Political infighting seems to have dropped an interesting and respectful program from the books.
Big freaking deal if the numbers are 'encrypted' or not. The problem is not that the NSA knows people's phone numbers - that's why we have phonebooks. The problem is that they have this huge database that lets anyone with access draw all kinds of inferences about people's relationships with each other. The right to freely associate is not free at all if it means that you end up on some big list in a government computer (or anyone else's computer for that matter).
Having your phone number encrypted when it is in the database doesn't help a bit because the encrypted number is just another unique identifier. Its the equivalent of saying that they used social security numbers in place of the phone numbers.
(me) Production companies aren't in the business to lose money, they wouldn't keep making movies if they didn't make money on them.
You seem to think that production companies would not make movies unless all of them are profitable. My point is that the 1 out of 10 that is profitable covers the losses on the other 9 and then some. As long as they don't hit a string of bad luck and go 20 or 30 without a moneymaker they will show a profit. That was the point of listing the companies that went under - they missed enough moneymakers until they were at the point where all bets were riding on a show and they lost the bet.
My point of listing the movies that were unexpected hits illustrates the flipside of the same coin. Just as they can not predict the losers, they can't predict the winners either.
If you can't predict either way, then there is no way to expect every movie to be profitable. My assertion that, on average, 1 out of 10 makes money is still is good enough to run a business on. It isn't the best odds, but other business run on worse. I'm betting that there are plenty of people who would like to improve them.
(You deleted my comment about most productions being done to a cost with an idea of the revenues ahead of time.)
As you said, such productions make up the volume of cable tv and are crap. My model won't work for them because, well, they are crap and people don't like to pay for crap. Unless it is really, really cheap crap.
Mark Cuban
Don't confuse Cuban's opinion of the market in general, which is what he was refering to in the blog entry I cited, with his own specific productions.
Again, on the DVD front, note that even cancelled TV shows hit DVD now.
They do, but only with what's in the can by the time they were cancelled. As you said, it brings in a few more pennies - maybe it even does bring them into black, I haven't seen any numbers either way. But, I don't see the phenonmenon lasting - unless the series has some sort of wrap-up or ending, few people are interested in purchasing half a season of a cancelled show.
On the other hand, I believe that those people who are buying such series on DVD today and have been getting disillusioned with dangling storylines, etc, would jump at the chance to buy new episodes, which is ideal for a business model like the one I propose.
Nope. I am working from a what the customer knows model. The customers know that it costs nothing to download a movie or song over the internet because they can do it themselves, they can send them to their friends via email, etc - it happens millions of times every day. Consquently, they don't assign much value to distribution and aren't willing to pay much for it. So charging for distribution as a means to recoup costs beyond just the distribution costs doesn't work out so well - they'll just go download it for free instead.
But what they can't do for free, or anywhere near it, is make a movie or a tv show or even just a song.
That's where you work from the idea of fairness. This market isn't working that way, it is working from a "whatever the market will bear" model. They'll cut prices when they think they'll make more by charging lower prices, not when their production costs drop.
Again, you thoroughly misunderstand the business model. It is all about charging what the market will bear - charge as much as you can convince the audience to pay. The two main differences are that the current model has to estimate what the market will bear, and consequently will only find out the real numbers after the investment of production costs is already spent -- a big risk, and that the resulting product has to compete with free downloads of the same work - and as Jack Valenti said, you can't compete with free.
Production companies aren't in the business to lose money, they wouldn't keep making movies if they didn't make money on them.
Which explains why there have been a number of spectacular implosions due to very expensive productions bombing out. For example - Heaven's Gate took out UA, Cutthroat Island took out Carolco and Raise the Titanic took out ITC. On the other hand, there have been plenty of underestimations - UA and Universal both took a pass on Star Wars, even Spielberg expected Jaws to be a career-ending bomb after he had finished shooting, and of course the titanic of underestimations - Titanic, expected to bomb so badly that Cameron had to forfeit his enitre salary of $8M plus his share of the gross just to keep the production afloat.
There are thousands more stories like those from the epic all the way down the line to the personal in hollywood business. Sure they are in business to make money, but it is more about luck than acumen and the constant rise and fall of fortunes is proof of that.
As for "hollywood accounting" and "a percentage of the net is a percentage of nothing" - moving money off the books and such ultimately doesn't make a difference to the bottom-line of the studios, and if you go long enough without a big hit, you go under -- and again I refer you to the constant churn in the business. A good recent example was SKG - they didn't have enough hit releases and consquently they burnt up a substantial portion of their cash on hand, it was only a matter of time until they were underwater, which is why they sold out to Paramount.
I don't believe TV productions in general work on this "90% lose money" principle either.
Got any hard numbers to support your beliefs? If it weren't 6am in the morning I'd dig up a ton of links to support mine, for now you will just have to be satisifed with Mark Cuban's statement that "more often than not... license fees are less than what it costs to produce the show" and that it is based on the hope that if the show does well that they can earn more on future deals, including syndication and dvd. http://www.blogmaverick.com/entry/1234000617063228 /
The way the business is run now, its all a big gamble, which is why hollywood is so conservative when it comes to the content of productions - if they think they've got a profitable formula, they ride into the ground and if they get a hint of failure, the production is cancelled lickity-split.
