I'm downloading the lossless version now. Mr Reznor is more than welcome to my 5 bucks. I hadn't listened to NIN since the nineties when one of my room mates used to blast "Closer" all the time. Not my kind of thing, but I figured there was nothing to lose in downloading the free tracks from "Ghosts" yesterday. I'm a big Brian Eno fan, so I was pleasantly surprised at how much I liked it.
This is how it should be. I would never have even listened to this album if I hadn't been able to try out those tracks for free. Being able to download DRM free in lossless is the killer. I hope this is a massive success for NIN to encourage other artists to do the same.
I really like how he has taken advantage of the digital format to make the album art for each song different. It shows up in iTunes album view with the regular cover, but if I play it on my iPod Touch the art (which is damn cool BTW) changes with each song. It's a nice little effect.
I only wish that Microsoft could be barred from competing in the workplace. Unfortunately, it is probably the most insidious monopoly in history such that most commercial enterprises depend on being able to buy their software. For many end users Microsoft is like one of those science-fiction infestations that you have to self-mutilate to rid yourself of. A threatened, sudden withdrawal of service, while good for the FOSS/Apple Rebel Alliance (TM), would be pretty catastrophic for some companies.
The punishments I was thinking of involve the creative use of livestock.
What's 1.3 billion to Microsoft? They threw a cool billion away because they couldn't be bothered doing proper quality control for the 360 and they threw away 4 billion on the original Xbox. Lord knows how much more they've thrown away. They probably burn $100 bills for fun.
The only punishments that would hurt Microsoft have been illegal since the Dark Ages.
Your tastes are different than mine. I'd rate Uncharted, R&C, Resistance and Warhawk as excellent PS3 exclusives. The only 360 game I would rate as clearly better would be Bioshock. Mass Effect I got tired of, and Halo 3 turned out to be quickly overrun by COD4. I'd add Forza 2 for the 360 as being a pretty decent exclusive. The PS3 exclusives for this year will even that up and put it in the PS3s favour. MGS4 looks excellent, as do RFOM 2 and Motorstorm 3, and whenever they get around to releasing GT5 I will stop playing Forza. Killzone 2, Haze, etc.
But that's all a bit silly and largely down to personal tastes. Most games will be released for both platforms. If you don't buy both, you will miss out on some exclusives, but that's life. By the end of the year the games will be six of one and half a dozen of the other. The 360s advantage is that it has had an extra year of releases. But, as the facts demonstrated, this did not stop the PS3 from selling faster even when its prime competitor had many more games than it did. What won't change is the lack of Blu Ray and the RROD crap. 360 owners, including myself, are stuck with that.
I like both consoles and exclusive titles for both, but that doesn't stop the figures demonstrating that the 360 has peaked and that the PS3 is eating it up outside the US (and recently inside the US). Sony won. Time to move on.
I don't think that this idea is revolutionary: it's just capitalism. Companies have given away short films of and glossy photos of their products for years. It's called advertising. Nothing revolutionary about that.
Revolutionary occurs when the authorities cannot enforce the market system at an acceptable cost. This is essentially what is happening with the online sharing of music. Musicians and music publishers can try to make a virtue of necessity, but they can no longer exercise any control over distribution and music will be free to anyone who wants it whatever they say. There's no moral judgement here (which would be futile anyway) just plain facts - greed abhors a vacuum. Politicians can lie their asses off about how they will stop file sharing, but they might as well be making fart noises into a microphone (If only they did that all the time).
Once the market can no longer be enforced, some other form of economic organization has to be found or the good concerned will disappear. When you think about how many goods we consume can be reproduced digitally now, and how this might expand in the future, you can see the end of the market system for large swathes of our lives. Some smart person better start thinking of a workable alternative to capitalism in these areas that does not involve voluntary self restraint.
Sony is already "winning" the console war (at least the part they are in). I was in a hurry before, but what I should have mentioned is that both Sony and Nintendo played it smarter than Microsoft. The PS3 and the Wii are competitors, but not direct competitors in the same way that the 360 and PS3 are. Nintendo knew that competing with Sony and Microsoft directly was not a good bet, so they made a much cheaper console sans HD, but gave a lot of people who don't usually buy games a reason to buy a Wii. This was an extremely smart move and Nintendo deserves every bit of the success they have had for being so bold.
Sony aimed at a different segment of the market by creating a hi tech gaming media centre. Microsoft did the same and, as I said above, had to release first, or they would have been buried by Sony. They bet on lower tech (DVD) and an early release to try to create such momentum that the contest would be over by the time the price of a PS3 came down. Initially it seemed as if they were right: the PS3 was extremely expensive and there were hardly any games for it compared to the 360 (even though there weren't that many great games for the 360 until Oblivion and GOW came out). That's over. The PS3 is now the better deal.
For Microsoft to be successful they would have to sell 360s at a much faster rate from launch than the PS3 sold from launch. If Sony kept pace and Blu Ray won, then the PS3 would eventually overhaul the 360 because it is better hardware. The longer the PS3 keeps pace in sales from launch, it becomes more attractive, because once both are discounted to the sweet spot for consoles, the PS3 is better value (you get the winning HD optical format, integrated wireless, etc.). In other words, it's the tortoise and the hare. The 360 really had to sell at Wii like rates in order to inflict a crushing win over Sony.
There's one way to tell if Microsoft's strategy worked: is PS3 adoption slower than 360 adoption? The answer is no. PS3 adoption is slightly faster than 360 adoption, even though you would expect 360 adoption to be better because of the advantage of more games. Unless the 360 can pull away at a fast rate, the tortoise will eventually catch the hare, and once that happens the hare is fucked.
