Don't get me wrong. I think Disney is floundering. Their relationship with Pixar has been the only bright point in their rather dismal recent history. I don't think they could do anything but buy Pixar out, but it does seem like it was a hefty price.
Yes, I'm making the assumption that Pixar's money is equal to 50% of whatever was split with Disney.
Wouldn't it be the other way around? Wouldn't the $3.2bn gross be before they paid Disney, at least that's how my concept of gross works. That would mean Disney made an even poorer deal than I thought if they were already getting half of Pixar's revenue.
Next person who says "Evolution is just a theory", I am going to push off a roof...
Ahhh.. but that is just the point. There is no doubt that organisims evolve. This is observable and can be proven with a batch of fruit flies, bacterium, whatever (Just like gravity is observable and can be proven by pushing someone off a roof). The problem many people have is that saying life evolved from a single cell amoeba is about a speculative about evolution and the existence of Man as this article is about gravity, gravitons and dark matter. Both are unobservable and unreproduceable.
you're talking about US box office numbers, not international [see the box office breakdown here]. International BO numbers will bring that figure way up.
According to your link, Pixar has only grossed $3.2bn since 1995. $7.4bn, or even $6.4bn considering the cash Pixar had on hand, still seems like a lot of money. Might take them 10 years to recoup their investment.
Hopefully it will just get Adobe to lower the price on their flash products. A little competition is always good and flash is expensive for a small time developer (like me) to buy. I hope Microsoft can make some inroads on this just to keep Adobe inspired and get their prices down.
I agree, but it doesn't seem to work that way. In my district I generally get a choice between a conservative moron and a liberal moron. The only thing most of them do is spout off buzzwords. I wouldn't trust them to understand the problems with DRM and the RIAA even if they mentioned the words during a campaign. On top of that, most of the people around here will vote for the incumbent, and lacking that for a choice will vote for whoever has held an office before.
"She's experienced! She was on the school board, we better vote her into congress."
With our system of a representative republic, and our current state of two dominant parties, it's difficult for most individuals to find a choice that even remotely represents our opinions. Much easier for individuals to ignore the law, download anything they want and hope the courts resolve it.
If I was an employee of Google and my stock options were worth over a couple of million, I would dump and run.
Perhaps, and as an EMPLOYEE of the company that might be something you would want to do. Keep in mind this article is concerning the execs. I don't know about Eric Schmidt, but Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded a company based on their Phd work. They don't have to worry about money, now they can continue with the research that they might have went on doing if they hadn't decided to start Google.
Kind of makes you wonder about what kind of people stick around when they are already super-rich. Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, etc. Why do they continue to work? Is it because they have nothing better to do?
Ummm... it's called greed. There is never enough for some of these people. I wouldn't expect Larry or Sergey to quit yet, Google is still a young company. OTOH, I agree with you, what does Gates have to prove? Some guys do get rich and get out. Look at Paul Allen and Steve Wozniak. Allen is out buying sports teams and building toy rockets. Woz went into teaching. I think everyone has their reasons for doing what they do, but keep in mind not everyone who is successful is unsatisfied with their achievements.
If the law itself is unjust, don't blame the courts for affirming this fact.
Let's not forget, the courts function as a check and balance against the legislative branch of government. The court system has an obligation to examine these laws for their constitutionality and legality. Courts don't create law, but they do have the power to declare a law unjust, and we need to make sure they are doing just that.
The judge actually stated that he will uphold the USPTO's CURRENT position. He is only interested in enforcing the patent, not determining it's validity. That's probably why RIM hasn't settled this already. They want to drag it out in the hope that the USPTO will actually invalidate NTP's patents sometime in the near future.
This whole case is an amazing example of bureaucracy at 'work'.
...so that ms and their henchmen can start targetting the companies...
Am I the only one that thinks the idea of Microsoft and henchmen sound funny. Some army of nerds in glasses is going to beat on your door and carry you off into the night.
Sure -- but we aren't trying to make a robotic soldier, or anything close to it.
Yeah, right. The US Military makes all of it's advanced projects public. There is no possible way they are working on robotic soldiers on some secret base.
