I'd push more for 15 to 30 years. Not every idea can be rolled out at Web 3.0 speeds. Anything that requires physical manufacturing, quality control, and any kind of regulatory oversight can't hope to go from concept to consumer within less than 2 years.
Fuck copyright law, what was that bit about cheapo Lambos?
Just this, say I'm a rich Italian dude and I get pissed at old man Enzo and tell him "F you, I'll make my own", and I spend a billion or so (in today's dollars) engineering a truly unique automobile, and I promote it, at considerable expense, as "the best of the best", and to whatever degree, I succeed in selling something that's not really any better than a Chevy Corvette in any meaningful objective measure, except possibly its distinctive look, and selling it for 5-10x the price of the Corvette, depending on options.
If some two-bit knock-off werks starts turning out fiberglass bodies that mount on old VW-bug frames that look, from 10' away, EXACTLY like the car that I spent all of this time and money developing and promoting, I damn well should be able to tell them to cease and desist, and have it stick, assuming I have paid off the proper authorities in whatever country they are operating in. The existence of the cheap knock-offs diminishes the exclusivity and value of the real thing, and most of the value of the knock-off comes from the investments that were made in the original.
There are other sides to the picture, imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, etc., but... copyright does have a place in encouraging creative work for profit.
Unfortunately, the people who have been profiting (massively) from copyright protection have also been successfully changing the laws recently until their terms are bordering on absurd, I'd say they are on the far side of the absurd border. Any person, or family, who can't make a decent living with 30 years of copyright protection needs to find another line of work - excessively long copyright protection terms encourage sloth and greed, not creative productivity.
Depends on your idea of what is a fun game. If I can have an Atari 800 emulator and M.U.L.E. on my PS3, that pretty much doubles the entertainment value of the machine for my family.
Yeah, GT5 is more impressive, but racing split-screen isn't nearly as easy or fun as playing a highly multi-player oriented game like M.U.L.E.
Why aren't you using your PS3 to watch Hulu on your TV, the PS3's web browser is capable of it.
It wasn't (hulu capable) the last time I tried... haven't tried in several months. We only watch one show off of hulu, not for lack of selection, just that we have other things to do with our time.
Re:"I have an SDTV, you insensitive clod"
on
Why TV Lost
·
· Score: 1
Not everybody has the money for a second PC to put in the TV room.
This costs about the same as $30/month cable TV service for 10 months. I know, not everybody has an attention span sufficient to take advantage of a 10 month ROI horizon...
I don't know of a single person that bought a computer or got internet connectivity because of Facebook - or any single site for that matter. Claiming that the internet is popular because of Facebook is patently absurd. Not even Google can make such a claim.
Crediting Facebook is oversimplifying a bit, but really, in 1996 what could you show your non 'net connected friends that would make them the slightest bit interested in learning how to use a web browser? Stuff like Facebook has increased the mass appeal of the internet, it might not be cited as a reason for buying a computer, but without that appeal a lot of people would stay with the "oh, I can use one at school / the library" rather than getting one for their living room.
there will always be demand for that sort of one way entertainment.
You Tuuuuuuuuube!
Seriously, the high end TVs are starting to incorporate streaming video receivers. It will take a while, but that one-way content is going to be delivered over the inter-tubes as a (very popular) option in a much greater catalog.
I don't like ads. Let me repeat that, I don't like ads. When I shelled out money for cable TV, I didn't expect to be barraged with ads in my paid-for programming. It's not like the cable companies offered any options to get things like "the History Channel sans advertising", they just had two or three "tiers" and all of them were chock full 'o ads.
TV might have held on a little longer if it had a "Sirius Radio"-like option. I see TV going down hard in about 15-20 years as the baby boomers age into irrelevancy - not that all boomers are 'net impaired, but there are enough of them that are to keep the old ways alive.
