I was wondering if they'd have double vision or some kind of delay on when you press a button and when you get a response, after all without those features it's not really a drunk sim but just a 'slightly buzzed sim' MADD has been successful in pushing state DUI laws to the point where the blood-alcohol limit is so low that it is now possible to test positive for DUI with only a single drink. Seems to me that it is entirely within their agenda to protest against a 'slight buzzed sim' since they seem to have a problem with that in real life.
As far as MySQL. It has always been dual licensed and some things were not always available in the community version. From the reports I've read, the things that are closed were in the works before Sun purchased them. I've heard that response many times and I don't understand why people like you think it means anything. When a company is acquired, there are changes. Often huge changes. Changes to bring the company into line with the goals of the parent company.
Schwartz has been regularly quoted saying things like "open source [is] a fundamental business-model advantage, and not a cheap complement to throw to the community in order to drive sales of 'the real value.'" Yet this "in the works" business decision from the former MySQL flies directly in the face of that statement.
Why is it so crazy to expect that such a business decision would have been re-evaluated and brought into line with the CEO's public comments before announcing it?
Actually you don't even have to call it a hunch. You can use all sorts of things in the course of an investigation that you cannot use in court. However, there are also all sorts of things that you can not use.
For example, see the recent wiretapping scandal. One of the judges on the FISA court resigned in protest because he felt that the results of the illegal wiretaps were being used to justify follow-on FISA warrants -- in effect 'white-washing' the original illegally obtained information.
However, there's nothing I can do to my browser window to make his original post not look like ass-- except perhaps switching to a monospaced font, but then all other posts would look like ass. Pretty hypocritical coming from someone who uses the italics tag rather than the quote tag to indicate the text you are responding to.
After all, if your point is that the reader should choose how the text is displayed, and not the writer, then just what do you think you've been doing all along?
This coming from a person who still doesn't quite get the concept of "variable-width fonts" and "text-wrapping." There is a reason that newspapers use narrow columns of text and it directly applies to your flammage. Something about the ignorant being cocksure.
what we need is more rewards for producing the more artistically challenging works. The ones that require real risk and sacrifice to create. If the product requires real risk and sacrifice to create, copyright registration should only be a very minor obstacle.
We might even see a few low cost 'registrars' whom the creator can just send an electronic copy of the work and for, say $30, will take care of all the work. We might even see places willing to do the filing pro-bono, in exchange for a nice cut of any awards fees from violations down the line. Just one win against Disney could pay for tens of thousands of filings.
I used to work as a security guard in a modern art museum. I the gallery was a plain looking wooden bench. I got asked, "Can I sit on this bench or is it art.?"
"No its just a bench". Little did you know that all benches at modern art museums are the work of one particular anonymous artist. His work is designed to incorporate both regular employees and patrons of each museum.
If there isn't any legal consequence for the owners of online "stores" for this sort of misrepresentation, there should be. Most ISPs have not had to own up to claiming "unlimited internet access" either.
Thanks for being overly literal. It is not overly literal. It is the HEART of the matter.
Copyright is a contract between society and creators. Once upon a time the ability to copy something was beyond the means of most men - owning a printing press required that you be an upper-class businessman in a time when the middle class was quite small. Thus giving up the right to make copies in return for some amount of incentive for creators to create and publish was a reasonable balance -- the majority of society gave up a right they could not make use of and creators got a government granted and enforced monopoly in copies of their work product.
Times have changed.
It is now possible for EVERYONE to make a copy for effectively nothing. The cost to society of giving up the right to make copies is much, much greater than when the original contract was struck.
Instead of trading away something we had no use for, we are now trading away something very much like freedom of speech (you'll note that the concept of freedom of speech makes no differentiation between original and unoriginal speech). But not only is the contract worse on the side of how much society pays, it is also worse on the other end - what society receives in return. The original 14-year copyright term is now essentially indefinite - under the current terms as dictated by the content cartels, copyright can easily last for more than a century and will probably continue to be extended on a regular basis so that the public domain is never enriched again.
