You are correct about idea to an extent. Vague ideas are not copyrightable... but a specific concept that can be fixed in a tangible form, going well beyond a vague idea, is. It depends on the specificity of the idea. For example, the concept of "goodwill" is not copyrightable because it is broad and ephemeral.
But consider two cases about ideas: Art Buchwald successfully won a case against Paramount because the concept the movie Coming to America was based on originated with a story treatment (these are very detailed ideas typically 40-80 pages in length, but nowhere near as specific as a script) that Paramount rejected. In Buchwald v. Paramount, Buchwald prevailed and was granted both royalties and story credit. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buchwald_v._Paramount).
Enough documentation existed to substantiate that the concept was in fact inspired by Buchwald's idea. The same thing happened with Roland Emmerich and Stargate. Years before the film went into production, an egyptologist named Omar Zuhdi had pitched the concept to him. Zuhdi had a colleague Emmerich expressed disinterest but then went on and adapted the story concept into Stargate. Emmerich settled out of court with Zuhdi for an undisclosed sum.
Even if Namco never published/manufactured Pac Man but had a detailed account of the game concept and evidence that OP knew about it, just as in the cases of Zuhdi and Buchwald, they could successfully hold OP responsible for copyright infringement and file for a number of remedies, including but not limited to injunctive relief and/or a substantial portion of OP's gross receipts.
There are several ways of looking at this. If I make a movie that "looks and feels" like Richard Donner's Superman in every way, right down to Lois's car stalling and falling into a crevice in the middle of a Central American earthquake, but I just change some names around and call Lois "Barbara" and Central America "Kazakhstan", and Superman "Super Miguel"... I'm pretty certain that I'm asking for some level of trouble.
But here he went steps further. In his own bugfix notes he refers to the character repeatedly as "pacman".
Trademark violation applies because he refers to the character as "pacman" in his release notes. Trademark violation may or may not apply to the game name. But the "look and feel" is not the only issue here. The specifics of the characters, their appearance, the gameplay, the objective, the maps, pills, power wafers, maze w/escape tunnels, etc. is so identical to the original in so many ways that is definitely meets the conditions for infringement.
30 years is too long? How old are you? The market for Pac Man hasn't died. It's still the top selling arcade game of all time. Just because other people lack creativity to come up with something even four or five degrees of difference from a game involving a yellow circle with a triangle mouth and four ghosts of different colors going around a maze with tunnels, pills and power wafers, doesn't automatically make licensing a moral obligation of the original creator/owner of the work.
It's also foolish of you to use the "hard work" argument in this context because as my description above demonstrates, Namco did 90 percent of the work for him.
Although my version is obviously inspired by the original arcade game, no original artwork or sound has been copied.
The idea of a "copy" means a facsimile... whether produced mechanically by an image, or produced by replicating the look and feel of, say, a Van Gogh painting, or by using your own code to generate a series of pixels that create a reasonably similar set of characters to the Pac Man game, that is essentially the definition of what it means to copy, transcending and irrespective of the particular technology used to facilitate the copy—whether by hand, photocopier or computer code. What also matters here is that your objective was commercial in nature, not related to education, criticism or comment as would have exempted you under 17 USC 1, Section 107. Bear in mind I'm not a lawyer, but I do know that you need to go talk to one now.
How does one "navigate the minefield" of copyright law? Well, for starters, don't attempt to make a spinoff of the most popular arcade game of all time without permission in writing from the creators.
I think he does have a leg to stand on. Remember when Apple sued Microsoft for copying the "look and feel" of Mac OS into MS Windows?? The judge said "look and feel" was not copyrightable and threw the whole thing out.
No, that's not at all what the judgment was. Instead, it was: "look, you dumb****s, you signed a contract granting Microsoft the rights to do this!" Copyright of look and feel has been upheld in multiple cases.
I was just about to say this. Yes, correct... The judge did find some 170+ elements that Microsoft did copy and would have been guilty of infringement had Apple not given Microsoft license to use these elements. They worded their agreement poorly and Microsoft had a pretty clear license to use elements of the Mac OS look and feel under that agreement.
I looked at this developer's page and he's got himself a real problem here. The characters, the "Super Pac" name, the maps, the pills, the gameplay, etc. all constitute a good case of copyright infringement.
Trademark infringement, incidentally, may not apply because while "Super Pac Man" is a trademark, "Super Pac" is less clear. However, copyright infringement applies because the detail of the gameplay, the characters, the look, the feel and the objective... more than 75% of the "idea" that constitutes the intellectual property known as the Pac Man game, is in this developer's product. It would not have the look, feel and gameplay that it does without having referenced Pac Man...and he completely shot himself in the foot by making direct reference to the Namco game in his description.