Otherwise use the "Fletch" approach on things like your customer loyalty cards. I keep mine under Harry S Truman, Ted Nugent and John Cocktosen. I have started using Igor Stravinsky lately.
If you've ever paid by check, debit or credit card in conjunction with using one of those 'loyalty' cards then the cat is out of the bag - you might as well just used your real name.
There are services that aggregate transaction data from participating merchants and then data-mine it to reveal connections like Joe buying baby-food at Grocery A so that Toystore B can send him junkmail advertising toys for infants and his cable company can send him junkmail pushing PPV disney movies.
The only way to stay out of those connect-the-dot databases is to use only cash and never give out personally identifiable information.
But don't accuse the other 63% of being stupid sheep unless you know what reasoning they applied to their opinion. What are they personally giving up (in more specific terms than just "privacy")? What are they personally gaining?
I will accuse them of being of stupid sheep because only stupid sheep who can't see beyond the direct personal effects would chose the way they did. If you limit the scope to personal effects it comes down to this:
PROs: No benefit - less than 1 out of 100,000 americans have been killed by terrorist acts in the last 10 years. Chance of happening to any individual is effectively zero, nothing the NSA does will reduce those odds. CONs: Waste of tax dollars.
Anyone smart enough to see beyond the scope of just personal effects can see a bunch more cons like:
1) Call graph data makes it easy to hunt down whistle-blowers who call reporters. 2) Call graph data makes it easy to infer bogus connections between people, potentially resulting in bogus arrests and false imprisonment.
Yet extending the scope like that reveals no new benefits - smart terrorists won't be using phones to communicate.
So yes, anyone who can't do a simple cost/benefits analysis of this situation is a stupid sheep.
Nah, you just need to get the legal department to add some disclaimers. For example:
"Land of the free (except where such freedom may be deemed by government agencies to conflict with the ability of the state to protect any such notional freedom from any perceived external or internal theats)"
It is amazing how closely your example mimics the Chinese constitution.
Their constitution also guarantees freedom:
Citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration.
But then it later says:
It is the duty of citizens of the People's Republic of China to safeguard the security, honour and interests of the motherland; they must not commit acts detrimental to the security, honour and interests of the motherland.
So, why do the illegals go to the emergency rooms rather than the much cheaper and more efficient walk-in clinics? Is it because the clinics are not required to treat them if they can't pay? That would be both counter-productive and mean-spirited.
I don't see the content developers suddently deciding that they should give a fair deal.
Where in the world did you get the idea that my proposal was about being fair?
It is about milking as much money as possible from the paying audience with the least amount of overhead and risk.
Maybe you don't know how hollywood works. Less than 1 out of 10 productions are hits - that hit has to pay for the other 9 failures, and only after the cost of the failures is covered will the production company show a profit. Even hit shows are rarely profitable until they make it to syndication, and that takes 100 shows in the can.
So a business model that can guarantee that each and every production is profitable is unheard of in hollywood. That is the shit that studio execs have wet dreams about. Push all the risk of failure to the audience and just sit back and skim the profits off the top. For really popular shows it is conceivable that they could get away with 1000%+ mark-ups.
Even if for some reason the hollywood old guard isn't interested in profits with zero risk, there are plenty of traditional investors who would absolutely love to get even just a 10% return in less than 6 months.
You all don't like it when companies charge too much (if the bitching on slashdot is any measure). But have no problem stepping into those same shoes.
As one loqacious contractor likes to say - "bidness is bidness."
The service business ain't no monopoly, any buyer is free to walk away and hire someone else if they don't like the price. If they can't find anyone at the price they want, then they are welcome to either handle it in house (it is open-source after all) or move to another product.
It is hard to get less coercive than that.
Wake me up when you can get a custom kernel patch for Windows - from somebody other than microsoft - for under $100K.
Meanwhile, I also like Diet Code Red from Mountain Dew, it is pretty flavorful and highly caffeinated, althought not available in some markets, like mine, oh how I dream of diet code red.
You could go with one of those diet energy drinks like diet red-bull or diet amp or diet rip-it. HIghly caffeniated and zero cal.
Of course you are going to get all kinds of horrible cancer and brain diseases, but if you live in the USA you are probably eating enough GM food that you are screwed anyway, so might as well enjoy it.
I've got high-hopes that network game-boxen are just the right platform for a joe-sixpack user-friendly system for that kind of business model. Pay a monthly/weekly subscription fee through your normal bill for the game network access and that goes into the escrow account and then get your paid-for-but-now-free shows delivered right to your game-box which happens to be conveniently connected to your tv and sound system.
Maybe your game-box will participate in a bittorrent like swarm for the distribution too, or you can opt out of the upload part of bittorrent for a fee.