Why did this happen? Well, Blu Ray was always the stronger format, so the PS3 was eventually going to get a big boost from that, but the main reason in my view is that Nintendo undercut Microsoft in a big way. Like I said, the 360 would have had to sell at Wii like rates in order to win, but unfortunately for Microsoft the Wii ended up selling at Wii like rates (bad joke, I know). Nintendo ate up the lower end of the market. Microsoft has ended up in the middle with a console that is more expensive than the Wii (and thus lost the cheap end of the market) and which has less features than the PS3 (which beats them at the high end). It's the red headed stepchild of consoles.
In 2006 Microsoft shipped over 10 million consoles. In 2007 they shipped about 7 1/2 million. That means that 360 appears to have peaked back in 2006. All the press about cumulative sales from launch is meant to hide that inconvenient truth (and the other inconvenient truth that the PS3 is winning outside North America).
Back before either console was released, assorted media aficionados were saying that the 360 was being released too early and that the lack of an integrated HD drive would hurt it in the long run. What they missed is that Microsoft had to do this in order to get a head start over Sony: it was the only way they would avoid taking another beating. Consumers paid for it with poor quality control.
The Blu Ray victory was the tipping point. Now the 360 is just a game console that plays pretty much the same games as Sony's, but which will probably break down, and costs quite a bit more when you include wireless and online gaming to bring it up to spec.
While the format war was still on, blu ray on the PS3 was a curiosity (I know I bought mine largely out of curiosity about it). Now you are basically getting a free next gen DVD player with every PS3 - that is not something Microsoft will be able to match in price any time soon.
Props to Sony. Whatever their other evils, they clearly kept their eye on the ball in this case.
To answer your question: I'm a communist, and I'm definitely smarter than you. How do I know this? Well, I read the papers and understand the English language and this has led me to realize that a guy like Hugo Chavez, who has won umpteen elections and referendums, and who gracefully admitted defeat when he didn't win the last referendum, cannot by any stretch of the imagination be called a totalitarian.
Chavez is a New Dealer and a throwback to the nationalizing governments that Western countries used to have (and some still do). Calling him a totalitarian is just silly, whether or not you like his policies.
I can't believe you are saying this with a straight face. Sure, many Cubans have attempted to leave Cuba for the US. That's because Cuba is comparatively poorer than the US (and is the subject of an economic embargo to boot). But people who bring up Cubans trying to leave Cuba seem to conveniently forget the never ending tidal wave of illegal economic migrants from supposedly "free" countries like Mexico and the rest of Latin America, who far outnumber the Cuban migrants. People from poor countries will try to get into rich countries. There's nothing interesting or controversial about that.
The Cubans do a pretty decent job with not many resources, and they still find the means to send a bunch of doctors to help even poorer people. I'd rather be poor in Cuba than in any other Latin American country. At least in Cuba someone would be looking out for me when I couldn't help myself.
What many in the US cannot understand is that most Cubans genuinely like Fidel. They don't necessarily look at the US and wonder why they aren't like them, but rather look at countries like Mexico, Jamaica and Colombia and thank God that they aren't like them.
Even though I am usually a pitiless and fanatical member of the Apple Hyper Commando Flame Unit in their Eternal War Against Evil (TM), this has gotten so bad that it is hard for me not to feel a bit sorry for the programmers who wrote Vista. It has to suck when you spend five years on something and pour your heart into it (as many no doubt did), yet poor management turns all your work into that.
There's a difference between speech that is primarily intended to make a point, but happens to piss someone off (e.g. "I believe that homosexuality is/is not immoral"), and speech which is primarily intended to piss people off rather than make a point (e.g. "burn all f4gg0+z fur havin A1DZ lolz").
I sincerely doubt that the people who wrote your constitution had the noble aim of allowing their citizens to call each other "poopyheads" in mind. The aim of the first amendment is presumably to allow the free transmission of ideas and for people to be able to speak their conscience. It doesn't protect every kind of lie, for example.
If the founders had wanted to protect the right to specifically annoy other people, they would have written something like: "The right of citizens to throw balloons full of dog shit at each other shall not be infringed".
Trolls can be funny, but they are more often a nuisance. It's not like much can be done in any case, since the law of the universe is that idiots and assholes must win.
Dude, you seriously need to read some history right now.
"Back then, Muslims and Christians alike (and pretty much everybody on Earth, except the rich) were an uneducated and superstitious lot."
Ummmm.... no. At the time of the Crusades, Islamic civilization was the most technologically, culturally and scientifically advanced civilization on earth. You do realize that every time you write down a number, you are using their numerals, right? There's a reason for that. Who do you think reintroduced the great books of Classical Civilization to the West? That's right, it was the Muslims. You might want to look around at what we owe to Islamic civilization before posting such ill-informed crap.
Now ask yourself whether you would rather live in Muslim controlled Spaini in AD 800, where people actually washed and wiped their asses, and where Jews, Muslims and Christians lived in the first properly multicultural society. Or would you like to live up north with the Franks, a group of uncultured barbarians who viewed personal hygiene with disdain, and whose attitude to religious tolerance could be described as "kill anyone who doesn't follow our God". And the Franks were pretty civilized for northern Europeans. You know how George W Bush seems to think that invading countries to civilize them actually works? Well, the Muslims actually made it work.
A thousand years ago we were unwashed barbarians and the Muslims were the civilized people. We tend to forget, but the Muslims have contributed as much to Western Civilization as the rest of us.
"Not only are you missing the point, but you seem awfully keen on justifying government paternalism. Liberty isn't about efficiency. Liberty is about leaving adults free to make of their lives what they can."
Read up on collective action problems and market failures. You have absolutely nothing of worth to contribute to this debate until you understand them. I'm serious about that: you have no business debating politics otherwise.