Bitching about yet another DRM standard is a bit silly. There is no DRM standard so how can there be another one. All you got is a lot of DRM crap all of wich hopes to become the standard.
Another DRM 'standard' is a good thing for the consumer. The more different forms of DRM there are the more difficult they are going to be to enforce. If all of the players could agree on one method of implementing DRM they might actually be able to make it work, but as longs as they fight about it they will never get consistent enforcement.
Not all DJs are playing music by RIAA or PPL artists or the equivalent of that in the UK, and if they are they should just boycot those artists and record companies.
Actually, here in the US anyway, I believe it's ASCAP and/org BMI that licenses the playing of prerecorded music. You are correct that any original work by the DJ, or uncopyrighted/indie work may not require a license. This seems to be an issue with podcasting as well, since they are considered a 'broadcast' type media by ASCAP and BMI. Most of the podcasters I listen to have talked about purchasing an ASCAP and BMI licenses to enable them to 'broadcast' the work of commercial artists. Many indie bands are more than happy for a podcast or a DJ to play their music since it results in more exposure for their music.
Of course, this only applies in the US and the article is from the UK. I'm guessing it's completely different over there.
Since when is high school chemistry considered a 'good solid science background'? You would think they could at least higher high school graduates to write their stories.
I used to have a situation like that, the 'corporate policy' stepped in and decided we couldn't have access from the house. Now I have to get up and drive to the office, supposedly within 15 minutes of the page. Fortunately that's only happened once in the last year.
Funny thing to me is, if it's so mission critical that you have to keep it up 24 hours a day why would you assign someone that's groggy and more prone to make a mistake to fix it. Seems like it would be more intelligent to wait until morning or actually hire someone to work the night shift.
In the second, perhaps you should consider why you think this trivializes their deaths. What about such an analogy causes you to think less of dead soldiers?
I think it's disrespectful, but that aside, a couple more comments on the analogy. The military analogy breaks down for a couple reasons. First, it's not like your 'bomb in a basket' is the only example of a military atrocity ever concocted. For the most part, besides a short time period where armies just lined up all civilized like a big game of red rover, war has always been filled with underhanded, evil tactics. You shouldn't sign up for military service without understanding the possibilty that something really bad and nasty COULD happen. Second, there's not really any way to stop bad things from happening in a wartime situation. What, is the dead soldier going to sue the US government because they were killed in an unorthodox fashion? Dying is kind of the point of war. Neither of these issues are true in our current topic.
...you think it is ok for that game to scour my hard drive for financial records and send them to the game company...
No, absolutely not. I don't think any licensing agreement can give a software vendor carte blanche to do anything they want on your computer. Thing is, both your software examples and your wacky blender example would have much more far reaching economic (not to mention logistic) problems than they would legal problems. If Hamilton-beach, sunbeam, Oster or any other appliance manufacturer came out with a blender that attacked you in the middle of the night I'm fairly confident that company would be bankrupt very shortly. The market would take care of itself and adjust accordingly. Software that takes data that you feed into it, reports said data back to it's manufacturer who then uses that data for legitimate business purposes does not seem like a problem to me at all. Why should the manufacturer have to jump through hoops to attempt to verify that the consumer understands what's happening, especially if the document it in an EULA or privacy policy.
Defeatism is not a logical argument. Making it illegal to mine data is a valid way to stop it.
