Never claimed otherwise. If you read the GP comment I was replying to, the argument being made was that everyone for shorter copyright terms was simply 'a thief' looking for free shit (my own words).
When a work made well before I was born has a chance of not entering public domain until after my death (not to mention well after the death of the creator), something is wrong.
No one is born a slave, to lose one's freedom requires the action of a force outside of them. Thus, no, blacks have and had an inherent right to equality just the same as any other person. The fact that the nation took (and is still taking) a while to realize and acknowledge this fact doesn't make it any less true.
What, again, is the difference between ESPN360.com and your average pay site? Other than, who is paying ESPN.
Nothing.
The only difference is who is making the decision on whether to pay or not. You can even still go to the site, you are blocked from it, you just don't have access to any of the 'inside' junk.
There are a number of sites in this wide wide internet that block access to non US-addresses, mostly because those sites serve up content that they don't have a license to serve up to anyone outside of the US.
Hell, I do believe that the BBC's free TV offering is only avalaible to those in the UK.
Are those any different? No.
This is a non-event. The only reason people are up in arms about it is that for the majority of the time that this has been happening with other places and other content, it's been given that we "US-ians" were always part of the in-club and not excluded. And now, we are finally getting a taste of what all those folk who can't use Hulu overseas, or can't get 'free' radio via Last.FM in Turkey, and etc. experience on a routine basis.
These "Artists" you speak of are the only people in the world that I've ever met who have honestly believed that they deserve to be paid by us in perpetutuality for 'an hours' worth of work using material they've borrows from us.
Engineers don't expect a monthly check from the people who drive over the bridges built to their design.
Architects aren't getting rich off the residuals on their building designs.
Your average office worker doesn't even get paid for all the reports and charts they create.
Why is it that being an "Artist" should equate to "being paid forever".
And PST... if we truely are living in such a connected world, then it sould be even easier for the "Artist" to make their buck in a shorter amount of time than before. The fact that the works 'last longer' is bullshit, given I still can go see the Mona Lisa, yet the majority of the TV shows broadcast just in the 30's and 40's are lost forever.
That boat sailed a long time ago grasshopper and the answer back when Shakespeare was doing his gig is the same as the answer today. You build on the shoulders of giants, and only reach the heights you do, by the efforts of those around you and before you.
In order to give you incentive to build, and in deference to the realization that it is work just the same, you are granted the ability to control the rights to copy something for a limited time. But all the same, your work stands on our backs, and thus, we share in the ultimate ownership.
That limited time is and should always be that, limited. If you can't (or won't) monetize your products in that time, then that is on you. Not us.
And we should not be expected to limit our own rights and abilities outside of that specific right of yours to control who can copy your work for a limited time, simply because you've failed to keep up with technology enough.
If this is against net neutrality, then at least its the 'ethical' version. If they want to build AOL 2.0, then let them.
The difference between someone saying "you can't access my content unless someone pays" and someone saying "you can't see this content unless the content provider pays me to let you, even though you've alredy paid me" is vast.
ESPN360 is just a estoteric version of a pay site where the choice to pay is made by your ISP rather than you. If you don't like their choice, you have the option to complain to them or switch.
If you read the article instead of knee jerking about how people are stupid and "OMG this is entitlement", you'd realize it isn't hundreds of dollars. Your 11 year old would be making at most $25 bucks a test (and since it says up to I imagine that's only if they score in the top percentile, esp since this is an achivement test, not "pop quiz" crap.)
Given there were ten tests in the year, a genius level 11 year old might make $250 a year. Which, is just about in line with normal 'bribes' for good behavior.
Worrying about other people's business, regardless of the content, tends to do that. Worry about what you do, and whether it's up to snuff. Let the world worry about the rest.
You must be a joy to work for, you either have unpaid sick days or you are a skinflint who doesn't get that the worker saved you money and is asking for consideration for that.
As far as the "absurdity" of rewarding children for working hard, I'm afraid just because you say it's been universially ridiculed, I don't quite buy it.
I might not have gotten $50 every achievement test, but I most certainly did receive rewards for working hard and getting good grades in school, and a good majority of the non-poverty level children in the world could probably claim the same.
There were school programs like the free personal pan pizzas for reading a certain number of book, or free tickets (albeit in the nosebleed sections) to sports events for good quarterly grades, or even a bump in allowance when the grade cards came out. This isn't new, this isn't ridiculous. The only difference between this and those programs that we had as kids is this is cold hard cash and it's for a class of tests that as a kid, I was never privy to the results of.
