Obviously you can prove this? What makes you so sure that people who download music aren't simply people who like music to a fairly average degree, but are too cheap to pay for it and therefore just take it for free?
The research I linked to shows that people who download music illegally buy more music on average than people who don't download music illegally.
Obviously there are going to be some people who download and don't buy, but the research indicates that those people are in a minority.
The fact remains that people who download music are people who love music. Yes, some of them might download something they might otherwise have bought, but just as important are the people that download something that they wouldn't usually get to hear and then go and buy it. I've fallen into the latter category more times than not.
maybe these brits should go back to boiling every piece of food to death, instead of using stupid words on slashdot.
How are we supposed to know which words you understand? Are we psychic? Sure I know a few words like 'pants' that cause confusion, but to expect people to translate for you is just childish.
As for the food 'quip', how about four out of the top ten restaurants in the world being in Britain, compared to two in the USA.
I've mostly heard it used/used it myself to describe "customers", particularly gamblers.
Exactly. It means customer, not 'bloke' or 'average joe'. Since it's a slang word you'll only hear it being used colloquially, usually in terms of gambling, market stalls, bars, clubs, brothels, etc.
Trust me, utopia will be sucky too, such is the vastness of human desire.
Exactly. Without a significant shift in human cultures any utopia cannot happen, whether we have the technology or not. We could never agree on what utopia should be like, and would fight about it.
I agree, but would say that a group of people who say specs are useless could be devided into more categories; the idiots, the ill-informed, the misquoted...
I don't know what Linus's experience of working in software houses is like, but I find there's usually a mix of talent and experience levels, with some developers tending to need things to be designed by a more senior team member. Linux kernel development is a very different environment and I'm not qualified to comment on how the process works, but in the regular world I've seen the benefits of a good spec, and no number of celebrity kernel developers could convince me otherwise.
What's the problem? If you want to pay less for a locked in phone thats your buisness. If you want to have freedom to go to any network you want you have to pay a premium. I don't necessarily see a problem with the buisness model...
The problem is that, although these companies are welcome to adopt a business model where you pay a premium to use the handset after your contract expires, there's no valid reason for that business model to be protected by law. Handset unlocking is not a great injustice, it's simply making use of something that you have paid for through line rental and call charges by the end of your contract.
Don't let him get you mad. He's a typical liberal.... But OMFG! GEORGE SHRUBA BUSH wont get close enough for me to throw a rock at him!!!111!!! The USA is teh EVIL just like ChinA!!! OMG OMG!
He may or may not have brought anything worth listening to the debate, but your rediculous straw man and resort to stereotypes doesn't bring anything either.
To the people who will flame me: Are things perfect in the US? No. I am fully aware that they are not. But we aren't even in the same order of magnitude as China.
This should have been the main point of your post, not the stereotypes and exaggeration. By all means disagree, but don't drag us all down to the same childish Fox News "Look a dirty 'liberal'!" level.
Bottom line, the free market only works properly when the market is informed and educated.
Excellent point, although "properly" is subjective. The current system does work properly from the perspective of the people who use marketing and advertising misinformation to make hug profits from poor products. I'll leave you to form your own subjective value judgements about those people.
Agreed. I'm not sure what you meant by the "this... is not technical innovation" comment, but apart from that I'm with you.
This is an overreaction to the overreaction to each successive Ipod. If the Ipod design team did see it, so what? If they didn't see it, they will have grown up with it, or things like it all around them. How can you not be effected by the design of things around you?
I think this is an example of the blog feedback loop creating meaningless noise.
Like a good American he will fully comply with his government's new policy. I mean who would oppose such a measure? By cataloguing those who may be interested in pornography you create a database of potential future offenders - and would you oppose a measure that could protect so many children in the future?
Banning smoking in public places would protect children, but plenty of people oppose that. It's a trade-off between crime-prevention and (in this case) privacy. Some people will oppose it, it's just a question of what percentage. The people that do oppose it have a right to do so without being labelled "bad americans".
...before the Nuke Washington crowd finally agrees that we've stopped?