My comment wasn't defeatism. Making data mining illegal is NOT a valid way to stop it for several reasons. First, it's not enforceable in any kind of practical way. Politicians and many of their constituents seem to think that just because a law is made the problem will go away. History has shown us that this is just not true. Drug laws haven't stopped drugs, traffic laws haven't stopped speeders and data mining laws won't stop data miners. There just aren't enough resources available to supervise every revision of every software product out there. Second, when the law was enforced, it's unlikely the law would be enforced evenhandedly. Our current legal climate is favoring large businesses. There have been several citizens arrested and tried for distributing computer viruses, but I'm not aware of any Sony employees on trial for distributing a rootkit to many thousands or millions of computers. Why isn't this justice being distributed evenhandedly. It is likely, based on recent history, that prosecuters would go after the low hanging fruit, prosecute small companies and leave big offenders, like Apple and their iTunes music monitoring, alone. Third, the penalties would have to be outrageous to make data mining stop being an economically viable activity. How much more music do you think iTunes will sell by being able to target their customers more accurately? How much revenue is that going to be? It's unlikely, if a law was passed outlawing data mining, that the penalty would be severe enough to deter a large company from conducting the activities. Finally, how could 'data mining' be defined? Would we arrest, as someone else in this article pointed out, the hippy down at the used book store that remembers what you like? All the grocery stores with their discount cards? Webmasters that watch their stats to see which page is most popular? Data mining has been done for (at least) hundreds of years in one form or another. Outlawing it isn't going to stop it.
Doesn't even have to be that hard. I'm assuming, although I didn't see where the article said, the marketers send their list to the state and the state sends them back either a clean list or a list of addresses that they have to remove. Should be pretty easy to just send a huge list and make a kids list from the 'prohibited' email addresses.
This problem of getting to full cognitive capacity after waking is a serious one in some professions.
The Army is an obvious example, although in a combat situation I believe most soldiers learn to be alert very quickly. Let's take it closer to home. I work in IT and I'm on call 24 hours. Fortunately the times I've needed to get up in the middle of the night are extremely rare, but when we have had a problem I know I haven't been at my best. If we ever had a real emergency I'm not sure if I would be able to get up at 2am and function properly.
You seem to be contradicting yourself. Is it a good analogy or not?
I think the analogy is accurate, but I think it's highly inappropriate to trivialize the service our men and women in uniform give this country by comparing them with something as innocous as data mining by a computer company.
One is intentionally deceitful. One is not. Are you arguing that the average person who buys a mac, or installs iTunes expects that Apple will be listening in on what music they play?
That's exactly what I'm arguing. If a person purchases a commercially licensed piece of software, and is concerned about things like this (which most people aren't), they should thoroughly read the EULA, with a lawyer present, and be sure they understand the ramifications of their purchase. If you don't want your information compromised be very careful about the software you use. To most of us it's not that important. At some point it has to be the individual's responsibilty to guard his/her rights. Companys are going to data mine, a bunch of lawmakers in Washington making a bunch of noise about it isn't going to change that.
You aren't opting in unless you are consciously aware of what is going on.
So who decides what constitutes being 'consciously aware' consists of? Where is the adequate level of informativeness? Sending out privacy policies that nobody can understand or read? Putting obscure references in EULAs? Popping up a warning that most people just click through?
You aren't opting in unless you are consciously aware of what is going on. GI's in Vietnam did not opt-in to being blown up with a hand grenade when they picked up a basket outside their barracks.
No, but that's a good example. They opted-in when they signed up with the military. They were expected to be in harms way. Of course those that were drafted did not 'opt-in' either way.
To take another example, what about anyone that signed up for the military just prior to 9/11? I'm sure their indoctrination said they could be sent to war, but we hadn't had a serious conflict in years. Who thought they would be going to Afghanistan or Iraq and being blown up by terrorists. I'm sure most 2001 high school grads that joined the army thought they'd do their two years and go to college on the governments dime, but some of them got killed halfway around the world. Were they 'conciously aware' of the decision that they made with that Army recruiter? Regardless, I think comparing a little data mining about your music habits to military service is a little out of proportion.
I disagree, and more importantly I've heard descriptions very different cultures from friends who have worked for both companies.
I didn't say Jobs was a jerk or didn't provide a better/different work environment. I said he was ruthless. He didn't get where he is today without being a very competitive businessman.
Until now? Come on, the new laptop is cool, but I don't think it has sold that well already.
I was referring (somewhat sarcastically) to the current topic of iTunes spyware. This could be an issue that tarnishes Apples spotless reputation.
Slashdot Mirror
transmit and store presentations in a useful and navigatable form.
Got it! It's called TV.
