You are not bidding again. You are changing what your maximum bid is. As someone else said, if this was a real auction with a real proxy, that would be a private phone call that the auction house knew nothing of.
Ebay is basically forcing people to use their proxy (to the best of my knowledge there is no other way to bid), and then penalising them for doing so.
1. Yes, but not if you bid first. If you bid first with a max greater than the current bid, but less than (current bid + increment), you are allowed to bid your max even though it's not a full increment.
2.He presumably wanted to bid higher if he had to to win the auction, but not if he didn't have to. His bid has been increased *even though it was winning*, which is what he's complaining about.
Yes, and that's exactly what the lawsuit's objecting to. When the grandparent puts it the way he does, it makes sense. But from the buyer's point of view, he's paying £4 extra just because he's increased his max bid.
They do make money from it. It's only a couple of cents an auction, but what people seem to be missing is that there are millions of auctions happening, a little bit on each one of them adds up to serious money. As for 1), this could be compared to shill bidding, which is illegal. You only agree to pay the minimum you have to to win the auction, not the max you entered
But at the moment it's already going for $110. Although this was the highest you thought you'd go to, you now decide you really want it, so you'll go to $210 if someone outbids you with $160. But as soon as you make this decision, your bid rises to $150? Doesn't make sense with the analogy to me. If it's going to be analogous to a traditional auction, they shouldn't let you enter a max that isn't a whole number of increments.
But I can't imagine that the ability to easily make copies of everything will allow everyone to quit their jobs and live in some utopian society where everything is free and everyone gets what they want.
Bluntly, I can and I do. I believe, perhaps optimistically, that people are on the whole good, that this is a good thing, and that people will try and do this.
Why would Sony invest time and money in making the next generation of TVs (or whatever) if no one's gonna buy them?
If the current generation is good enough, they won't, but why do they need to? I don't see forced upgrades to maintain sales as a good thing. If the newer TVs really make the difference, then someone who cars a lot will make one, or find some way to persuade others to.
So really, only the people who actually like what they do would continue working. For example I could see a lot of research and development work continuing, but all those shitty jobs that no one wants? Looks like everyone decided to quit. Hey, if you can copy whatever you need, why work?
You say it like you see this as a bad thing.
And how do you know that the great artists were happy with these sort of agreements? Maybe they just took what they could get? There wasn't a "music industry" like there is today, so they really had no other options except to just starve to death (or get another job).
The fact that they didn't go get another job shows that this was a better deal than the average person got. Which is all anyone deserves, imo, no matter how talented they are. I don't feel that you deserve a much better lifestyle than a normal person just because you can sing well - an artistic career doesn't seem to involve much more hard work than any other
What makes that any better than the current way of doing it? Why should one person have to pay some exorbitant amount of money for an artist to create something so that everyone else can get it for free?
It's better because there is less emphasis on selling to as many people as possible. Artists don't need to be mainstream and try and appeal to everyone, which results in blandness. You can make just as much by having a small, very dedicated group of fans, as by being liked a bit by everyone. Also, there is less of the black and white distinction between those who make it and those who don't. At the moment there are a few bands who stay small and keep going for years, but it takes a lot of dedication and they usually have a pretty low standard of living. When it's a negotiated fee for a commissioned work, there are more levels in between. You buy a piece from the biggest local band you can afford. Because there are more medium people than rich people, bands can be successful without being top flight, ultimately resulting in more successful bands.
I can't imagine all music being paid for by rich people who want to have an artist perform at some event and then recording it and letting everyone else copy it. What about studio recordings? Are all new albums going to be paid for by these rich people, just for the privelage of sitting in the studio while everything is being recorded? Oh and they get to keep the master tapes, but there isn't much difference between them and the copies. They sound pretty much identical. I could care less if I own the original 2" tapes or hard drives that an album was recorded on.
I can. I can't say that's the way it's going to be, but I see it as a possibility. I would certainly pay a lot to be sitting in the studio, giving input, when one of my favorite bands was making a new album, and being the first person to hear it. I probably couldn't afford to do it with the superstars, but a small local group, maybe someone I know in it, yeah I'd pay to do that even if the songs were free afterwards. When I got married (I said I was optimistic) I'd get a new song performed there, maybe other birthdays if I did well enough.
It's possible that things working this way would make it impossible for artists to become really big, because most people can't afford it. But I think there's probably enough rich people around. And even if not, if it means more artists make a comfortable living, then it's worth it.
It is obvious when you think about it, but people forget. When the poster I was replying to says "Because it hasn't worked and won't work. itune sells at $.99 per song and makes the tinyest profit after a couple of years... you think $14 per month for thousands of songs per subscription/month is even worth the time you took to post?" he's wrong. It won't work with the current RIAA system. But in the end, it will work. Yeah, I'm just stating the obvious, but sometimes people need reminding of it.
