Why is this news? None of the several hour long outage calls I've been involved with were ever on the news.
I'm afraid I can't remember what you said about the name of company you work for, can you please repeat it?
One of the major exchanges in Chicago, as well as one one of the bigger global banks. Not a small firm.
Besides, if Reuters or Currenex had this same issue for two hours, we STILL wouldn't hear about this.
I can't answer why it is "news", but I can answer why it is on Slashdot. Over the past couple of years, Slashdot has increasingly posted stories that have flamebait as their primary feature and where it isn't intrinsic to the story, it is often editorialised to add a little prompting to get us all arguing. This has an ostensible Linux vs. MS angle hence qualifies to be featured prominently for the sake of the post-count boosting flamewars it could induce. I say "ostensibly" because in reality, any change over between two such large, complex and hyper-used systems will experience problems.
well my friends,the term terrorism (or freedom fighting) is used when a non-goverment organization commits an act against the law of the country in which it is commited.
That's complete bollocks. A company dodging taxes would be terrorism by that definition. Terrorism is the use of attacks against a population in order to coerce the government into accepting your demands.
If you read these people's manifesto, you'll see that one of their pledges is to make Meego the focus of Nokia's future phone O/S's. That's not bad. They also have the pledge to extend the lifespan of Symbian by five years. *shrug* But they also have one of their main pledges to focus their hiring strategy on young people! And it's hard to find any actual names of these nine shareholders and whether they actually have significant shares or whether they are nine people who bought a few yesterday so that they could make this statement. I can't even see why this is on Slashdot except for the opportunity to troll us commenters in the hopes of a nice post-count boosting MS-bashing fest.
And that's the humour I don't get: Dilbert is an engineer beset by stupid policies and PHBs, and sometimes his own stupidity. BOFH is a social inadequate whose response to normal behaviour is extreme passive aggression. It's sort of: "this person didn't know their network cable was out, I shall get them sacked." Well if the guy doesn't want to deal with these sorts of problems, then he should try and get a higher-level job, except he doesn't seem capable. It seems less humour, and more a five-year old in a grown up body, trying to feel good by laughing at people who know less.
Yeah - I read a couple and I just couldn't find the wit. I really like Dilbert and find The Register entertaining. But those stories basically seem to consist of an unrealistically ignorant user being messed around by a humourless jerk. If I had someone like that working for me, I'd fire them on the spot.
When you're a crooked employer, you better take better care of your employers than the competition does
So your advice for jobseekers would be to find a crook and work for him, because you'll be better looked after?
Hardly. By "you better take better care", the GP is obviously saying that you 'should' take better care. Nowhere does the GP state that they 'will' take better care. People who are ethical in one area, in my experience, are more likely to be ethical in other areas. All things being equal, even from a pure self-interest point of view, I would rather work with an employer who doesn't defraud software companies.
Snitches on the other hand are the scum of the earth who violate peoples privacy for mundane things like software piracy and get paid for it too...
You think its mundane. A company selling software could be out of pocket by a lot of money, though. And bringing privacy into this... We're not talking knowing what some individual you wrote in a personal email or what websites they visited. We're talking about whether a company paid for the software licences or not. I don't believe you can't see the difference between those two categories of information.
Better to be honest, and then those you piss off wont be able to drop you in it. It's not like anyone should be running a business thinking, I'll defraud a few companies and I'll get away with it because all my employees love me and it will be that way forever!;)
Ok I see. The hard to find aspect is less like a really hard to counterfeit bill than a hard to find resource. Also they know how much is eventually going to be found, unlike gold where they could potentially find a bunch of it on an asteroid or something. Really I'm thrilled, on Slashdot it's usually like speaking into the void, I don't get any responses.
Isn't it, just.;)
In a sense, it's not really possible to counterfeit a BitCoin - a hash value is a hash value and if it's valid, then it's a real BitCoin, unlike a bank note where you can print illegitimate ones (even if you made them identical down to the paper and inks, it's still not a "real" one because it wasn't created by a legitimate authority). However, you can in theory sort of fake ownership of that BitCoin. To do that, you'd have to somehow fool other servers into thinking that the hash value was yours so that another party would accept it when you tried to pay them with it. It's a big reversal of something like bank notes where someone says "here is a note, it's in my hand so I can give it to you". With BitCoin, you're saying: "this hash value we both know, I am entitled to say that it is yours now". I think there are privacy implications in that as the process of payment is now a matter of announcing to the world that X number of your BitCoins now belong to party Y. Also, I haven't really looked into the matter of how hard it would be to fake ownership. I believe it has parallels to the TOR network in that regard, where if you controlled / hacked enough nodes, you could subvert it.
It would be fascinating to watch the economic play out of BitCoin if it became established, but government meddling in the financial system is the elephant in the room.
So what is better than gold? Anything that allows substantial increase in the money supply is fundamentally broken.