Don't get me wrong. I think Disney is floundering. Their relationship with Pixar has been the only bright point in their rather dismal recent history. I don't think they could do anything but buy Pixar out, but it does seem like it was a hefty price.
Yes, I'm making the assumption that Pixar's money is equal to 50% of whatever was split with Disney.
Wouldn't it be the other way around? Wouldn't the $3.2bn gross be before they paid Disney, at least that's how my concept of gross works. That would mean Disney made an even poorer deal than I thought if they were already getting half of Pixar's revenue.
Next person who says "Evolution is just a theory", I am going to push off a roof...
Ahhh.. but that is just the point. There is no doubt that organisims evolve. This is observable and can be proven with a batch of fruit flies, bacterium, whatever (Just like gravity is observable and can be proven by pushing someone off a roof). The problem many people have is that saying life evolved from a single cell amoeba is about a speculative about evolution and the existence of Man as this article is about gravity, gravitons and dark matter. Both are unobservable and unreproduceable.
you're talking about US box office numbers, not international [see the box office breakdown here]. International BO numbers will bring that figure way up.
According to your link, Pixar has only grossed $3.2bn since 1995. $7.4bn, or even $6.4bn considering the cash Pixar had on hand, still seems like a lot of money. Might take them 10 years to recoup their investment.
Hopefully it will just get Adobe to lower the price on their flash products. A little competition is always good and flash is expensive for a small time developer (like me) to buy. I hope Microsoft can make some inroads on this just to keep Adobe inspired and get their prices down.
Want to fix DRM? Vote it out of office.
I agree, but it doesn't seem to work that way. In my district I generally get a choice between a conservative moron and a liberal moron. The only thing most of them do is spout off buzzwords. I wouldn't trust them to understand the problems with DRM and the RIAA even if they mentioned the words during a campaign. On top of that, most of the people around here will vote for the incumbent, and lacking that for a choice will vote for whoever has held an office before.
"She's experienced! She was on the school board, we better vote her into congress."
With our system of a representative republic, and our current state of two dominant parties, it's difficult for most individuals to find a choice that even remotely represents our opinions. Much easier for individuals to ignore the law, download anything they want and hope the courts resolve it.
If I was an employee of Google and my stock options were worth over a couple of million, I would dump and run.
Perhaps, and as an EMPLOYEE of the company that might be something you would want to do. Keep in mind this article is concerning the execs. I don't know about Eric Schmidt, but Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded a company based on their Phd work. They don't have to worry about money, now they can continue with the research that they might have went on doing if they hadn't decided to start Google.
Kind of makes you wonder about what kind of people stick around when they are already super-rich. Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, etc. Why do they continue to work? Is it because they have nothing better to do?
Ummm... it's called greed. There is never enough for some of these people. I wouldn't expect Larry or Sergey to quit yet, Google is still a young company. OTOH, I agree with you, what does Gates have to prove? Some guys do get rich and get out. Look at Paul Allen and Steve Wozniak. Allen is out buying sports teams and building toy rockets. Woz went into teaching. I think everyone has their reasons for doing what they do, but keep in mind not everyone who is successful is unsatisfied with their achievements.
If the law itself is unjust, don't blame the courts for affirming this fact.
Let's not forget, the courts function as a check and balance against the legislative branch of government. The court system has an obligation to examine these laws for their constitutionality and legality. Courts don't create law, but they do have the power to declare a law unjust, and we need to make sure they are doing just that.
The judge actually stated that he will uphold the USPTO's CURRENT position. He is only interested in enforcing the patent, not determining it's validity. That's probably why RIM hasn't settled this already. They want to drag it out in the hope that the USPTO will actually invalidate NTP's patents sometime in the near future.
This whole case is an amazing example of bureaucracy at 'work'.
...so that ms and their henchmen can start targetting the companies...
Am I the only one that thinks the idea of Microsoft and henchmen sound funny. Some army of nerds in glasses is going to beat on your door and carry you off into the night.
Sure -- but we aren't trying to make a robotic soldier, or anything close to it.
Yeah, right. The US Military makes all of it's advanced projects public. There is no possible way they are working on robotic soldiers on some secret base.