Re:It was obvious 10 years ago
on
Why TV Lost
·
· Score: 1
The funny thing about newspapers is that even though they are dying, there are still a big group of people who aren't plugged in to their replacement (the 'net.)
30 years from now, people will think how stupid it was that you had to wait for your favorite TV show to come on at a specific time, rather than watching it whenever you wanted.
I've been thinking that for the last 20 years or so, programmable VCRs were a great thing, before hulu came around.
Re:I'm not dead yet
on
Why TV Lost
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
The "TV" in my living room is hooked up to basic analog cable which we watch about 20 hours a year and a PS3 which plays DVDs/Blu Ray about 20 hours a month (and games about 5 hours a month, lately.)
Sooner or later, something like an eeeBox is going to get hooked up to the big TV in our house, and then it will play Hulu, etc. too. For now, we watch Hulu in bed on a notebook.
Oh, and there are 3 computers in the house which probably browse the web about 20 hours a day between them;-)
If I were the developer, I'd consider shifting all of the numbers the app provides by an hour or a day or a minute or something--maybe randomly +/- a few minutes. If the table is no longer factual and makes no claim to be, the copyright claim may be somewhat weakened--or not. Worth looking into at any rate.
This is what "fake books" do for sheet music, the tunes sound very very familiar, but they are just a little different.
In this particular instance (fake books), I think the spirit of the law has been raped and left in the gutter - there should still be protection against this, just like Lamborghini replicars, etc. On the other hand, copyright law needs every kick in the teeth it can get, things really should go public domain after 30 years or so.
I have used it for successfully to get out at the right stop when I cannot read the station names. You get out when the train is scheduled to arrive at your destination. My experience is that (a) the train is actually stopped within the scheduled minute, and (b) it is at the right destination. Very comforting when the script it complete gibberish to you.
I tried this in the Swiss Alps once, thinking that "hey, it's Switzerland, these things should be on-time, right?" I forgot how close the Alps are to Italy. Luckily, the mountain trains don't run much faster than walking speed in that place - when the conductor discovered my error (about 5 minutes out of the station), he said "that's your train over there, want to change?" He went ahead of me to give me a hand jumping up, hopped off of one moving train sprinted about 20 yards and hopped onto another moving train. I wonder how often they do that?
The easiest way to make the trains run on time is to run them sufficiently below possible speed under normal conditions such that you can make up for 99% of the delays encountered simply by running at higher speed after the delay happens.
What I hated the most during my unemployment (post grad-school I found my first job within a month and kept it for 12 years, the company eventually tanked and I was out of work for 4 months)...
back to the story: what I hated the most were the interviewers who had absolutely no intention of hiring you, or anyone, they just wanted you to come in for an interview for their benefit. The government contractor who needed a certain number of interviews before justifying that they're keeping the newly allocated salary and dividing it amongst present employees I can almost understand, but I had one guy ask me to drive Miami to Orlando just because he wanted to meet me, though he dangles a job interview as bait to get me there - he was curious how I kept my first job for 12 years, so I drive 350 miles to meet him and get a chicken sandwich lunch with him and his team in exchange for my time and expense, he was actually looking for someone entry level that he could hire for less than $30K/year.
Then there's the headhunters... just another layer of other people acting for their own best interests between you and gainful employment...
Compare the bright, hardworking people's accomplishments and "luck" to the hundreds of big lottery winners around the country every year.
Now, compare those lottery winners to the thousands of people who are born to high social standing (rich, powerful parents).
Now contrast all of those people with the luck of the neighbors of the slumdog millionaire stars.
Everyone should work to better themselves and their children, and to make the most of the gifts they have - it definitely helps your position in life. But... where you start out, and the uncontrollable events that occur near/to you, have more to do with where you end up than anything else.
Remember kids, it's nothing personal when you get rejected, it's just the modern equivalent of chicken gizzards look wrong.
Very very true - and oh so hard to keep in mind when you've been out of work for 4 months, the savings is rapidly heading for zero, and the new baby is on the way in 3 more months.