Another condition of proving copyright infringement is proving significant infringement of the brand and/or market for Pac Man. Since there's a good chance that users may confuse this product as being related to, derivative of, an offshoot, etc. of the Namco branded game, there is significant opportunity for harm to their brand image and their market for Pac Man games. It doesn't matter if the distribution is limited or they think the "chances" aren't likely it will outstrip Namco's sales of Pac Man, it's about whether or not it could be easily confused, in principle.
Fishexe states he's studied copyright law. I take that to mean he's had coursework but isn't a lawyer. If he were a copyright lawyer he'd say so. I'm not saying this to attack the messenger but just to establish some parity here... I have also studied copyright law. I am not a copyright attorney but I have worked for an ISP's internet security group and had direct contact with General Counsel on matters of DMCA. Also, I am both a copyright owner, and a copyright user (I've used copyright material under 17 USC 1, Section 107, fair use, for the purposes of comment, criticism or education. I would say that for the past 20 years I have gained a pretty intimate understanding of copyright issues... and this is a copyright issue.
Notwithstanding people's moral objections to intellectual property (an entirely separate discussion)... As to whether it's a DMCA issue or not, it is. While 17 USC 12 concerning circumvention of copyright protection systems does not apply, the other amendment, 17 USC 5, Section 512, does. That amendment passed under the DMCA concerns the notification requirements and limitation of liability of ISP's acting as mere conduit to a third party who is responsible for creating and distributing the unauthorized work. In this case, a valid DMCA notification filed with the ISP is the proper course of action.
Now can we work on that awkward name which sounds a little too much like "Department of Fatherland Security"? How about Domestic Security Service or Dept. of Domestic Security? Or State Security Department? "Homeland" sounds far too much like something George Bush thought of while he was playing with his Al Qaeda and G.I. Joe figurines.
Facebook has 500 million users. At this point, they have few places to go, but down is a very likely possibility if they don't extend themselves into the fabric of the net and collaborate so they will always stick around in some form or another. Zuckerberg reportedly even made a contribution to the Diaspora guys in an undisclosed amount because he thinks the idea has merit... or, more likely, he wants to make sure there's cross-compatibility for years to come.
One other point, sort of tangential to the topic... Some of the comments in preceding discussions about Diaspora keep falling back on the "oh sure four guys in a garage with no professional experience EVER got a project off the ground" sort of sarcasm. Ok, I know it's all wonderful and cool to us nerds to rely on sarcasm and cynicism, but a little perspective should be in order as well: Facebook, Apple, Google, Yahoo and other "garage" startups... There's a reason there's only a handful of them. There are a ton of coders, but not everyone is Harvard educated, massively talented, in the right place at the right time or any combination of these. Not every coder who thinks he has a great idea can execute...... Conversely, not everyone needs to be a Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Wozniak. In this Age of Entitlement, we all like to think life is a choice between either being rich or being nothing... but there's plenty of respectable room in between, even if all your project does is get you solid employment at someone else's company.
Good point. Another thing I'm noticing is that the market for certifications is so overpriced. A week of CCNA instruction will cost you $3000. In the 90's I paid half that for a full load of courses per quarter, or about $4500 a year in tuition. I have a friend who did an Oracle DBA cert for $14,000 and has little to show for it in this market. Then there's keeping up with all those certs. If you don't move into management, you'll find yourself recertifying every three years or so. My brother was a couple weeks away from completing a Novell cert when he got promoted (he also had a BSEE, so without that he'd have no managerial opportunity). He's now a program director at AMD making in the upper $100k's base salary, and yet more in bonuses. Is it a lot of work? sure.
But how many developers keep track of just how many hours they work for less than that amount of pay? You might have a coder making $80,000 a year thinking that's a lot... his employer is happy to let him work remotely or in his shorts, because that'll get him to commit more hours for the same money. Some developers are working 16 hour days just like my brother, but with considerably less income to show for it.
I'm an audio nerd but I believe in the old adage: "Garbage in, garbage out." The problem with fidelity today is that there is almost not a single recording since 1990 that has been mastered properly.
Almost every single recording is overdriven to clipping amplitude levels, which makes a fidelity argument nonsensical. The loudness wars are partly to blame, but also the advent of digital audio workstations that allowed any idiot with a computer to record a "passable" album without possessing the kind of finer knowledge required to fine tune ("sweeten") during the mastering process to compensate for the idiosyncrasies of the analogue systems.