Allegedly the USA has stopped overthrowing democracies, but I agree, allegedly doesn't cut it. What has changed between now and 1973? Are Bush and his cohorts more considerate of other nations soveriegnty than Nixon? Is he less willing to employ covert and overt force against people he's taken a dislike to? Recent history says not.
I agree with you that we really need more evidence, but bearing in mind Bush's track record I'm inclined to ignore "innocent until proven guilty" just like he ignores it in Guantanamo Bay.
You DO have other sources besides Wikipedia for the first one?
The fact that the Whitehouse welcomed rather than condemned the 3-day junta is a matter of public record. First one up in a Google search is an account in The Observer.
If you cite something which happened in 1953 as a proof... just think a little.
Sure, I appreciate it was a while ago, but the four examples I've given (Iran:1953, Guatemala:1954, Chile:1973, Venezuela:2002) show a fairly healthy disdain for democracy. The question is how can you tell whether a leopard has changed its spots? The Venezuela incident may or may not have been directly contributed to by the USA, but it certainly doesn't look good.
That's not to take anything away from these engineers. To the contrary, it shows how little they have to work with. But solar cars are simply and provably not the future.
You're right in that this particular application probably wouldn't find commercial success, but that doesn't mean the technology and engineering techniques these people develop wont be of use in other areas. Technology has a fascinating habit of jumping application boundaries.
Venezuela? When did the US government try to topple Chavez?
2002 allegedly. Even if you believe the official Whitehouse version their behaviour was hardly pro-democracy. Chavez had popular support and was deposed undemocratically, and the US government immediately recognised rather than condemning the suspiciously oil-friendly junta that took control.
Iran's government is not democratically elected. Plus, the US is not going to attack Iran.
Democratically elected cultural enemies are still enemies, and the US must carry the torch against Islam.
Islam preaches peace, humility and charity. Curiously similar to Christianity, non? Your enemy isn't Islam, it's people who distort and exploit to further their ambitions. Those people exist on both sides of this so-called "war".
The way to destroy a low-tech, nil-infrastructure, dispersed enemy is to use BW.
The best way to destroy a low-tech, nil-infrastructure, dispersed enemy is to go home and stop bombing them. Then they wont be your enemy any more. It's a much cheaper solution than biological weapons.
In a Kulturkampf, there is no reason for the civilised rules one might follow against an opponent one merely disagrees with. Each person in an enemy culture is an enemy for they carry their culture like a virus. Genocide is no crime in a Kulturkampf, for the removal of the other is a duty to ones own.
Just because a disagreement seems to be based on culture doesn't change the nature of genocide. Surely by that logic you could say that the Nazis had a "Kulturkampf" with the Jews, and that makes the Holocaust acceptable.
Perhaps when the right/.er has his/her loved ones destroyed by Muslims, they'll fire up a home lab and fight back.
Perhaps they will, and perhaps they'll get arrested and locked up for a very long time.
Stop bombing people. Stop toppling democratically elected governments. Stop preaching about democracy when your own government is controlled by corporate lobbyists. Stop torturing people. Stop imprisonment without trial. Clean up your pollution.
I have good friends who are citizens of the USA. Lots of you are nice people, but as a nation you face justifiable critisism.
If people criticising the USA makes you unhappy then do something about the bad things your country is doing. Don't try and stop the free speech that your great nation was founded on.
I don't disagree with your comment overall, but what makes you think this above comment is true? I don't have a "home cinema" setup - I have a 27" TV, DVD and VHS players, and a stereo system. I like my stuff, but I wouldn't say it was a "cinema" experience exactly.
I agree, 'home cinema' isn't the same as 'cinema'. It's a common term, I didn't invent it. We can debate the finer points of English usage if you like but I doubt it'd get us anywhere.
I don't know, it just seems to me that you might be the kind of person that says things like: "Let them eat cake" because you have no sense of reality.