There should be a rule of etiquitte that potential employers acknowledge receipt of an application within some reasonable timeframe... I've gotten "thank you for your application" letters from the larger corporations up to 2 years after sending them in, and, of course, the smaller ones often don't answer at all.
If we can't even get acknowledgment of receipt, how could we ever get a meaningful answer as to why the application was rejected?
On the other side of the fence, the first opening I advertised in Miami after the Internet started getting "hot" (1999, I think) received over 400 applicants for a single opening. The ad explicitly stated "local candidates only", which didn't stop resumes coming from San Francisco, London and Singapore.
I think the legislators have only classified "race, gender and religion" this way, so far... not sure what their re-election chances would be if they added "caught butt-naked outside a convent" to the protected groups.
I think what people don't have their heads around yet is that if they acted like a drunken ass at a frat party in 1995, it was witnessed by about two dozen people, most of whom did not remember it clearly in the morning, but, if they acted like a drunken ass at a frat party in 2005, it was caught on 3 different cell-phone video cameras and uploaded to 5 different websites, permanently archived with their name attached and searchable, basically forever if they did something truly remarkable.
This isn't Andy Warhol's 15 minutes of fame, it's more like 15 years in the public spotlight, except that everybody is getting it all at once. You don't have everyone's attention the way Walter Cronkite did, but every time you scratch your nose on camera, that's potentially discoverable for the rest of your life if anyone cares to look.
It's going to take a while for people's behavior and/or expectations of behavior to adjust to the new reality.
POD is relatively new, and a completely different beast - yeah, 0.21 a copy was referring to the mass produced stuff you'd buy in an airport kiosk for $8.
Might be more than $0.21 today - but for an $8 retail paperback that's sold by the millions, it's not much more.
It wasn't too long ago that pulp fiction sold for less than $0.25 a copy.
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I'd push more for 15 to 30 years. Not every idea can be rolled out at Web 3.0 speeds. Anything that requires physical manufacturing, quality control, and any kind of regulatory oversight can't hope to go from concept to consumer within less than 2 years.
Fuck copyright law, what was that bit about cheapo Lambos?
Just this, say I'm a rich Italian dude and I get pissed at old man Enzo and tell him "F you, I'll make my own", and I spend a billion or so (in today's dollars) engineering a truly unique automobile, and I promote it, at considerable expense, as "the best of the best", and to whatever degree, I succeed in selling something that's not really any better than a Chevy Corvette in any meaningful objective measure, except possibly its distinctive look, and selling it for 5-10x the price of the Corvette, depending on options.
If some two-bit knock-off werks starts turning out fiberglass bodies that mount on old VW-bug frames that look, from 10' away, EXACTLY like the car that I spent all of this time and money developing and promoting, I damn well should be able to tell them to cease and desist, and have it stick, assuming I have paid off the proper authorities in whatever country they are operating in. The existence of the cheap knock-offs diminishes the exclusivity and value of the real thing, and most of the value of the knock-off comes from the investments that were made in the original.
There are other sides to the picture, imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, etc., but... copyright does have a place in encouraging creative work for profit.
Unfortunately, the people who have been profiting (massively) from copyright protection have also been successfully changing the laws recently until their terms are bordering on absurd, I'd say they are on the far side of the absurd border. Any person, or family, who can't make a decent living with 30 years of copyright protection needs to find another line of work - excessively long copyright protection terms encourage sloth and greed, not creative productivity.
You still haven't answered the question: WHY? What possible use could such weapons be?
I'd say the same use that they have been for 50+ years now - deterrence by mutual terror.
Peace through superior firepower.
Depends on your idea of what is a fun game. If I can have an Atari 800 emulator and M.U.L.E. on my PS3, that pretty much doubles the entertainment value of the machine for my family.
