The point I was making is that the reason the article's logic, what rsborg called "a leap of faith," is so poor is that twitter needs to be seen as something more than just a bunch of twits - that the article may even be the result of pay-for-play to promote the company as something more important and valuable than it really is.
The guy said "entertainment." That is not just hollywood movies. It's tv shows, sports (super bowl anyone?), music, and all the other stuff
Hollywood is most movies, most tv shows and most music. Sports, I dunno I guess the NFL, et al are mostly independent. "All the other stuff" is what? Video games, books and magazines?
Either way, it is unlikely that "entertainment" exports from all of those other sources bring the total to more than the total domestic and foreign revenue from 'just' Hollywood.
Finally I have to question that chart more than a little bit, given the extremely high rate for general unemployment it is reporting.
It isn't. Its reporting by category of education. Combine them all (including the unlisted group of people with a HS education but not a 4 year degree), factor in the population of each group which is not mentioned in the chart, to get general unemployment.
Based on what I've read elsewhere, unemployment for the under-educated is really as bad as the chart makes it out to be.
I know the above doesn't apply to everyone, but really, if you're applying for a job at least crack a book the night before the interview so you're not wasting everyone's time.
As a guy who as interviewed a few people over the years, I disagree.
Some things are basic knowledge like memorizing your multiplication tables in 4th grade and knowing what traceroute does if you are a network admin. But if cramming before an interview is enough to pass the interview, you aren't doing good interviews. If the guy shows that he doesn't know basic shit then he is not wasting your time in the interview - he's saving you thousands of hours you would have wasted by actually hiring him.
Especially since the national average is over 9% currently. Seems to me a more accurate story would be "Tech sector hasn't recovered to previous levels, but has much lower unemployment than many other areas."
Presuming that the majority of people in the tech sector have at least a 4 year college degree and thus average nearly the same unemployment rates as other primarily white-collar sectors, I believe "soaring" is appropriate.
This chart shows that people in that category have had no more than 3% unemployment for nearly the last 20 years - including the dot-bomb fall-out. Given that unemployment was roughly 2% before the latest crash, a 200% increase is pretty drastic.
Is it really so widespread? I'm a male in my late twenties, and none of my friends or acquaintances have ever falsely been accused of rape, at least as far as I know of.
Have any of them been truthfully accused of rape? Maybe rape isn't so widespread either.
I'm serious. If people are going to be there for long periods of time, they should get a little exercise. I'm not talking about running, just a leisurely ~1mph walk. Standing and walking are probably the absolute best options for maintaining good ergonomics.
I have no doubt this will make them money, but it will also make them look much worse on traffic accident statistics vs. other states.
Depends on where they are allowed to drive 90mph. 90mph is well within the design limits of most freeways in the USA - a fact demonstrated quite frequently by people who drive that fast regardless of legality. I've been in rush-hour traffic in some big cities where the traffic was flowing at 80+ mph - not just single speeders, but the entire flow of very dense traffic.
I think what's fundamentally wrong with his idea is that it proves the lie that speed limits are set for our safety and not for revenue generation or political pandering. Spending money alone does not increase safety, so either it is safe enough to raise the limit for everyone or it's not just a license to speed, it's a license to create mayhem.
As Trent Reznor pointed out in an interview with Digg's Kevin Rose, this business model can only work for those who are already well established or can accept not being megastars.
I have to say - that's a good thing. I'd rather 1,000 productive artists making a living wage than 10 megastars living the life of luxury. After all, being a megastar today is mostly an artifact of the monopoly on distribution enabled by the monopoly of copyright.
What I think is likely to ultimately happen though is that we'll just end up with another avenue to megastardom. People really seem to like to be the same as their neighbors, so I think one way or another they will tend to converge on a handful of artists in order to share in that common experience that comes from listening to the same music (and watching the same movies and reading the same books, etc).
I just hope that whatever new avenues to megastardom become popular, that they don't have the same level of deleterious effect on society and culture that modern copyright law has.
I think you would be hard pressed to find anyone who pays attention to that threat level thing. Even places where they do care - like DoD contractors which tend to keep it posted somewhere around their front desks, nobody even looks at it and the paper its printed on has long faded from UV exposure. That's what happens when it hardly ever changes.