I question it to the extent I simply don't believe in it. I think the Israeli explanation that gravity falls off slower than one over r squared at big distances is more likely, and the Pioneer anomalies give it some support. Much as I hate to lose the first ever universal law, I think this makes more sense.
Just look at any major religion's response to any challenge to its sacred writings. I cannot think of a single religion which does not claim that its sacred text(s) is absolutely correct, and if something disagrees with them then it's the universe which must be wrong.
Out of curiousity, what is the evidenced effect that you are saying is caused by "God" until you know what the thing causing it really is?
Stars orbiting faster than Newtownian gravity as tested with the planets going round our sun suggests they should is a pretty strongly evidenced and testable (just look through your telescope) effect. I haven't seen anything like that which suggests the existence of anything I'm inclined to call "God".
Basic principles seem to be where we differ then. I think it will be OK to stop buying things at all. It strikes me as absurd to insist that people have to keep working when there's no need for it. If you can copy everything like that, most jobs will disappear. Are you going to insist that large numbers of people should starve because they have no job and no money, when they could replicate food at no cost to anyone - well, except possibly the food companies, since they are reducing the cost of food by getting theirs for free, when they should be begging to get enough money to live on, or something. In a world where you can copy anything for free, saying you are allowed to copy anything seems to me to be the only sensible choice.
With other things, I will try to get for free what I can't afford. I'll borrow a book from a library, or buy it secondhand, if I want a book and have spent all I can on books for the month. If I want a coat and have spent what I can on clothes, I'll look for one in a charity shop or something. If I need a new graphics card and can't afford one I'll put a note in my/. sig asking for one. (Well, I did this once anyway). My "I can afford it" list is what I really like, and I do make an effort to buy what I downloaded last month if I have money spare this month. I take your point about me getting value from it, but the way I see it, if it has no effect on me whether or not you have something, why should I want you not to have it?
I don't think it should be illegal to copy things. Your plasma TV analogy is a perfect example really - provided he lets you, I think you should be able to make a copy. The way I see it that's likely to lead to a better lifestyle for most of humanity than artificial scarcity of things. I know when reading science fiction, the societies where you can get anything you want just by asking for it seem like a better one to live in - I'm thinking of Peter Hamilton's The Naked God mainly here, where it is seen as self-evident that a free matter replicator will solve most of humanity's problems as exemplified by the other society which has such a thing, also perhaps to a lesser extent the Culture.
One last argument: the great artists did not live by having control over the reproduction of their works. Michaelangelo, Beethoven, Shakespeare didn't make a living getting royalties of the copies sold - Shakespeare sold copies of his scripts for a few pence on the way out. They made their money through commissioned works, and selling them to people who wanted to see them first. Some owners would then keep an original painting secret and their own - but most would sell copies of it to others, at far lower prices than they had paid, and not give the original artist any of it. It's the original which costs the money, the copying is peanuts - which was reflected in the pricing. It's only in the past few centuries that a business model based on restricting copying and selling every copy for the same price has existed. I think a return to the old model is the most likely result of the ease of digital copying, and see this as no bad thing. The wealthy or truly fanatic will pay bands to produce a song for them, and probably perform it for them at some event - royal birthdays spring to mind. Therafter it will be released to the public for all to enjoy - but the person who paid holds the original, and everyone knows it, and purists insist you haven't heard it until you've heard the original. It doesn't matter that they're the same.
The fact that C-3PO puts ten times as much emotion into his lines as Anakin does. Oh, and the fact that most those lines are incredibly cheasy head jokes. And that Obi-Wan comes across as being incredibly pompous because he's talking like he's the wisest guy in the universe and he's nowhere near old enough.
Companies are starting to have digital signatures on their firmware and BIOS, mostly to stop geeks messing with them but it also stops this happening. The limited space available and the difficulty of programming at such a low level also puts a bios-level rootkit beyond the capabilities of most script kiddies. It's doable, but very hard - even when viruses were hand-coded in assembley, very few of them went near the bios, and those that did usually just trashed it.
Running as Administrator *is* bad, because any vulnerability means you are rooted. If an attacker has to find a privilidge escalation bug as well to get root on your system, although this is far from impossible it adds another layer of security.
They know it already, but you're still making them aware of it. The problem is that the law requires them to report not only when their service is being used to access child porn, but when it can be used to access child porn. From TFA, all that needs to happen is for the ISP to be "made aware that their service can be used to access material that they have reasonable grounds to believe is child pornography or child abuse material". I suppose you might be able to argue that someone telling them without references is not reasonable grounds, but I wouldn't want to risk it.
