the least, made sure they delivered the specs so late in the development stage that ESPN was already in the beta testing stage and past the point of installing "feature code". Now, maybe, they are out of the XSN software business, so it's suddenly open architecture for everyone to use and it just happened to be a shame that ESPN couldn't have used it last year.
I don't mind the way they are doing things, but they should call a spade a spade. They could say they tried to do XSN with their own sports titles, but that their quality didn't measure up, and now they're happy to work with ESPN & EA by offering the use of their XSN network to make the XBox the best console for sports ever. But then we get back to the whole royalties issue between EA & Microsoft: EA thinks that their very logo = $$$$, and that anybody playing their game should pay them a royalty for the use of their logo. Microsoft would want, naturally, EA to pay them for the use of their XSN network. Ne'er the twain shall meet....
I really have to think there's more behind the scenes than this announcement by Microsoft.
I mean, they pushed into a market that would otherwise have been their own slaughter: EA and Sega have been doing sports titles (especially football) since the Joe Montana Sportstalk Football and Bird vs. Jordan Basketball days. They knew what they were up against. And even though the XSN line is only about 70% the quality of this year's EA/Sega lineups, they had innovation that gave them a chance: XSN network.
Given the contractual disagreements over royalties between EA and Microsoft, and the branding issues involved, I figured there'd be no hope for EA/Microsoft to make up and get EA online. Now, I'm not so sure. I recall (can't find the link) an interview with someone in the XBox team who was saying that there would be an exciting annoucement "soon" regarding EA and Microsoft, but wouldn't elaborate. I also recall an interview with EA CEO Larry Probst where he stated in December 2003 that "...we're moving closer and closer together in terms of a business model that we think is palatable. I think we'll eventually get there."
I have a feeling something is up. This seems a lot to me like a 3rd Party Political candidate situation: the Democrat/Republican (Sega/ESPN) wins the online "election" because the Republican/Democrat (EA) doesn't have enough "votes" because the Reform/Green candidate (XSN) has just enough voter appeal to keep them out of the picture. I wouldn't be surprised if EA dropped their royalties demand in exchange for Microsoft killing the XSN product line so that EA can take on Sega directly - perhaps they even won an agreement to have their product tied into the existing framework for the XSN network. If Microsoft agreed to tie in the EA line with the virtual tournaments, leagues, etc they had built up for the XSN network, EA knows they could make millions by making nice with Microsoft. Microsoft would have to know that they would potentially make millions by having EA online games on their platform - if not profit in console sales (there's no profit there), then in follow-up 1st party sales (like Halo 2, hrm?) or in market penetration in time for XBox-2 (timed with today's $149.99 price drop too....)
I mean, when have we ever really seen Microsoft just up and quit on something that had miserable quality when they had a chance to snag and retain market share? Heck, the XBox itself is an example of that statement: they were bleeding money like mad to sell the consoles at the price they were, yet they kept doing so because they want market penetration. Why suddenly cancel a product line that has at least sold copies (maybe not to the level of EA)? Always look for the deeper reason....
It's been true enough in the world of sports for quite some time already. If you ever watch old replays on ESPN Classic, you can see the gradual intrusion of advertising into the sports arena.
It used to be the Sugar Bowl. Now it's the Nokia Sugar Bowl. Was the Fiesta Bowl. Now it's the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl. Don't ask fans of the old Candlestick Park what they think of the arena's "new" name. That's just the tip of the iceberg there. What about NASCAR? Is there anyone watching NASCAR who doesn't feel off-kilter when they can't say "Winston Cup" anymore? Does anybody remember that, rather than the name of an award/trophy, they are talking about a vendor when they say that?