And honestly, none of us, not you, not me, not your work crews, grew up with our motivations set in stone or even with motivations at all (other than, "I want mamma and daddy to love me.") we were given them through our upbringing and environment. Those kids that wanted to 'be the first' didn't start out wanting it, they wanted it to make someone proud or to prove to themselves something.
If the school happens to step in and help that out by helping kids, many of which haven't yet figured out that coasting through life is not going to be as easy as it seems when you are living on your parents dime, find motivation, then more power to it.
You seem to not have noticed, but they don't all make it to the end of their childhood actually wanting to do shit but shit, eat, and shit some more. If it takes proding to help reduce that number and increase the number of folk who are actually motivated to work because they 'get' that work = money, then I could give a shit about entilements. They aren't fucking adults, I don't expect them to have their heads on completely straight yet.
I say this by first acknowledging that I have pretty much every book Heinlein wrote. But please do not bring in his libertarian wank dreams into a discussion about what is real literature. Heinlein's ideas worked in his books because he rigged the stories so that they worked in his books. Period.
He spung a good tale, and I've worn out more than a few copies of his stuff as a kid. But basing your life decisions on what a grumpy old man who had problems deciding if he was a libertarian or a facist WISHED the world was like rather than actually view the world head on, is as bad as doing what you claim those people you are snidely insulting have screwed up on.
Discipline (bootstraping or whever else you want to call it), is simply motivation. Yes, some people in bad situations often get the motivation to better their place in society simply to avoid being stuck in that situation for the rest of their life.
But that isn't the ONLY motivation in life and frankly, if you think the only way someone can be motivated is to have a shitty childhood, I suggest you put down your Frank Miller comics and rejoin the rest of us in society.
No, GPA shouldn't be the only measurement of someone's value in life. And it's extremely easy for some people to simply coast through most of their childhood and get to the end of it with a high GPA and absolutely no fucking idea how to survive in the real world. But that doesn't mean all of them have or that sitting back and saying "Fuck it, good grades for for nerds" is going to make you any more successful.
How is this any different from AOL, CompuServe, Delphi, our ghosts in the past?
"Get access to our exclusive content, and internet too!" has been around for a long time and it's never (since there was an option) ever beat out vanilla internet.
It's hardly likely this to catch on either, and even if it does, it won't be universal by any means. They'll be companies out there willing to work for your buck by selling you 'cut rate connections without all that overhead' just as there will be companies out there telling you they have access to every 'sub-network' out there.
If you think you aren't getting enough moola from ME, then raise your prices and watch me leave for another provider that isn't as greedy
So what will you do when the other provider doesn't have the titles you want or the titles your SO or children want?
Ignoring the fact that the quoted sentence has nothing to do with the idea of being signed up for a service such as this:
The same thing I'd do today without the service?
Either get over it, get a copy of the movie from the DVD rental store, buy it from Best Buy, or order it online, or sign up for your service depending on how urgently I cared about fullfilling our every whim.
Hint: The last option is very, very unlikely.
Given that this is going to be competing against things like NetFlix and Amazon's online offerings much less their physical offerings, I seriously doubt that a service limited to a smaller selection of material is going to have the leverage to pry anything out of anyone's wallets.
PS. if you slow down and actually read my previous comment, you'll realize that the snippet you quoted from it was refering to an ISP that raises prices simply because they think they aren't being paid enough for the traffic they are seeing, not one that raises prices due to adding features such as this.
The "Secret" to raising smart kids is to instill in them a work ethic. I don't see how this is any different. Providing incentive to work harder at a task and achieve results, rather than simply stumble into them due to your 'natural talent' is pretty much the default story of how people become successful.
Your arguement seems to boil down to "convincing kids to work harder is bad because kids who work harder will look better than kids who don't". Of course kids who work harder are going to come off better, that's sort of the point. Given the rest of your comment is a rambling complaint against people who test well but can't perform, I don't exactly understand how you could possibly bitch about a method which actually convinces the children to perform well so you can accurately test them at their real performance level rather than at their "I could give a shit, why should I care what my score is." level.
This is nothing but there own way to stick it to Net Neutrality.
However this is the 'proper' way of doing it.
I have no problem if a content provider wants to try to reinvent the wheel and make the new AOL. It's their content, it's up to them to 'sell' it as they best feel they can.
