I almost never buy a new game until it's marked down in the $10-$15 rack. By that time the DRM is often gone and/or irrelevant, the bugs are patched, add-ons sequels are available, and the necessary hardware is pretty cheap too. As long as I stay consistently several years behind, it's all fresh and exciting to my eyes, because I'm only comparing it to even older games.
How is it a scam to give paying customers what they want? This is just capitalism at work. If customers don't like the latest crop 3D movies they won't pay to see them, and the fad will die quickly. If they do like it enough to pay $10+ a ticket, then what is the complaint?
One can grouse about poor quality and cheap conversions, but right now 3D entertainment is in its infancy. It's little more than a novelty. But hey, isn't novelty and vapid thrills what movies are all about? It's not like this is something even remotely important. Besides if this is successful the technology will improve, the quality will improve, and the infrastructure will be upgraded.
It's no different than color movies. If people want to see an old B&W movie in color, why not colorize it? If they want to see Titanic in 3D who cares? The original is still there for purists.
Tech is always this way: you live with half-baked goods for years before the technology matures. Some people (early adopters) pay for it, others stay away until later. The Apple II was a scam by this logic.
Your hand is always full. If you don't have an apple, you may have an orange. If you don't have an orange, you might have any of a million other things. When your hand contains air, we say it is empty, even though it is not. Emptiness is only an abstraction, and it is assigned to a specific content.
You do realize that if they were called Belgian Fries, the name would quickly be shortened to "Belch Fries." Naturally they would be even more popular among children than they already are, exacerbating the obesity problem.
It would not only be grossly unfair, but just plain gross.
Abortion, if you're not killing a person (tricky thing to define, I admit, but your arm is alive and removing ('aborting') it is no moral problem) and I feel the same way about an unthinking fetus.
What if I remove your arm without your permission? I think it becomes a moral problem when it belongs to someone else.
As to the thinking/unthinking bit, does it become morally acceptable for me to remove your arms if I render you unconscious first? Sure you'll become conscious again later, but so will the fetus.
Though honestly I think even removing one's own arm is morally questionable. If your mom tried to cut off her own arm, or slit her wrists, you'd likely intervene to prevent it and seek psychological help for her 'mental illness', at least I hope you would. We don't just smile and turn away. Removing an arm is only considered acceptable if it is diseased or crippled beyond repair. Some forms of self mutilation are of course accepted (plastic surgery, sex change, etc) though even so they remain controversial.
On topic, I agree that anonymity is valuable and worth preserving. Free speech is only free when there is no danger of reprisal, and anonymity is the only way to truly achieve that in this world.
Anonymity is self-limiting anyway. People take anonymous speech with a grain of salt if they pay any attention at all, and the speaker doesn't get credit for his words. It's useful when it's the only way to speak out, but it is severely limited.
How do you sell water? You clean it up so it tastes better, package it for convenience, and brand it. (Branding provides both convenience in selecting a product as well as assurance of quality.)
Anyone could do the same for themselves of course. Water is freely available, and it can be purified and bottled if you have time and effort. Many people appreciate the convenience but don't have time to do it themselves, nor the inclination to spend money on filters, distillers, or disposable bottles.
When you buy water, you are paying for service and convenience.
Most people don't have the time or knowledge to download linux, build a distro, figure out how to install it, tune an installation, fix issues, etc. And having the source code to everything is nice... if you have the skill and time to actually do something with it.
In a pure FOSS world I think maybe there would be no software companies. There would be businesses that have software staff to develop and maintain the software they use, and software outsourcers providing these services to smaller businesses. But programmers would be similar to maintenance personnell: they provide support and infrastructure, but are not producing product for sale. Software becomes like the water inside a plumbing system, and programmers are the plumbers that design the system and keep it flowing.
To get there, businesses would need to stop viewing software as an asset that they can own and sell, and start viewing it as overhead, even a raw material. Hard to see this happening any time soon.
The American people don't want safety, they want wealth. Corporations want wealth. Rich politicians want wealth. They don't trust stability, and they don't trust the government, and they certainly don't trust each other. They trust wealth and only wealth. Just give me enough money and I'm immune to everything. It's every man for himself in a greed-for-all.
Ron Paul promoted stability, discipline, and responsibility and nobody gave him the time of day. It's not the message they want to hear. Safety over wealth is political suicide in this nation of "I want more than the other guy, and I want it NOW."