Media advertising has been with us for some time, lurking in the shadows of consciousness. The seminal symbol of sports events, the Goodyear Blimp, is itself a giant advertising billboard flying from one sporting/concert event to another. Watch any televised World Cup soccer match, where instead of commercial breaks people may take a trip to the bathroom or kitchen during (and miss), you are now subconciously enticed into viewing an advertising logo every 12.5 seconds when you peer at the score or time remaining. Need I now point out the even more incredibly intrusive AOL yellow "dude" that runs onto the football field to display the first down yellow line? (That one killed me the first time I saw it...talk about marketing)
The more DVRs like ReplayTV and Tivo make the rounds, the more this sort of advertising will integrate itself into the programming itself. If not in some blatant smack of product placement ("Vote for the next American Idol by sending VOTE with your AT&T Wireless cell phone"), then certainly by some subtle logo or "bug" placed in such a way that you can't exclude the logo with any technological means without severly impacting the watchability of the programming itself.
I wouldn't be surprised if you don't see television programming deriving someday to the "watch-per-view" format that many premium websites go lately which require you to sit and watch a 30sec commercial before proceeding to the next page/download/etc. With the convergence of digital media and control devices (remotes, etc), it's not unlikely you'd get some method where you must watch a commercial and key a code on your remote to continue with the show. Incredibly invasive -- yes -- effective to force people to watch a commercial -- absolutely. How many people could they force to sit through mandatory commercials to watch the Friends finale in May?
I just don't see BW compatibility as being all "that". I've worked in videogame retail for nearly 6 years, so I've had the luck to be in on most of the recent big launches, and I also was around for the end of some of the stinkers (Saturn, anyone?).
;-) Seriously, time and time again they were far more impressed with the graphical leap they saw than they were in the software compatibility. Once we got done giving the customer the usual rundown on the memory card incompatibility and the analog-button PS1 incompatibility, most of the guests concluded they were buying a 60% standalone unit and were happy with that.
Admittedly I am in a middle-sized town in Florida (Lakeland), but we get a fair share of business, so I've seen and spoken to many a gamer over those 6 years. When PS2 launched, very few people were interested in the fact that it could play PS1 games. The closest consideration I repeatedly saw was that some parents were buying one because that way they could put their old PS1 in the kid's room to get the kids out of their hair.
Even now, with all 3 consoles firmly on their last sprints, BWC just isn't the buzz for selling a PS2 over an XBox or GC. In fact, 80% of the time in my store it isn't a factor. At this stage, it is game selection almost all the time. It is either generalized software selection (lack of online EA sports games on XBox, lack of Mario on PS2, lack of "M" games on GC) or niche accessories (EyeToy is selling a number of PS2s in our store, believe it or not...a $49.99 accessory triggering a $179.99 console sale...the XBox Live system triggering XBox sales...GBA connectivity selling GCs).
I also don't think the PS2 BWC was the defining reason for the PS2's profound success in the market, either. Consider that the PS2 had a nice marketplace leadtime over the other two, giving it time to build a console library. Not only that, but each of the XBox and GC has been crippled to some degree by various issues. To whit, the XBox "fails" for the following reasons: Overabundance of "M"/"T" based on desired audience market (lack of "E"/Disney/etc), sterile launch selection (many sports, fighting games, little platforming), unknown market "grasp" (new contender). The GC "fails" for the following reasons: Overabundance of "E"/Disney/etc (too many games are "cutesy" to teenage/adult gamers), baffling lack of any online gaming titles (other than Phantasy Star Online series), lack of BWC in GC.
Now, note if you've read carefully that I indicate a lack of BWC as a failure of the GC. That wasn't a mistype. I believe that BWC does not necessarily increase sales of a console, but in some ways, not having BWC will decrease sales of a console. The two aren't the same thing. Clearly the attractive price of the GC this last holiday season helped Nintendo unload a ton of GCs, regardless of their lack of BWC. Yet, in the early weeks of the GC launch, I can't tell you how many people boycotted the GC out of principle because it wouldn't support the N64. For some reason, I heard many vehement complaints about that lack of BWC. I think people were still smarting over the $49.99 or higher prices of N64 cartridges (rather than the $39.99 or less PS1 cds), and then to not be able to use them was insult to injury. People weren't buying PS2 in my store because they could play PS1, they were not buying GCs because they couldn't play N64. Go figure.