'They said I was this William Shatner character, and I figured I had to be it. Pompous, takes himself seriously, hardheaded.' Shatner said that that character evolved slowly, until one day he realized he couldn't change it. 'So I played it. But I didn't see it.
He does impersonations and his Shatner is apparently so good that Shatner asked him write a little bit about it for his autobiography. To hear Pollak tell it, he slagged it off until the last minute and then made up some bullshit about how Shatner was just doing an incredible sort of method acting with all the random pauses. Apparently not only did Shatner buy the line of bs, he ran with the hook, line and sinker and adopted that explanation as a sort of core identity for himself. I'm sure Pollak over emphasized for comedic effect, but I couldn't help but laugh when I read what was essentially his premise in the very summary here on slashdot.
By the way, that comedy show was hilarious - totally worth tracking down, especially the story about impersonating Alan Arkin on Larry King.
FWIW - Here's an article on recent improvements in brasilian agriculture from The Economist. I thought it was a pretty good article, as far as it went, fortunately some of the comments flesh out some of the parts that the article glossed over. Not that many people here are likely to become corporate farmers in Brazil, but it gives you a sense of things.
I don't think it's a question of what some group of people think is fair. It's human nature to copy in all aspects of our lives. For example, software piracy is rampant in business for the same reason entertainment piracy is rampant among individuals - it is easy to do and the chances of getting caught are minuscule. And that's just one type of widespread violation, I'm sure you are aware of all kinds of other classes of corporate copyright violations, like those along the lines of American Geophysical Union v. Texaco which are still the norm at places with profiles less than that of Texaco (and common enough, despite being in violation of official company policy, at the others). Without a significant, and essentially impractical, increase in surveillance, people will always feel that they should make a copy just because they can make a copy. Thus what is fair in the abstract will differ from what is fair in the moment. I think we should have a system where such a dichotomy is irrelevant.
I think that if there is an incentive model that can survive widespread uncompensated person-to-person copying, then there is probably a good chance that something very close to that model will also work for commercial copying. It might make some businesses infeasible, like encrypted satellite television which relies on the DMCA to protect the encryption. But I'm just as willing to believe that it will enable other kinds of businesses too, ones that perhaps couldn't have competed with monopoly-dependent businesses otherwise.
No system that tries to implement any sort of monopoly can address the fundamental problem with copyright that the internet has amplified - that it is human nature to copy stuff we like, on both a wholesale and a piecemeal (derivative) basis. It seems like common sense that we would settle on a system that channels human nature to incent creators instead of fights it.
Hi to complex fish of some sort, big Hawaiian guy, jailbait follower, and... oh yeah, knife lover who I had to bail out. Of jail, that is, not his leaky little boat.)
Dude, step back from the bong and call a doctor, you may have inhaled a lethal dose.
I bet there were dirty stories and FTP servers housing content before the Web was even a fully-realized thought. Long before.
No need to bet, I will testify. ASCII porn doesn't really count, but there were plenty of x-rated gifs (and other now mostly forgotten formats like.pic and.pcx).
Yes, back in the day we had to spend half an hour to download a single image but the waiting made it that much sweeeter.
My understanding is that there is one downside - the PS3 is pissy about video framerates. So, if you have anything that is 25fps (standard for UK and Euro TV shows and often used for their movie releases) it won't play on a USA-version PS3. Almost all dedicated "network media tanks" and most standalone bluray players will play any framerate video and do a pretty good job of matching it to your display, be it 25fps, 24fps, 30fps, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
The point I was making is that the reason the article's logic, what rsborg called "a leap of faith," is so poor is that twitter needs to be seen as something more than just a bunch of twits - that the article may even be the result of pay-for-play to promote the company as something more important and valuable than it really is.
It's like saying "Suits are back!"
Funny thing, your oddly moderated woooosh! of a post would fit in twitter's 140 character limit.
You have a gift for stating the obvious - you must practice quite a bit.
The guy said "entertainment." That is not just hollywood movies. It's tv shows, sports (super bowl anyone?), music, and all the other stuff
Hollywood is most movies, most tv shows and most music. Sports, I dunno I guess the NFL, et al are mostly independent.
"All the other stuff" is what? Video games, books and magazines?
Either way, it is unlikely that "entertainment" exports from all of those other sources bring the total to more than the total domestic and foreign revenue from 'just' Hollywood.