If you leave adults free to make of their lives what they can, they will end up on the losing end of collective action problems. This is not something I made up, but something that is a recognized fact (those who praise markets for working often do not realize that successful markets operate according to the same principle to set prices). Some of these problems will be minor, others will cause major quality of life issues. It is in the interest of every rational person not to get caught in collective action problems because we end up worse off. This is why we have to give up some of our liberties in order to secure others. If we do not, we will end up with nothing.
Libertarians already recognize this anyway, since they allow for authority to coercively enforce contracts. They just don't understand that the same need extends to other areas of human life. Freedom fundamentalists are no different than other fundamentalist whackjobs, and are to be ignored by reasonable people.
"As a matter of fact, I am. First off, it wouldn't be fifty bucks a month in the US. Second, what part of "it's my money" don't you understand? I worked for it, I earned it, therefore it is my property. What gives you or anybody else the right to dispose of my property in my name?
Guess what: you don't have the right. You might outvote me, and the government might outgun me, but that doesn't give you the right to take my property and throw it away chasing after some illusory "common good". If you want to claim that the government has the right because most of the people want it to do so, then take your "might makes right" approach to ethics and go back to kindergarten."
I'm sorry, but you are deeply mistaken in your fundamental assumptions here. When exchange of goods is strictly voluntary, we have a market (that's basically what a market is - a giant swap fair). For about 1/4 to 2/3 of the goods we need, the voluntary payment system is the most efficient. It's the other 1/3 that is the problem. What you need to do is Google "Collective Action Problem", "Prisoner's Dilemma" and "Market Failure" and read very carefully. This is basic economics and something that every citizen in a democracy should know. It is ignorance of this fundamental fact that generates most of the misguided support for forms of anarcho capitalism. Thomas Hobbes explained this hundreds of years ago: if everything is left up to individual voluntary decision making, then life would be nasty, brutish and short.
In essence, Libertarians believe that if everyone acts voluntarily in their own self interest, then everyone will be better off. The problem is it is demonstrably not true. In certain cases everyone acting in their own self interest leaves everyone worse off. That is a collective action problem (the right often talk about this in the form of "the tragedy of the commons"). That is to say that certain forms of liberty are self defeating (but obviously not most of them).
For exactly the same reasons that markets function brilliantly to make sure we have an adequate supply of cars or hats, they tend to function woefully in other contexts. That means, instead of voluntary payment generating massive efficiency gains, it generates massive efficiency losses (Google "externalities" and you will see why). Areas in which markets habitually fail include industrial pollution, natural monopolies, primary and secondary education, and most importantly certain types of insurance. This is why health care cannot be left up to the market, since it is subject to market failure.
Left to their own devices, people will attempt to free ride. Here's a classic example, why have your children immunized when there is a small chance that they might die from it, and everyone else is having their children immunized (so it is unlikely that there will be an epidemic)? From each individual's perspective it makes no sense to have your children immunized, and if immunization is voluntary, a lot of people will opt not to. The result is to make epidemics much more likely and everyone will be worse off. On the other hand, if the government makes immunization compulsory, the collective action problem vanishes. That's why immunization tends to be compulsory. It's not because the government knows what is best for you, but because if you and everyone else are left to their own devices, you will engage in collectively self defeating behaviour. The same basic argument applies to national defence, the police, funding the justice system and health care (which is an insurance product).
Once we accept the reality of collective action problems and market failures, we cannot avoid the conclusion that extreme anarcho-capitalism will be self defeating (Objectivism is worse since it morally requires extreme self interest). Asking for a voluntary solution is as dumb as asking Olympic athletes to adopt a self regulating policy regarding performance enhancing drugs.
The ethical counterargument is easily dispensed with. In effect you are saying that it is
That might not be so bad. There are many black people who (in some cases rightly) think that the system is stacked against black people, and that the only black people who are allowed to succeed politically are ones like Clarence Thomas. Obama isn't an Uncle Tom or an Oreo, and he's not perceived as being all about racial politics like Sharpton (whom I actually quite like). He's a successful, extremely intelligent and well-spoken man who happens to be black. In fact he's exactly the type of black guy that doesn't get enough press. Who characteristically gets more press? Rappers who exalt criminality and deviance as a way of making it in the world, or someone like Wynton Marsalis, who is one of the most respected and cultured musicians in the world? People don't like Marsalis because he is black, but because he's an awesome musician and composer, and he happens to be a really smart and decent person, worthy of anyone's respect.
How many movies have you seen where there is a fictional black president. Usually it is someone like Morgan Freeman playing the role, a person who doesn't pretend to ignore the issue of race, and yet has won the respect of everyone as a charismatic and talented person. Screenwriters have known for years what the first black president was going to be like: a man who wields enough personal moral gravitas to get everyone on side without having to pretend he isn't black or covering over race issues in America. Look at these fictional presidents, they are all just like Obama.
Electing Obama would be about the best thing the US could do to close some of the ugly racial cracks that still afflict it. Obama is the sort of postive role model not only for black people, but for everyone, same as MLK.
I don't know about that. Going to the moon is probably the outstanding achievement of our species. If you wanted to ask why it was done, there are lots of reasons, the most enduring one being "because it was there".No-one gives a crap about the Cold War now, but the moon continues to fascinate. It's probably the first time there had been a global awareness of our planet as an organic whole and our small place in the universe. There's a reason why enivronmental pamphlets tend to use the "Whole Earth" or "Apollo 8 Sunrise" shots. All in all we make ourselves better people when we do things like exploration, art and science.
It's not as if Apollo was particularly expensive either. Sure, 25 billion dollars (1960s) sounds real expensive, but given there were 200 million Americans at the time, the cost works out to a bit over 10 bucks a year per person over the 10 years of the program. That's probably not much more than a kid's pocket money each to watch arguably the greatest film ever shot (and it was real!!).