I'm not advocating spending thousands of dollars on the consumer end because once it's ruined in the recording, it's ruined forever. that and consumer audio is a ton of snake oil.
Speaker cables: get yourself 16-gauge zip cord from a hardware store, as long as it's OFC (annealed) copper it won't corrode and its thickness and shortness will dictate the only two parameters that matter: capacitance and inductance.
Vinyl: Bullshit. I can't begin to tell you the number of ways in which vinyl is inferior as an end user format. From the wear and tear on the grooves, to the compression on spiral grooves that causes one channel to pitch slightly differently than the other (due to pressure of the cutting stylus on each concentric portion of the groove already cut), and the limited (~80dB) dynamic range due to the narrow groove width and clarity... It's about the shittiest format you could listen to a highly dynamic recording in.
Then again if all you listen to is LCD Soundsystem and Arcade Fire, it doesn't matter... They'll sound like a dogs ass on a cheese grater recorded on crumpled wax paper and edited with a potato peeler no matter what format you buy their recordings in.
Not everyone is a Mark Zuckerberg or a Bill Gates. In fact, there are about 6.7 billion people who aren't Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates. There are about 6.7 billion people who aren't Madonna, Michael Jackson or Warren Buffett, also.
We live the Age of Entitlement, where post-boomer parents sought to break from their parents' generation by not telling their kids "no" or treating them as average human beings. Every parent has a tendency to tell their child they're special, that they can do anything... but they can't. Just like I have cerebral palsy and I can't run a four minute mile, there are very few people who can come up with the right idea at the right time in the right set of social, financial and geographical circumstances to be the next Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft or Berkshire Hathaway*.
But most people aren't going to have that kind of royal flush of timing, circumstances and resources. Consider what it takes academically to get into a Harvard or Stanford, MIT or Princeton... The people who drop out of schools like this already have an intellectual and/or financial advantage over the other 99% of us. So regardless, you're probably going to have to work hard to be in the kind of environments where these people found others to collaborate with and to raise capital to make these startups not end up in the bottomless pit of the ones that failed miserably.
Additionally, consider if Zuckerberg had finished college... he might be less of a robot. I've seen the guy in interviews. If Facebook didn't work out for him, I'm not sure I know anyone who'd want to work with the guy. But college tends to, on average, produce well-rounded human beings with a considerably broader world view than high school graduates. As an employer, if I have a choice between picking some basement dweller who codes exceptionally well, and an affable guy with a college degree who codes equally well, guess who I'll hire 9 times out of 10. But even aside from the numbers, there's value to having more knowledge than simply that which is necessary to be a walking money laundering machine.
The financial analysis presented in the OP as counterpoint to the "stay in school" argument is a bit flawed. For one thing, they compare investing $76,000 (roughly) from high school onward. Can I ask you how many high school graduates have $76,000 saved up? Most people who enter college aren't going to spend $76,000 of their own saved up money, nor given their average income without a college degree are they going to have an easy time saving up that amount of money over even the next ten years afterward. Sure, if you're Warren Buffett then by the time you were 20 you had $90,000 saved up (in 2009 dollars) because you started your first business at age 10... but, again, how many of you did that?
Another point... an undergraduate degree today really is the equivalent of what high school diplomas used to be... It's a minimum requirement in many cases. It doesn't end there. If you really want an edge, a graduate degree is where you're going to need to be. Most of the hardcore software engineering or network engineering jobs I see really require at minimum a BSEE or Comp Sci undergrad degree... unless you want to hit a ceiling and stay there.
The conventional reality is that college grads will either a) borrow, or b) get through on scholarships and grants. The latter come out ahead any way you slice it... because it takes hard work, academic competence, intelligence, and resourcefulness to get scholarships. They don't just fall into your hands. Those people will be successful no matter what, but college gives them an edge by introducing them to even more people, resources and methods to getting something off the ground.
Those who borrow aren't necessarily sunk. When I started college the loans I took were about 8%, and fixed, which in perspective is a pretty good rate for the time... right now, rates are considerably lower. Suffice it to say I consolidated my loans at a fixed 3.37% for the life of the
The San Luis Obispo County Sheriff's Office: Antiquated Memes Division's next case will involve Hamburglar and his doppelganger, H.R. Pufnstuf. This cold case has been unsolved for more than 20 years.
Rest assured, however, the SLOC Sheriff's Office: Antiquated Memes Division is determined to get to the bottom of it!