Would you pay 25 cents per episode of a show like Lost in HDTV in exchange for owning the right to share each episode with 4 billion of your closest friends? That's all it would take for Lost (with roughly 20M viewers) to make roughly a 200% profit with no DRM needed or wanted.
Yep. I call it the "security blanket syndrome" - because it makes people very comfortable and gives them a strong feeling of safety to know that if they have a problem, no matter how rare such problems are, that the guy to fix it for them is right there. And let me tell you -- it is VERY profitable.
I myself discovered it by accident. I was getting burnt out with a particular client, but I didn't want to just shut down the connection. So, I decided to raise my rates until they 'fired' me for being a geedy bastard. I tripled my rate, well into the triple digits, and they did not bat an eye.
In fact, as my client as gone through a fair amount of managerial turn-over, hardly anyone left knows what my original billing rate was and I am now perceived as more important and more valuable than I was when I walked in the door in large part due to how much more expensive I am than any of their other contractors and all I really do is give advice to people and put out the occasional fire. Lots of time for slashdot during the day.
So, now I am totally burnt out on this boring, tedious gig - the rest of my life is a total mess, but if I can suffer through another year of this, I will be able to retire well before 40.
This phenomenon is also one reason I am a strong believer in the service business-model for Free software. Selling high-quality, highly personalized service to be big corps with deep pockets can be very profitable.
The difference here is that the customers of Boeing and Airbus tend themselves to be large corporations, with a trade association.
Lol! Somehow I don't think a few more trade associations are going to make much difference in Boeing's chances of being able to succesfully outlaw gravity!
Have you taken a look at the trailers size at apple.com, which are encoded in mpeg4?
Have you taken a look at 720p material encoded at 1GB/hour? I have, on a 120" 16:9 screen on a regular basis. I stand by my analysis that it is good enough for non-videophiles. Regardless, with an 8Mbps+ connection you can afford a bigher bitrate and still be timely.
The premise of the article is right - the game consoles are going to decide the winner in the "hi-def" wars.
But the article totally misses the dark horse candidate which I, with my great knowledge and keen insight of the market, predict will be the real winner.
The losers will be both BLU-RAY and HD-DVD. The winner will be downloaded content.
All of the game systems are network centric. In order to get much benefit out of any of the systems you practically have no choice but to connect them to the internet and that is typically going to be a broad-band connection too.
Combine that ubiquitous high-speed internet connectivity with the high-powered processing built into these systems and you have the ideal platform for media distribution using new highly efficient codecs like h.264.
An hour of 720p encoded with h.264 to just 1GB looks pretty good. In most cases it looks a lot better than a DVD. A low-end 1.5Mbps (DSL) connection can transfer that 1GB in under 2 hours. A mid-range 8mbps (comcast cable) connection can transfer it in less than 20 minutes, and high-end 20mbps (Verizon FIOS fibre) will do it in under 10 minutes with plenty of bandwidth to spare.
This combination of processing and network throughput will make it feasible to sell direct downloaded hi-def video to anyone with one of these game consoles.
I believe that just as MP3's portability convenience trounced the non-portable high-def audio products like SACD and DVD-Audio, so too will downloaded (possibly, but not necessarily) pay-per-view hi-def tv and movies.
Of course the quality of 1080p at 8G/hr with h.264 will be significantly better than just 720p at 1G/hr - but for many people the lower quality will be still be more than good enough, and for the videophile, waiting a little bit longer for the download of a top-notch 1080p encoding won't be a terrible inconvenience.
But it will never vanish, because you have to take into account the cost of production as well as the cost of distribution.
Now that the cost of distribution is effectively zero, it does not make sense to try to mark-up the distribution costs so as to pay for the production costs. After all 2000% of $0 is still $0.
It's not perfect, any more than capitalism and democracy are perfect; it's just that all the other systems anyone's ever proposed are even worse. If you have a better idea, of course, do pray share it with us.
The thing about copyright is that it has become progressively less and less perfect as digital technology, and access to it, has spread. We are at a point now where the only reason copyright continues to exist is inertia. The presence (and actions like the continuous extension of copyright duration) of the copyright dinosaurs like the RIAA and MPAA members is stifling innovation in the marketplace.
There certainly are better ideas for compensating artists in the modern world, they just have yet to take root. For example - now that digital networks have eliminated the cost of distribution, we should also use those networks to eliminate the cost of collecting payment. That would open up all kinds of new opportunties for financing the production of content.
For example - if Paramount where to announce that they need revenues of $150M in order to make the next star trek film a worthwhile venture and that they were accepting "pre-order" payments to an escrow account it would take only 15 million fans to each ante up $10 to reach that price.
If we take the production costs for the last star trek movie ("Nemesis") at $70M as a guide, that $150M is approximately a 100% profit. But, and this is where such new financing models can be hugely beneficial for hollywood, that is a guaranteed profit up front before Paramount has to spend a single dime. In today's hollywood that is UNHEARD of. You tell the studio execs that you can guarantee 100% profitability for each and every production and they will never ever need to take viagra again. In effect, this fiancing model removes the studios from the role of venture capitalist and instead distributes that risk out to the paying audience.