It's certainly a lot less than the warmongering sacks of shit spent on 'Nam, which achieved fuck all other than killing millions of people, poisoning vast areas of land, sowing mass social discord and ruining the lives of young men.
I'm convinced that historians will look back on Apollo as the high point of our civilization, before it sank into selfish decadence. When I was a kid, everyone wanted to be an astronaut. Now they want to be a rap star with guns, bling and mansions full of semi-naked hookers./get off my lawn
Moral arguments matter a great deal to me. I'm just not prepared to make the crass and unjustified generalization that everything "collectivist" is necessarily bad. Only Randian fanatics and other dupes believe that. Economics is more complicated and nuanced than bad novelists or Rush would have you believe.
I guess I should go visit the Stalinist tyrannies of Canada, Australia and Sweden before my beliefs make the gulag inevitable.;)
You sound just like that mad dude out of Bioshock BTW.
OK. I see what you mean. But I would point out that Apple already offers links from their OS X Downloads page to thousands of apps for OS X. Presumably, they try out these apps to make sure that they aren't malicious before they link to them, because it would be a major PR bummer if they were distributing malware from their own site (insert joke about MS Office demo here). Similarly, Apple vets podcasts to make sure that "Bob's Super Live Porno with Chickens" doesn't make it in to iTunes (thereby disappointing the Gonzos of this world).
They'd be nuts if they made indie developers pay them to sign the kind of miniature widget apps that people actually want on their phones.
You've made it pretty clear that you don't understand public goods. When CDs and albums were the only reasonable way to get music to people, they were effectively private goods.
With file sharing music can be something "which all enjoy in common in the sense that each individual's consumption of such a good leads to no subtractions from any other individual's consumption of that good...:". In other words, a public good as defined here:
You can upload as many copies as you like and you'll still have full enjoyment of your music.
The government (i.e. all of us) already funds public libraries because its a lot cheaper (i.e. much more efficient) than everyone buying their own personal copy of a book. Public libraries are efficiency promoting institutions. This proposal is not that much different.
Forgive me if I misunderstand you, but where does it say that Apple is not going to allow free app downloads?
I can see why they would want an authorization system, because they have already expressed their worries about iPhone malware. Moreover, Apple was going to have to distribute the apps anyway, because most people use iTunes to manage their iPhones. The hackers among us will find a way around it, but the idea seems to be to protect ordinary users, not frustrate the uber leet among us (of which I am not one).
I'd be surprised if there weren't free downloads anyway along with the pay stuff. It may well be in the interest of some developers to offer free apps that complement their pay offerings or web services. The kind of small widgets that people will make are free anyway (and Dashboard widgets tend to be free). Podcasts are free, so it's not like iTunes doesn't already offer free content. Hell, they offer free DRMed songs every week.
In any case, even if the apps do start off on a pay basis, I'm guessing that pressure from developers will lead to free apps being offered.
You are missing the point. This is not about forcing the economy into some ideological straightjacket. Rather it is about what works best. Virtually every modern society splits spending between individual and collective spending. About 2/3 of the stuff we buy is best handled by the market. If you ever drove a communist car, you will know why. The other third is spent collectively, to avoid market failures. Canadians don't have public health care because they are communists (almost nobody in Canada is a communist), but because it's the most efficient way to deliver health care. Look at what Canadians spend as a %age of GDP on health care, and look at the US. Canadians spend far less and receive better care (although not as good as the French, who have the world's best health care system).
There's a reason every advanced nation splits spending between the market and collective spending: it works the best. All that is being suggested here is that we can get rid of the problems we have with file sharing by adopting an alternative funding model. The people who want us to pay as we go are just asking for a market mechanism for some things that have demonstrable market failures. That's like throwing petrol on a fire.
And complaining that you don't want to pay for something you don't get is not an argument. Most people who have private insurance already do that. The whole point of insurance is that it is redistributive. I have never had to call the police in my life, because I have never been the victim of a crime. Yet I have paid my share of tax to fund the police. If the police were privatized there would be severe underfunding, because everyone would try to free ride. This is why the police are publicly funded, not because we're communists.
The communists thought that everything could be publicly funded, we now know that this is a bad idea. On the other hand, it doesn't mean that nothing is better off being publicly funded. Some things are, some things aren't. Some things that should be publicly funded aren't. Some things that shouldn't be publicly funded are. Times and technology change. Perhaps music would be better off being funded by a tariff, perhaps not. However, there is little intellectual merit in simply dismissing it as a "communist" idea. The case should be argued on its own merits.
And, although I am loath to defend communism, the communist countries at least worked after a fashion (hell, they even managed to put a dude into space). They worked nowhere near as well as ours, but they struggled along like a badly made car. On the other hand, there is no example of a modern economy being entirely run on free market principles that has actually managed to sustain itself.
This is a false dilemma. Artists have no such rights other than those they are granted by the state in this matter. That is because copyrights have always been justified by consequentialist arguments. Artists are given copyrights because this is supposed to benefit the public. The public comes first, not the artists. If copyright starts to benefit artists at the expense of the public, it is time to revise the system.
In any case (and take this from someone who has taught Kant), Kantian arguments for property rights fail in obvious ways. In the context of music, they fail in extremely obvious ways, since almost all the music that is created depends on freely appropriating what others have done before (for example, Eddie Van Halen's style of guitar playing has been ripped off by millions). It would simply be pointless and inefficient to try to enforce all such "rights".
First, $1200 a year is too much. You have clearly exaggerated the likely costs of some things. Probably about half of that would do it. But even if that is not the case, it's still a good deal.