It's when someone I pay for a connection to the internet turns around and tells me that I can't access content or that I can only do so in a degraded manner, because someone hasn't paid the ISP some 'protection money', that I get a bit irritated. I'm already paying you to provide something, provide it. If you think you aren't getting enough moola from ME, then raise your prices and watch me leave for another provider that isn't as greedy. Don't pull this double-dipping bullshit, don't sell me something and then refuse to provide it under some mistaken idea that you don't have to unless you get even more money from someone else.
Seriously, have you even started to wonder why there are so many IMAX 3D releases these days? You wanna guess how much space one of those takes up on a hard drive?
If the only thing you can talk to (prior to being 'registered') is the ISP's servers, then it is trivial for the ISP to sign everything. All your IP are belong to the ISP, all your traffic goes to the server they send you to.
And how many people are actually cognitively aware of these facts while driving? Again, we desire the illusion of control, so long as we believe we are in control, we don't honestly care to investigate or think about the idea that we aren't.
When we become intelligent enough to realize that there are forces that affect us and out of our control, we instinctively look for ways to 'control' them. And gods are our answer to that need.
Notice that there are no organized religions out there where we actually give up control to our 'gods', every single one has built in ways to influence the gods to do things 'our' way.
If we pray hard enough, sacrifice enough, tithe enough, we expect our gods to take care of us, to protect us from those evil acts of fate.
When they don't, it was either our failure to be pious enough, or they abandoned us, or 'it wasn't really bad, it set me up for something good in the future'.
And to cover the reality of the fact that these gods don't actually affect anything in our life, we invent needlessly complex rules and demands for ourselves which we are all guaranteed to fail to meet. Thus giving our gods an out for when the bad things happen.
Apply what Ayn Rand (and no I agree with very little else that she's said) wrote in Atlas Shrugged: "There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws." to the concept of sinners and you get the general drift.
We make a lot of lip service to the IDEA of giving up control, but very little actual practice towards it.
Slashdot Mirror
Never claimed otherwise. If you read the GP comment I was replying to, the argument being made was that everyone for shorter copyright terms was simply 'a thief' looking for free shit (my own words).
When a work made well before I was born has a chance of not entering public domain until after my death (not to mention well after the death of the creator), something is wrong.
No one is born a slave, to lose one's freedom requires the action of a force outside of them. Thus, no, blacks have and had an inherent right to equality just the same as any other person. The fact that the nation took (and is still taking) a while to realize and acknowledge this fact doesn't make it any less true.
What, again, is the difference between ESPN360.com and your average pay site? Other than, who is paying ESPN.
Nothing.
The only difference is who is making the decision on whether to pay or not. You can even still go to the site, you are blocked from it, you just don't have access to any of the 'inside' junk.
There are a number of sites in this wide wide internet that block access to non US-addresses, mostly because those sites serve up content that they don't have a license to serve up to anyone outside of the US.
Hell, I do believe that the BBC's free TV offering is only avalaible to those in the UK.
Are those any different? No.
This is a non-event. The only reason people are up in arms about it is that for the majority of the time that this has been happening with other places and other content, it's been given that we "US-ians" were always part of the in-club and not excluded. And now, we are finally getting a taste of what all those folk who can't use Hulu overseas, or can't get 'free' radio via Last.FM in Turkey, and etc. experience on a routine basis.
These "Artists" you speak of are the only people in the world that I've ever met who have honestly believed that they deserve to be paid by us in perpetutuality for 'an hours' worth of work using material they've borrows from us.
Engineers don't expect a monthly check from the people who drive over the bridges built to their design.
Architects aren't getting rich off the residuals on their building designs.
Your average office worker doesn't even get paid for all the reports and charts they create.
Why is it that being an "Artist" should equate to "being paid forever".
And PST... if we truely are living in such a connected world, then it sould be even easier for the "Artist" to make their buck in a shorter amount of time than before. The fact that the works 'last longer' is bullshit, given I still can go see the Mona Lisa, yet the majority of the TV shows broadcast just in the 30's and 40's are lost forever.
Or me, I'd make a great king. Honest.
That boat sailed a long time ago grasshopper and the answer back when Shakespeare was doing his gig is the same as the answer today. You build on the shoulders of giants, and only reach the heights you do, by the efforts of those around you and before you.
In order to give you incentive to build, and in deference to the realization that it is work just the same, you are granted the ability to control the rights to copy something for a limited time. But all the same, your work stands on our backs, and thus, we share in the ultimate ownership.