Despite electromagnetism being many times stronger than gravity at close range (for an illustration of this, pick up a paperclip with a small magnet... the small magnetic field is counteracting the much larger gravitational field of the entire planet), if RF signals as one part of the EM spectrum have THIS strong a wide-field (the school) effect, wouldn't many other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, ranging from longwave to microwave to visible light, induce other kinds of effects? We evolved in a world bombarded by all kinds of electromagnetic radiation, the vast majority of which our senses cannot detect.
I smell a teenage conspiracy to avoid school... or at least some other, much more plausible cause at work.
First adopters are always the biggest geeks. The internet, however, is less about its applications today than it is about content. When I started college, the World Wide Web was just emerging, and one had to have some technical aptitudes to know what to do with a PPP dialer, Eudora or, even more primitive, PINE mail, Gopher, Telnet, etc. The first major graphical browser, NCSA Mosaic, had just come out. But the net is so ubiquitous and content driven that users aren't talking about the net in terms of its technology... they're talking about it in terms of content: movies, music, images, news, friends, games, etc.
A technology becomes most useful is when the tech itself is at its most transparent, and the user is directly interfacing with their content with no tremendous awareness of the underlying layers (e.g. OSI model)... and that is precisely how it ought to be, be it for casual or business usage.
And let me add... that fiction implies misreporting of the facts. I am not advocating that, and that isn't what editorializing is. That's punditry, that's bullshit and that is the business of deception.
We journalists leave that business to the bloggers and network news outfits.
By that logic, scientists should never construct scientific theories, which are defined as the analysis of a set of facts in their relation to one another.
You have a very odd definition of journalism that excludes 99% of what journalism is comprised of. Then we'd never have Hunter S. Thompson, Roger Ebert (whose "non-journalism" apparently earned him the first Pulitzer Prize in Criticism), Cameron Crowe and countless other writers who have contributed substantially to the fabric of our culture.
What you seem to be thinking of is sensationalism pieces with edge, the kind of crap Fox News does where they intentionally blur the line... but that isn't reporting, and it isn't editorializing, and it isn't even journalism. That's punditry, or as I like to call it, Talking Head Syndrome. CNN does it as well, as does MSNBC in some segments (though one can hardly confuse "THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW" or "KEITH OLBERMANN" for news reporting, as they're clearly delineated op-ed shows).
But what you seem to advocate is doing away with ALL op-ed, which is patently ridiculous for the reasons I already mentioned. Whether your personal experience is hobbled by what idiot bloggers and network news programs call "journalism", whether you believe it or not, it is possible, even beneficial, for a journalist to inform you from a given point of view, so long as they can properly substantiate their viewpoint.
Film criticism is still journalism as long as the writer's primary purpose is to inform the reader about the movie. But ALL reporting is inherently biased by what we see and how we perceive it, which may not necessarily represent exactly what has taken place.
It's just that reporting is biased to varying degrees. There's no objectivity in reporting because it is a subjective perspective, and only that perspective, through which one observes the world. Without rigorous testing of the assertions, which reporters never involve themselves in, they're always reporting on what limited information they have filtered through their perspective.
But again, I think you have a corrupted idea of editorializing thanks to network news and bloggers... Both of which barely qualify as journalism, news or reporting... if at all.
I didn't go into film criticism to change the world. I did it because I enjoy analyzing art, the way some people enjoy analyzing politics. If nobody used their critical thinking skills to share their analyses with others, we would be better off how, exactly?
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You are correct about idea to an extent. Vague ideas are not copyrightable... but a specific concept that can be fixed in a tangible form, going well beyond a vague idea, is. It depends on the specificity of the idea. For example, the concept of "goodwill" is not copyrightable because it is broad and ephemeral.
But consider two cases about ideas: Art Buchwald successfully won a case against Paramount because the concept the movie Coming to America was based on originated with a story treatment (these are very detailed ideas typically 40-80 pages in length, but nowhere near as specific as a script) that Paramount rejected. In Buchwald v. Paramount, Buchwald prevailed and was granted both royalties and story credit. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buchwald_v._Paramount).
Enough documentation existed to substantiate that the concept was in fact inspired by Buchwald's idea. The same thing happened with Roland Emmerich and Stargate. Years before the film went into production, an egyptologist named Omar Zuhdi had pitched the concept to him. Zuhdi had a colleague Emmerich expressed disinterest but then went on and adapted the story concept into Stargate. Emmerich settled out of court with Zuhdi for an undisclosed sum.
