there's a fundamental flaw in your interpretation.
if we developed a technology that allowed us to reproduce cars for free once the original was created, $25 would have the same value it has today. after the original costs had been recovered, this would be pure profit no matter what you were charging, opening up your flexibility even further.
more importantly, as time went on, an automotive company would lower prices further to encourage purchase of the older materials. this is fundamental economics that seems to elude this industry. when people aren't buying your products, either they don't want them, or you've priced them too high.
my point is that maintaining an artificialy inflated price far above what the market is willing to bear, and/or changing your policies to make those things less usable then they were before (especially without any matching incentive to do so, such as much lower prices) doesn't work for anybody else. so why should i accept DRM and laws to force it to work for the music industry?
a song is no longer worth a dollar. DRM brings no benefit at all to the consumer (seriously, name one reason a consumer, who does the purchasing, would want this in it's current form).
i find it very easy to understand why this isn't working, and it's not because people can't get enough DRM in their music.
it is now less aggrevating to rent a movie, rip, remove the annoying 5 minutes of unskippable warnings and previews, and reburn, then just to buy the movie (which i've stopped doing since buying this player).
if they would sell music at a reasonable price, unencumbered, there would be no motivation to steel it.
follow my thought here a moment. if cars cost $25 dollars, who would go through the trouble of trying to steel a car?
i wouldn't bother with trying to download an illegal copy i have no idea of it's origins and quality, if $.25 bought me an unemcumbered, guaranteed quality, file from a quality high bandwidth source. music has a very small fixed cost (compared to say a movie). there is no more distribution cost (other than some hardware and bandwidth, which compared to today's retail infrastructure is infintesimal).
to my mind the funniest thing about this whole situation is the music industry did it to themselves, and continues to perpetuate it. if they had released a quality service, at a price customers felt was fair, napster and p2p never would have stood a chance (multi-billion dollar international organizations couldn't beat a college student?). it's like watching 3dfx fall. the world was their's to loose, and at every crucial juncture they made the wrong choice.
even funnier, if they had done this, they would have grabbed complete control of the market. no one would ever have been able to compete with the content owners for the price. they would have been larger and stronger than ever. controlling the content AND distribution completely.
who devalued music to it's current status? the music industry.
now i use allofmp3.com. is it an extreme? yes. i understand that in america they probably couldn't make money at the prices i currently get. but i'd pay more. what attracts me to the service is it's nice interface. i can get the songs i want, unencumbered (and share with the girlfriend if i like it, or heaven forbid use it with a non-ipod). i hadn't bought music in years before this, now it's the first place i go when i'm looking for something new. i find what i want, i buy it without a second thought. it beats the pants off of running around usenet or p2p services trying to find the song i want, in the format and bitrate i want.
Because I don't hear any denouncement. If you want me to believe you don't agree with the extremes, you will state that plainly and clearly.
i don't ever hear a religious group standing up against any of this nonsense. so my assumption is, on some level, that everyone agrees. (where do you think an islamic leader that doesn't denounce terrorism stands?)
even in your own post, you hint at the fact that you don't necessarily believe with some of what they say, but stop short of saying what it is you disagree with in any specificity. You definitely don't denounce their actions. Instead you redirect the blame for their intolerance back on others. (as though violence and skin tone prejudices have any bearing whatsoever to a culture based on a book that clearly states slavery based on national origin is acceptable.)
want me to take you semi-seriously? say in plain uncertain terms you disagree with what they are doing. Want me to really listen to your opinion? Avoid attending services and giving your money to organizations that behave this way.
is that belief? postulating that since a god might exist, and if he does would punish you for not believing in him, doesn't sound like belief to me. it sounds like hedging your bets.
an equally valid "theory" is that i, in a past life, created the universe and life because i liked the idea of having rocks around. eventually i created people b/c i wanted the rocks to get moved around on an intensely micro scale
you cannot prove yours is any more valid than mine. so as long as you put the "ryan" theory next to creationism in the textbooks then i have no problem teaching children this.
on further thought i'd like to dispute gravity too... not because i have any evidence of what did happen, but because the model isn't complete yet...