I also said "Perhaps it's time to stop the protectionism and let cinemas innovate or die out". From that you should be able to deduce that I think cinemas should be forced to compete on equal terms with other media, i.e. ending the current delay before DVD release. If people want to go to cinemas they can pay for them. If they don't want cinemas then they'll go out of business. Supply and demand. That means that if people in poorer areas of the world don't have TVs and DVD players then cinemas there will keep going.
Many people in the world barely have enough to eat much less worry about home cinema systems. I think it'd be nice if you tried to see the world situation beyond your own fat ass sitting in an easy chair in front of your big screen plasma TV, surrounded no doubt by your 7.1 speaker system. I bet it's nice having Jeeves there to make you popcorn on demand too. Knock, knock - reality calling!
My post did not say that all cinemas should be shut down. That would be ludicrous. It said that they should meet demand and not be artificially supported. You're welcome to rant and be rude, this is Slashdot after all, but I'd advise reading posts all the way through before replying.
Have you ever considered that the problem might not be with Hollywood or movie theatres but with your fellow citizens' basic inability to act in what would be considered a civilised manner?
Last time I went to the cinema a couple behind us were whispering to each other in Polish for most of the film.
The time before that, three girls down at the front were chatting at normal volume, then popped open a bottle of champaigne.
Going to the cinema is a great experience, but it's by no means necessary to enjoy most films. Most people have 'home cinema' setups these days anyway. Perhaps it's time to stop the protectionism and let cinemas innovate or die out.
Exactly. There are plenty of examples that just help people get a bigger slice of the pie, starting with pretty much any software used by stockmarket traders. This is the nature of companies though, I'm not sure why this is news.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously you can prove this? What makes you so sure that people who download music aren't simply people who like music to a fairly average degree, but are too cheap to pay for it and therefore just take it for free?
The research I linked to shows that people who download music illegally buy more music on average than people who don't download music illegally.
Obviously there are going to be some people who download and don't buy, but the research indicates that those people are in a minority.
People who download music are people who love music when it costs them nothing. There's a difference.
It's possible to love music, AND love music when it costs nothing. The two things aren't mutually exclusive.
Besides, if they only love music when it costs nothing then they wouldn't pay for music anyway, so the music company loses nothing.
...according the copyright holders. There's research that says otherwise.
The fact remains that people who download music are people who love music. Yes, some of them might download something they might otherwise have bought, but just as important are the people that download something that they wouldn't usually get to hear and then go and buy it. I've fallen into the latter category more times than not.
How many american resturants serve native American food? Hmmm? Thought so.
Good point well made.
maybe these brits should go back to boiling every piece of food to death, instead of using stupid words on slashdot.
How are we supposed to know which words you understand? Are we psychic? Sure I know a few words like 'pants' that cause confusion, but to expect people to translate for you is just childish.
As for the food 'quip', how about four out of the top ten restaurants in the world being in Britain, compared to two in the USA.
I've mostly heard it used/used it myself to describe "customers", particularly gamblers.
Exactly. It means customer, not 'bloke' or 'average joe'. Since it's a slang word you'll only hear it being used colloquially, usually in terms of gambling, market stalls, bars, clubs, brothels, etc.
Trust me, utopia will be sucky too, such is the vastness of human desire.
Exactly. Without a significant shift in human cultures any utopia cannot happen, whether we have the technology or not. We could never agree on what utopia should be like, and would fight about it.
Its an idiot who says a spec is useless.
I agree, but would say that a group of people who say specs are useless could be devided into more categories; the idiots, the ill-informed, the misquoted...
I don't know what Linus's experience of working in software houses is like, but I find there's usually a mix of talent and experience levels, with some developers tending to need things to be designed by a more senior team member. Linux kernel development is a very different environment and I'm not qualified to comment on how the process works, but in the regular world I've seen the benefits of a good spec, and no number of celebrity kernel developers could convince me otherwise.
From 30gigs.com: "Our main goal is to increase our space even further, to 50 gigs, or maybe 100 as time goes on."
Looks like they're going to keep changing their name to match the storage capacity. Foolish marketeers know nothing about encapsulation.