Using multiple commodities to back the currency. Sure, someone might discover a new use for gold and send the prices up, but what if it's backed by an index of gold, platinum, copper and helium? The maths is simple. Instead of a "gold" standard, have a composite standard. That ameliorates one of the biggest criticisms of the gold standard.
Bad analogy. It's not about counterfeiting them. A BitCoin is an actual hash value. The computing power goes into discovering them. In that sense, it's more like mining gold.
I still fail to see what harm comes from hoarding money. That keeps getting repeated over and over again as if it is something evil but doesn't make sense to me at all.
I'll play Devil's Advocate on this one. It has to do with the relationship between money and wealth. The connection between the two must be there or money becomes meaningless. Now a society that hordes money is not directing its resources into building wealth. It is not improving houses, funding new technology through purchases, investing in better education or whatever else is felt like a worthwhile use of money. Spending money translates to how you direct the resources of society. Spend it all on movies and computer games, you get a society focused on creating movies and computer games. Spend it all on going to fine restaurants, society produces lots of fine restaurants. Spend it all in McDonalds, you get lots of McDonalds. In all these cases, real wealth and real human labour, is going into producing these things. Money is a means by which we direct our efforts as a society. Now if money is being hoarded, then it is akin to not doing much but resting up on the sofa instead. Now profligate spending is often perceived negatively because it is associated with both wasting money (got to have a bigger TV) and spending more than you actually have (put it on the credit card). But these aren't intrinsically tied to spending money, they're just associated in some people's minds. Now consider the case of a society hoarding money. This is associated in people's minds with prudence, and that can be so. It's good to have a little money put aside for when you need it or to save toward something rather than buy it with a loan. But that doesn't mean that there aren't negative consequences too. If no money is being spent, no wealth is being directed to the improvement of society. Essentially, we're reaping benefits but not re-investing that money.
A society must be active and constructive to be healthy. A society that predominantly hoards money is not active or healthy. Now if you're talking about investing money, that's something different, though related.
because all major currencies are fiat currencies, money essentially *is* credit. its all pretend.
You don't understand your terms. US Dollar, UK pound, Euro, et al. These systems are essentially credit. The central bank in each case creates money (by fiat) and loans it out to other banks, who then loan it out to businesses, people like you, etc, and thus it enters the economy. At no point is the money ever anything other than a loan (i.e. you are living on "credit", though I would normally use more precise terms). BitCoin has no central lending authority. Essentially you generate your own money and thus it is not a "credit" based monetary system.
In fact, you are also incorrect to call BitCoin a "fiat" monetary system. BitCoins are linked to hashes which are essentially "discovered". Once found and registered, that hash is unusable by others. This makes BitCoin far closer to a commodity currency (i.e. one based on gold which is finite and has to be mined) than currencies like the US dollar. No one in the BitCoin system can wave their hand and say "let it be so" (fiat) and suddenly there are more BitCoins around than before.
There's just no way that there's an internal tech person with the force of will to push the business guys around and all he or she needed was Ballmer's okay to make more impact.
Why not? If the head guy says: "invite this engineer guy into your strategy meetings" when he wasn't otherwise, that's a potentially very good thing.
Due to social factors, including perceived bias and trying to avoid the stigma of being abused by a woman (often seen as emasculating) I wouldn't be surprised if the percentage of non-violent men being abused by violent women is much higher than reported. I don't have statistics in front of me, or I would be quoting them, but it would come to no surprise to me if men in those circumstances would be even more reluctant to admit to abuse than women.
Consequently, I believe it is very probable that women who are prone to violence will be more likely to use it, as they won't face nearly the same penalties that men would in the same circumstances.
Well with the greatest respect, I do have statistics and, as I also pointed out, they don't come from police statistics but from the UK's Home Office British Crime Survey which is traditionally recognized as being one of the best sources for crime in the UK to the extent that the last Labour government got quite pissy with them because it undermined the more flattering figures coming from less examined methods such as police reported crimes. I don't know why you wish to show that women is "just as, or even more common" than that of men. Actually, I think I do. You feel there is an imbalance in society with how such things are treated and wish to redress that. But it really doesn't matter to a victim of domestic abuse whether they are in the majority or the minority - it's still a serious matter and you're currently arguing against someone who, in this thread, is the one that is posting statistics highlighting how common abuse of men by their female partners is. Men and women are two separate sides in some battle where injustice on one side can be made up for by injustice on the other. If there is to be a dividing line, then it is one between those who commit violent abuse and those that do not. Trying to create a second dividing line by fudging or denying likely facts only weakens the first dividing line by nudging people toward some sort of allegiance based on gender, not morality. I can see your anecdote and raise you one as I have several friends who I am aware have been physically abused by male partners, but only one male friend who I am aware has been abused by a former girlfriend. It's an anecdote. If we were to give weight to them, then our experiences would prove my case rather than yours, but they're just anecdotes. Male on female domestic violence is more common than the other way around, but that doesn't invalidate the suffering of any male victim. I get that you want to correct the impression that male victims aren't important - but that's what I was doing when I highlighted that for every four women who have been abused, three men have been. Arguing against me on that by trying to pump it up even higher, I think is counter-productive to what you want to achieve: you defeat misconceptions with truth, not different misconceptions.