I agree it's still a leap of faith to conclude that the Twitter access freed the journalist...
How much VC funding has twitter spent? $50M or so? Gotta get some good press out there in order to recoup that investment.
Finally I have to question that chart more than a little bit, given the extremely high rate for general unemployment it is reporting.
It isn't. Its reporting by category of education. Combine them all (including the unlisted group of people with a HS education but not a 4 year degree), factor in the population of each group which is not mentioned in the chart, to get general unemployment.
Based on what I've read elsewhere, unemployment for the under-educated is really as bad as the chart makes it out to be.
Sun's PSARC 2002/013(sun4m EOL) is why I run an IBM RS/6000 today.
Is that a RowerPC system?
I know the above doesn't apply to everyone, but really, if you're applying for a job at least crack a book the night before the interview so you're not wasting everyone's time.
As a guy who as interviewed a few people over the years, I disagree.
Some things are basic knowledge like memorizing your multiplication tables in 4th grade and knowing what traceroute does if you are a network admin. But if cramming before an interview is enough to pass the interview, you aren't doing good interviews. If the guy shows that he doesn't know basic shit then he is not wasting your time in the interview - he's saving you thousands of hours you would have wasted by actually hiring him.
Especially since the national average is over 9% currently. Seems to me a more accurate story would be "Tech sector hasn't recovered to previous levels, but has much lower unemployment than many other areas."
Presuming that the majority of people in the tech sector have at least a 4 year college degree and thus average nearly the same unemployment rates as other primarily white-collar sectors, I believe "soaring" is appropriate.
This chart shows that people in that category have had no more than 3% unemployment for nearly the last 20 years - including the dot-bomb fall-out. Given that unemployment was roughly 2% before the latest crash, a 200% increase is pretty drastic.
Is it really so widespread? I'm a male in my late twenties, and none of my friends or acquaintances have ever falsely been accused of rape, at least as far as I know of.
Have any of them been truthfully accused of rape?
Maybe rape isn't so widespread either.
It could be a good opportunity for wikiLeaks to show they are truly committed to posting all information in the public interest
They've already done that at least once when they leaked their own donor list.
Anyone else here on /. heard of anyone else she may have raped, especially someone under 18?
It is well-known that Birgitta Jonsdottir has allegedly raped many children under the age of 18.
Our PRIMARY export right now is "entertainment".
No it isn't. Not by a long shot.
The most recently available number for total hollywood studio revenues is $42.3 billion in 2007.
Total US exports were a hair over $1 trillion in 2009.
So even if every single cent hollywood made came from exports, they would still be a drop in the bucket.
I'm serious. If people are going to be there for long periods of time, they should get a little exercise.
I'm not talking about running, just a leisurely ~1mph walk.
Standing and walking are probably the absolute best options for maintaining good ergonomics.
The office furniture company Steelcase makes one.
I'm not saying to ban chairs, keep them as backup and for people who physically can't stand for extended periods of time.
Isn't that the purpose of the test you take when you get your driver's license?
Nope, its just there to distract you from the fact that you are giving up lots of personal information for a national ID database.
I have no doubt this will make them money, but it will also make them look much worse on traffic accident statistics vs. other states.
Depends on where they are allowed to drive 90mph. 90mph is well within the design limits of most freeways in the USA - a fact demonstrated quite frequently by people who drive that fast regardless of legality. I've been in rush-hour traffic in some big cities where the traffic was flowing at 80+ mph - not just single speeders, but the entire flow of very dense traffic.
I think what's fundamentally wrong with his idea is that it proves the lie that speed limits are set for our safety and not for revenue generation or political pandering. Spending money alone does not increase safety, so either it is safe enough to raise the limit for everyone or it's not just a license to speed, it's a license to create mayhem.
As Trent Reznor pointed out in an interview with Digg's Kevin Rose, this business model can only work for those who are already well established or can accept not being megastars.
I have to say - that's a good thing. I'd rather 1,000 productive artists making a living wage than 10 megastars living the life of luxury. After all, being a megastar today is mostly an artifact of the monopoly on distribution enabled by the monopoly of copyright.