So now you've got guaranteed profitability and zero need for copyright. Once the new Star Trek: Sixty of Nine movie is released, the studio gets their money out of escrow and the fans can copy it all they want and share it with 4 billion of their closest friends.
And if the movie sucks? Well, each person who paid is only out $10, bucks just like they would be out at least $10 if they bought tickets or the dvd under the current system. And maybe next time around, Paramount will have to ask for less.
But if the movie rocks, the more people who see it because their friends gave them a copy for free, the more people who are going to be willing to ante up $10 for the next one, and maybe this time Paramount asks for $200M and is able to get paying fans. Thus earning more than 150% profit with zero risk.
But if you believe VESA's hype, DisplayPort's bandwidth is "future extensible" while DVI's badwidth is maxed out at 9.9 Gbps (dual-link) per port. Ars Technica's article on DisplayPort also mentions VESA's claim of higher bandwidth in the future.
I think it is marketing. For either choice will require new silicon to support increased bandwidth. Its possible that displayport will require less logic to support increased bandwidth than DVI would - but once it is packaged up in a chip that most manufacturers will just drop into their designs, it doesn't matter all that much if that chip has 100K or 200K transistors.
I believe Lenovo manufactures IBM's flat panel displays. Could the T221 be a potential justification for Lenovo to co-sponsor this technology?
IBM's manufacturing partner for the T22x family was IDTech in Japan.
IBM stopped selling the monitors almost a year ago, probably right about the time they sold their PC division to Lenovo.
Furthermore, DisplayPort has only a negligble bandwidth lead over DVI. The total raw capacity of DisplayPort is 10.8 Gbps versus 9.9 Gbps for a dual-link DVI connection (or a "type B" HDMI connection).
The main reason for DisplayPort's existence is the onerous licensing terms for HDMI - and some technical requirements that make it harder to miniaturize and integrate the DVI/HDMI electronics.
Are you really comparing a relative monopoly on, say, energy distribution, mining, or rail transport with a trade association made up of hundreds of publishing companies representing thousands of artists?
Yes.
Because that trade association is comprised of approximately 5 large companies that together account for over 90% of the market for all media in the western, and most of the eastern, world.
That makes them an oligopoly, who is just as cut-throat and abusive as his neighbor, monopoly.
It's up to the musician to decide if they agree with you, and want to give their work away, or sell it through a different pricing model?
That's tantamount to asking if it is up to Boeing and Airbus to decide if they agree with gravity and want to make planes that work with gravity or if they should purchase a law that makes gravity illegal instead.
It is human nature to make copies of stuff we like. People have been making mix-tapes since they first invented reel-to-reel recorders and people have been making copies of books since pen and ink were first invented.
Now that the tools to make millions of digital copies for effectively no cost at all are in the hands of hundreds of millions of people, trying to outlaw human nature's desire to copy is like outlawing gravity.
These artists need to realize that the market has changed if they don't figure out how to change with it, the new gravity is going to crush them. Just like any other business that has had to deal with revolutionary changes in technology. Keep making buggy-whips and try to outlaw cars, or start building engines instead - their choice.
When it was expensive to reproduce original works, the incentive to do so is minimal and copyright laws didn't matter very much unless you happened to have the rather large capital investment sitting there in the form of a Linotype machine and a web-fed printing press.
You hit the nail on the head - back when the social compact of copyright was created - we, the people, did not give up much on our end of the bargain. Since, as you said, it wasn't easy to make copies back then, so giving up the inherent natural right to make copies was no big deal.
Now that copying is easy for anyone and everyone, that bargain is no longer so favorable to us, the people and we want to renegotiate.
The problem is, the entrenched copyright cartel thinks they don't have to renegotiate, that they can just dictate terms. That is a severe denial of reality on their part.
If the public safety situation seems urgent and has the potential of escalating by not making the telephone call, call 9-1-1. The 9-1-1 professional will determine whether the call should be processed via 9-1-1, or whether the caller should be referred to another number or agency as appropriate. http://www.sfgov.org/site/ecd_index.asp?id=14063
From those, and many more - it seems like anytime the presence of an officer is required in a timely fashion, calling 911 would be appropriate. Tresspass, especially criminal trespass and not just civil tresspass (which maybe the only kind of tresspass in some states) probably qualifies as needing an officer to respond.
For exactly the same reasons it came with a card in Australia - didn't you read the summary at the top of the page?
isn't helping the sick one of our obligations as a society?
Maybe it is, and maybe it isn't. If the benefits of providing the service are outweighed by the problems that are created by tying it to a card, then obviously society as a whole would be better off just shitcanning the whole thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Political infighting seems to have dropped an interesting and respectful program from the books.
Big freaking deal if the numbers are 'encrypted' or not. The problem is not that the NSA knows people's phone numbers - that's why we have phonebooks. The problem is that they have this huge database that lets anyone with access draw all kinds of inferences about people's relationships with each other. The right to freely associate is not free at all if it means that you end up on some big list in a government computer (or anyone else's computer for that matter).