Sorry - all this is probably too harsh. I understand your good intentions and I agree that it must be hard for a man to own up to being the victim of domestic abuse and he may not taken as seriously sometimes. I'm very careful with what I write and challenges to my statements tend to get thorough replies. Men and women are not different sides and highlighting the concerns of one group shouldn't involve (mildly) demonising the other.
H.
Which isn't addressing the entire point of what I wrote which is that the cost of duplication does not necessarily have any bearing on the cost of content production.
Less than 1% of music written is ever distributed. Even if you discount commercial ventures there's more music out there than anyone could possibly listen to.
So? What if everyone wants to listen to Beyonce this year - your argument is that pirating the album is legitimized because nobody is pirating the orchestral works of Salieri? The connection between my point and your reply is hard to discern.
So why do they sometimes with DRM? Because they are trying to combat piracy.
They'll never be able to close the analogue hole. The fact is that DRM doesn't actually prevent priacy (sharing really) as any of this content will be torrented on day zero. It's entire purpose is to restrict what the average costumer can do. With DRM I can no longer make copies for backups or interoperability, or extract excerpts for commentary, research, or education, which are uncontested legal rights anyone has with any media.
So you're saying that DRM isn't an attempt to combat the vast amounts of piracy that take place, but to stop a home user from playing computer games on more than five computers or from transferring their purchased MP3s onto their MP3 player? Wow - these content producers certainly have their priorities right! Or could it be that your statement is merely an article of faith that flies in the face of the actual logical response of content producers.
Similarly, your own difficulty with your particular hardware can hardly be said to be an argument for the mass piracy that goes on
You really mean mass sharing. I demand that my media works, and that I retain at minimum all the traditional rights that come with any media. I buy DVD's which are so trivial to crack that they mights as well not be DRM'ed. The issue is $20 or a blue ray vs. $12 for a DVD $7 for live theater, or $3 for a rental.
No I don't mean "mass sharing". You can distribute Libre Software or openly licenced novels easily and that is "mass sharing". You can also distribute most current movies and computer games and that is "mass sharing". But the latter is done against the wishes of the content producer and the former not. So why substitute a specific term (piracy) with a less meaningful, super-set? Unless of course it is for ideological purposes. Ideology is not an argument, it is a subject to be examined. As to the rest of your post, it doesn't address what I said at all. I pointed out that your personal problem with getting your TV to work with your player can hardly be a reason for the mass piracy that takes place (unless everyone comes round to yours to watch them). You responded saying that the issue was "$20 for a blu-ray, $12 for a DVD..." Again, I don't see how that connects to anything I said. It appears to just be a generic statement. Are you implying that these costs are too high and thus you should take them for free? I'm unclear on what you are trying to say, but if that's it, why do you get to determine that you should pay less than the rest of us or tell a content producer how much they may sell something for?
Which costs and which studios? And how is that relevant?
Music studios predominately. The cost of recording and distribution are counted as advances against any royalties, so much so only about 2% of artists with a recording contract ever see a penny for their cd.
Okay. So you're applying your personal dislike with some music studios as an argument to legitimize piracy of computer games. May I suggest a career in politics? The "think of the children" people would love you. Besides, artists are free to engage with companies with whatever contracts they negotiate. By pirating their album, y
No, physical abuse is just as common, if not more common by women. It's just that there's a social stigmata attached to men being abused by women, so it's vastly underreported. And when it is reported, it's likely to be counted as abuse against women, because guess what happens when a man reports violence?
That's right -- the abusive woman will say "he hit me first", and the police will believe her, because they have the same bias as you do.
Do you want to prove that because the statistics I refer to come from Home Office studies in the UK which are not primarily from self-reported victims to the police. One of the Home Office reports is here (the 1999 report, I don't have a later report to hand). You'll note that incidents of domestic abuse between adults are slightly higher for males abusing women, but not greatly so, and the degree of violence used from males to females is also slightly more extreme than the other way around.
I don't know why you would accuse me of having "a bias". A victim of abuse is a victim of abuse whether they are male or female and both are common enough that no assumptions should be made in either case and a male shouldn't be derided for being a victim any more than a female should be. Did you even click the image link in my original post?
Sad but true. There is a reason for this double-standard: physical abuse is usually treated more seriously than mental abuse (the latter is often hard to entangle as it frequently goes both ways, whilst physical abuse almost always goes in one direction) and males are more likely to physically abuse their female partner than the other way around. But the difference isn't that large statistically and there shouldn't be a double-standard. In the UK, the Home Office started an anti-domestic abuse program. Fine and good, but it was focused on women only. There was a very nice satire picture of it here which is probably similar for America too.