As for this next round, people are more jaded now. They fully expect no compatibility, unless it's by Sony. Anything else will be a bonus. This next round, to my opinion, will easily have PS3/PS2 BWC, possible GC2/GC BWC, and there's still a chance for XB2/XB BWC. (I still see a chance because: Black/white button could be emulated somehow [they aren't used all that often], hard drive memory saves could be handled by some form of high capacity 512mb or gb+ flash memory cards [using internal XB2 APIs to redirect old software hard drive calls to the new medi
Perhaps I wasn't clear in my response. I was discussing it from the PoV of the producer. You're just not seeing the discussion.
Explain to me how a producer is losing a sale when a used copy is purchased. Again, the physical copies of the software sitting on every shelf were already purchased by the retailers from the producers. Whether or not you purchase the new shrinkwrapped copy or not, that piece of software on the shelf was already paid for. Now, if you try to claim a causality chain, such that if I buy a used copy then a new copy sits on the shelf and thus an order for a replacement copy wouldn't take place, then that's not the case either.
The bottom line is there are some people who won't pay full retail regardless of whether or not used copies exist. They might be kids on allowance, they might be adults on a budget, whatever. If no used copies existed, they would simply wait until the game was out long enough to normally drop in price (say NFL 2002, down to $19.99 from $49.99). If they then bought that copy, it's so far out of the normal product lifecycle that the store could not even buy another new copy to replace it since it's out of print! Thus, again, the producer's rewards weren't impacted, or at least were impacted in the exact same manner used copies impact their rewards: a sale did not occur at full retail. Bottom line.
I would ask you another question: do you shop at Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Target, Kohl's, or any grocery store? I would imagine that you do. Now, does every single item you buy from those retailers come from the retailer themself, such as Wal-Mart generic branded medicine or soda? If not, if even a single item you buy in a store could be bought directly from a manufacturer via phone/mail/internet, then you are in ethical distress by your own contention. Why? Because Wal-Mart (and others) buy their items from the producer at cost, and if you buy from them, you aren't paying the full retail directly to the producer, but rather to Wal-Mart, who takes their cut off the top. All of retail is the resale of used goods, economically speaking, since you aren't the first buyer of those products. That's how retail works: I pay a producer a lower price negotiated by us in the hopes of getting a consumer to pay me a higher price so I can make money.
Here's a good example: In my hands is a novel I bought at Wal-Mart. It's Prey by Michael Crichton, by Avon Books. I paid $5.97 for it. Now, in the back of the book is a page with an order sheet where I can buy this same book from Avon Books directly for $7.99. Thus, I am ethically distressed, by your admission. I bought this copy new (not used!), yet I paid $5.97 to Wal-Mart when I could have paid $7.99 to the publisher themself. Thus, the producer was "cheated" out of at least $2.03 by my buying it from Wal-Mart instead of them ($7.99 retail - $5.96 minimum cost Wal-Mart paid to publisher for copy of book).
Thus, if we as citizens of Earth buy anything from anyone other than the original maker/producer, we are ethically wrong. That is a surprisingly and dangerously narrow vision of the world. I won't even get into the ethical morass that would result in forcing schools to always buy new textbooks each year for each new grade of students, regardless of whether or not they could reuse them. We wouldn't want to be ethically distressed. Of course, the cost of education would then exponentiate overnight, and we couldn't handle the burden in society for this cost. Is that ethically right or wrong? I wonder....
I think the difference in opinion is that people, myself included, don't consider there to be a moral or ethical dilemma in selling or purchasing used goods.
I work in retail, and have done so for over 6 years. I cannot begin to count the number of pieces of product I have been forced to see destroyed because of lack of sales. You might be inclined to say that is because of piracy, because of secondhand sales, or some other causitive reason.