Having your phone number encrypted when it is in the database doesn't help a bit because the encrypted number is just another unique identifier. Its the equivalent of saying that they used social security numbers in place of the phone numbers.
http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm? story_id=6889252
(me) Production companies aren't in the business to lose money, they wouldn't keep making movies if they didn't make money on them.
You seem to think that production companies would not make movies unless all of them are profitable. My point is that the 1 out of 10 that is profitable covers the losses on the other 9 and then some. As long as they don't hit a string of bad luck and go 20 or 30 without a moneymaker they will show a profit. That was the point of listing the companies that went under - they missed enough moneymakers until they were at the point where all bets were riding on a show and they lost the bet.
My point of listing the movies that were unexpected hits illustrates the flipside of the same coin. Just as they can not predict the losers, they can't predict the winners either.
If you can't predict either way, then there is no way to expect every movie to be profitable. My assertion that, on average, 1 out of 10 makes money is still is good enough to run a business on. It isn't the best odds, but other business run on worse. I'm betting that there are plenty of people who would like to improve them.
(You deleted my comment about most productions being done to a cost with an idea of the revenues ahead of time.)
As you said, such productions make up the volume of cable tv and are crap. My model won't work for them because, well, they are crap and people don't like to pay for crap. Unless it is really, really cheap crap.
Mark Cuban
Don't confuse Cuban's opinion of the market in general, which is what he was refering to in the blog entry I cited, with his own specific productions.
Again, on the DVD front, note that even cancelled TV shows hit DVD now.
They do, but only with what's in the can by the time they were cancelled. As you said, it brings in a few more pennies - maybe it even does bring them into black, I haven't seen any numbers either way. But, I don't see the phenonmenon lasting - unless the series has some sort of wrap-up or ending, few people are interested in purchasing half a season of a cancelled show.
On the other hand, I believe that those people who are buying such series on DVD today and have been getting disillusioned with dangling storylines, etc, would jump at the chance to buy new episodes, which is ideal for a business model like the one I propose.
You are working from a cost model.
... license fees are less than what it costs to produce the show" and that it is based on the hope that if the show does well that they can earn more on future deals, including syndication and dvd. http://www.blogmaverick.com/entry/1234000617063228 /
Nope. I am working from a what the customer knows model. The customers know that it costs nothing to download a movie or song over the internet because they can do it themselves, they can send them to their friends via email, etc - it happens millions of times every day. Consquently, they don't assign much value to distribution and aren't willing to pay much for it. So charging for distribution as a means to recoup costs beyond just the distribution costs doesn't work out so well - they'll just go download it for free instead.
But what they can't do for free, or anywhere near it, is make a movie or a tv show or even just a song.
That's where you work from the idea of fairness. This market isn't working that way, it is working from a "whatever the market will bear" model. They'll cut prices when they think they'll make more by charging lower prices, not when their production costs drop.
Again, you thoroughly misunderstand the business model. It is all about charging what the market will bear - charge as much as you can convince the audience to pay. The two main differences are that the current model has to estimate what the market will bear, and consequently will only find out the real numbers after the investment of production costs is already spent -- a big risk, and that the resulting product has to compete with free downloads of the same work - and as Jack Valenti said, you can't compete with free.
Production companies aren't in the business to lose money, they wouldn't keep making movies if they didn't make money on them.
Which explains why there have been a number of spectacular implosions due to very expensive productions bombing out. For example - Heaven's Gate took out UA, Cutthroat Island took out Carolco and Raise the Titanic took out ITC. On the other hand, there have been plenty of underestimations - UA and Universal both took a pass on Star Wars, even Spielberg expected Jaws to be a career-ending bomb after he had finished shooting, and of course the titanic of underestimations - Titanic, expected to bomb so badly that Cameron had to forfeit his enitre salary of $8M plus his share of the gross just to keep the production afloat.
There are thousands more stories like those from the epic all the way down the line to the personal in hollywood business. Sure they are in business to make money, but it is more about luck than acumen and the constant rise and fall of fortunes is proof of that.
As for "hollywood accounting" and "a percentage of the net is a percentage of nothing" - moving money off the books and such ultimately doesn't make a difference to the bottom-line of the studios, and if you go long enough without a big hit, you go under -- and again I refer you to the constant churn in the business. A good recent example was SKG - they didn't have enough hit releases and consquently they burnt up a substantial portion of their cash on hand, it was only a matter of time until they were underwater, which is why they sold out to Paramount.
I don't believe TV productions in general work on this "90% lose money" principle either.
Got any hard numbers to support your beliefs? If it weren't 6am in the morning I'd dig up a ton of links to support mine, for now you will just have to be satisifed with Mark Cuban's statement that "more often than not
The way the business is run now, its all a big gamble, which is why hollywood is so conservative when it comes to the content of productions - if they think they've got a profitable formula, they ride into the ground and if they get a hint of failure, the production is cancelled lickity-split.