Even if Namco never published/manufactured Pac Man but had a detailed account of the game concept and evidence that OP knew about it, just as in the cases of Zuhdi and Buchwald, they could successfully hold OP responsible for copyright infringement and file for a number of remedies, including but not limited to injunctive relief and/or a substantial portion of OP's gross receipts.
There are several ways of looking at this. If I make a movie that "looks and feels" like Richard Donner's Superman in every way, right down to Lois's car stalling and falling into a crevice in the middle of a Central American earthquake, but I just change some names around and call Lois "Barbara" and Central America "Kazakhstan", and Superman "Super Miguel"... I'm pretty certain that I'm asking for some level of trouble.
But here he went steps further. In his own bugfix notes he refers to the character repeatedly as "pacman".
Trademark violation applies because he refers to the character as "pacman" in his release notes. Trademark violation may or may not apply to the game name. But the "look and feel" is not the only issue here. The specifics of the characters, their appearance, the gameplay, the objective, the maps, pills, power wafers, maze w/escape tunnels, etc. is so identical to the original in so many ways that is definitely meets the conditions for infringement.
Oh. My. God. I'm sorry but OP is a fucking imbecile if he is so deluded as to believe he did not infringe on Namco's copyright.
30 years is too long? How old are you? The market for Pac Man hasn't died. It's still the top selling arcade game of all time. Just because other people lack creativity to come up with something even four or five degrees of difference from a game involving a yellow circle with a triangle mouth and four ghosts of different colors going around a maze with tunnels, pills and power wafers, doesn't automatically make licensing a moral obligation of the original creator/owner of the work.
It's also foolish of you to use the "hard work" argument in this context because as my description above demonstrates, Namco did 90 percent of the work for him.
"filed by the ISP" to their end user, that should read in the last paragraph.
Although my version is obviously inspired by the original arcade game, no original artwork or sound has been copied.
The idea of a "copy" means a facsimile... whether produced mechanically by an image, or produced by replicating the look and feel of, say, a Van Gogh painting, or by using your own code to generate a series of pixels that create a reasonably similar set of characters to the Pac Man game, that is essentially the definition of what it means to copy, transcending and irrespective of the particular technology used to facilitate the copy—whether by hand, photocopier or computer code. What also matters here is that your objective was commercial in nature, not related to education, criticism or comment as would have exempted you under 17 USC 1, Section 107. Bear in mind I'm not a lawyer, but I do know that you need to go talk to one now.
How does one "navigate the minefield" of copyright law? Well, for starters, don't attempt to make a spinoff of the most popular arcade game of all time without permission in writing from the creators.
I think he does have a leg to stand on. Remember when Apple sued Microsoft for copying the "look and feel" of Mac OS into MS Windows?? The judge said "look and feel" was not copyrightable and threw the whole thing out.
No, that's not at all what the judgment was. Instead, it was: "look, you dumb****s, you signed a contract granting Microsoft the rights to do this!" Copyright of look and feel has been upheld in multiple cases.
I was just about to say this. Yes, correct... The judge did find some 170+ elements that Microsoft did copy and would have been guilty of infringement had Apple not given Microsoft license to use these elements. They worded their agreement poorly and Microsoft had a pretty clear license to use elements of the Mac OS look and feel under that agreement.
I looked at this developer's page and he's got himself a real problem here. The characters, the "Super Pac" name, the maps, the pills, the gameplay, etc. all constitute a good case of copyright infringement.
Trademark infringement, incidentally, may not apply because while "Super Pac Man" is a trademark, "Super Pac" is less clear. However, copyright infringement applies because the detail of the gameplay, the characters, the look, the feel and the objective... more than 75% of the "idea" that constitutes the intellectual property known as the Pac Man game, is in this developer's product. It would not have the look, feel and gameplay that it does without having referenced Pac Man...and he completely shot himself in the foot by making direct reference to the Namco game in his description.
Another condition of proving copyright infringement is proving significant infringement of the brand and/or market for Pac Man. Since there's a good chance that users may confuse this product as being related to, derivative of, an offshoot, etc. of the Namco branded game, there is significant opportunity for harm to their brand image and their market for Pac Man games. It doesn't matter if the distribution is limited or they think the "chances" aren't likely it will outstrip Namco's sales of Pac Man, it's about whether or not it could be easily confused, in principle.