Wow. But you're comparing apples and oranges. If Saudi Arabia was a giant toxic waste dump, and the text book said "Saudi Arabia is a giant toxic waste dump", then what's the problem? the textbook is now fulfilling it's goal to educate the reader about what Saudi Arabia is.
maybe you like toxic waste and disagree with this discription, not because it's untrue, but b/c it paints a picture in the average readers mind that you may not like. so you petition to have a sticker put on the front of the book that says something about how readers should be critical of all information in the book regarding Saudi Arabia.
it doesn't change the facts one bit. but now it introduces as fact, to children, something that simply isn't true.
worse, children educated elsewhere are now better prepared and educated. congratulations, you've managed to make professional success of your children inherently more difficult b/c of your own personal, irrational, bias.
not talking about it doesn't make the mistake not exist. there was a mistake. everyone in the world can see it. everyone here can see it too. nothing we have done lately seems to have made us any friends. so i don't know where there is any more face to loose. leaving out the fact that i'm voting and paying for this, not iraqi's...
and of course taxes are going to go up. they have to. i'm being driven insane by the party line that taxes need to be kept down by the same people who are all about spending hundreds of billions of dollars waging a war that we started. i didn't want the war to begin with, and even i see that now we need to pay for it.
i read polls that say 50% of america wants bush. yet the military is having retention problems. everyone wants lower taxes. so who are these people? they want war because it's right. there were no weapons, but it's ok because sadam was evil. but they don't want war that is going to cost them money. they definitely don't want to join the military, or send their children.
what kind of policy is that? what should the iraqi's think of all this?
right. i completely believe he acted in good faith when he made the decision. however, it's now clear that the primary reason he gave for going to war was non-existant, whether or not it was his fault. was right for other reasons? that is completely debatable. but the man said in the debates, if he knew then what he knew now, he'd do it all the same again...
to my mind on this kerry's point is well taken. knowing what we know now, we should have done some things differently. to get credit with me all bush has to do is own up to that. i want to see some sign he realizes mistakes were made, learns from it, and applies it to the future decisions he makes. his platform at this point seems to be that this would be a violation of his "core values".
any man who can't even find one mistake he made in 4 years (and by the second time, i mean come on, by the 3rd debate he had already heard the question once in the 2nd) just scares the snot out of me. he has a huge ego, and any man who can't be flexible and admit when a mistake was made, doesn't deserve to be in his position.
interesting... so, when are you signing up with the military to go over there? how about petitioning to raise your taxes to pay for it?
my biggest problem here is bush's mystical belief that taking in new information and applying it to policies is "wishy washy"... no moron, that's what is called smart. any idiot who looks at the current situation, with all the knowledge he has today, and says "nope i'd do it all over again EXACTLY THE SAME" isn't "sticking to his core principles"...that person is stupid.
if the man could just say he made a mistake, it was bad information, now we're here, let's deal with it, i'd be a lot more tolerant. hell, i might even vote for him, as i'm no kerry fan.
lying to me about the reason you gave me, in a live televised speach, to go to war, pisses me off. lying to me says "i know what i did was wrong, but i'm too much of a chicken sh!7 to admit it".
you may feel you've found a righteous principled man to lead you. i see a man so involved in his own ego he can't think of, on the second time he's asked a question, anything has has ever done wrong (2nd and 3rd debate). and that scares me.
the real problem still is that these illegal systems are still more customer minded than the legal ones.
if the music industry would just get its head out of its a$$ and sell people the music in unrestricted formats for a reasonable price (reflecting the reduced cost of this medium), there would be no motivation to deal with these services. i mean it's not as if downloading music from kazaa is any way an easy pleasure anymore.
i actually feel that allofmp3.com has got it right. i would pay a little more, say 10 cents per mb. no restrictions, and i can get it at whatever quality i want, because i'm paying for the file size... perfect.
and i have to strongly disagree. using stored procedures as a front end to your database means i can totally resdesign databases and tables, and none of the hundreds of apps i have out there need be the wiser.