Regardless of the reason, the bottom line is that the producer of that item was paid cost for each copy that is sitting on the shelf in my store. It becomes a financial loss for our business if we fail to sell that item. As time passes, we will mark down our pricing until it moves, or until we "buy it out" and destroy it. In none of those cases was the producer out any money. With only rare exceptions are software sold on consignment; 99% of the time if a box of software sits on a shelf in a local store, it's because the store paid the producer for that physical copy.
In a way, it's an interesting quandary of ethics, and I'll pose it this way: Determine which is ethically "worse". Is it worse to buy a used copy of an item, thereby infusing the economy with money, purchasing a legally owned copy, or is it worse to force individuals into always buying at full retail, thus relegating all previously owned copies to landfills when their owners no longer desire to possess them? Furthermore, when consumers are spending more money per item, they are likely to purchase less items per annum (due to reduced funds), thus causing a ripple effect in the economy.
In fact, by being able to purchase used titles, consumers are more often able to afford and discover games that might otherwise have never been purchased in the first place. In those instances, they may find something appealing, and then look for other titles by that publisher/creator, possibly generating more revenue for the producers -- not less, as you seem to imply in your ethical concern. In fact, whether a consumer buys a new copy in my store, or a used copy down the street, that physical box in their hand (plus the one in my store) were both already bought from the producer. He has the money, has already invested it, and his shareholders are already happy.
As an example, consider companies like Nintendo who advertise 500,000 Gameboy Advance SP sales in a week at launch. That figure is only how many they have sold to retailers worldwide for resale, not necessarily how many consumers bought. Does Nintendo care? No -- they've received their money from the retailers. By your contention, the producers have been rewarded.
The bottom line is there is a serious and definable line both legally, morally, and ethically between piracy and the secondhand market. In a secondhand market a sold item generates revenue multiple times: the producer gets full cost for the first time it is sold to a store for retail sales; a consumer gets revenue when they sell the copy to a store that buys used games; a consumer who thus sells a used copy to a store will very often reinvest that profit into another game, quite often a game at full retail (trade in 2 games and get XXXX for only $10!); the used copy will generate revenue again when sold to someone purchasing the used copy; in some cases, the used copy will generate revenue for the producer should a warranty issue come to play, since the producer will charge a fee for assistance/replacement due to the out-of-warranty condition of the copy.
Piracy, however, generates revenue only once: a producer gets revenue for selling a copy to a store. That's it.
To me, I see no ethical challenge or dilemma. If you can establish beyond doubt that every single copy of a used game sold directly causes the immediate loss of a sale at full price for the same title, then I might concede there is a feduciary concern -- not ethical. In any case, the producers were always rewarded, which was the point you kept raising. It's really the retailers who w
Actually, I remember tons of prerelease paperwork for NFL Fever 2003 (I think) for the XBox that claimed exactly that - if you had your XBox set up on XBox Live, you would get actual weather for the games you were playing. They were trying to hype up the reality angle pretty heavy. Too bad when the game came out, that "feature" got ignored...
I'm not sure if that would work, but I would think that most MPG compressors would likely keep those frames, and release groups wouldn't know which scene should have frames removed (or added). That would be different than putting a serial on the print that could be erased out, and it wouldn't ruin the print by putting the brown dots we were talking about earlier.
I began working in the retail industry over 6 years ago, and have gone from being a part-time sales associate to [now] a full-time sales manager. I work for a nationwide toy retailer. During that span of time, I've been witness to the constant evolution of return policies that our company has gone through.
Five years ago, our policy was extremely liberal, to the extent that, open or not, so long as you had a receipt, you could return the item. We were even liberal enough that we would even exchange an item for the same item even without a receipt. Clearly, our customers were thrilled with the relative freedom that policy allowed.