What difference is there between making a physical _copy_ and an electronic one. A physical copy always has an incremental cost - that of the physical medium. An electronic copy has an incremental cost so small that it is typically in the noise.
I didn't actually read any of the points - the mere fact that he posted a comment on slashdot proves that Sun is committed to open source. When was last time Bill Gates posted a reply on slashdot? Faulty reasoning. When has Bill Gates ever claimed to be committed to open source? If anything, he is committed to the opposite of open source. So why would he post on slashdot?
If you want to compare apples to apples, a much better question would be: "When was the last time Bill Gates posted a reply on MSDN?"
Depends on the type. The "night-shift at factory" or "factory surplus" variety is up and running at the same day that manufacture of the "true" product starts. Yes they do, but I wouldn't consider them copy-cats, because no copying is required, the items are the genuine article. Those kinds of problems ought to be something that can be handled contractually since the guilty party already has a business relationship with the aggrieved. No need for any laws beyond contract law to deal with the issue.
That's in no small part because the video game stores/publishers don't keep older product on the shelves, unless it sold extremely well in that first month. Regardless, it is an industry that sure seems to be thriving on a model where most of the profit is made before piracy can have a significant impact. Remember, copyright isn't supposed to be about maximizing profit above all else, it is supposed to be about encouraging the creation of new works. So it appears that copyright has only a minor role in the current market for games.
This goes double for "arms race" technologies like the IT field, where a mobo will be deprecated in ~8 months. They NEED to sell a certain number in order to fund the development of the next model and so on I disagree.
In "arms race" technologies, emphasis on the race, they probably have the least need to prevent true copy-cats precisely because of the short duration of profitability. Copy-cats don't literally spring up over night, it takes time to reverse engineer the system, source the components and bring up the manufacturing line. By then, most of the profit from a true "arms race" product has already been realized.
Shoddy knock-offs are another thing, I'm talking about true copy-cats. Trademarks are generally useful to the public at large whereas my point is that patents and copyrights are not so utilitarian.
Similarly, there was a report that video games make 50% of their sales in the first month and 25% of their sales in the first week with 8% as pre-orders. Its a lot easier to pirate a video game since it does not require any reverse engineering and the production line can literally be started over night. Yet, a well managed video game developer ought to be able to preload the distribution channels to take advantage of having 'first access' to the product and monopolize the first few weeks of availability where most of the revenue is at.
2. Pair of Martin Logan Quest front speakers = $10000 3. Decent amp = $2000 4. Random center/rear channel speakers = $800 As long as your center and surrounds don't match your mains, your movie listening experience is going to be sub-par. Any sound that pans from one speaker to another is going to sound weird because of the difference in timbre between the originating speaker and the destination speaker. For example, when a tank rolls across the screen it will sound like a real tank when it enters stage right, then turn into a little toy, mickey-mouse tank, as it traverses the screen and then exits stage left again as a real tank should. By the time it makes it around the room to the surround speakers, it might as well be a ricer car with a fartbox on the exhaust.
Notice central Europe, Greenland, Newfoundland, Norway, Sweden, the Middle East, northern Africa, Russia, etc..., all fit in the same sized view. It isn't quite that simple. Google maps uses mercator projection which distorts the size as a trade-off for depicting longitude lines as parallel instead of converging like they do on a real sphere.
Thus the farther towards the poles, the more the size is exaggerated. Which, in this case makes Europe, the UK and especially greenland, look larger as they are generally more northern than the US. For example, NYC seems to be roughly in the same latitude as northern spain or the south of france.
Each of the 3 major credit reporting companies (transunion, equifax, and experian) have 800 numbers, and physical addresses to contact them at. I don't think he meant the agencies that report to corps, but rather the variety of websites that sell you access to your own credit report(s) with optional services like emailing you every time there is change to your report.
They seem like a bunch of over-priced profiteers cashing in on problems and fears of problems like identity theft.