The Slippery Slope is a fallacy in which a person asserts that some event must inevitably follow from another without any argument for the inevitability of the event in question. In most cases, there are a series of steps or gradations between one event and the one in question and no reason is given as to why the intervening steps or gradations will simply be bypassed. This "argument" has the following form:
Event X has occurred (or will or might occur).
Therefore event Y will inevitably happen.
This sort of "reasoning" is fallacious because there is no reason to believe that one event must inevitably follow from another without an argument for such a claim. This is especially clear in cases in which there is a significant number of steps or gradations between one event and another.
The Slippery Slope is a Fallacy argument, is a strawman. It mischaracterises the whole point of "slippery slope" as saying X must inevitably produce Y. In fact, what the slippery slope is, is the highlighting that X enables Y. Those that would object to Y, rightly point out that X is therefore dangerous because it makes Y easier to occur. This Slippery Slope Strawman is fallacious because it says Slippery Slope is only valid if X must lead to Y which is incorrect. It is akin to someone taking steps toward a dangerous cliff and with each step saying: "the next step is not inevitable". Indeed it is not, but when there are demonstrable forces pushing one toward the cliff, it can make a great deal more sense to resist that pressure earlier, rather than later. Especially when the initial steps themselves are already a negative outcome for us.
Not really at no cost, but at a cost not significantly higher than mass production. It means that one copy in a one copy run isn't significantly more expensive than one copy in a million-copy run.
Which isn't addressing the entire point of what I wrote which is that the cost of duplication does not necessarily have any bearing on the cost of content production.
The cost of many processes are routinely inflated so the studios can take a bigger cut.
Which costs and which studios? And how is that relevant?
But you miss the point, which is that companies need to find alternative models rather than declare war on their customers.
Why do they need to find alternative models? Because otherwise people will take their product for free? Hard to find a model that competes with "free" and what you are doing is removing one party's right to negotiate over price and saying one party must agree with the buyer, or the buyer will become the thief. That might stand if you're the only person who is selling necessary food or medicine, but it hardly translates well as an ethical social contract to novels, computer games, movies, music, etcetera.
1. Pirates were never your customers and never will be. People who never pay for anything will never pay for your product because they can't afford it, or don't think they should have to pay.
I know lots of people who download things instead of paying for them. I've had some very funny looks from friends when I've said I'm going to / have bought a movie on DVD. That puts the lie to the statement that pirates were never customers and never will be.
2. Focus on providing value to those who want to reciprocate. The last thing you want to do inconvenience those who pay for your product.
Companies do provide value. Otherwise their products wouldn't be selling at all and wouldn't be downloaded en masse. Certainly companies don't want to inconvenience their paying customers. So why do they sometimes with DRM? Because they are trying to combat piracy. Logically therefore, I can lay some of the blame for my inconvenice at the doors of pirates. DRM is primarily a response to piracy.
There's a huge problem with Sony's business model: it's easier for me to download a mpeg4 or mkv file of a blue ray rip, and hoot my PC into my home theater system, than it is the get the damn HDMI handshake to work between the BD player and the TV. Why should I pay 20 dollars more to be frustrated and inconvenienced, for content that is quite frankly more often than not cliche, juvenile, or so violent as to be disturbing?
If you find it "cliche, juvenile or so violent to be disturbing" - i.e. you don't find it has value - then don't buy it. To take something for free and then say: "I take it for free because it's not very good" sounds unconvincing and you can hardly expect any author, game producer, movie studio, musician or anyone else to see that as other than a rationalisation of not wanting to pay. Similarly, your own difficulty with your particular hardware can hardly be said to be an argument for the mass piracy that goes on. It's not a problem with "Sony's business model". You're just taking stuff for free that is subsidised by the rest of us and ignoring the entire point of my original post which is that the cost of duplication can have negligible impact on the actual costs of the content production. If you think the Lord of the Rings trilogy (to pick an example) would make vast cost savings by offering to sell the movie online as a download, you're deeply detached from reality.
The internet allows infinite duplication at almost no cost. People know this and are demanding that they can get their goods for free, or almost-free.
Cheap duplication does not mean the costs of creating the content are reduced. Some people think so, and thus are demanding goods for free. Fortunately many of us still pay so that the content can be produced, otherwise the freeloaders would have no-one to leach off.
I inferred it from you saying that nowadays you just use Gmail and Yahoo, which I took to mean you had left your Hotmail account behind and adopted these ones in its place. Was I incorrect? When did you start using the different accounts and what different purposes do they serve. For example, my old one that I use on multiple forums gets lots of spam. Newer ones that I've been more careful with, even on the same service, get far less spam. I'm therefore wary of drawing conclusions based on comparing different email addresses registered at different times and used for different services.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is this news? None of the several hour long outage calls I've been involved with were ever on the news.
I'm afraid I can't remember what you said about the name of company you work for, can you please repeat it?