The implementation. C# has a pretty decent open implementation which I can fork and add my own bits to. I don't care if my new language isn't C#, I don't even care if I have to rename it, but I do care about whether I can make a new language with the bits I want without having to reimplement the whole language from scratch, which is pretty much the case with Java. (Yes there are free implementations around which do a bit of the language, but a lot is missing - and iirc, they can't even publish the partially-implemented versions).
How would I propose changes to C#? I'd implement them, and submit them to mono and MS, and we'd see if they got adopted. If they were useful enough to warrant changing the language, they would get adopted. I trust this mechanism a lot more than a committee.
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Ebay is basically forcing people to use their proxy (to the best of my knowledge there is no other way to bid), and then penalising them for doing so.
2.He presumably wanted to bid higher if he had to to win the auction, but not if he didn't have to. His bid has been increased *even though it was winning*, which is what he's complaining about.
Yes, and that's exactly what the lawsuit's objecting to. When the grandparent puts it the way he does, it makes sense. But from the buyer's point of view, he's paying £4 extra just because he's increased his max bid.
They do make money from it. It's only a couple of cents an auction, but what people seem to be missing is that there are millions of auctions happening, a little bit on each one of them adds up to serious money. As for 1), this could be compared to shill bidding, which is illegal. You only agree to pay the minimum you have to to win the auction, not the max you entered
Possible but unlikely. I think they would get in serious trouble if they didn't record the actual bids.
But at the moment it's already going for $110. Although this was the highest you thought you'd go to, you now decide you really want it, so you'll go to $210 if someone outbids you with $160. But as soon as you make this decision, your bid rises to $150? Doesn't make sense with the analogy to me. If it's going to be analogous to a traditional auction, they shouldn't let you enter a max that isn't a whole number of increments.
It doesn't immediately make sense. Just because I raised my maximum, I have to make another bid, even though my bid was winning?
Of course not. This is only a minor release.
Try Konqueror or Epiphany under linux and Opera under windows for slower machines.
Bluntly, I can and I do. I believe, perhaps optimistically, that people are on the whole good, that this is a good thing, and that people will try and do this.
Why would Sony invest time and money in making the next generation of TVs (or whatever) if no one's gonna buy them?
If the current generation is good enough, they won't, but why do they need to? I don't see forced upgrades to maintain sales as a good thing. If the newer TVs really make the difference, then someone who cars a lot will make one, or find some way to persuade others to.
So really, only the people who actually like what they do would continue working. For example I could see a lot of research and development work continuing, but all those shitty jobs that no one wants? Looks like everyone decided to quit. Hey, if you can copy whatever you need, why work?
You say it like you see this as a bad thing.
And how do you know that the great artists were happy with these sort of agreements? Maybe they just took what they could get? There wasn't a "music industry" like there is today, so they really had no other options except to just starve to death (or get another job).
The fact that they didn't go get another job shows that this was a better deal than the average person got. Which is all anyone deserves, imo, no matter how talented they are. I don't feel that you deserve a much better lifestyle than a normal person just because you can sing well - an artistic career doesn't seem to involve much more hard work than any other
What makes that any better than the current way of doing it? Why should one person have to pay some exorbitant amount of money for an artist to create something so that everyone else can get it for free?
It's better because there is less emphasis on selling to as many people as possible. Artists don't need to be mainstream and try and appeal to everyone, which results in blandness. You can make just as much by having a small, very dedicated group of fans, as by being liked a bit by everyone. Also, there is less of the black and white distinction between those who make it and those who don't. At the moment there are a few bands who stay small and keep going for years, but it takes a lot of dedication and they usually have a pretty low standard of living. When it's a negotiated fee for a commissioned work, there are more levels in between. You buy a piece from the biggest local band you can afford. Because there are more medium people than rich people, bands can be successful without being top flight, ultimately resulting in more successful bands.
I can't imagine all music being paid for by rich people who want to have an artist perform at some event and then recording it and letting everyone else copy it. What about studio recordings? Are all new albums going to be paid for by these rich people, just for the privelage of sitting in the studio while everything is being recorded? Oh and they get to keep the master tapes, but there isn't much difference between them and the copies. They sound pretty much identical. I could care less if I own the original 2" tapes or hard drives that an album was recorded on.
I can. I can't say that's the way it's going to be, but I see it as a possibility. I would certainly pay a lot to be sitting in the studio, giving input, when one of my favorite bands was making a new album, and being the first person to hear it. I probably couldn't afford to do it with the superstars, but a small local group, maybe someone I know in it, yeah I'd pay to do that even if the songs were free afterwards. When I got married (I said I was optimistic) I'd get a new song performed there, maybe other birthdays if I did well enough.
It's possible that things working this way would make it impossible for artists to become really big, because most people can't afford it. But I think there's probably enough rich people around. And even if not, if it means more artists make a comfortable living, then it's worth it.