Fishexe states he's studied copyright law. I take that to mean he's had coursework but isn't a lawyer. If he were a copyright lawyer he'd say so. I'm not saying this to attack the messenger but just to establish some parity here... I have also studied copyright law. I am not a copyright attorney but I have worked for an ISP's internet security group and had direct contact with General Counsel on matters of DMCA. Also, I am both a copyright owner, and a copyright user (I've used copyright material under 17 USC 1, Section 107, fair use, for the purposes of comment, criticism or education. I would say that for the past 20 years I have gained a pretty intimate understanding of copyright issues... and this is a copyright issue.
Notwithstanding people's moral objections to intellectual property (an entirely separate discussion)... As to whether it's a DMCA issue or not, it is. While 17 USC 12 concerning circumvention of copyright protection systems does not apply, the other amendment, 17 USC 5, Section 512, does. That amendment passed under the DMCA concerns the notification requirements and limitation of liability of ISP's acting as mere conduit to a third party who is responsible for creating and distributing the unauthorized work. In this case, a valid DMCA notification filed with the ISP is the proper course of action.
Now can we work on that awkward name which sounds a little too much like "Department of Fatherland Security"? How about Domestic Security Service or Dept. of Domestic Security? Or State Security Department? "Homeland" sounds far too much like something George Bush thought of while he was playing with his Al Qaeda and G.I. Joe figurines.
Facebook has 500 million users. At this point, they have few places to go, but down is a very likely possibility if they don't extend themselves into the fabric of the net and collaborate so they will always stick around in some form or another. Zuckerberg reportedly even made a contribution to the Diaspora guys in an undisclosed amount because he thinks the idea has merit... or, more likely, he wants to make sure there's cross-compatibility for years to come.
One other point, sort of tangential to the topic... Some of the comments in preceding discussions about Diaspora keep falling back on the "oh sure four guys in a garage with no professional experience EVER got a project off the ground" sort of sarcasm. Ok, I know it's all wonderful and cool to us nerds to rely on sarcasm and cynicism, but a little perspective should be in order as well: Facebook, Apple, Google, Yahoo and other "garage" startups... There's a reason there's only a handful of them. There are a ton of coders, but not everyone is Harvard educated, massively talented, in the right place at the right time or any combination of these. Not every coder who thinks he has a great idea can execute... ... Conversely, not everyone needs to be a Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Wozniak. In this Age of Entitlement, we all like to think life is a choice between either being rich or being nothing... but there's plenty of respectable room in between, even if all your project does is get you solid employment at someone else's company.
Good point. Another thing I'm noticing is that the market for certifications is so overpriced. A week of CCNA instruction will cost you $3000. In the 90's I paid half that for a full load of courses per quarter, or about $4500 a year in tuition. I have a friend who did an Oracle DBA cert for $14,000 and has little to show for it in this market. Then there's keeping up with all those certs. If you don't move into management, you'll find yourself recertifying every three years or so. My brother was a couple weeks away from completing a Novell cert when he got promoted (he also had a BSEE, so without that he'd have no managerial opportunity). He's now a program director at AMD making in the upper $100k's base salary, and yet more in bonuses. Is it a lot of work? sure.
But how many developers keep track of just how many hours they work for less than that amount of pay? You might have a coder making $80,000 a year thinking that's a lot... his employer is happy to let him work remotely or in his shorts, because that'll get him to commit more hours for the same money. Some developers are working 16 hour days just like my brother, but with considerably less income to show for it.
I'm an audio nerd but I believe in the old adage: "Garbage in, garbage out." The problem with fidelity today is that there is almost not a single recording since 1990 that has been mastered properly.
Almost every single recording is overdriven to clipping amplitude levels, which makes a fidelity argument nonsensical. The loudness wars are partly to blame, but also the advent of digital audio workstations that allowed any idiot with a computer to record a "passable" album without possessing the kind of finer knowledge required to fine tune ("sweeten") during the mastering process to compensate for the idiosyncrasies of the analogue systems.
I'm not advocating spending thousands of dollars on the consumer end because once it's ruined in the recording, it's ruined forever. that and consumer audio is a ton of snake oil.
Speaker cables: get yourself 16-gauge zip cord from a hardware store, as long as it's OFC (annealed) copper it won't corrode and its thickness and shortness will dictate the only two parameters that matter: capacitance and inductance.
Vinyl: Bullshit. I can't begin to tell you the number of ways in which vinyl is inferior as an end user format. From the wear and tear on the grooves, to the compression on spiral grooves that causes one channel to pitch slightly differently than the other (due to pressure of the cutting stylus on each concentric portion of the groove already cut), and the limited (~80dB) dynamic range due to the narrow groove width and clarity... It's about the shittiest format you could listen to a highly dynamic recording in.