One of the major exchanges in Chicago, as well as one one of the bigger global banks. Not a small firm.
Besides, if Reuters or Currenex had this same issue for two hours, we STILL wouldn't hear about this.
I can't answer why it is "news", but I can answer why it is on Slashdot. Over the past couple of years, Slashdot has increasingly posted stories that have flamebait as their primary feature and where it isn't intrinsic to the story, it is often editorialised to add a little prompting to get us all arguing. This has an ostensible Linux vs. MS angle hence qualifies to be featured prominently for the sake of the post-count boosting flamewars it could induce. I say "ostensibly" because in reality, any change over between two such large, complex and hyper-used systems will experience problems.
I bought an N900 because I needed the functionality. I can manage servers using it. That's handy when travelling.
well my friends,the term terrorism (or freedom fighting) is used when a non-goverment organization commits an act against the law of the country in which it is commited.
That's complete bollocks. A company dodging taxes would be terrorism by that definition. Terrorism is the use of attacks against a population in order to coerce the government into accepting your demands.
If you read these people's manifesto, you'll see that one of their pledges is to make Meego the focus of Nokia's future phone O/S's. That's not bad. They also have the pledge to extend the lifespan of Symbian by five years. *shrug* But they also have one of their main pledges to focus their hiring strategy on young people! And it's hard to find any actual names of these nine shareholders and whether they actually have significant shares or whether they are nine people who bought a few yesterday so that they could make this statement. I can't even see why this is on Slashdot except for the opportunity to troll us commenters in the hopes of a nice post-count boosting MS-bashing fest.
...and then they would burn your house down.
And that's the humour I don't get: Dilbert is an engineer beset by stupid policies and PHBs, and sometimes his own stupidity. BOFH is a social inadequate whose response to normal behaviour is extreme passive aggression. It's sort of: "this person didn't know their network cable was out, I shall get them sacked." Well if the guy doesn't want to deal with these sorts of problems, then he should try and get a higher-level job, except he doesn't seem capable. It seems less humour, and more a five-year old in a grown up body, trying to feel good by laughing at people who know less.
Yeah - I read a couple and I just couldn't find the wit. I really like Dilbert and find The Register entertaining. But those stories basically seem to consist of an unrealistically ignorant user being messed around by a humourless jerk. If I had someone like that working for me, I'd fire them on the spot.
So your advice for jobseekers would be to find a crook and work for him, because you'll be better looked after?
Hardly. By "you better take better care", the GP is obviously saying that you 'should' take better care. Nowhere does the GP state that they 'will' take better care. People who are ethical in one area, in my experience, are more likely to be ethical in other areas. All things being equal, even from a pure self-interest point of view, I would rather work with an employer who doesn't defraud software companies.
Snitches on the other hand are the scum of the earth who violate peoples privacy for mundane things like software piracy and get paid for it too...
You think its mundane. A company selling software could be out of pocket by a lot of money, though. And bringing privacy into this... We're not talking knowing what some individual you wrote in a personal email or what websites they visited. We're talking about whether a company paid for the software licences or not. I don't believe you can't see the difference between those two categories of information.
If you give monkeys poo, they'll throw it.
;)
Better to be honest, and then those you piss off wont be able to drop you in it. It's not like anyone should be running a business thinking, I'll defraud a few companies and I'll get away with it because all my employees love me and it will be that way forever!
Ok I see. The hard to find aspect is less like a really hard to counterfeit bill than a hard to find resource. Also they know how much is eventually going to be found, unlike gold where they could potentially find a bunch of it on an asteroid or something. Really I'm thrilled, on Slashdot it's usually like speaking into the void, I don't get any responses.
Isn't it, just. ;)
In a sense, it's not really possible to counterfeit a BitCoin - a hash value is a hash value and if it's valid, then it's a real BitCoin, unlike a bank note where you can print illegitimate ones (even if you made them identical down to the paper and inks, it's still not a "real" one because it wasn't created by a legitimate authority). However, you can in theory sort of fake ownership of that BitCoin. To do that, you'd have to somehow fool other servers into thinking that the hash value was yours so that another party would accept it when you tried to pay them with it. It's a big reversal of something like bank notes where someone says "here is a note, it's in my hand so I can give it to you". With BitCoin, you're saying: "this hash value we both know, I am entitled to say that it is yours now". I think there are privacy implications in that as the process of payment is now a matter of announcing to the world that X number of your BitCoins now belong to party Y. Also, I haven't really looked into the matter of how hard it would be to fake ownership. I believe it has parallels to the TOR network in that regard, where if you controlled / hacked enough nodes, you could subvert it.
It would be fascinating to watch the economic play out of BitCoin if it became established, but government meddling in the financial system is the elephant in the room.
So what is better than gold? Anything that allows substantial increase in the money supply is fundamentally broken.