That limited time is and should always be that, limited. If you can't (or won't) monetize your products in that time, then that is on you. Not us.
And we should not be expected to limit our own rights and abilities outside of that specific right of yours to control who can copy your work for a limited time, simply because you've failed to keep up with technology enough.
"BOOM! Headshot!" would seem more appropriate. Handshot... well that just seems wrong.
If this is against net neutrality, then at least its the 'ethical' version. If they want to build AOL 2.0, then let them.
The difference between someone saying "you can't access my content unless someone pays" and someone saying "you can't see this content unless the content provider pays me to let you, even though you've alredy paid me" is vast.
ESPN360 is just a estoteric version of a pay site where the choice to pay is made by your ISP rather than you. If you don't like their choice, you have the option to complain to them or switch.
Do you know why it's illegal to collect rainwater in a barrel in Utah and Colorado?
If there is only a gallon of water in the air over an acre of land, removing a quart does in fact change the balance of things.
Po - Ta - Ble
Here. It even says it for you.
So in a decade when these are ubiquitous and most of the world is a desert, suddenly the Fraunhofer Institute will announce they had a patent on this and anyone drinking the water will have to pay licensing fees.
Great, just... great.
Besides, everyone knows "Jet Engine" is a Microsoft product! This is more like... a steam engine!
and from your link:
A tad more than "some" I would imagine.
If you read the article instead of knee jerking about how people are stupid and "OMG this is entitlement", you'd realize it isn't hundreds of dollars. Your 11 year old would be making at most $25 bucks a test (and since it says up to I imagine that's only if they score in the top percentile, esp since this is an achivement test, not "pop quiz" crap.)
Given there were ten tests in the year, a genius level 11 year old might make $250 a year. Which, is just about in line with normal 'bribes' for good behavior.
Worrying about other people's business, regardless of the content, tends to do that. Worry about what you do, and whether it's up to snuff. Let the world worry about the rest.
You must be a joy to work for, you either have unpaid sick days or you are a skinflint who doesn't get that the worker saved you money and is asking for consideration for that.
As far as the "absurdity" of rewarding children for working hard, I'm afraid just because you say it's been universially ridiculed, I don't quite buy it.
I might not have gotten $50 every achievement test, but I most certainly did receive rewards for working hard and getting good grades in school, and a good majority of the non-poverty level children in the world could probably claim the same.
There were school programs like the free personal pan pizzas for reading a certain number of book, or free tickets (albeit in the nosebleed sections) to sports events for good quarterly grades, or even a bump in allowance when the grade cards came out. This isn't new, this isn't ridiculous. The only difference between this and those programs that we had as kids is this is cold hard cash and it's for a class of tests that as a kid, I was never privy to the results of.
And honestly, none of us, not you, not me, not your work crews, grew up with our motivations set in stone or even with motivations at all (other than, "I want mamma and daddy to love me.") we were given them through our upbringing and environment. Those kids that wanted to 'be the first' didn't start out wanting it, they wanted it to make someone proud or to prove to themselves something.
If the school happens to step in and help that out by helping kids, many of which haven't yet figured out that coasting through life is not going to be as easy as it seems when you are living on your parents dime, find motivation, then more power to it.
You seem to not have noticed, but they don't all make it to the end of their childhood actually wanting to do shit but shit, eat, and shit some more. If it takes proding to help reduce that number and increase the number of folk who are actually motivated to work because they 'get' that work = money, then I could give a shit about entilements. They aren't fucking adults, I don't expect them to have their heads on completely straight yet.
I say this by first acknowledging that I have pretty much every book Heinlein wrote. But please do not bring in his libertarian wank dreams into a discussion about what is real literature. Heinlein's ideas worked in his books because he rigged the stories so that they worked in his books. Period.
He spung a good tale, and I've worn out more than a few copies of his stuff as a kid. But basing your life decisions on what a grumpy old man who had problems deciding if he was a libertarian or a facist WISHED the world was like rather than actually view the world head on, is as bad as doing what you claim those people you are snidely insulting have screwed up on.
Discipline (bootstraping or whever else you want to call it), is simply motivation. Yes, some people in bad situations often get the motivation to better their place in society simply to avoid being stuck in that situation for the rest of their life.
But that isn't the ONLY motivation in life and frankly, if you think the only way someone can be motivated is to have a shitty childhood, I suggest you put down your Frank Miller comics and rejoin the rest of us in society.