Sadly, it did not take long to see the net result of that leniance: piles upon piles of software (both console and PC) that was returned opened. Naturally, for legal reasons alone, that software could not be resold as new condition, regardless of whether or not it was used, or was out of the store for a day or a week. We still had to rewrap it, which meant time and energy wasted on rewrapping items, then marking them down in price so we could sell them as used, then merchandising them in a way that customers would [hopefully] notice the cheaper, previously opened copy, and lastly spending the time and energy to encourage a customer to actually purchase the product.
I daresay that 90% of the time, we were forced to mark such games so low in price that we would take a loss on the game. Admittedly, as anyone in videogame retail knows, the profit is made on software, not on hardware. However, when you are faced with the decision on how much to mark down a title that is open so that a customer will actually purchase it, you are forced to make that choice: mark it too low to make money but to get rid of it, or mark it to the point that you'll still make money if you sell it, but risk having it waste shelf space until someone finally "bites" (which invariably becomes the last week before Christmas).
It's a difficult choice, and after much prolonged difficulty dealing with it, about 2 years ago my company switched its policy to a stringent one as well. We now will generally not accept any returns on opened software at all. We will exchange for the exact same title with a receipt. Without a receipt, we do nothing. Lest those who would try to use the system for their own purposes, even when we exchange a bad disc for a new one, we will open the new package to ensure the open-box policy will apply to that copy as well.
Since I have lived on both sides of the issue, my perspective is more generalized. When I was in college, I was the one faced with rationing out my funds to decide which games I would purchase. Did I ever buy titles that were absolutely abominable? Absolutely. Did I return them to the stores I bought them in? Occassionally, yes. That was back about 10 or more years ago, and I can commiserate with those who [now] argue that policies should be more open than they are.
Having now evolved into a sales manager, where my career, salary, and daily job status depends entirely on the viability of our store's business, I have a far different perspective. I have to monitor daily margins, profits, payroll expenses, and other financial considerations. Quite frankly, I've had my share over the last 3 years of management dealing with this sort of return policy issue. I've had to deal with the mountains of returns that come in from those who clearly impulse purchased a game, only to find its not up to their expectations.
I will offer an excellent case-in-point: Madden 2004/NFL Fever 2004. With Madden and Fever being release nearly simulataneously, there were many who chose to take home Fever simply due to its online XBox support, which Madden does not offer. As it turns out, many of those people were not satisfied with the overall quality of the title. If I were given a cash bonus for each title of Fever that a customer tried
However, I'm not sure I agree with the assessment that the half billion penalty was egregious. First off, you have to consider the scope of the patent infringement as alleged (and upheld).
According to Google.com, right now they are searching 3,307,998,701 web pages. That's over 3 billion, with a "b". Now, given the ridiculous profusion of media-based content on websites that require the use of plugins as covered by the patent, you could argue that even as little as .1% of those websites contain such material. (It's likely higher than that.) That figure converts the web page count to 3,307,998 pages. That's at the current point in time.
Now, keep in mind that this patent was filed in 1994, if I recall correctly, which was 9 years ago. How many web pages have been created, and subsequently viewed, by people during that intervening time? Again, millions.
If you were to impose a fine on Microsoft for each violation of the patent that they knowingly allowed, you could argue that they should be fined for every time a web page containing such media was viewed by a user of the web browser. That's not entirely unreasonable, if there's enough proof that Microsoft was made aware of their infringment of the patent and continued to develop and release updates of the browser that still infringed.
So, how much is enough of a fine? Millions upon millions of web pages, viewed on browsers millions upon millions of times over. Just for fun, if you assume a 50 cent fine for each time a page is viewed on the Microsoft browser, forcing the use of a plugin in violation of the patent, you come up with around 304,000 viewings a day. Yes, that's a little high, but it's not terribly unreasonable when you consider that is worldwide.
I'm just tossing numbers around for the sake of doing so, but I can see why the high dollar amount is there. I'm not sure if punitive damages (per se) are applicable in such cases as they are in other court cases. If so, you could see even more the high dollar amount - a per use fine, plus a pure $$$ fine.