Using multiple commodities to back the currency. Sure, someone might discover a new use for gold and send the prices up, but what if it's backed by an index of gold, platinum, copper and helium? The maths is simple. Instead of a "gold" standard, have a composite standard. That ameliorates one of the biggest criticisms of the gold standard.
Bad analogy. It's not about counterfeiting them. A BitCoin is an actual hash value. The computing power goes into discovering them. In that sense, it's more like mining gold.
I still fail to see what harm comes from hoarding money. That keeps getting repeated over and over again as if it is something evil but doesn't make sense to me at all.
I'll play Devil's Advocate on this one. It has to do with the relationship between money and wealth. The connection between the two must be there or money becomes meaningless. Now a society that hordes money is not directing its resources into building wealth. It is not improving houses, funding new technology through purchases, investing in better education or whatever else is felt like a worthwhile use of money. Spending money translates to how you direct the resources of society. Spend it all on movies and computer games, you get a society focused on creating movies and computer games. Spend it all on going to fine restaurants, society produces lots of fine restaurants. Spend it all in McDonalds, you get lots of McDonalds. In all these cases, real wealth and real human labour, is going into producing these things. Money is a means by which we direct our efforts as a society. Now if money is being hoarded, then it is akin to not doing much but resting up on the sofa instead. Now profligate spending is often perceived negatively because it is associated with both wasting money (got to have a bigger TV) and spending more than you actually have (put it on the credit card). But these aren't intrinsically tied to spending money, they're just associated in some people's minds. Now consider the case of a society hoarding money. This is associated in people's minds with prudence, and that can be so. It's good to have a little money put aside for when you need it or to save toward something rather than buy it with a loan. But that doesn't mean that there aren't negative consequences too. If no money is being spent, no wealth is being directed to the improvement of society. Essentially, we're reaping benefits but not re-investing that money.
A society must be active and constructive to be healthy. A society that predominantly hoards money is not active or healthy. Now if you're talking about investing money, that's something different, though related.
because all major currencies are fiat currencies, money essentially *is* credit. its all pretend.
You don't understand your terms. US Dollar, UK pound, Euro, et al. These systems are essentially credit. The central bank in each case creates money (by fiat) and loans it out to other banks, who then loan it out to businesses, people like you, etc, and thus it enters the economy. At no point is the money ever anything other than a loan (i.e. you are living on "credit", though I would normally use more precise terms). BitCoin has no central lending authority. Essentially you generate your own money and thus it is not a "credit" based monetary system.
In fact, you are also incorrect to call BitCoin a "fiat" monetary system. BitCoins are linked to hashes which are essentially "discovered". Once found and registered, that hash is unusable by others. This makes BitCoin far closer to a commodity currency (i.e. one based on gold which is finite and has to be mined) than currencies like the US dollar. No one in the BitCoin system can wave their hand and say "let it be so" (fiat) and suddenly there are more BitCoins around than before.
On a side note, if they were real geeks, they would've called them credits.
Bitcoin is not a credit-based money system. That's kind of the point.
Thanks for clearing that up. I did wonder why we were arguing. ;)
H.
There's just no way that there's an internal tech person with the force of will to push the business guys around and all he or she needed was Ballmer's okay to make more impact.
Why not? If the head guy says: "invite this engineer guy into your strategy meetings" when he wasn't otherwise, that's a potentially very good thing.
Due to social factors, including perceived bias and trying to avoid the stigma of being abused by a woman (often seen as emasculating) I wouldn't be surprised if the percentage of non-violent men being abused by violent women is much higher than reported. I don't have statistics in front of me, or I would be quoting them, but it would come to no surprise to me if men in those circumstances would be even more reluctant to admit to abuse than women. Consequently, I believe it is very probable that women who are prone to violence will be more likely to use it, as they won't face nearly the same penalties that men would in the same circumstances.
Well with the greatest respect, I do have statistics and, as I also pointed out, they don't come from police statistics but from the UK's Home Office British Crime Survey which is traditionally recognized as being one of the best sources for crime in the UK to the extent that the last Labour government got quite pissy with them because it undermined the more flattering figures coming from less examined methods such as police reported crimes. I don't know why you wish to show that women is "just as, or even more common" than that of men. Actually, I think I do. You feel there is an imbalance in society with how such things are treated and wish to redress that. But it really doesn't matter to a victim of domestic abuse whether they are in the majority or the minority - it's still a serious matter and you're currently arguing against someone who, in this thread, is the one that is posting statistics highlighting how common abuse of men by their female partners is. Men and women are two separate sides in some battle where injustice on one side can be made up for by injustice on the other. If there is to be a dividing line, then it is one between those who commit violent abuse and those that do not. Trying to create a second dividing line by fudging or denying likely facts only weakens the first dividing line by nudging people toward some sort of allegiance based on gender, not morality. I can see your anecdote and raise you one as I have several friends who I am aware have been physically abused by male partners, but only one male friend who I am aware has been abused by a former girlfriend. It's an anecdote. If we were to give weight to them, then our experiences would prove my case rather than yours, but they're just anecdotes. Male on female domestic violence is more common than the other way around, but that doesn't invalidate the suffering of any male victim. I get that you want to correct the impression that male victims aren't important - but that's what I was doing when I highlighted that for every four women who have been abused, three men have been. Arguing against me on that by trying to pump it up even higher, I think is counter-productive to what you want to achieve: you defeat misconceptions with truth, not different misconceptions.