What I think is likely to ultimately happen though is that we'll just end up with another avenue to megastardom. People really seem to like to be the same as their neighbors, so I think one way or another they will tend to converge on a handful of artists in order to share in that common experience that comes from listening to the same music (and watching the same movies and reading the same books, etc).
I just hope that whatever new avenues to megastardom become popular, that they don't have the same level of deleterious effect on society and culture that modern copyright law has.
I think you would be hard pressed to find anyone who pays attention to that threat level thing. Even places where they do care - like DoD contractors which tend to keep it posted somewhere around their front desks, nobody even looks at it and the paper its printed on has long faded from UV exposure. That's what happens when it hardly ever changes.
'They said I was this William Shatner character, and I figured I had to be it. Pompous, takes himself seriously, hardheaded.' Shatner said that that character evolved slowly, until one day he realized he couldn't change it. 'So I played it. But I didn't see it.
Anyone else catch Kevin Pollak's recent comedy show The Littlest Suspect?
He does impersonations and his Shatner is apparently so good that Shatner asked him write a little bit about it for his autobiography. To hear Pollak tell it, he slagged it off until the last minute and then made up some bullshit about how Shatner was just doing an incredible sort of method acting with all the random pauses. Apparently not only did Shatner buy the line of bs, he ran with the hook, line and sinker and adopted that explanation as a sort of core identity for himself. I'm sure Pollak over emphasized for comedic effect, but I couldn't help but laugh when I read what was essentially his premise in the very summary here on slashdot.
By the way, that comedy show was hilarious - totally worth tracking down, especially the story about impersonating Alan Arkin on Larry King.
FWIW - Here's an article on recent improvements in brasilian agriculture from The Economist. I thought it was a pretty good article, as far as it went, fortunately some of the comments flesh out some of the parts that the article glossed over. Not that many people here are likely to become corporate farmers in Brazil, but it gives you a sense of things.
I don't think it's a question of what some group of people think is fair. It's human nature to copy in all aspects of our lives. For example, software piracy is rampant in business for the same reason entertainment piracy is rampant among individuals - it is easy to do and the chances of getting caught are minuscule. And that's just one type of widespread violation, I'm sure you are aware of all kinds of other classes of corporate copyright violations, like those along the lines of American Geophysical Union v. Texaco which are still the norm at places with profiles less than that of Texaco (and common enough, despite being in violation of official company policy, at the others). Without a significant, and essentially impractical, increase in surveillance, people will always feel that they should make a copy just because they can make a copy. Thus what is fair in the abstract will differ from what is fair in the moment. I think we should have a system where such a dichotomy is irrelevant.
I think that if there is an incentive model that can survive widespread uncompensated person-to-person copying, then there is probably a good chance that something very close to that model will also work for commercial copying. It might make some businesses infeasible, like encrypted satellite television which relies on the DMCA to protect the encryption. But I'm just as willing to believe that it will enable other kinds of businesses too, ones that perhaps couldn't have competed with monopoly-dependent businesses otherwise.
No system that tries to implement any sort of monopoly can address the fundamental problem with copyright that the internet has amplified - that it is human nature to copy stuff we like, on both a wholesale and a piecemeal (derivative) basis. It seems like common sense that we would settle on a system that channels human nature to incent creators instead of fights it.
Hi to complex fish of some sort, big Hawaiian guy, jailbait follower, and ... oh yeah, knife lover who I had to bail out. Of jail, that is, not his leaky little boat.)
Dude, step back from the bong and call a doctor, you may have inhaled a lethal dose.
Well the Beatles and Rolling Stones made hundreds of millions more than the Grateful Dead by not making their music free.
Or they were just more mainstream and thus had a bigger audience.
I bet there were dirty stories and FTP servers housing content before the Web was even a fully-realized thought. Long before.
No need to bet, I will testify. ASCII porn doesn't really count, but there were plenty of x-rated gifs (and other now mostly forgotten formats like .pic and .pcx).
Yes, back in the day we had to spend half an hour to download a single image but the waiting made it that much sweeeter.
My understanding is that there is one downside - the PS3 is pissy about video framerates. So, if you have anything that is 25fps (standard for UK and Euro TV shows and often used for their movie releases) it won't play on a USA-version PS3. Almost all dedicated "network media tanks" and most standalone bluray players will play any framerate video and do a pretty good job of matching it to your display, be it 25fps, 24fps, 30fps, etc.