What if your ATM machine presented you with a list of five different banks and you had to choose which one to pay? And if you hit the wrong button you paid the wrong bank, and they gleefully took your money and said nothing. Now you're out 20% of your income and your mortgage is still unpaid! But wait, it's also a cash transfer with no records or receipts, so you cannot prove anything. And even worse, the ATM that does these cash transactions is managed by a faceless third party, perhaps volunteers or petty beureaucrats who may own stock in a rival bank or might even divert the funds into their own accounts, with nobody the wiser.
The problem is that A can never win as long as B exists.
B exists because the B-promoters want to give as little as possible while preventing C from winning. You don't have to be best, you just have to be better than C.
The only way to get rid of B is to never let it win. The B-promoters don't want C to win, and if they see they can't win with B they'll shift ground until they can win.
So, you have to call their bluff, and that means you are going to have to lose at least once to get your point across. In all likelihood you'll have to suck up a few losses if you want to change the world. But if you can keep B from winning eventually their hatred for C will force them to join you.
Now it is possible that there are enough other idiots to vote for B anyway, in which case your vote is irrelevant. So you really have nothing to lose by voting your conscience, and everything to gain.
"Blessed are those who do not condemn themselves by what they approve." -- Romans 14:22
Yes there's a lot of DVDs I would buy if they were that cheap.
As it is I don't pirate, but I don't buy DVDs either. I did do some pirating back in the napster era. I didn't buy stuff before I did that, I didn't buy stuff afterwards. It justs costs too much, the value is not nearly high enough. So I pirated stuff that was essentially worthless to me. Most of it I listened to maybe once or twice, some I never listened to, just "collected" because it was out there.
A lot of stuff wasn't even worth pirating, because the annoyance of waiting for the download to complete or retrying failed downloads was greater than the value of the content itself.
I don't even buy songs for 99c (well I did one) because I think it's overpriced. It's not worth a buck for a song I might listen to once or twice, if ever.
But if I could buy entire albums or movies for $1 there are quite a few I would buy. At least in my case their revenues would increase by dropping the price to 1/15.
But there is still plenty of dreck I wouldn't pay even $1 for.
Now there is material I downloaded for free that I listen to ALL THE TIME. All day every day. But it's not produced by the RIAA, and it's not pirated. Most of it came is independent artists from the now defuct mp3.com. Too bad it's gone.
I will also add that every new album I have personally purchased in the last decade was from music that I downloaded out of curiousity, liked, and purchased a CD because I wanted more from the same artist, and I wanted better quality than MP3. I can't speak for others, but that's my experience and nowadays I will not buy anything I can't listen to first. Because of download sampling, the quality of music I purchased on CD as skyrocketed as I am able to avoid the merely good in favor of the excellent. I can be selective.
I think that's what the labels are really afraid of. They want us to buy blind, because then they can sell us crap and by the time we figure it out it's too late.
When I was younger I bought a number of albums on speculation, because they were popular or had cool cover art or were even follow-on material from bands I thought I liked. I bought a lot of garbage that way that I hated and never listened to. That's why I largely stopped buying stuff. It was a shot in the dark and the odds were against me. I bought almost nothing for 10 years, and didn't re-start until the Napster era. I also only bought old familiar stuff until the Napster era, and then I started getting back into new material.
Music is an art. People make music because they like to do it. People will make music whether you pay them to do it or not, for nothing more than fun and fame. Just like free software.
Record companies had a good thing going as long as we had to buy blind and they had no competition. Now they have competition from talented amateurs; that alone would be enough to decimate their sales. And the ability to try before you buy means the decades of easy living are over. They have to work to find talented artists who are willing to sign their contracts, and good enough that even after listening to them you still want to buy their material.
That's as is should be. I don't favor piracy, but I think music wants to be free. Heck music IS free. You can do it, I can do it. If someone wants to sell it they better be GOOD.
Slashdot Mirror
Preciouss datumses, gollum
Surely you meant Saturn, not the moon.
For sightseeing, it's hard to beat a tropical beach and booze goggles. Also, no sunshine at home, and the water's freezing cold.
Charlemagne begs to differ. So does William the Conqueror. And Napoleon.
I almost never buy a new game until it's marked down in the $10-$15 rack. By that time the DRM is often gone and/or irrelevant, the bugs are patched, add-ons sequels are available, and the necessary hardware is pretty cheap too. As long as I stay consistently several years behind, it's all fresh and exciting to my eyes, because I'm only comparing it to even older games.