Sorry - all this is probably too harsh. I understand your good intentions and I agree that it must be hard for a man to own up to being the victim of domestic abuse and he may not taken as seriously sometimes. I'm very careful with what I write and challenges to my statements tend to get thorough replies. Men and women are not different sides and highlighting the concerns of one group shouldn't involve (mildly) demonising the other.
H.
Which isn't addressing the entire point of what I wrote which is that the cost of duplication does not necessarily have any bearing on the cost of content production.
Less than 1% of music written is ever distributed. Even if you discount commercial ventures there's more music out there than anyone could possibly listen to.
So? What if everyone wants to listen to Beyonce this year - your argument is that pirating the album is legitimized because nobody is pirating the orchestral works of Salieri? The connection between my point and your reply is hard to discern.
So why do they sometimes with DRM? Because they are trying to combat piracy.
They'll never be able to close the analogue hole. The fact is that DRM doesn't actually prevent priacy (sharing really) as any of this content will be torrented on day zero. It's entire purpose is to restrict what the average costumer can do. With DRM I can no longer make copies for backups or interoperability, or extract excerpts for commentary, research, or education, which are uncontested legal rights anyone has with any media.
So you're saying that DRM isn't an attempt to combat the vast amounts of piracy that take place, but to stop a home user from playing computer games on more than five computers or from transferring their purchased MP3s onto their MP3 player? Wow - these content producers certainly have their priorities right! Or could it be that your statement is merely an article of faith that flies in the face of the actual logical response of content producers.
Similarly, your own difficulty with your particular hardware can hardly be said to be an argument for the mass piracy that goes on
You really mean mass sharing. I demand that my media works, and that I retain at minimum all the traditional rights that come with any media. I buy DVD's which are so trivial to crack that they mights as well not be DRM'ed. The issue is $20 or a blue ray vs. $12 for a DVD $7 for live theater, or $3 for a rental.
No I don't mean "mass sharing". You can distribute Libre Software or openly licenced novels easily and that is "mass sharing". You can also distribute most current movies and computer games and that is "mass sharing". But the latter is done against the wishes of the content producer and the former not. So why substitute a specific term (piracy) with a less meaningful, super-set? Unless of course it is for ideological purposes. Ideology is not an argument, it is a subject to be examined. As to the rest of your post, it doesn't address what I said at all. I pointed out that your personal problem with getting your TV to work with your player can hardly be a reason for the mass piracy that takes place (unless everyone comes round to yours to watch them). You responded saying that the issue was "$20 for a blu-ray, $12 for a DVD..." Again, I don't see how that connects to anything I said. It appears to just be a generic statement. Are you implying that these costs are too high and thus you should take them for free? I'm unclear on what you are trying to say, but if that's it, why do you get to determine that you should pay less than the rest of us or tell a content producer how much they may sell something for?
Which costs and which studios? And how is that relevant?
Music studios predominately. The cost of recording and distribution are counted as advances against any royalties, so much so only about 2% of artists with a recording contract ever see a penny for their cd.
Okay. So you're applying your personal dislike with some music studios as an argument to legitimize piracy of computer games. May I suggest a career in politics? The "think of the children" people would love you. Besides, artists are free to engage with companies with whatever contracts they negotiate. By pirating their album, y
No, physical abuse is just as common, if not more common by women. It's just that there's a social stigmata attached to men being abused by women, so it's vastly underreported. And when it is reported, it's likely to be counted as abuse against women, because guess what happens when a man reports violence? That's right -- the abusive woman will say "he hit me first", and the police will believe her, because they have the same bias as you do.
Do you want to prove that because the statistics I refer to come from Home Office studies in the UK which are not primarily from self-reported victims to the police. One of the Home Office reports is here (the 1999 report, I don't have a later report to hand). You'll note that incidents of domestic abuse between adults are slightly higher for males abusing women, but not greatly so, and the degree of violence used from males to females is also slightly more extreme than the other way around.
I don't know why you would accuse me of having "a bias". A victim of abuse is a victim of abuse whether they are male or female and both are common enough that no assumptions should be made in either case and a male shouldn't be derided for being a victim any more than a female should be. Did you even click the image link in my original post?
Sad but true. There is a reason for this double-standard: physical abuse is usually treated more seriously than mental abuse (the latter is often hard to entangle as it frequently goes both ways, whilst physical abuse almost always goes in one direction) and males are more likely to physically abuse their female partner than the other way around. But the difference isn't that large statistically and there shouldn't be a double-standard. In the UK, the Home Office started an anti-domestic abuse program. Fine and good, but it was focused on women only. There was a very nice satire picture of it here which is probably similar for America too.