Yeah, GT5 is more impressive, but racing split-screen isn't nearly as easy or fun as playing a highly multi-player oriented game like M.U.L.E.
Why aren't you using your PS3 to watch Hulu on your TV, the PS3's web browser is capable of it.
It wasn't (hulu capable) the last time I tried... haven't tried in several months. We only watch one show off of hulu, not for lack of selection, just that we have other things to do with our time.
Not everybody has the money for a second PC to put in the TV room.
This costs about the same as $30/month cable TV service for 10 months. I know, not everybody has an attention span sufficient to take advantage of a 10 month ROI horizon...
I don't know of a single person that bought a computer or got internet connectivity because of Facebook - or any single site for that matter. Claiming that the internet is popular because of Facebook is patently absurd. Not even Google can make such a claim.
Crediting Facebook is oversimplifying a bit, but really, in 1996 what could you show your non 'net connected friends that would make them the slightest bit interested in learning how to use a web browser? Stuff like Facebook has increased the mass appeal of the internet, it might not be cited as a reason for buying a computer, but without that appeal a lot of people would stay with the "oh, I can use one at school / the library" rather than getting one for their living room.
there will always be demand for that sort of one way entertainment.
You Tuuuuuuuuube!
Seriously, the high end TVs are starting to incorporate streaming video receivers. It will take a while, but that one-way content is going to be delivered over the inter-tubes as a (very popular) option in a much greater catalog.
I don't like ads. Let me repeat that, I don't like ads. When I shelled out money for cable TV, I didn't expect to be barraged with ads in my paid-for programming. It's not like the cable companies offered any options to get things like "the History Channel sans advertising", they just had two or three "tiers" and all of them were chock full 'o ads.
TV might have held on a little longer if it had a "Sirius Radio"-like option. I see TV going down hard in about 15-20 years as the baby boomers age into irrelevancy - not that all boomers are 'net impaired, but there are enough of them that are to keep the old ways alive.
The funny thing about newspapers is that even though they are dying, there are still a big group of people who aren't plugged in to their replacement (the 'net.)
30 years from now, people will think how stupid it was that you had to wait for your favorite TV show to come on at a specific time, rather than watching it whenever you wanted.
I've been thinking that for the last 20 years or so, programmable VCRs were a great thing, before hulu came around.
The "TV" in my living room is hooked up to basic analog cable which we watch about 20 hours a year and a PS3 which plays DVDs/Blu Ray about 20 hours a month (and games about 5 hours a month, lately.)
;-)
Sooner or later, something like an eeeBox is going to get hooked up to the big TV in our house, and then it will play Hulu, etc. too. For now, we watch Hulu in bed on a notebook.
Oh, and there are 3 computers in the house which probably browse the web about 20 hours a day between them
If I were the developer, I'd consider shifting all of the numbers the app provides by an hour or a day or a minute or something--maybe randomly +/- a few minutes. If the table is no longer factual and makes no claim to be, the copyright claim may be somewhat weakened--or not. Worth looking into at any rate.
This is what "fake books" do for sheet music, the tunes sound very very familiar, but they are just a little different.
In this particular instance (fake books), I think the spirit of the law has been raped and left in the gutter - there should still be protection against this, just like Lamborghini replicars, etc. On the other hand, copyright law needs every kick in the teeth it can get, things really should go public domain after 30 years or so.
I have used it for successfully to get out at the right stop when I cannot read the station names. You get out when the train is scheduled to arrive at your destination. My experience is that (a) the train is actually stopped within the scheduled minute, and (b) it is at the right destination. Very comforting when the script it complete gibberish to you.
I tried this in the Swiss Alps once, thinking that "hey, it's Switzerland, these things should be on-time, right?" I forgot how close the Alps are to Italy. Luckily, the mountain trains don't run much faster than walking speed in that place - when the conductor discovered my error (about 5 minutes out of the station), he said "that's your train over there, want to change?" He went ahead of me to give me a hand jumping up, hopped off of one moving train sprinted about 20 yards and hopped onto another moving train. I wonder how often they do that?