also this way i only have 1 point of failure. if something screwy is happening with the databases and info i don't have to wonder what of my many, many programs out there has some weird bug that's just started expressing itself. AND i don't have to debug any new code that i write, i have tested and retested the stored procedures. they just work.
want to change table/column names, locations, or references? knock yourself out. just change the stored procedure to return the required result sets from the new database design.
and to top this all off Microsoft SQL Server has the most awesome tools for looking for ways to clean up your sql code. i've been doing this a long time and even i find new and cool ways to tighten my sql code every day. the fact is that it will almost always run faster as a tuned, compiled stored procedure than an ad-hoc query, and in my world, query result times are what matter. i just don't see what the competition is.
i mean even simple things like analyzing the result set. i'm supposed to send all that data to the client for it to analyze what it wants? for some of my stuff that is a LOT of data. i laugh just thinking about the phone call where i explain that to get that result set i have to send you gigs of data so your computer can figure out what it really wants (granted a situation like this is rare, but they do happen).
and using some 3rd party programming language to handle this as a library or something would suffer from additional suckage. now i can only program in this language. and what happens when i want to update this library? as far as i can tell it'd be the same as just compiling the logic into the app.
i work with this stuff all the time, you can't just be recompiling and shipping out new code everytime a table changes (or is even added or removed). i'd never get any work done.
i've never tried 7up. it comes in a green can, and i've never really been a fan of green cans.
i prefer coke.
the part i'm going to leave out is i'm not sure i like coke more than 7up because i've created an opinion based on my inability to get over that damn green can...
i'm as of yet to hear a "valid legal or moral justification" for accepting the system that is being proposed to me.
let's not kid ourselves, p2p did not take off because it was this miraculous, easy, free way to get music. it became that later. napster, and others, took off because we were offered absolutely no alternative to pay for the music in this new medium to begin with.
i refuse to buy cd's anymore. it's just silly, there's no need for it, the first thing i would do is rip it. why would i pay iTunes for music that is protected from me. let's imagine in 5 years apple decides iTunes just doesn't make economic sense anymore (or even better, much nearer when music sales hit rock bottom because no one will pay $3 a song). the music industry would never stand up and say "well, not letting people listen to music they paid for is wrong, so here you go, this will unencrypt and allow you to listen to all the music you paid for". no i get the very bizarre feeling that this would just be my problem.
personally i am willing to bet on capitalism. i wouldn't pay for a cd anymore, and obviously i'm not alone. the music industry is more than welcome to raise the prices for online music, it will just accelerate the fall. there is money to be made in this business, and if we have the industry as we know it fall to pieces, someone with a better plan will step in and take over.
this new system will more than likely view me as the "customer" not the "mark"...
i believe the point you're missing is that at this point the value is not where it was. now companies can get what they've gotten in the past for much less money somewhere else. you need to evolve and find work that can't be done by someone in india for $5/hr.
this is just like the music industry. just because you've made money doing something in the past, does not entitle you to make it the same way forever...
Slashdot Mirror
if we developed a technology that allowed us to reproduce cars for free once the original was created, $25 would have the same value it has today. after the original costs had been recovered, this would be pure profit no matter what you were charging, opening up your flexibility even further.
more importantly, as time went on, an automotive company would lower prices further to encourage purchase of the older materials. this is fundamental economics that seems to elude this industry. when people aren't buying your products, either they don't want them, or you've priced them too high.
my point is that maintaining an artificialy inflated price far above what the market is willing to bear, and/or changing your policies to make those things less usable then they were before (especially without any matching incentive to do so, such as much lower prices) doesn't work for anybody else. so why should i accept DRM and laws to force it to work for the music industry?
a song is no longer worth a dollar. DRM brings no benefit at all to the consumer (seriously, name one reason a consumer, who does the purchasing, would want this in it's current form).
i find it very easy to understand why this isn't working, and it's not because people can't get enough DRM in their music.