What's the problem? If you want to pay less for a locked in phone thats your buisness. If you want to have freedom to go to any network you want you have to pay a premium. I don't necessarily see a problem with the buisness model...
The problem is that, although these companies are welcome to adopt a business model where you pay a premium to use the handset after your contract expires, there's no valid reason for that business model to be protected by law. Handset unlocking is not a great injustice, it's simply making use of something that you have paid for through line rental and call charges by the end of your contract.
Don't let him get you mad. He's a typical liberal.... But OMFG! GEORGE SHRUBA BUSH wont get close enough for me to throw a rock at him!!!111!!! The USA is teh EVIL just like ChinA!!! OMG OMG!
He may or may not have brought anything worth listening to the debate, but your rediculous straw man and resort to stereotypes doesn't bring anything either.
To the people who will flame me: Are things perfect in the US? No. I am fully aware that they are not. But we aren't even in the same order of magnitude as China.
This should have been the main point of your post, not the stereotypes and exaggeration. By all means disagree, but don't drag us all down to the same childish Fox News "Look a dirty 'liberal'!" level.
They can also protest openly (within reason) against the government without fear of being arrested.
All except Cindy Sheehan, who was arrested for protesting in Washington yesterday.
Bottom line, the free market only works properly when the market is informed and educated.
Excellent point, although "properly" is subjective. The current system does work properly from the perspective of the people who use marketing and advertising misinformation to make hug profits from poor products. I'll leave you to form your own subjective value judgements about those people.
Agreed. I'm not sure what you meant by the "this... is not technical innovation" comment, but apart from that I'm with you.
This is an overreaction to the overreaction to each successive Ipod. If the Ipod design team did see it, so what? If they didn't see it, they will have grown up with it, or things like it all around them. How can you not be effected by the design of things around you?
I think this is an example of the blog feedback loop creating meaningless noise.
Like a good American he will fully comply with his government's new policy. I mean who would oppose such a measure? By cataloguing those who may be interested in pornography you create a database of potential future offenders - and would you oppose a measure that could protect so many children in the future?
Banning smoking in public places would protect children, but plenty of people oppose that. It's a trade-off between crime-prevention and (in this case) privacy. Some people will oppose it, it's just a question of what percentage. The people that do oppose it have a right to do so without being labelled "bad americans".
Allegedly the USA has stopped overthrowing democracies, but I agree, allegedly doesn't cut it. What has changed between now and 1973? Are Bush and his cohorts more considerate of other nations soveriegnty than Nixon? Is he less willing to employ covert and overt force against people he's taken a dislike to? Recent history says not.
I agree with you that we really need more evidence, but bearing in mind Bush's track record I'm inclined to ignore "innocent until proven guilty" just like he ignores it in Guantanamo Bay.
You DO have other sources besides Wikipedia for the first one?
The fact that the Whitehouse welcomed rather than condemned the 3-day junta is a matter of public record. First one up in a Google search is an account in The Observer.
If you cite something which happened in 1953 as a proof... just think a little.
Sure, I appreciate it was a while ago, but the four examples I've given (Iran:1953, Guatemala:1954, Chile:1973, Venezuela:2002) show a fairly healthy disdain for democracy. The question is how can you tell whether a leopard has changed its spots? The Venezuela incident may or may not have been directly contributed to by the USA, but it certainly doesn't look good.
That's not to take anything away from these engineers. To the contrary, it shows how little they have to work with. But solar cars are simply and provably not the future.
You're right in that this particular application probably wouldn't find commercial success, but that doesn't mean the technology and engineering techniques these people develop wont be of use in other areas. Technology has a fascinating habit of jumping application boundaries.
Venezuela? When did the US government try to topple Chavez?
2002 allegedly. Even if you believe the official Whitehouse version their behaviour was hardly pro-democracy. Chavez had popular support and was deposed undemocratically, and the US government immediately recognised rather than condemning the suspiciously oil-friendly junta that took control.
Iran's government is not democratically elected. Plus, the US is not going to attack Iran.