On the other hand. What would the benefits be, if every single book, film, piece of software, picture, etc. was yours to download whenever you wanted (because if it were legal, everyone would upload everything they had and there would be very few Bittorrent leechers).
Let's say you buy a Starbucks Latte for $3.50 every morning of every day. That would come out to roughly the same sort of money you are talking about. Now if someone told you that you could have the entirety of digitally reproducible human culture at your fingertips for the cost of one cup of coffee a day, wouldn't you be stark raving mad to turn them down?
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I'm downloading the lossless version now. Mr Reznor is more than welcome to my 5 bucks. I hadn't listened to NIN since the nineties when one of my room mates used to blast "Closer" all the time. Not my kind of thing, but I figured there was nothing to lose in downloading the free tracks from "Ghosts" yesterday. I'm a big Brian Eno fan, so I was pleasantly surprised at how much I liked it.
This is how it should be. I would never have even listened to this album if I hadn't been able to try out those tracks for free. Being able to download DRM free in lossless is the killer. I hope this is a massive success for NIN to encourage other artists to do the same.
I really like how he has taken advantage of the digital format to make the album art for each song different. It shows up in iTunes album view with the regular cover, but if I play it on my iPod Touch the art (which is damn cool BTW) changes with each song. It's a nice little effect.
I only wish that Microsoft could be barred from competing in the workplace. Unfortunately, it is probably the most insidious monopoly in history such that most commercial enterprises depend on being able to buy their software. For many end users Microsoft is like one of those science-fiction infestations that you have to self-mutilate to rid yourself of. A threatened, sudden withdrawal of service, while good for the FOSS/Apple Rebel Alliance (TM), would be pretty catastrophic for some companies.
The punishments I was thinking of involve the creative use of livestock.
PS. like your blog so much I bookmarked it.
What's 1.3 billion to Microsoft? They threw a cool billion away because they couldn't be bothered doing proper quality control for the 360 and they threw away 4 billion on the original Xbox. Lord knows how much more they've thrown away. They probably burn $100 bills for fun.
The only punishments that would hurt Microsoft have been illegal since the Dark Ages.
Your tastes are different than mine. I'd rate Uncharted, R&C, Resistance and Warhawk as excellent PS3 exclusives. The only 360 game I would rate as clearly better would be Bioshock. Mass Effect I got tired of, and Halo 3 turned out to be quickly overrun by COD4. I'd add Forza 2 for the 360 as being a pretty decent exclusive. The PS3 exclusives for this year will even that up and put it in the PS3s favour. MGS4 looks excellent, as do RFOM 2 and Motorstorm 3, and whenever they get around to releasing GT5 I will stop playing Forza. Killzone 2, Haze, etc.
But that's all a bit silly and largely down to personal tastes. Most games will be released for both platforms. If you don't buy both, you will miss out on some exclusives, but that's life. By the end of the year the games will be six of one and half a dozen of the other. The 360s advantage is that it has had an extra year of releases. But, as the facts demonstrated, this did not stop the PS3 from selling faster even when its prime competitor had many more games than it did. What won't change is the lack of Blu Ray and the RROD crap. 360 owners, including myself, are stuck with that.
I like both consoles and exclusive titles for both, but that doesn't stop the figures demonstrating that the 360 has peaked and that the PS3 is eating it up outside the US (and recently inside the US). Sony won. Time to move on.
I don't think that this idea is revolutionary: it's just capitalism. Companies have given away short films of and glossy photos of their products for years. It's called advertising. Nothing revolutionary about that.
Revolutionary occurs when the authorities cannot enforce the market system at an acceptable cost. This is essentially what is happening with the online sharing of music. Musicians and music publishers can try to make a virtue of necessity, but they can no longer exercise any control over distribution and music will be free to anyone who wants it whatever they say. There's no moral judgement here (which would be futile anyway) just plain facts - greed abhors a vacuum. Politicians can lie their asses off about how they will stop file sharing, but they might as well be making fart noises into a microphone (If only they did that all the time).
Once the market can no longer be enforced, some other form of economic organization has to be found or the good concerned will disappear. When you think about how many goods we consume can be reproduced digitally now, and how this might expand in the future, you can see the end of the market system for large swathes of our lives. Some smart person better start thinking of a workable alternative to capitalism in these areas that does not involve voluntary self restraint.
Sony is already "winning" the console war (at least the part they are in). I was in a hurry before, but what I should have mentioned is that both Sony and Nintendo played it smarter than Microsoft. The PS3 and the Wii are competitors, but not direct competitors in the same way that the 360 and PS3 are. Nintendo knew that competing with Sony and Microsoft directly was not a good bet, so they made a much cheaper console sans HD, but gave a lot of people who don't usually buy games a reason to buy a Wii. This was an extremely smart move and Nintendo deserves every bit of the success they have had for being so bold.
Sony aimed at a different segment of the market by creating a hi tech gaming media centre. Microsoft did the same and, as I said above, had to release first, or they would have been buried by Sony. They bet on lower tech (DVD) and an early release to try to create such momentum that the contest would be over by the time the price of a PS3 came down. Initially it seemed as if they were right: the PS3 was extremely expensive and there were hardly any games for it compared to the 360 (even though there weren't that many great games for the 360 until Oblivion and GOW came out). That's over. The PS3 is now the better deal.
For Microsoft to be successful they would have to sell 360s at a much faster rate from launch than the PS3 sold from launch. If Sony kept pace and Blu Ray won, then the PS3 would eventually overhaul the 360 because it is better hardware. The longer the PS3 keeps pace in sales from launch, it becomes more attractive, because once both are discounted to the sweet spot for consoles, the PS3 is better value (you get the winning HD optical format, integrated wireless, etc.). In other words, it's the tortoise and the hare. The 360 really had to sell at Wii like rates in order to inflict a crushing win over Sony.