it is now less aggrevating to rent a movie, rip, remove the annoying 5 minutes of unskippable warnings and previews, and reburn, then just to buy the movie (which i've stopped doing since buying this player).
amazing.
follow my thought here a moment. if cars cost $25 dollars, who would go through the trouble of trying to steel a car?
i wouldn't bother with trying to download an illegal copy i have no idea of it's origins and quality, if $.25 bought me an unemcumbered, guaranteed quality, file from a quality high bandwidth source. music has a very small fixed cost (compared to say a movie). there is no more distribution cost (other than some hardware and bandwidth, which compared to today's retail infrastructure is infintesimal).
to my mind the funniest thing about this whole situation is the music industry did it to themselves, and continues to perpetuate it. if they had released a quality service, at a price customers felt was fair, napster and p2p never would have stood a chance (multi-billion dollar international organizations couldn't beat a college student?). it's like watching 3dfx fall. the world was their's to loose, and at every crucial juncture they made the wrong choice.
even funnier, if they had done this, they would have grabbed complete control of the market. no one would ever have been able to compete with the content owners for the price. they would have been larger and stronger than ever. controlling the content AND distribution completely.
who devalued music to it's current status? the music industry.
now i use allofmp3.com. is it an extreme? yes. i understand that in america they probably couldn't make money at the prices i currently get. but i'd pay more. what attracts me to the service is it's nice interface. i can get the songs i want, unencumbered (and share with the girlfriend if i like it, or heaven forbid use it with a non-ipod). i hadn't bought music in years before this, now it's the first place i go when i'm looking for something new. i find what i want, i buy it without a second thought. it beats the pants off of running around usenet or p2p services trying to find the song i want, in the format and bitrate i want.
i don't ever hear a religious group standing up against any of this nonsense. so my assumption is, on some level, that everyone agrees. (where do you think an islamic leader that doesn't denounce terrorism stands?)
even in your own post, you hint at the fact that you don't necessarily believe with some of what they say, but stop short of saying what it is you disagree with in any specificity. You definitely don't denounce their actions. Instead you redirect the blame for their intolerance back on others. (as though violence and skin tone prejudices have any bearing whatsoever to a culture based on a book that clearly states slavery based on national origin is acceptable.)
want me to take you semi-seriously? say in plain uncertain terms you disagree with what they are doing. Want me to really listen to your opinion? Avoid attending services and giving your money to organizations that behave this way.
is that belief? postulating that since a god might exist, and if he does would punish you for not believing in him, doesn't sound like belief to me. it sounds like hedging your bets.
or better yet:
Today: give me your wallet, or i shoot!
Tomorrow: give me your finger, or i shoot!
an equally valid "theory" is that i, in a past life, created the universe and life because i liked the idea of having rocks around. eventually i created people b/c i wanted the rocks to get moved around on an intensely micro scale
you cannot prove yours is any more valid than mine. so as long as you put the "ryan" theory next to creationism in the textbooks then i have no problem teaching children this.
on further thought i'd like to dispute gravity too... not because i have any evidence of what did happen, but because the model isn't complete yet...
maybe you like toxic waste and disagree with this discription, not because it's untrue, but b/c it paints a picture in the average readers mind that you may not like. so you petition to have a sticker put on the front of the book that says something about how readers should be critical of all information in the book regarding Saudi Arabia.
it doesn't change the facts one bit. but now it introduces as fact, to children, something that simply isn't true.
worse, children educated elsewhere are now better prepared and educated. congratulations, you've managed to make professional success of your children inherently more difficult b/c of your own personal, irrational, bias.
mandrake 10.1 does this out of the box. i was amazed when i found it, and it worked exactly as advertised... with no configuration...
and of course taxes are going to go up. they have to. i'm being driven insane by the party line that taxes need to be kept down by the same people who are all about spending hundreds of billions of dollars waging a war that we started. i didn't want the war to begin with, and even i see that now we need to pay for it.
i read polls that say 50% of america wants bush. yet the military is having retention problems. everyone wants lower taxes. so who are these people? they want war because it's right. there were no weapons, but it's ok because sadam was evil. but they don't want war that is going to cost them money. they definitely don't want to join the military, or send their children.