It is obvious when you think about it, but people forget. When the poster I was replying to says "Because it hasn't worked and won't work. itune sells at $.99 per song and makes the tinyest profit after a couple of years... you think $14 per month for thousands of songs per subscription/month is even worth the time you took to post?" he's wrong. It won't work with the current RIAA system. But in the end, it will work. Yeah, I'm just stating the obvious, but sometimes people need reminding of it.
Because Java looks butt-ugly, and is very slow. Call me a troll if you like but it's true.
I question it to the extent I simply don't believe in it. I think the Israeli explanation that gravity falls off slower than one over r squared at big distances is more likely, and the Pioneer anomalies give it some support. Much as I hate to lose the first ever universal law, I think this makes more sense.
Just look at any major religion's response to any challenge to its sacred writings. I cannot think of a single religion which does not claim that its sacred text(s) is absolutely correct, and if something disagrees with them then it's the universe which must be wrong.
Stars orbiting faster than Newtownian gravity as tested with the planets going round our sun suggests they should is a pretty strongly evidenced and testable (just look through your telescope) effect. I haven't seen anything like that which suggests the existence of anything I'm inclined to call "God".
Slashdotters can still get social security
With other things, I will try to get for free what I can't afford. I'll borrow a book from a library, or buy it secondhand, if I want a book and have spent all I can on books for the month. If I want a coat and have spent what I can on clothes, I'll look for one in a charity shop or something. If I need a new graphics card and can't afford one I'll put a note in my /. sig asking for one. (Well, I did this once anyway). My "I can afford it" list is what I really like, and I do make an effort to buy what I downloaded last month if I have money spare this month. I take your point about me getting value from it, but the way I see it, if it has no effect on me whether or not you have something, why should I want you not to have it?
I don't think it should be illegal to copy things. Your plasma TV analogy is a perfect example really - provided he lets you, I think you should be able to make a copy. The way I see it that's likely to lead to a better lifestyle for most of humanity than artificial scarcity of things. I know when reading science fiction, the societies where you can get anything you want just by asking for it seem like a better one to live in - I'm thinking of Peter Hamilton's The Naked God mainly here, where it is seen as self-evident that a free matter replicator will solve most of humanity's problems as exemplified by the other society which has such a thing, also perhaps to a lesser extent the Culture.
One last argument: the great artists did not live by having control over the reproduction of their works. Michaelangelo, Beethoven, Shakespeare didn't make a living getting royalties of the copies sold - Shakespeare sold copies of his scripts for a few pence on the way out. They made their money through commissioned works, and selling them to people who wanted to see them first. Some owners would then keep an original painting secret and their own - but most would sell copies of it to others, at far lower prices than they had paid, and not give the original artist any of it. It's the original which costs the money, the copying is peanuts - which was reflected in the pricing. It's only in the past few centuries that a business model based on restricting copying and selling every copy for the same price has existed. I think a return to the old model is the most likely result of the ease of digital copying, and see this as no bad thing. The wealthy or truly fanatic will pay bands to produce a song for them, and probably perform it for them at some event - royal birthdays spring to mind. Therafter it will be released to the public for all to enjoy - but the person who paid holds the original, and everyone knows it, and purists insist you haven't heard it until you've heard the original. It doesn't matter that they're the same.
Maybe he was trying to make up for his robotic voice.
The fact that C-3PO puts ten times as much emotion into his lines as Anakin does. Oh, and the fact that most those lines are incredibly cheasy head jokes. And that Obi-Wan comes across as being incredibly pompous because he's talking like he's the wisest guy in the universe and he's nowhere near old enough.
Companies are starting to have digital signatures on their firmware and BIOS, mostly to stop geeks messing with them but it also stops this happening. The limited space available and the difficulty of programming at such a low level also puts a bios-level rootkit beyond the capabilities of most script kiddies. It's doable, but very hard - even when viruses were hand-coded in assembley, very few of them went near the bios, and those that did usually just trashed it.
Running as Administrator *is* bad, because any vulnerability means you are rooted. If an attacker has to find a privilidge escalation bug as well to get root on your system, although this is far from impossible it adds another layer of security.
They know it already, but you're still making them aware of it. The problem is that the law requires them to report not only when their service is being used to access child porn, but when it can be used to access child porn. From TFA, all that needs to happen is for the ISP to be "made aware that their service can be used to access material that they have reasonable grounds to believe is child pornography or child abuse material". I suppose you might be able to argue that someone telling them without references is not reasonable grounds, but I wouldn't want to risk it.
How would I propose changes to C#? I'd implement them, and submit them to mono and MS, and we'd see if they got adopted. If they were useful enough to warrant changing the language, they would get adopted. I trust this mechanism a lot more than a committee.
No, that's 300% power, not 300% more power. If they had 5/4 times as much power, that would only be 25% more power, though 125% power.
Since Taco realised he could buy the stock just before posting the story? :)