There's one way to tell if Microsoft's strategy worked: is PS3 adoption slower than 360 adoption? The answer is no. PS3 adoption is slightly faster than 360 adoption, even though you would expect 360 adoption to be better because of the advantage of more games. Unless the 360 can pull away at a fast rate, the tortoise will eventually catch the hare, and once that happens the hare is fucked.
Why did this happen? Well, Blu Ray was always the stronger format, so the PS3 was eventually going to get a big boost from that, but the main reason in my view is that Nintendo undercut Microsoft in a big way. Like I said, the 360 would have had to sell at Wii like rates in order to win, but unfortunately for Microsoft the Wii ended up selling at Wii like rates (bad joke, I know). Nintendo ate up the lower end of the market. Microsoft has ended up in the middle with a console that is more expensive than the Wii (and thus lost the cheap end of the market) and which has less features than the PS3 (which beats them at the high end). It's the red headed stepchild of consoles.
In 2006 Microsoft shipped over 10 million consoles. In 2007 they shipped about 7 1/2 million. That means that 360 appears to have peaked back in 2006. All the press about cumulative sales from launch is meant to hide that inconvenient truth (and the other inconvenient truth that the PS3 is winning outside North America).
Back before either console was released, assorted media aficionados were saying that the 360 was being released too early and that the lack of an integrated HD drive would hurt it in the long run. What they missed is that Microsoft had to do this in order to get a head start over Sony: it was the only way they would avoid taking another beating. Consumers paid for it with poor quality control.
The Blu Ray victory was the tipping point. Now the 360 is just a game console that plays pretty much the same games as Sony's, but which will probably break down, and costs quite a bit more when you include wireless and online gaming to bring it up to spec.
While the format war was still on, blu ray on the PS3 was a curiosity (I know I bought mine largely out of curiosity about it). Now you are basically getting a free next gen DVD player with every PS3 - that is not something Microsoft will be able to match in price any time soon.
Props to Sony. Whatever their other evils, they clearly kept their eye on the ball in this case.
Full disclosure: I own both consoles.
Wants to be a dictator, eh? Well he's going a funny way about it with them elections and referendums and all.
To answer your question: I'm a communist, and I'm definitely smarter than you. How do I know this? Well, I read the papers and understand the English language and this has led me to realize that a guy like Hugo Chavez, who has won umpteen elections and referendums, and who gracefully admitted defeat when he didn't win the last referendum, cannot by any stretch of the imagination be called a totalitarian.
Chavez is a New Dealer and a throwback to the nationalizing governments that Western countries used to have (and some still do). Calling him a totalitarian is just silly, whether or not you like his policies.
I can't believe you are saying this with a straight face. Sure, many Cubans have attempted to leave Cuba for the US. That's because Cuba is comparatively poorer than the US (and is the subject of an economic embargo to boot). But people who bring up Cubans trying to leave Cuba seem to conveniently forget the never ending tidal wave of illegal economic migrants from supposedly "free" countries like Mexico and the rest of Latin America, who far outnumber the Cuban migrants. People from poor countries will try to get into rich countries. There's nothing interesting or controversial about that.
The Cubans do a pretty decent job with not many resources, and they still find the means to send a bunch of doctors to help even poorer people. I'd rather be poor in Cuba than in any other Latin American country. At least in Cuba someone would be looking out for me when I couldn't help myself.
What many in the US cannot understand is that most Cubans genuinely like Fidel. They don't necessarily look at the US and wonder why they aren't like them, but rather look at countries like Mexico, Jamaica and Colombia and thank God that they aren't like them.
Ugh... now that's desperate.
Even though I am usually a pitiless and fanatical member of the Apple Hyper Commando Flame Unit in their Eternal War Against Evil (TM), this has gotten so bad that it is hard for me not to feel a bit sorry for the programmers who wrote Vista. It has to suck when you spend five years on something and pour your heart into it (as many no doubt did), yet poor management turns all your work into that.
Obviously you have nothing to contribute, since you "simply refuse to care".
Toodles.
There's a difference between speech that is primarily intended to make a point, but happens to piss someone off (e.g. "I believe that homosexuality is/is not immoral"), and speech which is primarily intended to piss people off rather than make a point (e.g. "burn all f4gg0+z fur havin A1DZ lolz").
I sincerely doubt that the people who wrote your constitution had the noble aim of allowing their citizens to call each other "poopyheads" in mind. The aim of the first amendment is presumably to allow the free transmission of ideas and for people to be able to speak their conscience. It doesn't protect every kind of lie, for example.
If the founders had wanted to protect the right to specifically annoy other people, they would have written something like: "The right of citizens to throw balloons full of dog shit at each other shall not be infringed".
Trolls can be funny, but they are more often a nuisance. It's not like much can be done in any case, since the law of the universe is that idiots and assholes must win.
Dude, you seriously need to read some history right now.
"Back then, Muslims and Christians alike (and pretty much everybody on Earth, except the rich) were an uneducated and superstitious lot."
Ummmm.... no. At the time of the Crusades, Islamic civilization was the most technologically, culturally and scientifically advanced civilization on earth. You do realize that every time you write down a number, you are using their numerals, right? There's a reason for that. Who do you think reintroduced the great books of Classical Civilization to the West? That's right, it was the Muslims. You might want to look around at what we owe to Islamic civilization before posting such ill-informed crap.