Too late. It already happened.
You mean Hussein's democratically elected government?
No. Saddam Hussein wasn't elected. I was talking about Guatamala, Venezuela, Iran, etc. take your pick.
Democratically elected cultural enemies are still enemies, and the US must carry the torch against Islam.
Islam preaches peace, humility and charity. Curiously similar to Christianity, non? Your enemy isn't Islam, it's people who distort and exploit to further their ambitions. Those people exist on both sides of this so-called "war".
The way to destroy a low-tech, nil-infrastructure, dispersed enemy is to use BW.
The best way to destroy a low-tech, nil-infrastructure, dispersed enemy is to go home and stop bombing them. Then they wont be your enemy any more. It's a much cheaper solution than biological weapons.
In a Kulturkampf, there is no reason for the civilised rules one might follow against an opponent one merely disagrees with. Each person in an enemy culture is an enemy for they carry their culture like a virus. Genocide is no crime in a Kulturkampf, for the removal of the other is a duty to ones own.
Just because a disagreement seems to be based on culture doesn't change the nature of genocide. Surely by that logic you could say that the Nazis had a "Kulturkampf" with the Jews, and that makes the Holocaust acceptable.
Perhaps when the right /.er has his/her loved ones destroyed by Muslims, they'll fire up a home lab and fight back.
Perhaps they will, and perhaps they'll get arrested and locked up for a very long time.
Stop the US bashing
Stop bombing people. Stop toppling democratically elected governments. Stop preaching about democracy when your own government is controlled by corporate lobbyists. Stop torturing people. Stop imprisonment without trial. Clean up your pollution.
I have good friends who are citizens of the USA. Lots of you are nice people, but as a nation you face justifiable critisism.
If people criticising the USA makes you unhappy then do something about the bad things your country is doing. Don't try and stop the free speech that your great nation was founded on.
I don't disagree with your comment overall, but what makes you think this above comment is true? I don't have a "home cinema" setup - I have a 27" TV, DVD and VHS players, and a stereo system. I like my stuff, but I wouldn't say it was a "cinema" experience exactly.
I agree, 'home cinema' isn't the same as 'cinema'. It's a common term, I didn't invent it. We can debate the finer points of English usage if you like but I doubt it'd get us anywhere.
I don't know, it just seems to me that you might be the kind of person that says things like: "Let them eat cake" because you have no sense of reality.
I also said "Perhaps it's time to stop the protectionism and let cinemas innovate or die out". From that you should be able to deduce that I think cinemas should be forced to compete on equal terms with other media, i.e. ending the current delay before DVD release. If people want to go to cinemas they can pay for them. If they don't want cinemas then they'll go out of business. Supply and demand. That means that if people in poorer areas of the world don't have TVs and DVD players then cinemas there will keep going.
Many people in the world barely have enough to eat much less worry about home cinema systems. I think it'd be nice if you tried to see the world situation beyond your own fat ass sitting in an easy chair in front of your big screen plasma TV, surrounded no doubt by your 7.1 speaker system. I bet it's nice having Jeeves there to make you popcorn on demand too. Knock, knock - reality calling!
My post did not say that all cinemas should be shut down. That would be ludicrous. It said that they should meet demand and not be artificially supported. You're welcome to rant and be rude, this is Slashdot after all, but I'd advise reading posts all the way through before replying.
Have you ever considered that the problem might not be with Hollywood or movie theatres but with your fellow citizens' basic inability to act in what would be considered a civilised manner?
Last time I went to the cinema a couple behind us were whispering to each other in Polish for most of the film.
The time before that, three girls down at the front were chatting at normal volume, then popped open a bottle of champaigne.
Going to the cinema is a great experience, but it's by no means necessary to enjoy most films. Most people have 'home cinema' setups these days anyway. Perhaps it's time to stop the protectionism and let cinemas innovate or die out.
Exactly. There are plenty of examples that just help people get a bigger slice of the pie, starting with pretty much any software used by stockmarket traders. This is the nature of companies though, I'm not sure why this is news.