what kind of policy is that? what should the iraqi's think of all this?
to my mind on this kerry's point is well taken. knowing what we know now, we should have done some things differently. to get credit with me all bush has to do is own up to that. i want to see some sign he realizes mistakes were made, learns from it, and applies it to the future decisions he makes. his platform at this point seems to be that this would be a violation of his "core values".
any man who can't even find one mistake he made in 4 years (and by the second time, i mean come on, by the 3rd debate he had already heard the question once in the 2nd) just scares the snot out of me. he has a huge ego, and any man who can't be flexible and admit when a mistake was made, doesn't deserve to be in his position.
my biggest problem here is bush's mystical belief that taking in new information and applying it to policies is "wishy washy"... no moron, that's what is called smart. any idiot who looks at the current situation, with all the knowledge he has today, and says "nope i'd do it all over again EXACTLY THE SAME" isn't "sticking to his core principles"...that person is stupid.
if the man could just say he made a mistake, it was bad information, now we're here, let's deal with it, i'd be a lot more tolerant. hell, i might even vote for him, as i'm no kerry fan.
lying to me about the reason you gave me, in a live televised speach, to go to war, pisses me off. lying to me says "i know what i did was wrong, but i'm too much of a chicken sh!7 to admit it".
you may feel you've found a righteous principled man to lead you. i see a man so involved in his own ego he can't think of, on the second time he's asked a question, anything has has ever done wrong (2nd and 3rd debate). and that scares me.
it rocks...
if the music industry would just get its head out of its a$$ and sell people the music in unrestricted formats for a reasonable price (reflecting the reduced cost of this medium), there would be no motivation to deal with these services. i mean it's not as if downloading music from kazaa is any way an easy pleasure anymore.
i actually feel that allofmp3.com has got it right. i would pay a little more, say 10 cents per mb. no restrictions, and i can get it at whatever quality i want, because i'm paying for the file size... perfect.
and i have to strongly disagree. using stored procedures as a front end to your database means i can totally resdesign databases and tables, and none of the hundreds of apps i have out there need be the wiser.
also this way i only have 1 point of failure. if something screwy is happening with the databases and info i don't have to wonder what of my many, many programs out there has some weird bug that's just started expressing itself. AND i don't have to debug any new code that i write, i have tested and retested the stored procedures. they just work.
want to change table/column names, locations, or references? knock yourself out. just change the stored procedure to return the required result sets from the new database design.
and to top this all off Microsoft SQL Server has the most awesome tools for looking for ways to clean up your sql code. i've been doing this a long time and even i find new and cool ways to tighten my sql code every day. the fact is that it will almost always run faster as a tuned, compiled stored procedure than an ad-hoc query, and in my world, query result times are what matter. i just don't see what the competition is.
i mean even simple things like analyzing the result set. i'm supposed to send all that data to the client for it to analyze what it wants? for some of my stuff that is a LOT of data. i laugh just thinking about the phone call where i explain that to get that result set i have to send you gigs of data so your computer can figure out what it really wants (granted a situation like this is rare, but they do happen).
and using some 3rd party programming language to handle this as a library or something would suffer from additional suckage. now i can only program in this language. and what happens when i want to update this library? as far as i can tell it'd be the same as just compiling the logic into the app.
i work with this stuff all the time, you can't just be recompiling and shipping out new code everytime a table changes (or is even added or removed). i'd never get any work done.
inane...
i've never tried 7up. it comes in a green can, and i've never really been a fan of green cans.
i prefer coke.
the part i'm going to leave out is i'm not sure i like coke more than 7up because i've created an opinion based on my inability to get over that damn green can...
i guess i don't get the point of the comment
i believe the point you're missing is that at this point the value is not where it was. now companies can get what they've gotten in the past for much less money somewhere else. you need to evolve and find work that can't be done by someone in india for $5/hr.
this is just like the music industry. just because you've made money doing something in the past, does not entitle you to make it the same way forever...