Now ask yourself whether you would rather live in Muslim controlled Spaini in AD 800, where people actually washed and wiped their asses, and where Jews, Muslims and Christians lived in the first properly multicultural society. Or would you like to live up north with the Franks, a group of uncultured barbarians who viewed personal hygiene with disdain, and whose attitude to religious tolerance could be described as "kill anyone who doesn't follow our God". And the Franks were pretty civilized for northern Europeans. You know how George W Bush seems to think that invading countries to civilize them actually works? Well, the Muslims actually made it work.
A thousand years ago we were unwashed barbarians and the Muslims were the civilized people. We tend to forget, but the Muslims have contributed as much to Western Civilization as the rest of us.
"Not only are you missing the point, but you seem awfully keen on justifying government paternalism. Liberty isn't about efficiency. Liberty is about leaving adults free to make of their lives what they can."
Read up on collective action problems and market failures. You have absolutely nothing of worth to contribute to this debate until you understand them. I'm serious about that: you have no business debating politics otherwise.
If you leave adults free to make of their lives what they can, they will end up on the losing end of collective action problems. This is not something I made up, but something that is a recognized fact (those who praise markets for working often do not realize that successful markets operate according to the same principle to set prices). Some of these problems will be minor, others will cause major quality of life issues. It is in the interest of every rational person not to get caught in collective action problems because we end up worse off. This is why we have to give up some of our liberties in order to secure others. If we do not, we will end up with nothing.
Libertarians already recognize this anyway, since they allow for authority to coercively enforce contracts. They just don't understand that the same need extends to other areas of human life. Freedom fundamentalists are no different than other fundamentalist whackjobs, and are to be ignored by reasonable people.
"As a matter of fact, I am. First off, it wouldn't be fifty bucks a month in the US. Second, what part of "it's my money" don't you understand? I worked for it, I earned it, therefore it is my property. What gives you or anybody else the right to dispose of my property in my name?
Guess what: you don't have the right. You might outvote me, and the government might outgun me, but that doesn't give you the right to take my property and throw it away chasing after some illusory "common good". If you want to claim that the government has the right because most of the people want it to do so, then take your "might makes right" approach to ethics and go back to kindergarten."
I'm sorry, but you are deeply mistaken in your fundamental assumptions here. When exchange of goods is strictly voluntary, we have a market (that's basically what a market is - a giant swap fair). For about 1/4 to 2/3 of the goods we need, the voluntary payment system is the most efficient. It's the other 1/3 that is the problem. What you need to do is Google "Collective Action Problem", "Prisoner's Dilemma" and "Market Failure" and read very carefully. This is basic economics and something that every citizen in a democracy should know. It is ignorance of this fundamental fact that generates most of the misguided support for forms of anarcho capitalism. Thomas Hobbes explained this hundreds of years ago: if everything is left up to individual voluntary decision making, then life would be nasty, brutish and short.
In essence, Libertarians believe that if everyone acts voluntarily in their own self interest, then everyone will be better off. The problem is it is demonstrably not true. In certain cases everyone acting in their own self interest leaves everyone worse off. That is a collective action problem (the right often talk about this in the form of "the tragedy of the commons"). That is to say that certain forms of liberty are self defeating (but obviously not most of them).
For exactly the same reasons that markets function brilliantly to make sure we have an adequate supply of cars or hats, they tend to function woefully in other contexts. That means, instead of voluntary payment generating massive efficiency gains, it generates massive efficiency losses (Google "externalities" and you will see why). Areas in which markets habitually fail include industrial pollution, natural monopolies, primary and secondary education, and most importantly certain types of insurance. This is why health care cannot be left up to the market, since it is subject to market failure.
Left to their own devices, people will attempt to free ride. Here's a classic example, why have your children immunized when there is a small chance that they might die from it, and everyone else is having their children immunized (so it is unlikely that there will be an epidemic)? From each individual's perspective it makes no sense to have your children immunized, and if immunization is voluntary, a lot of people will opt not to. The result is to make epidemics much more likely and everyone will be worse off. On the other hand, if the government makes immunization compulsory, the collective action problem vanishes. That's why immunization tends to be compulsory. It's not because the government knows what is best for you, but because if you and everyone else are left to their own devices, you will engage in collectively self defeating behaviour. The same basic argument applies to national defence, the police, funding the justice system and health care (which is an insurance product).
Once we accept the reality of collective action problems and market failures, we cannot avoid the conclusion that extreme anarcho-capitalism will be self defeating (Objectivism is worse since it morally requires extreme self interest). Asking for a voluntary solution is as dumb as asking Olympic athletes to adopt a self regulating policy regarding performance enhancing drugs.
The ethical counterargument is easily dispensed with. In effect you are saying that it is
That might not be so bad. There are many black people who (in some cases rightly) think that the system is stacked against black people, and that the only black people who are allowed to succeed politically are ones like Clarence Thomas. Obama isn't an Uncle Tom or an Oreo, and he's not perceived as being all about racial politics like Sharpton (whom I actually quite like). He's a successful, extremely intelligent and well-spoken man who happens to be black. In fact he's exactly the type of black guy that doesn't get enough press. Who characteristically gets more press? Rappers who exalt criminality and deviance as a way of making it in the world, or someone like Wynton Marsalis, who is one of the most respected and cultured musicians in the world? People don't like Marsalis because he is black, but because he's an awesome musician and composer, and he happens to be a really smart and decent person, worthy of anyone's respect.
How many movies have you seen where there is a fictional black president. Usually it is someone like Morgan Freeman playing the role, a person who doesn't pretend to ignore the issue of race, and yet has won the respect of everyone as a charismatic and talented person. Screenwriters have known for years what the first black president was going to be like: a man who wields enough personal moral gravitas to get everyone on side without having to pretend he isn't black or covering over race issues in America. Look at these fictional presidents, they are all just like Obama.