Bitching about yet another DRM standard is a bit silly. There is no DRM standard so how can there be another one. All you got is a lot of DRM crap all of wich hopes to become the standard.
Another DRM 'standard' is a good thing for the consumer. The more different forms of DRM there are the more difficult they are going to be to enforce. If all of the players could agree on one method of implementing DRM they might actually be able to make it work, but as longs as they fight about it they will never get consistent enforcement.
Not all DJs are playing music by RIAA or PPL artists or the equivalent of that in the UK, and if they are they should just boycot those artists and record companies.
Actually, here in the US anyway, I believe it's ASCAP and/org BMI that licenses the playing of prerecorded music. You are correct that any original work by the DJ, or uncopyrighted/indie work may not require a license. This seems to be an issue with podcasting as well, since they are considered a 'broadcast' type media by ASCAP and BMI. Most of the podcasters I listen to have talked about purchasing an ASCAP and BMI licenses to enable them to 'broadcast' the work of commercial artists. Many indie bands are more than happy for a podcast or a DJ to play their music since it results in more exposure for their music.
Of course, this only applies in the US and the article is from the UK. I'm guessing it's completely different over there.
I was hoping my editor would catch that.
Since when is high school chemistry considered a 'good solid science background'? You would think they could at least higher high school graduates to write their stories.
Probably depends on x86 compatibility requirements.
Seriously, we should all send him a copy of those movies, or at least email telling him to watch it.
I used to have a situation like that, the 'corporate policy' stepped in and decided we couldn't have access from the house. Now I have to get up and drive to the office, supposedly within 15 minutes of the page. Fortunately that's only happened once in the last year.
Funny thing to me is, if it's so mission critical that you have to keep it up 24 hours a day why would you assign someone that's groggy and more prone to make a mistake to fix it. Seems like it would be more intelligent to wait until morning or actually hire someone to work the night shift.
In the second, perhaps you should consider why you think this trivializes their deaths. What about such an analogy causes you to think less of dead soldiers?
...you think it is ok for that game to scour my hard drive for financial records and send them to the game company...
I think it's disrespectful, but that aside, a couple more comments on the analogy. The military analogy breaks down for a couple reasons. First, it's not like your 'bomb in a basket' is the only example of a military atrocity ever concocted. For the most part, besides a short time period where armies just lined up all civilized like a big game of red rover, war has always been filled with underhanded, evil tactics. You shouldn't sign up for military service without understanding the possibilty that something really bad and nasty COULD happen. Second, there's not really any way to stop bad things from happening in a wartime situation. What, is the dead soldier going to sue the US government because they were killed in an unorthodox fashion? Dying is kind of the point of war. Neither of these issues are true in our current topic.
No, absolutely not. I don't think any licensing agreement can give a software vendor carte blanche to do anything they want on your computer. Thing is, both your software examples and your wacky blender example would have much more far reaching economic (not to mention logistic) problems than they would legal problems. If Hamilton-beach, sunbeam, Oster or any other appliance manufacturer came out with a blender that attacked you in the middle of the night I'm fairly confident that company would be bankrupt very shortly. The market would take care of itself and adjust accordingly. Software that takes data that you feed into it, reports said data back to it's manufacturer who then uses that data for legitimate business purposes does not seem like a problem to me at all. Why should the manufacturer have to jump through hoops to attempt to verify that the consumer understands what's happening, especially if the document it in an EULA or privacy policy.
Defeatism is not a logical argument. Making it illegal to mine data is a valid way to stop it.