Otherwise use the "Fletch" approach on things like your customer loyalty cards. I keep mine under Harry S Truman, Ted Nugent and John Cocktosen. I have started using Igor Stravinsky lately.
If you've ever paid by check, debit or credit card in conjunction with using one of those 'loyalty' cards then the cat is out of the bag - you might as well just used your real name.
There are services that aggregate transaction data from participating merchants and then data-mine it to reveal connections like Joe buying baby-food at Grocery A so that Toystore B can send him junkmail advertising toys for infants and his cable company can send him junkmail pushing PPV disney movies.
The only way to stay out of those connect-the-dot databases is to use only cash and never give out personally identifiable information.
But don't accuse the other 63% of being stupid sheep unless you know what reasoning they applied to their opinion. What are they personally giving up (in more specific terms than just "privacy")? What are they personally gaining?
I will accuse them of being of stupid sheep because only stupid sheep who can't see beyond the direct personal effects would chose the way they did. If you limit the scope to personal effects it comes down to this:
PROs: No benefit - less than 1 out of 100,000 americans have been killed by terrorist acts in the last 10 years. Chance of happening to any individual is effectively zero, nothing the NSA does will reduce those odds.
CONs: Waste of tax dollars.
Anyone smart enough to see beyond the scope of just personal effects can see a bunch more cons like:
1) Call graph data makes it easy to hunt down whistle-blowers who call reporters.
2) Call graph data makes it easy to infer bogus connections between people, potentially resulting in bogus arrests and false imprisonment.
Yet extending the scope like that reveals no new benefits - smart terrorists won't be using phones to communicate.
So yes, anyone who can't do a simple cost/benefits analysis of this situation is a stupid sheep.
It is amazing how closely your example mimics the Chinese constitution. Their constitution also guarantees freedom:
But then it later says:If he sent e-mail from a personal account to "customers@formeremployer.com", then there's no hax0ring involved.
From the summary of the article, that is exactly what I figured must have happened.
So, why do the illegals go to the emergency rooms rather than the much cheaper and more efficient walk-in clinics? Is it because the clinics are not required to treat them if they can't pay? That would be both counter-productive and mean-spirited.
What Would You Like to See from Game AI?
What I tell it to open the pod bay door, it had damn well better open the effing door!
I don't see the content developers suddently deciding that they should give a fair deal.
Where in the world did you get the idea that my proposal was about being fair?
It is about milking as much money as possible from the paying audience with the least amount of overhead and risk.
Maybe you don't know how hollywood works. Less than 1 out of 10 productions are hits - that hit has to pay for the other 9 failures, and only after the cost of the failures is covered will the production company show a profit. Even hit shows are rarely profitable until they make it to syndication, and that takes 100 shows in the can.
So a business model that can guarantee that each and every production is profitable is unheard of in hollywood. That is the shit that studio execs have wet dreams about. Push all the risk of failure to the audience and just sit back and skim the profits off the top. For really popular shows it is conceivable that they could get away with 1000%+ mark-ups.
Even if for some reason the hollywood old guard isn't interested in profits with zero risk, there are plenty of traditional investors who would absolutely love to get even just a 10% return in less than 6 months.
You all don't like it when companies charge too much (if the bitching on slashdot is any measure). But have no problem stepping into those same shoes.
As one loqacious contractor likes to say - "bidness is bidness."
The service business ain't no monopoly, any buyer is free to walk away and hire someone else if they don't like the price. If they can't find anyone at the price they want, then they are welcome to either handle it in house (it is open-source after all) or move to another product.
It is hard to get less coercive than that.
Wake me up when you can get a custom kernel patch for Windows - from somebody other than microsoft - for under $100K.
No caffeine, but these have got some major sweetness going on, like kool-aid made with double the sugar-flavor mix.
http://www.theimpulsivebuy.com/?p=100
Meanwhile, I also like Diet Code Red from Mountain Dew, it is pretty flavorful and highly caffeinated, althought not available in some markets, like mine, oh how I dream of diet code red.
You could go with one of those diet energy drinks like diet red-bull or diet amp or diet rip-it. HIghly caffeniated and zero cal.
Of course you are going to get all kinds of horrible cancer and brain diseases, but if you live in the USA you are probably eating enough GM food that you are screwed anyway, so might as well enjoy it.
These downloads will be DRMed to high heaven, locked to a given machine.
2 80820
You might think that, but I believe there is another way.
See: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=185094&cid=15
I've got high-hopes that network game-boxen are just the right platform for a joe-sixpack user-friendly system for that kind of business model. Pay a monthly/weekly subscription fee through your normal bill for the game network access and that goes into the escrow account and then get your paid-for-but-now-free shows delivered right to your game-box which happens to be conveniently connected to your tv and sound system.
Maybe your game-box will participate in a bittorrent like swarm for the distribution too, or you can opt out of the upload part of bittorrent for a fee.
Would you pay 25 cents per episode of a show like Lost in HDTV in exchange for owning the right to share each episode with 4 billion of your closest friends? That's all it would take for Lost (with roughly 20M viewers) to make roughly a 200% profit with no DRM needed or wanted.