The market already has too many choices, many of them offering the same content. Not online. Its just as easy for the MAFIAA to halt distribution through any company it doesn't like.
At the very least, no one is unseating iTunes in the next several years. Totally irrelevant to the conversation. The MAFIAA does not just 'give up' because they don't like the current situation.
when the kind of people that will pay ridiculous prices just to be trendy are the ones buying Apple for the most part. Poor understanding of basic set theory -- ipods are ubiquitous - I even bought one because my car came with an ipod interface - it sits in the glove compartment and no one even knows its there, ipod owners are not the same set as commercial-driven teens. Poor understanding of what monopoly means - the prices won't be ridiculous until the other sites have had their supply turned off.
News Corp has very almost no interests in the music industry. Even more reason for them to scratch fellow MAFIAAOSA's backs, they've got nothing to lose. But they certainly can benefit from a few favors in the other oligopolies under MAFIAA control.
(HINT: the MPAA and RIAA are actually separate organizations, contrary to popular belief) HINT no fucking duh, that you would feel the need to point out baseline knowledge as if it were some sort of coup of insults just means you are way out of your league.
If they can't muscle around one company who sells online music (Apple) to get higher prices, what makes you think they're going to be able to do it with the next hypothetical "Online Music Monopoly" (assuming they can even create a new one while destroying Apple's)? 1) Myspace is Rupert Murdoch's toy - aka it is part of the MAFIAA already 2) Contractual agreements. The only reason itunes isn't contractually bound to the MAFIAA's will was their single-minded focus on DRM to the exclusion of all else. Bit them in the ass it did, they won't let that happen again.
A couple of other people have already given you the most obvious answer: consumers can always go back to piracy to some degree. Yeah, and frankly those couple of other people are dumbshits. I laid out what I thought was an obvious explanation for why piracy wouldn't happen - because piracy of CDs wasn't enough to kill them and even at $2.99 a song, its still easier for the itunes using but bittorrent illiterate to acquire a song here and there as they do today.
I don't expect the record companies are willing to make an offer good enough that they can drive enough people away from iTunes (assuming that's even their goal). When their marginal cost is effectively nothing, they can give away music for a year and then up the prices later once the monopoly is wrested away from apple. How many songs were given away free through itunes near the start? Millions? Tens of millions?
If you're going to claim all CDs are also going up to $30 an album Nope, I claim they won't go up. And furthermore, I don't claim that the MAFIAA would raise prices across the board. They'd price the hit singles at $2.99+ and leave the filler at 99 cents or less - after all their mantra has been variable pricing. When the choice is instant gratification for the latest ultra-hyped song or waiting until the weekend to go the mall or for amazon to ship the full CD, plenty are just going to suck it up and buy the one ultra-hyped, over-priced song.
4a) If [new competitor] complies, consumers flock out in droves quicker then they came in, Where do you propose that they "flock out" to? They've been trained to buy online and if the only places to buy are overpriced, then that's where they will buy. After all, they've been buying overpriced CDs forever and the MAFIAA's marketing is relentless.
Seriously, consumers have had $.99 songs for too long now to accept a price hike with no justification. This theory someone always pops up when a new store is announced, that once they get a big enough market share iTunes will get the boot and prices will go through the roof. It's crazier than the RIAA litigation strategy. Sorry, I really don't think you've shown any plausible supporting evidence or reasoning for that claim. Weren't you paying attention to all the news reports a year ago that were 'leaked' by the MAFIAA about how they were trying to renegotiate with Jobs to allow for variable pricing on itunes? Do you think those were made up? Do you think that the MAFIAA isn't looking for any opportunity it can to increase the average selling price?
School zones are pretty retarded, if you ask me. I've never passed one where I saw children out by the road. It seems like more of a convenience thing for parents, so they can get in and out more quickly. I totally agree. In fact, I've noticed some "school zones" are illegal - in the state of Massachusetts "school zone" speed limits are only legal/valid if they are restricted to certain times of the day. But I regularly drive by two different schools which have blanket school zone speed limits - no times listed at all, in clear violation of the law.