How is it a scam to give paying customers what they want? This is just capitalism at work. If customers don't like the latest crop 3D movies they won't pay to see them, and the fad will die quickly. If they do like it enough to pay $10+ a ticket, then what is the complaint?
One can grouse about poor quality and cheap conversions, but right now 3D entertainment is in its infancy. It's little more than a novelty. But hey, isn't novelty and vapid thrills what movies are all about? It's not like this is something even remotely important. Besides if this is successful the technology will improve, the quality will improve, and the infrastructure will be upgraded.
It's no different than color movies. If people want to see an old B&W movie in color, why not colorize it? If they want to see Titanic in 3D who cares? The original is still there for purists.
Tech is always this way: you live with half-baked goods for years before the technology matures. Some people (early adopters) pay for it, others stay away until later. The Apple II was a scam by this logic.
> So what's up with all the innocent people sitting in jail who could be proven innocent by DNS testing?
But I really didn't back the DNS server, your Honor!
Hopefully Google will buy FB so we don't have to worry about someone using the data for evil.
WTF? Must be a japanese invention. What does it do, give a robotic tongue bath? I think I'd want to hide it in the closet too!
No, a 'computer father' is like a 'godfather', only digital.
We got buried in Oregon too; we don't use salt either and I'm glad. Salt just corrodes everything. I can live with a few days of ice each year.
I guess their administrative METHOD IS Too inflexible.
I haven't been able to do anything useful with the signal yet
Build a detector?
Your hand is always full. If you don't have an apple, you may have an orange. If you don't have an orange, you might have any of a million other things. When your hand contains air, we say it is empty, even though it is not. Emptiness is only an abstraction, and it is assigned to a specific content.
NULL is the air in your hand.
No kidding, 0.000003048 of a quadrant of the earth is so much more intuitive with than 100 feet.
Nothing to add, but I agree. If I had mod points I'd use them here.
You do realize that if they were called Belgian Fries, the name would quickly be shortened to "Belch Fries." Naturally they would be even more popular among children than they already are, exacerbating the obesity problem.
It would not only be grossly unfair, but just plain gross.
Abortion, if you're not killing a person (tricky thing to define, I admit, but your arm is alive and removing ('aborting') it is no moral problem) and I feel the same way about an unthinking fetus.
What if I remove your arm without your permission? I think it becomes a moral problem when it belongs to someone else.
As to the thinking/unthinking bit, does it become morally acceptable for me to remove your arms if I render you unconscious first? Sure you'll become conscious again later, but so will the fetus.
Though honestly I think even removing one's own arm is morally questionable. If your mom tried to cut off her own arm, or slit her wrists, you'd likely intervene to prevent it and seek psychological help for her 'mental illness', at least I hope you would. We don't just smile and turn away. Removing an arm is only considered acceptable if it is diseased or crippled beyond repair. Some forms of self mutilation are of course accepted (plastic surgery, sex change, etc) though even so they remain controversial.
On topic, I agree that anonymity is valuable and worth preserving. Free speech is only free when there is no danger of reprisal, and anonymity is the only way to truly achieve that in this world.
Anonymity is self-limiting anyway. People take anonymous speech with a grain of salt if they pay any attention at all, and the speaker doesn't get credit for his words. It's useful when it's the only way to speak out, but it is severely limited.
How do you sell water? You clean it up so it tastes better, package it for convenience, and brand it. (Branding provides both convenience in selecting a product as well as assurance of quality.)
Anyone could do the same for themselves of course. Water is freely available, and it can be purified and bottled if you have time and effort. Many people appreciate the convenience but don't have time to do it themselves, nor the inclination to spend money on filters, distillers, or disposable bottles.
When you buy water, you are paying for service and convenience.
Most people don't have the time or knowledge to download linux, build a distro, figure out how to install it, tune an installation, fix issues, etc. And having the source code to everything is nice... if you have the skill and time to actually do something with it.
In a pure FOSS world I think maybe there would be no software companies. There would be businesses that have software staff to develop and maintain the software they use, and software outsourcers providing these services to smaller businesses. But programmers would be similar to maintenance personnell: they provide support and infrastructure, but are not producing product for sale. Software becomes like the water inside a plumbing system, and programmers are the plumbers that design the system and keep it flowing.
To get there, businesses would need to stop viewing software as an asset that they can own and sell, and start viewing it as overhead, even a raw material. Hard to see this happening any time soon.