Yep. I call it the "security blanket syndrome" - because it makes people very comfortable and gives them a strong feeling of safety to know that if they have a problem, no matter how rare such problems are, that the guy to fix it for them is right there. And let me tell you -- it is VERY profitable.
I myself discovered it by accident. I was getting burnt out with a particular client, but I didn't want to just shut down the connection. So, I decided to raise my rates until they 'fired' me for being a geedy bastard. I tripled my rate, well into the triple digits, and they did not bat an eye.
In fact, as my client as gone through a fair amount of managerial turn-over, hardly anyone left knows what my original billing rate was and I am now perceived as more important and more valuable than I was when I walked in the door in large part due to how much more expensive I am than any of their other contractors and all I really do is give advice to people and put out the occasional fire. Lots of time for slashdot during the day.
So, now I am totally burnt out on this boring, tedious gig - the rest of my life is a total mess, but if I can suffer through another year of this, I will be able to retire well before 40.
This phenomenon is also one reason I am a strong believer in the service business-model for Free software. Selling high-quality, highly personalized service to be big corps with deep pockets can be very profitable.
The difference here is that the customers of Boeing and Airbus tend themselves to be large corporations, with a trade association.
Lol! Somehow I don't think a few more trade associations are going to make much difference in Boeing's chances of being able to succesfully outlaw gravity!
Have you taken a look at the trailers size at apple.com, which are encoded in mpeg4?
Have you taken a look at 720p material encoded at 1GB/hour? I have, on a 120" 16:9 screen on a regular basis. I stand by my analysis that it is good enough for non-videophiles. Regardless, with an 8Mbps+ connection you can afford a bigher bitrate and still be timely.
The premise of the article is right - the game consoles are going to decide the winner in the "hi-def" wars.
But the article totally misses the dark horse candidate which I, with my great knowledge and keen insight of the market, predict will be the real winner.
The losers will be both BLU-RAY and HD-DVD. The winner will be downloaded content.
All of the game systems are network centric. In order to get much benefit out of any of the systems you practically have no choice but to connect them to the internet and that is typically going to be a broad-band connection too.
Combine that ubiquitous high-speed internet connectivity with the high-powered processing built into these systems and you have the ideal platform for media distribution using new highly efficient codecs like h.264.
An hour of 720p encoded with h.264 to just 1GB looks pretty good. In most cases it looks a lot better than a DVD. A low-end 1.5Mbps (DSL) connection can transfer that 1GB in under 2 hours. A mid-range 8mbps (comcast cable) connection can transfer it in less than 20 minutes, and high-end 20mbps (Verizon FIOS fibre) will do it in under 10 minutes with plenty of bandwidth to spare.
This combination of processing and network throughput will make it feasible to sell direct downloaded hi-def video to anyone with one of these game consoles.
I believe that just as MP3's portability convenience trounced the non-portable high-def audio products like SACD and DVD-Audio, so too will downloaded (possibly, but not necessarily) pay-per-view hi-def tv and movies.
Of course the quality of 1080p at 8G/hr with h.264 will be significantly better than just 720p at 1G/hr - but for many people the lower quality will be still be more than good enough, and for the videophile, waiting a little bit longer for the download of a top-notch 1080p encoding won't be a terrible inconvenience.
But it will never vanish, because you have to take into account the cost of production as well as the cost of distribution.
Now that the cost of distribution is effectively zero, it does not make sense to try to mark-up the distribution costs so as to pay for the production costs. After all 2000% of $0 is still $0.
It's not perfect, any more than capitalism and democracy are perfect; it's just that all the other systems anyone's ever proposed are even worse. If you have a better idea, of course, do pray share it with us.
The thing about copyright is that it has become progressively less and less perfect as digital technology, and access to it, has spread. We are at a point now where the only reason copyright continues to exist is inertia. The presence (and actions like the continuous extension of copyright duration) of the copyright dinosaurs like the RIAA and MPAA members is stifling innovation in the marketplace.
There certainly are better ideas for compensating artists in the modern world, they just have yet to take root. For example - now that digital networks have eliminated the cost of distribution, we should also use those networks to eliminate the cost of collecting payment. That would open up all kinds of new opportunties for financing the production of content.
For example - if Paramount where to announce that they need revenues of $150M in order to make the next star trek film a worthwhile venture and that they were accepting "pre-order" payments to an escrow account it would take only 15 million fans to each ante up $10 to reach that price.
If we take the production costs for the last star trek movie ("Nemesis") at $70M as a guide, that $150M is approximately a 100% profit. But, and this is where such new financing models can be hugely beneficial for hollywood, that is a guaranteed profit up front before Paramount has to spend a single dime. In today's hollywood that is UNHEARD of. You tell the studio execs that you can guarantee 100% profitability for each and every production and they will never ever need to take viagra again. In effect, this fiancing model removes the studios from the role of venture capitalist and instead distributes that risk out to the paying audience.