Yeah! If there's competition between iTunes and MySpace, and MySpace charges $2.99 per track like the RIAA wants, Whatever will Apple do? They'll be forced to raise their prices to $2.99 just to compete! I guess it is not obvious.
The competition between itunes and myspace is not for the consumer dollar, it is for the music industry's product. If myspace gets enough traction with consumers the MAFIAA can tell Jobs to stick that 99 cents up his ass, because they are going to stop supplying music to itunes for sale - instead they will switch over all of their product to myspace and it's $2.99 prices.
Apple is left with no songs to sell, and the music industry gets to start raping and pillaging again with the help of their old buddy, Rupert Murdoch.
Slashdot Mirror
Schwartz has been regularly quoted saying things like "open source [is] a fundamental business-model advantage, and not a cheap complement to throw to the community in order to drive sales of 'the real value.'" Yet this "in the works" business decision from the former MySQL flies directly in the face of that statement.
Why is it so crazy to expect that such a business decision would have been re-evaluated and brought into line with the CEO's public comments before announcing it?
Got it.
BTW, it's only 5 characters. The HTML standards do not define slashdot markup.
For example, see the recent wiretapping scandal. One of the judges on the FISA court resigned in protest because he felt that the results of the illegal wiretaps were being used to justify follow-on FISA warrants -- in effect 'white-washing' the original illegally obtained information.
After all, if your point is that the reader
should choose how the text is displayed,
and not the writer, then just what do you think
you've been doing all along?
Living in a glass house?
We might even see a few low cost 'registrars' whom the creator can just send an electronic copy of the work and for, say $30, will take care of all the work. We might even see places willing to do the filing pro-bono, in exchange for a nice cut of any awards fees from violations down the line. Just one win against Disney could pay for tens of thousands of filings.
"No its just a bench". Little did you know that all benches at modern art museums are the work of one particular anonymous artist. His work is designed to incorporate both regular employees and patrons of each museum.
Copyright is a contract between society and creators. Once upon a time the ability to copy something was beyond the means of most men - owning a printing press required that you be an upper-class businessman in a time when the middle class was quite small. Thus giving up the right to make copies in return for some amount of incentive for creators to create and publish was a reasonable balance -- the majority of society gave up a right they could not make use of and creators got a government granted and enforced monopoly in copies of their work product.
Times have changed.
It is now possible for EVERYONE to make a copy for effectively nothing. The cost to society of giving up the right to make copies is much, much greater than when the original contract was struck.
Instead of trading away something we had no use for, we are now trading away something very much like freedom of speech (you'll note that the concept of freedom of speech makes no differentiation between original and unoriginal speech). But not only is the contract worse on the side of how much society pays, it is also worse on the other end - what society receives in return. The original 14-year copyright term is now essentially indefinite - under the current terms as dictated by the content cartels, copyright can easily last for more than a century and will probably continue to be extended on a regular basis so that the public domain is never enriched again.
An electronic copy has an incremental cost so small that it is typically in the noise.
When was last time Bill Gates posted a reply on slashdot? Faulty reasoning. When has Bill Gates ever claimed to be committed to open source?
If anything, he is committed to the opposite of open source. So why would he post on slashdot?
If you want to compare apples to apples, a much better question would be:
"When was the last time Bill Gates posted a reply on MSDN?"
In "arms race" technologies, emphasis on the race, they probably have the least need to prevent true copy-cats precisely because of the short duration of profitability. Copy-cats don't literally spring up over night, it takes time to reverse engineer the system, source the components and bring up the manufacturing line. By then, most of the profit from a true "arms race" product has already been realized.
Shoddy knock-offs are another thing, I'm talking about true copy-cats. Trademarks are generally useful to the public at large whereas my point is that patents and copyrights are not so utilitarian.