Then again if all you listen to is LCD Soundsystem and Arcade Fire, it doesn't matter... They'll sound like a dogs ass on a cheese grater recorded on crumpled wax paper and edited with a potato peeler no matter what format you buy their recordings in.
Not everyone is a Mark Zuckerberg or a Bill Gates. In fact, there are about 6.7 billion people who aren't Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates. There are about 6.7 billion people who aren't Madonna, Michael Jackson or Warren Buffett, also.
We live the Age of Entitlement, where post-boomer parents sought to break from their parents' generation by not telling their kids "no" or treating them as average human beings. Every parent has a tendency to tell their child they're special, that they can do anything... but they can't. Just like I have cerebral palsy and I can't run a four minute mile, there are very few people who can come up with the right idea at the right time in the right set of social, financial and geographical circumstances to be the next Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft or Berkshire Hathaway*.
But most people aren't going to have that kind of royal flush of timing, circumstances and resources. Consider what it takes academically to get into a Harvard or Stanford, MIT or Princeton... The people who drop out of schools like this already have an intellectual and/or financial advantage over the other 99% of us. So regardless, you're probably going to have to work hard to be in the kind of environments where these people found others to collaborate with and to raise capital to make these startups not end up in the bottomless pit of the ones that failed miserably.
Additionally, consider if Zuckerberg had finished college... he might be less of a robot. I've seen the guy in interviews. If Facebook didn't work out for him, I'm not sure I know anyone who'd want to work with the guy. But college tends to, on average, produce well-rounded human beings with a considerably broader world view than high school graduates. As an employer, if I have a choice between picking some basement dweller who codes exceptionally well, and an affable guy with a college degree who codes equally well, guess who I'll hire 9 times out of 10. But even aside from the numbers, there's value to having more knowledge than simply that which is necessary to be a walking money laundering machine.
The financial analysis presented in the OP as counterpoint to the "stay in school" argument is a bit flawed. For one thing, they compare investing $76,000 (roughly) from high school onward. Can I ask you how many high school graduates have $76,000 saved up? Most people who enter college aren't going to spend $76,000 of their own saved up money, nor given their average income without a college degree are they going to have an easy time saving up that amount of money over even the next ten years afterward. Sure, if you're Warren Buffett then by the time you were 20 you had $90,000 saved up (in 2009 dollars) because you started your first business at age 10... but, again, how many of you did that?
Another point... an undergraduate degree today really is the equivalent of what high school diplomas used to be... It's a minimum requirement in many cases. It doesn't end there. If you really want an edge, a graduate degree is where you're going to need to be. Most of the hardcore software engineering or network engineering jobs I see really require at minimum a BSEE or Comp Sci undergrad degree... unless you want to hit a ceiling and stay there.
The conventional reality is that college grads will either a) borrow, or b) get through on scholarships and grants. The latter come out ahead any way you slice it... because it takes hard work, academic competence, intelligence, and resourcefulness to get scholarships. They don't just fall into your hands. Those people will be successful no matter what, but college gives them an edge by introducing them to even more people, resources and methods to getting something off the ground.
Those who borrow aren't necessarily sunk. When I started college the loans I took were about 8%, and fixed, which in perspective is a pretty good rate for the time... right now, rates are considerably lower. Suffice it to say I consolidated my loans at a fixed 3.37% for the life of the
God damned hipsters.
The San Luis Obispo County Sheriff's Office: Antiquated Memes Division's next case will involve Hamburglar and his doppelganger, H.R. Pufnstuf. This cold case has been unsolved for more than 20 years.
Rest assured, however, the SLOC Sheriff's Office: Antiquated Memes Division is determined to get to the bottom of it!
It appears that you can toggle instant off and just use regular search.
I had a conversation with a hipster the other day... Keep in mind I grew up in the 70's and 80's:
Hipster: "I had LCD Soundsystem's debut album before they recorded it."
Me: "i liked LCD Soundystem better when they were Gil-Scott Heron."
Him: "I stopped listening to the Arcade Fire years ago."
Me: "I liked Arcade Fire better when they were The Cure."
Him: "I listened to 80's music in the 90's."
Me: "I hated 80's music in the 70's."
Him: "I buy demo tapes on CD and transfer them to vinyl."
Me: "In 1981 I bought a Sony PCM-F1 and recorded digital on VHS."
Him: "I bought a $3000 Mac to run an NES Emulator."
Me: "I hacked my Atari VCS to make international phonecalls."
Him: "My other computer is an Amstrad."
Me: "I sold my Amstrad to some hipster shmuck for 10x what I paid... Hey..."