So now you've got guaranteed profitability and zero need for copyright. Once the new Star Trek: Sixty of Nine movie is released, the studio gets their money out of escrow and the fans can copy it all they want and share it with 4 billion of their closest friends.
And if the movie sucks? Well, each person who paid is only out $10, bucks just like they would be out at least $10 if they bought tickets or the dvd under the current system. And maybe next time around, Paramount will have to ask for less.
But if the movie rocks, the more people who see it because their friends gave them a copy for free, the more people who are going to be willing to ante up $10 for the next one, and maybe this time Paramount asks for $200M and is able to get paying fans. Thus earning more than 150% profit with zero risk.
But if you believe VESA's hype, DisplayPort's bandwidth is "future extensible" while DVI's badwidth is maxed out at 9.9 Gbps (dual-link) per port. Ars Technica's article on DisplayPort also mentions VESA's claim of higher bandwidth in the future.
I think it is marketing. For either choice will require new silicon to support increased bandwidth. Its possible that displayport will require less logic to support increased bandwidth than DVI would - but once it is packaged up in a chip that most manufacturers will just drop into their designs, it doesn't matter all that much if that chip has 100K or 200K transistors.
I believe Lenovo manufactures IBM's flat panel displays. Could the T221 be a potential justification for Lenovo to co-sponsor this technology?
IBM's manufacturing partner for the T22x family was IDTech in Japan.
IBM stopped selling the monitors almost a year ago, probably right about the time they sold their PC division to Lenovo.
Furthermore, DisplayPort has only a negligble bandwidth lead over DVI. The total raw capacity of DisplayPort is 10.8 Gbps versus 9.9 Gbps for a dual-link DVI connection (or a "type B" HDMI connection).
The main reason for DisplayPort's existence is the onerous licensing terms for HDMI - and some technical requirements that make it harder to miniaturize and integrate the DVI/HDMI electronics.
Are you really comparing a relative monopoly on, say, energy distribution, mining, or rail transport with a trade association made up of hundreds of publishing companies representing thousands of artists?
Yes.
Because that trade association is comprised of approximately 5 large companies that together account for over 90% of the market for all media in the western, and most of the eastern, world.
That makes them an oligopoly, who is just as cut-throat and abusive as his neighbor, monopoly.
It's up to the musician to decide if they agree with you, and want to give their work away, or sell it through a different pricing model?
That's tantamount to asking if it is up to Boeing and Airbus to decide if they agree with gravity and want to make planes that work with gravity or if they should purchase a law that makes gravity illegal instead.
It is human nature to make copies of stuff we like. People have been making mix-tapes since they first invented reel-to-reel recorders and people have been making copies of books since pen and ink were first invented.
Now that the tools to make millions of digital copies for effectively no cost at all are in the hands of hundreds of millions of people, trying to outlaw human nature's desire to copy is like outlawing gravity.
These artists need to realize that the market has changed if they don't figure out how to change with it, the new gravity is going to crush them. Just like any other business that has had to deal with revolutionary changes in technology. Keep making buggy-whips and try to outlaw cars, or start building engines instead - their choice.
When it was expensive to reproduce original works, the incentive to do so is minimal and copyright laws didn't matter very much unless you happened to have the rather large capital investment sitting there in the form of a Linotype machine and a web-fed printing press.
You hit the nail on the head - back when the social compact of copyright was created - we, the people, did not give up much on our end of the bargain. Since, as you said, it wasn't easy to make copies back then, so giving up the inherent natural right to make copies was no big deal.
Now that copying is easy for anyone and everyone, that bargain is no longer so favorable to us, the people and we want to renegotiate.
The problem is, the entrenched copyright cartel thinks they don't have to renegotiate, that they can just dictate terms. That is a severe denial of reality on their part.
There does not seem to be a clear comprehensive policy, but the general tone is the same:
i ce/emerman/911.htm
/ whentocall.htm
Don't hesitate to call 911. The 911 system was created to make it easy to request police, fire or medical response.
http://www.ci.bloomington.mn.us/cityhall/dept/pol
If the public safety situation seems urgent and has the potential of escalating by not making the telephone call, call 9-1-1. The 9-1-1 professional will determine whether the call should be processed via 9-1-1, or whether the caller should be referred to another number or agency as appropriate.
http://www.sfgov.org/site/ecd_index.asp?id=14063
Any activity that seems unusual for your neighbourhood during the day or the night.
http://www.city.vancouver.bc.ca/police/blockwatch
From those, and many more - it seems like anytime the presence of an officer is required in a timely fashion, calling 911 would be appropriate. Tresspass, especially criminal trespass and not just civil tresspass (which maybe the only kind of tresspass in some states) probably qualifies as needing an officer to respond.
Why would it have to come with a card?
For exactly the same reasons it came with a card in Australia - didn't you read the summary at the top of the page?
isn't helping the sick one of our obligations as a society?
Maybe it is, and maybe it isn't. If the benefits of providing the service are outweighed by the problems that are created by tying it to a card, then obviously society as a whole would be better off just shitcanning the whole thing.