Londovir
Growing up in South Florida, I've spent 30 years watching the influx of immigrants, both legal and illegal, spread and increase. The ratio of those of foreign origin to native origin in the southern portion of the state has boomed, with areas such as Miami now being nearly evenly split, if not more foreign. I watched news stories begin in a small trickle, then a river, and nowadays a flood where people lose their jobs to those willing to work for a cheaper labor rate. Often (not always, but often) they lose their jobs to foreigners who don't expect fair wages (perhaps out of gratitude for living in the US, or out of fear of being reported for being illegal). It's nothing new in South Florida.
How often have we seen the same problem in areas of the Southwest, where the large exodus of illegal aliens from Mexico has led to a changeover of jobs from native born workers to those of foreign origin? Most of the time, these foreigners are being exploited by the employers because of their status, which is a problem in and of itself.
Now we're seeing the 21st century version of this same problem, where employers are outsourcing vital job opportunities to foreign businesses or individuals. This is a decade where businesses fail at any moment because of the ripple effect felt by lack of consumer confidence, unsteady stock prices, and often unethical & illegal corporate business practices. In order to survive, these businesses will try to cut to the bone wherever they can, and rather than pay the average rate to an American employee, they will go where they can to save what they can.
Will laws help solve the problem? Probably not. They may stop the flow for awhile, but it won't succeed in the long run. We already have corporations move their corporate headquarters offshore in order to escape tax brackets and regulations. We have auto companies move major manufacturing plants to Mexico so that they can hire lower cost labor and make a higher margin on their vehicle sales. If states such as California pass some law that restricts the hiring of foreign employees, the only result I can foresee for the future is an exodus of companies from California to states that allow it, or to countries other than the US.
It almost makes me glad that I abandoned Computer Science in college in favor of Education. I don't have to compete with foreign labor for cheaper wage rates - as a teacher cheap wage rates are already built into the system!
Londovir
In both their cases, they have used intimidation to practically extort large sums of money, not necessarily from those who are in the wrong, but from those who cannot [afford to] defend themselves. Once again, our country's established legal system, which purports that you are innocent until proven guilty, has displayed itself as a system that is unavailable to those without sufficient funds to protect oneself under those same laws.
The parallels are amazing, when one thinks about it. In each case, we have a large entity that is more concerned with using scare tactics and intimidation than with the pursuit of honest, open discourse. In the case of the RIAA, they happen to have the law on their side, although their means are reprehensible and beyond contempt. In the case of SCO, they are in a gray area as to whether their claims are legitimate, but again, if they are, they are using essentially the same copyright laws to lean on those who use Linux to try and generate cashflow by forcing them into paying licensing fees.
Ironically, in neither case have we really seen the large entity step forward with a definitive example or proof of the guilt of those they are suing. Has the RIAA produced a lengthy list of filenames, dates, IP addresses, and so forth for any of the 261 people they've sued? To my knowledge they haven't, and they aren't even obligated to do so at this point since no one they've "chosen" to sue has the resources to force such a disclosure in a courtroom.
And for anyone who continues to live under the false pretention that the RIAA's sole consideration in pursuing these lawsuits is the trueness of their cause, consider what the most recent AP update about the 12 year old has noted:
In other words, now that they see that they are winning their extortion war, they are raising the prices. If I recall, I believe the low end limit on copyright infringement penalty was $150 per case -- if so, why did they feel the need to punish a 12 year old and her mother by laying down a $2000 settlement? They clearly already had their press exposure, and could have turned a potentially damaging PR nightmare to their side by dropping the fine to the minimum allowed by law. The fact that they didn't points to their true motivation.Londovir
They rapidly announced today that they've agreed to a $2000 settlement, and went so far as to make a nice little public apology and promise to never do it again.
AP Excite News Story
It's just a shame that the family couldn't get help from a high powered lawyer who wanted to make a name for himself in this case. The publicity alone would have been phenomenal. Oh well. The RIAA has won yet another round on their campaign to step all over people.
Londovir