Him: "Back in the day we only had 8-bit colors."
Me: "Back in my day, we didn't have colors. We had A color... Amber, white or green."
Him: "I watched Ninja Warrior when it was called Sasuke."
Me: "I watched Power Rangers when it was called Voltron."
Him: "I was the first kid on my block to play Mortal Kombat."
Me: "I was the only kid on my block to own "Pac Man Fever" by Buckner & Garcia."
Him: "I played the first popular FPS, Wolfenstein 3-D."
Me: "I have Silas Warner's original Wolfenstein... in 2-D."
Him: "I listened to Massive Attack before House made their music popular."
Me: "I listened to Massive Attack when they had lyrics."
Him: "Oh yeah, I buy corduroy pants from the thrift store."
Me: "I gave my corduroy pants from third grade to the thrift store. You're wearing them."
I listen to bands so obscure they haven't been formed yet.
IRC never had cool people. I know, I was one of them.
Either you have a life, or you're feigning ignorance trying to one up us all... damn hipsters.
I hear every bar that you go to is more relevant than every bar I go to.
Despite electromagnetism being many times stronger than gravity at close range (for an illustration of this, pick up a paperclip with a small magnet... the small magnetic field is counteracting the much larger gravitational field of the entire planet), if RF signals as one part of the EM spectrum have THIS strong a wide-field (the school) effect, wouldn't many other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, ranging from longwave to microwave to visible light, induce other kinds of effects? We evolved in a world bombarded by all kinds of electromagnetic radiation, the vast majority of which our senses cannot detect.
I smell a teenage conspiracy to avoid school... or at least some other, much more plausible cause at work.
First adopters are always the biggest geeks. The internet, however, is less about its applications today than it is about content. When I started college, the World Wide Web was just emerging, and one had to have some technical aptitudes to know what to do with a PPP dialer, Eudora or, even more primitive, PINE mail, Gopher, Telnet, etc. The first major graphical browser, NCSA Mosaic, had just come out. But the net is so ubiquitous and content driven that users aren't talking about the net in terms of its technology... they're talking about it in terms of content: movies, music, images, news, friends, games, etc.
A technology becomes most useful is when the tech itself is at its most transparent, and the user is directly interfacing with their content with no tremendous awareness of the underlying layers (e.g. OSI model)... and that is precisely how it ought to be, be it for casual or business usage.
And let me add... that fiction implies misreporting of the facts. I am not advocating that, and that isn't what editorializing is. That's punditry, that's bullshit and that is the business of deception.
We journalists leave that business to the bloggers and network news outfits.
By that logic, scientists should never construct scientific theories, which are defined as the analysis of a set of facts in their relation to one another.
You have a very odd definition of journalism that excludes 99% of what journalism is comprised of. Then we'd never have Hunter S. Thompson, Roger Ebert (whose "non-journalism" apparently earned him the first Pulitzer Prize in Criticism), Cameron Crowe and countless other writers who have contributed substantially to the fabric of our culture.
What you seem to be thinking of is sensationalism pieces with edge, the kind of crap Fox News does where they intentionally blur the line... but that isn't reporting, and it isn't editorializing, and it isn't even journalism. That's punditry, or as I like to call it, Talking Head Syndrome. CNN does it as well, as does MSNBC in some segments (though one can hardly confuse "THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW" or "KEITH OLBERMANN" for news reporting, as they're clearly delineated op-ed shows).
But what you seem to advocate is doing away with ALL op-ed, which is patently ridiculous for the reasons I already mentioned. Whether your personal experience is hobbled by what idiot bloggers and network news programs call "journalism", whether you believe it or not, it is possible, even beneficial, for a journalist to inform you from a given point of view, so long as they can properly substantiate their viewpoint.
Film criticism is still journalism as long as the writer's primary purpose is to inform the reader about the movie. But ALL reporting is inherently biased by what we see and how we perceive it, which may not necessarily represent exactly what has taken place.
It's just that reporting is biased to varying degrees. There's no objectivity in reporting because it is a subjective perspective, and only that perspective, through which one observes the world. Without rigorous testing of the assertions, which reporters never involve themselves in, they're always reporting on what limited information they have filtered through their perspective.
But again, I think you have a corrupted idea of editorializing thanks to network news and bloggers... Both of which barely qualify as journalism, news or reporting... if at all.
I didn't go into film criticism to change the world. I did it because I enjoy analyzing art, the way some people enjoy analyzing politics. If nobody used their critical thinking skills to share their analyses with others, we would be better off how, exactly?