Similarly, there was a report that video games make 50% of their sales in the first month and 25% of their sales in the first week with 8% as pre-orders. Its a lot easier to pirate a video game since it does not require any reverse engineering and the production line can literally be started over night. Yet, a well managed video game developer ought to be able to preload the distribution channels to take advantage of having 'first access' to the product and monopolize the first few weeks of availability where most of the revenue is at.
3. Decent amp = $2000
4. Random center/rear channel speakers = $800 As long as your center and surrounds don't match your mains, your movie listening experience is going to be sub-par. Any sound that pans from one speaker to another is going to sound weird because of the difference in timbre between the originating speaker and the destination speaker. For example, when a tank rolls across the screen it will sound like a real tank when it enters stage right, then turn into a little toy, mickey-mouse tank, as it traverses the screen and then exits stage left again as a real tank should. By the time it makes it around the room to the surround speakers, it might as well be a ricer car with a fartbox on the exhaust.
In some circles P4P means "Pay for Play" aka hookers.
Seems entirely appropriate that Comcast would claim that the hookers they sent to congress and the FCC are enough to take are of any problems.
Thus the farther towards the poles, the more the size is exaggerated. Which, in this case makes Europe, the UK and especially greenland, look larger as they are generally more northern than the US. For example, NYC seems to be roughly in the same latitude as northern spain or the south of france.
They seem like a bunch of over-priced profiteers cashing in on problems and fears of problems like identity theft.
You are a minority in the market, your anecdote does not represent proof of anything relevant.
2) Contractual agreements. The only reason itunes isn't contractually bound to the MAFIAA's will was their single-minded focus on DRM to the exclusion of all else. Bit them in the ass it did, they won't let that happen again. A couple of other people have already given you the most obvious answer: consumers can always go back to piracy to some degree. Yeah, and frankly those couple of other people are dumbshits. I laid out what I thought was an obvious explanation for why piracy wouldn't happen - because piracy of CDs wasn't enough to kill them and even at $2.99 a song, its still easier for the itunes using but bittorrent illiterate to acquire a song here and there as they do today. I don't expect the record companies are willing to make an offer good enough that they can drive enough people away from iTunes (assuming that's even their goal). When their marginal cost is effectively nothing, they can give away music for a year and then up the prices later once the monopoly is wrested away from apple. How many songs were given away free through itunes near the start? Millions? Tens of millions? If you're going to claim all CDs are also going up to $30 an album Nope, I claim they won't go up. And furthermore, I don't claim that the MAFIAA would raise prices across the board. They'd price the hit singles at $2.99+ and leave the filler at 99 cents or less - after all their mantra has been variable pricing. When the choice is instant gratification for the latest ultra-hyped song or waiting until the weekend to go the mall or for amazon to ship the full CD, plenty are just going to suck it up and buy the one ultra-hyped, over-priced song.
They've been trained to buy online and if the only places to buy are overpriced, then that's where they will buy. After all, they've been buying overpriced CDs forever and the MAFIAA's marketing is relentless. Seriously, consumers have had $.99 songs for too long now to accept a price hike with no justification. This theory someone always pops up when a new store is announced, that once they get a big enough market share iTunes will get the boot and prices will go through the roof. It's crazier than the RIAA litigation strategy. Sorry, I really don't think you've shown any plausible supporting evidence or reasoning for that claim. Weren't you paying attention to all the news reports a year ago that were 'leaked' by the MAFIAA about how they were trying to renegotiate with Jobs to allow for variable pricing on itunes? Do you think those were made up? Do you think that the MAFIAA isn't looking for any opportunity it can to increase the average selling price?
The competition between itunes and myspace is not for the consumer dollar, it is for the music industry's product. If myspace gets enough traction with consumers the MAFIAA can tell Jobs to stick that 99 cents up his ass, because they are going to stop supplying music to itunes for sale - instead they will switch over all of their product to myspace and it's $2.99 prices.
Apple is left with no songs to sell, and the music industry gets to start raping and pillaging again with the help of their old buddy, Rupert Murdoch.