The American people don't want safety, they want wealth. Corporations want wealth. Rich politicians want wealth. They don't trust stability, and they don't trust the government, and they certainly don't trust each other. They trust wealth and only wealth. Just give me enough money and I'm immune to everything. It's every man for himself in a greed-for-all.
Ron Paul promoted stability, discipline, and responsibility and nobody gave him the time of day. It's not the message they want to hear. Safety over wealth is political suicide in this nation of "I want more than the other guy, and I want it NOW."
Any sufficiently flat warm diet mountain dew is indistinguishable from... never mind.
What if your ATM machine presented you with a list of five different banks and you had to choose which one to pay? And if you hit the wrong button you paid the wrong bank, and they gleefully took your money and said nothing. Now you're out 20% of your income and your mortgage is still unpaid! But wait, it's also a cash transfer with no records or receipts, so you cannot prove anything. And even worse, the ATM that does these cash transactions is managed by a faceless third party, perhaps volunteers or petty beureaucrats who may own stock in a rival bank or might even divert the funds into their own accounts, with nobody the wiser.
Would you still trust the ATM?
They have her confession as proof.
The problem is that A can never win as long as B exists.
B exists because the B-promoters want to give as little as possible while preventing C from winning. You don't have to be best, you just have to be better than C.
The only way to get rid of B is to never let it win. The B-promoters don't want C to win, and if they see they can't win with B they'll shift ground until they can win.
So, you have to call their bluff, and that means you are going to have to lose at least once to get your point across. In all likelihood you'll have to suck up a few losses if you want to change the world. But if you can keep B from winning eventually their hatred for C will force them to join you.
Now it is possible that there are enough other idiots to vote for B anyway, in which case your vote is irrelevant. So you really have nothing to lose by voting your conscience, and everything to gain.
"Blessed are those who do not condemn themselves by what they approve." -- Romans 14:22
Yes there's a lot of DVDs I would buy if they were that cheap.
As it is I don't pirate, but I don't buy DVDs either. I did do some pirating back in the napster era. I didn't buy stuff before I did that, I didn't buy stuff afterwards. It justs costs too much, the value is not nearly high enough. So I pirated stuff that was essentially worthless to me. Most of it I listened to maybe once or twice, some I never listened to, just "collected" because it was out there.
A lot of stuff wasn't even worth pirating, because the annoyance of waiting for the download to complete or retrying failed downloads was greater than the value of the content itself.
I don't even buy songs for 99c (well I did one) because I think it's overpriced. It's not worth a buck for a song I might listen to once or twice, if ever.
But if I could buy entire albums or movies for $1 there are quite a few I would buy. At least in my case their revenues would increase by dropping the price to 1/15.
But there is still plenty of dreck I wouldn't pay even $1 for.
Now there is material I downloaded for free that I listen to ALL THE TIME. All day every day. But it's not produced by the RIAA, and it's not pirated. Most of it came is independent artists from the now defuct mp3.com. Too bad it's gone.
I will also add that every new album I have personally purchased in the last decade was from music that I downloaded out of curiousity, liked, and purchased a CD because I wanted more from the same artist, and I wanted better quality than MP3. I can't speak for others, but that's my experience and nowadays I will not buy anything I can't listen to first. Because of download sampling, the quality of music I purchased on CD as skyrocketed as I am able to avoid the merely good in favor of the excellent. I can be selective.
I think that's what the labels are really afraid of. They want us to buy blind, because then they can sell us crap and by the time we figure it out it's too late.
When I was younger I bought a number of albums on speculation, because they were popular or had cool cover art or were even follow-on material from bands I thought I liked. I bought a lot of garbage that way that I hated and never listened to. That's why I largely stopped buying stuff. It was a shot in the dark and the odds were against me. I bought almost nothing for 10 years, and didn't re-start until the Napster era. I also only bought old familiar stuff until the Napster era, and then I started getting back into new material.
Music is an art. People make music because they like to do it. People will make music whether you pay them to do it or not, for nothing more than fun and fame. Just like free software.
Record companies had a good thing going as long as we had to buy blind and they had no competition. Now they have competition from talented amateurs; that alone would be enough to decimate their sales. And the ability to try before you buy means the decades of easy living are over. They have to work to find talented artists who are willing to sign their contracts, and good enough that even after listening to them you still want to buy their material.
That's as is should be. I don't favor piracy, but I think music wants to be free. Heck music IS free. You can do it, I can do it. If someone wants to sell it they better be GOOD.