The Slippery Slope is a fallacy in which a person asserts that some event must inevitably follow from another without any argument for the inevitability of the event in question. In most cases, there are a series of steps or gradations between one event and the one in question and no reason is given as to why the intervening steps or gradations will simply be bypassed. This "argument" has the following form:
Event X has occurred (or will or might occur). Therefore event Y will inevitably happen. This sort of "reasoning" is fallacious because there is no reason to believe that one event must inevitably follow from another without an argument for such a claim. This is especially clear in cases in which there is a significant number of steps or gradations between one event and another.
The Slippery Slope is a Fallacy argument, is a strawman. It mischaracterises the whole point of "slippery slope" as saying X must inevitably produce Y. In fact, what the slippery slope is, is the highlighting that X enables Y. Those that would object to Y, rightly point out that X is therefore dangerous because it makes Y easier to occur. This Slippery Slope Strawman is fallacious because it says Slippery Slope is only valid if X must lead to Y which is incorrect. It is akin to someone taking steps toward a dangerous cliff and with each step saying: "the next step is not inevitable". Indeed it is not, but when there are demonstrable forces pushing one toward the cliff, it can make a great deal more sense to resist that pressure earlier, rather than later. Especially when the initial steps themselves are already a negative outcome for us.
Not really at no cost, but at a cost not significantly higher than mass production. It means that one copy in a one copy run isn't significantly more expensive than one copy in a million-copy run.
Which isn't addressing the entire point of what I wrote which is that the cost of duplication does not necessarily have any bearing on the cost of content production.
The cost of many processes are routinely inflated so the studios can take a bigger cut.
Which costs and which studios? And how is that relevant?
But you miss the point, which is that companies need to find alternative models rather than declare war on their customers.
Why do they need to find alternative models? Because otherwise people will take their product for free? Hard to find a model that competes with "free" and what you are doing is removing one party's right to negotiate over price and saying one party must agree with the buyer, or the buyer will become the thief. That might stand if you're the only person who is selling necessary food or medicine, but it hardly translates well as an ethical social contract to novels, computer games, movies, music, etcetera.
1. Pirates were never your customers and never will be. People who never pay for anything will never pay for your product because they can't afford it, or don't think they should have to pay.
I know lots of people who download things instead of paying for them. I've had some very funny looks from friends when I've said I'm going to / have bought a movie on DVD. That puts the lie to the statement that pirates were never customers and never will be.
2. Focus on providing value to those who want to reciprocate. The last thing you want to do inconvenience those who pay for your product.
Companies do provide value. Otherwise their products wouldn't be selling at all and wouldn't be downloaded en masse. Certainly companies don't want to inconvenience their paying customers. So why do they sometimes with DRM? Because they are trying to combat piracy. Logically therefore, I can lay some of the blame for my inconvenice at the doors of pirates. DRM is primarily a response to piracy.
There's a huge problem with Sony's business model: it's easier for me to download a mpeg4 or mkv file of a blue ray rip, and hoot my PC into my home theater system, than it is the get the damn HDMI handshake to work between the BD player and the TV. Why should I pay 20 dollars more to be frustrated and inconvenienced, for content that is quite frankly more often than not cliche, juvenile, or so violent as to be disturbing?
If you find it "cliche, juvenile or so violent to be disturbing" - i.e. you don't find it has value - then don't buy it. To take something for free and then say: "I take it for free because it's not very good" sounds unconvincing and you can hardly expect any author, game producer, movie studio, musician or anyone else to see that as other than a rationalisation of not wanting to pay. Similarly, your own difficulty with your particular hardware can hardly be said to be an argument for the mass piracy that goes on. It's not a problem with "Sony's business model". You're just taking stuff for free that is subsidised by the rest of us and ignoring the entire point of my original post which is that the cost of duplication can have negligible impact on the actual costs of the content production. If you think the Lord of the Rings trilogy (to pick an example) would make vast cost savings by offering to sell the movie online as a download, you're deeply detached from reality.
The internet allows infinite duplication at almost no cost. People know this and are demanding that they can get their goods for free, or almost-free.
Cheap duplication does not mean the costs of creating the content are reduced. Some people think so, and thus are demanding goods for free. Fortunately many of us still pay so that the content can be produced, otherwise the freeloaders would have no-one to leach off.
Where did I say that?
I inferred it from you saying that nowadays you just use Gmail and Yahoo, which I took to mean you had left your Hotmail account behind and adopted these ones in its place. Was I incorrect? When did you start using the different accounts and what different purposes do they serve. For example, my old one that I use on multiple forums gets lots of spam. Newer ones that I've been more careful with, even on the same service, get far less spam. I'm therefore wary of drawing conclusions based on comparing different email addresses registered at different times and used for different services.