No, GPA shouldn't be the only measurement of someone's value in life. And it's extremely easy for some people to simply coast through most of their childhood and get to the end of it with a high GPA and absolutely no fucking idea how to survive in the real world. But that doesn't mean all of them have or that sitting back and saying "Fuck it, good grades for for nerds" is going to make you any more successful.
How is this any different from AOL, CompuServe, Delphi, our ghosts in the past?
"Get access to our exclusive content, and internet too!" has been around for a long time and it's never (since there was an option) ever beat out vanilla internet.
It's hardly likely this to catch on either, and even if it does, it won't be universal by any means. They'll be companies out there willing to work for your buck by selling you 'cut rate connections without all that overhead' just as there will be companies out there telling you they have access to every 'sub-network' out there.
Ignoring the fact that the quoted sentence has nothing to do with the idea of being signed up for a service such as this:
The same thing I'd do today without the service?
Either get over it, get a copy of the movie from the DVD rental store, buy it from Best Buy, or order it online, or sign up for your service depending on how urgently I cared about fullfilling our every whim.
Hint: The last option is very, very unlikely.
Given that this is going to be competing against things like NetFlix and Amazon's online offerings much less their physical offerings, I seriously doubt that a service limited to a smaller selection of material is going to have the leverage to pry anything out of anyone's wallets.
PS. if you slow down and actually read my previous comment, you'll realize that the snippet you quoted from it was refering to an ISP that raises prices simply because they think they aren't being paid enough for the traffic they are seeing, not one that raises prices due to adding features such as this.
Bull Hockey.
The "Secret" to raising smart kids is to instill in them a work ethic. I don't see how this is any different. Providing incentive to work harder at a task and achieve results, rather than simply stumble into them due to your 'natural talent' is pretty much the default story of how people become successful.
Your arguement seems to boil down to "convincing kids to work harder is bad because kids who work harder will look better than kids who don't". Of course kids who work harder are going to come off better, that's sort of the point. Given the rest of your comment is a rambling complaint against people who test well but can't perform, I don't exactly understand how you could possibly bitch about a method which actually convinces the children to perform well so you can accurately test them at their real performance level rather than at their "I could give a shit, why should I care what my score is." level.
However this is the 'proper' way of doing it.
I have no problem if a content provider wants to try to reinvent the wheel and make the new AOL. It's their content, it's up to them to 'sell' it as they best feel they can.
It's when someone I pay for a connection to the internet turns around and tells me that I can't access content or that I can only do so in a degraded manner, because someone hasn't paid the ISP some 'protection money', that I get a bit irritated. I'm already paying you to provide something, provide it. If you think you aren't getting enough moola from ME, then raise your prices and watch me leave for another provider that isn't as greedy. Don't pull this double-dipping bullshit, don't sell me something and then refuse to provide it under some mistaken idea that you don't have to unless you get even more money from someone else.
Seriously, have you even started to wonder why there are so many IMAX 3D releases these days? You wanna guess how much space one of those takes up on a hard drive?
If the only thing you can talk to (prior to being 'registered') is the ISP's servers, then it is trivial for the ISP to sign everything. All your IP are belong to the ISP, all your traffic goes to the server they send you to.
And how many people are actually cognitively aware of these facts while driving? Again, we desire the illusion of control, so long as we believe we are in control, we don't honestly care to investigate or think about the idea that we aren't.
When we become intelligent enough to realize that there are forces that affect us and out of our control, we instinctively look for ways to 'control' them. And gods are our answer to that need.
Notice that there are no organized religions out there where we actually give up control to our 'gods', every single one has built in ways to influence the gods to do things 'our' way.
If we pray hard enough, sacrifice enough, tithe enough, we expect our gods to take care of us, to protect us from those evil acts of fate.
When they don't, it was either our failure to be pious enough, or they abandoned us, or 'it wasn't really bad, it set me up for something good in the future'.
And to cover the reality of the fact that these gods don't actually affect anything in our life, we invent needlessly complex rules and demands for ourselves which we are all guaranteed to fail to meet. Thus giving our gods an out for when the bad things happen.
Apply what Ayn Rand (and no I agree with very little else that she's said) wrote in Atlas Shrugged: "There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws." to the concept of sinners and you get the general drift.
We make a lot of lip service to the IDEA of giving up control, but very little actual practice towards it.