The easiest way to make the trains run on time is to run them sufficiently below possible speed under normal conditions such that you can make up for 99% of the delays encountered simply by running at higher speed after the delay happens.
What I hated the most during my unemployment (post grad-school I found my first job within a month and kept it for 12 years, the company eventually tanked and I was out of work for 4 months)...
back to the story: what I hated the most were the interviewers who had absolutely no intention of hiring you, or anyone, they just wanted you to come in for an interview for their benefit. The government contractor who needed a certain number of interviews before justifying that they're keeping the newly allocated salary and dividing it amongst present employees I can almost understand, but I had one guy ask me to drive Miami to Orlando just because he wanted to meet me, though he dangles a job interview as bait to get me there - he was curious how I kept my first job for 12 years, so I drive 350 miles to meet him and get a chicken sandwich lunch with him and his team in exchange for my time and expense, he was actually looking for someone entry level that he could hire for less than $30K/year.
Then there's the headhunters... just another layer of other people acting for their own best interests between you and gainful employment...
Compare the bright, hardworking people's accomplishments and "luck" to the hundreds of big lottery winners around the country every year.
Now, compare those lottery winners to the thousands of people who are born to high social standing (rich, powerful parents).
Now contrast all of those people with the luck of the neighbors of the slumdog millionaire stars.
Everyone should work to better themselves and their children, and to make the most of the gifts they have - it definitely helps your position in life. But... where you start out, and the uncontrollable events that occur near/to you, have more to do with where you end up than anything else.
showing how dedicated you are to working over time and how you're doing it for the team dispite not getting paid!
4. Profit!
Are you sure about step 4? Seems like you're asking to be hired into a position of abuse.
Remember kids, it's nothing personal when you get rejected, it's just the modern equivalent of chicken gizzards look wrong.
Very very true - and oh so hard to keep in mind when you've been out of work for 4 months, the savings is rapidly heading for zero, and the new baby is on the way in 3 more months.
There should be a rule of etiquitte that potential employers acknowledge receipt of an application within some reasonable timeframe... I've gotten "thank you for your application" letters from the larger corporations up to 2 years after sending them in, and, of course, the smaller ones often don't answer at all.
If we can't even get acknowledgment of receipt, how could we ever get a meaningful answer as to why the application was rejected?
On the other side of the fence, the first opening I advertised in Miami after the Internet started getting "hot" (1999, I think) received over 400 applicants for a single opening. The ad explicitly stated "local candidates only", which didn't stop resumes coming from San Francisco, London and Singapore.
I think the legislators have only classified "race, gender and religion" this way, so far... not sure what their re-election chances would be if they added "caught butt-naked outside a convent" to the protected groups.
I think what people don't have their heads around yet is that if they acted like a drunken ass at a frat party in 1995, it was witnessed by about two dozen people, most of whom did not remember it clearly in the morning, but, if they acted like a drunken ass at a frat party in 2005, it was caught on 3 different cell-phone video cameras and uploaded to 5 different websites, permanently archived with their name attached and searchable, basically forever if they did something truly remarkable.
This isn't Andy Warhol's 15 minutes of fame, it's more like 15 years in the public spotlight, except that everybody is getting it all at once. You don't have everyone's attention the way Walter Cronkite did, but every time you scratch your nose on camera, that's potentially discoverable for the rest of your life if anyone cares to look.
It's going to take a while for people's behavior and/or expectations of behavior to adjust to the new reality.
Like Second Life?
POD is relatively new, and a completely different beast - yeah, 0.21 a copy was referring to the mass produced stuff you'd buy in an airport kiosk for $8.
Might be more than $0.21 today - but for an $8 retail paperback that's sold by the millions, it's not much more. It wasn't too long ago that pulp fiction sold for less than $0.25 a copy.