My comment wasn't defeatism. Making data mining illegal is NOT a valid way to stop it for several reasons. First, it's not enforceable in any kind of practical way. Politicians and many of their constituents seem to think that just because a law is made the problem will go away. History has shown us that this is just not true. Drug laws haven't stopped drugs, traffic laws haven't stopped speeders and data mining laws won't stop data miners. There just aren't enough resources available to supervise every revision of every software product out there. Second, when the law was enforced, it's unlikely the law would be enforced evenhandedly. Our current legal climate is favoring large businesses. There have been several citizens arrested and tried for distributing computer viruses, but I'm not aware of any Sony employees on trial for distributing a rootkit to many thousands or millions of computers. Why isn't this justice being distributed evenhandedly. It is likely, based on recent history, that prosecuters would go after the low hanging fruit, prosecute small companies and leave big offenders, like Apple and their iTunes music monitoring, alone. Third, the penalties would have to be outrageous to make data mining stop being an economically viable activity. How much more music do you think iTunes will sell by being able to target their customers more accurately? How much revenue is that going to be? It's unlikely, if a law was passed outlawing data mining, that the penalty would be severe enough to deter a large company from conducting the activities. Finally, how could 'data mining' be defined? Would we arrest, as someone else in this article pointed out, the hippy down at the used book store that remembers what you like? All the grocery stores with their discount cards? Webmasters that watch their stats to see which page is most popular? Data mining has been done for (at least) hundreds of years in one form or another. Outlawing it isn't going to stop it.
Yeah, but that's probably going to only work for the first couple hundred marketing companies. They might tighten security eventually.
Doesn't even have to be that hard. I'm assuming, although I didn't see where the article said, the marketers send their list to the state and the state sends them back either a clean list or a list of addresses that they have to remove. Should be pretty easy to just send a huge list and make a kids list from the 'prohibited' email addresses.
This problem of getting to full cognitive capacity after waking is a serious one in some professions.
The Army is an obvious example, although in a combat situation I believe most soldiers learn to be alert very quickly. Let's take it closer to home. I work in IT and I'm on call 24 hours. Fortunately the times I've needed to get up in the middle of the night are extremely rare, but when we have had a problem I know I haven't been at my best. If we ever had a real emergency I'm not sure if I would be able to get up at 2am and function properly.
You seem to be contradicting yourself. Is it a good analogy or not?
I think the analogy is accurate, but I think it's highly inappropriate to trivialize the service our men and women in uniform give this country by comparing them with something as innocous as data mining by a computer company.
One is intentionally deceitful. One is not. Are you arguing that the average person who buys a mac, or installs iTunes expects that Apple will be listening in on what music they play?
That's exactly what I'm arguing. If a person purchases a commercially licensed piece of software, and is concerned about things like this (which most people aren't), they should thoroughly read the EULA, with a lawyer present, and be sure they understand the ramifications of their purchase. If you don't want your information compromised be very careful about the software you use. To most of us it's not that important. At some point it has to be the individual's responsibilty to guard his/her rights. Companys are going to data mine, a bunch of lawmakers in Washington making a bunch of noise about it isn't going to change that.
You aren't opting in unless you are consciously aware of what is going on.
So who decides what constitutes being 'consciously aware' consists of? Where is the adequate level of informativeness? Sending out privacy policies that nobody can understand or read? Putting obscure references in EULAs? Popping up a warning that most people just click through?
You aren't opting in unless you are consciously aware of what is going on. GI's in Vietnam did not opt-in to being blown up with a hand grenade when they picked up a basket outside their barracks.
No, but that's a good example. They opted-in when they signed up with the military. They were expected to be in harms way. Of course those that were drafted did not 'opt-in' either way.
To take another example, what about anyone that signed up for the military just prior to 9/11? I'm sure their indoctrination said they could be sent to war, but we hadn't had a serious conflict in years. Who thought they would be going to Afghanistan or Iraq and being blown up by terrorists. I'm sure most 2001 high school grads that joined the army thought they'd do their two years and go to college on the governments dime, but some of them got killed halfway around the world. Were they 'conciously aware' of the decision that they made with that Army recruiter? Regardless, I think comparing a little data mining about your music habits to military service is a little out of proportion.
I disagree, and more importantly I've heard descriptions very different cultures from friends who have worked for both companies.
I didn't say Jobs was a jerk or didn't provide a better/different work environment. I said he was ruthless. He didn't get where he is today without being a very competitive businessman.
Until now? Come on, the new laptop is cool, but I don't think it has sold that well already.
I was referring (somewhat sarcastically) to the current topic of iTunes spyware. This could be an issue that tarnishes Apples spotless reputation.