Electing Obama would be about the best thing the US could do to close some of the ugly racial cracks that still afflict it. Obama is the sort of postive role model not only for black people, but for everyone, same as MLK.
I don't know about that. Going to the moon is probably the outstanding achievement of our species. If you wanted to ask why it was done, there are lots of reasons, the most enduring one being "because it was there".No-one gives a crap about the Cold War now, but the moon continues to fascinate. It's probably the first time there had been a global awareness of our planet as an organic whole and our small place in the universe. There's a reason why enivronmental pamphlets tend to use the "Whole Earth" or "Apollo 8 Sunrise" shots. All in all we make ourselves better people when we do things like exploration, art and science.
/get off my lawn
It's not as if Apollo was particularly expensive either. Sure, 25 billion dollars (1960s) sounds real expensive, but given there were 200 million Americans at the time, the cost works out to a bit over 10 bucks a year per person over the 10 years of the program. That's probably not much more than a kid's pocket money each to watch arguably the greatest film ever shot (and it was real!!).
It's certainly a lot less than the warmongering sacks of shit spent on 'Nam, which achieved fuck all other than killing millions of people, poisoning vast areas of land, sowing mass social discord and ruining the lives of young men.
I'm convinced that historians will look back on Apollo as the high point of our civilization, before it sank into selfish decadence. When I was a kid, everyone wanted to be an astronaut. Now they want to be a rap star with guns, bling and mansions full of semi-naked hookers.
Moral arguments matter a great deal to me. I'm just not prepared to make the crass and unjustified generalization that everything "collectivist" is necessarily bad. Only Randian fanatics and other dupes believe that. Economics is more complicated and nuanced than bad novelists or Rush would have you believe.
;)
I guess I should go visit the Stalinist tyrannies of Canada, Australia and Sweden before my beliefs make the gulag inevitable.
You sound just like that mad dude out of Bioshock BTW.
OK. I see what you mean. But I would point out that Apple already offers links from their OS X Downloads page to thousands of apps for OS X. Presumably, they try out these apps to make sure that they aren't malicious before they link to them, because it would be a major PR bummer if they were distributing malware from their own site (insert joke about MS Office demo here). Similarly, Apple vets podcasts to make sure that "Bob's Super Live Porno with Chickens" doesn't make it in to iTunes (thereby disappointing the Gonzos of this world).
:(
They'd be nuts if they made indie developers pay them to sign the kind of miniature widget apps that people actually want on their phones.
Well... Apple has done nutty things before...
You've made it pretty clear that you don't understand public goods. When CDs and albums were the only reasonable way to get music to people, they were effectively private goods.
With file sharing music can be something "which all enjoy in common in the sense that each individual's consumption of such a good leads to no subtractions from any other individual's consumption of that good...:". In other words, a public good as defined here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good
You can upload as many copies as you like and you'll still have full enjoyment of your music.
The government (i.e. all of us) already funds public libraries because its a lot cheaper (i.e. much more efficient) than everyone buying their own personal copy of a book. Public libraries are efficiency promoting institutions. This proposal is not that much different.
Forgive me if I misunderstand you, but where does it say that Apple is not going to allow free app downloads?
I can see why they would want an authorization system, because they have already expressed their worries about iPhone malware. Moreover, Apple was going to have to distribute the apps anyway, because most people use iTunes to manage their iPhones. The hackers among us will find a way around it, but the idea seems to be to protect ordinary users, not frustrate the uber leet among us (of which I am not one).
I'd be surprised if there weren't free downloads anyway along with the pay stuff. It may well be in the interest of some developers to offer free apps that complement their pay offerings or web services. The kind of small widgets that people will make are free anyway (and Dashboard widgets tend to be free). Podcasts are free, so it's not like iTunes doesn't already offer free content. Hell, they offer free DRMed songs every week.
In any case, even if the apps do start off on a pay basis, I'm guessing that pressure from developers will lead to free apps being offered.
You are missing the point. This is not about forcing the economy into some ideological straightjacket. Rather it is about what works best. Virtually every modern society splits spending between individual and collective spending. About 2/3 of the stuff we buy is best handled by the market. If you ever drove a communist car, you will know why. The other third is spent collectively, to avoid market failures. Canadians don't have public health care because they are communists (almost nobody in Canada is a communist), but because it's the most efficient way to deliver health care. Look at what Canadians spend as a %age of GDP on health care, and look at the US. Canadians spend far less and receive better care (although not as good as the French, who have the world's best health care system).
There's a reason every advanced nation splits spending between the market and collective spending: it works the best. All that is being suggested here is that we can get rid of the problems we have with file sharing by adopting an alternative funding model. The people who want us to pay as we go are just asking for a market mechanism for some things that have demonstrable market failures. That's like throwing petrol on a fire.
And complaining that you don't want to pay for something you don't get is not an argument. Most people who have private insurance already do that. The whole point of insurance is that it is redistributive. I have never had to call the police in my life, because I have never been the victim of a crime. Yet I have paid my share of tax to fund the police. If the police were privatized there would be severe underfunding, because everyone would try to free ride. This is why the police are publicly funded, not because we're communists.
The communists thought that everything could be publicly funded, we now know that this is a bad idea. On the other hand, it doesn't mean that nothing is better off being publicly funded. Some things are, some things aren't. Some things that should be publicly funded aren't. Some things that shouldn't be publicly funded are. Times and technology change. Perhaps music would be better off being funded by a tariff, perhaps not. However, there is little intellectual merit in simply dismissing it as a "communist" idea. The case should be argued on its own merits.
And, although I am loath to defend communism, the communist countries at least worked after a fashion (hell, they even managed to put a dude into space). They worked nowhere near as well as ours, but they struggled along like a badly made car. On the other hand, there is no example of a modern economy being entirely run on free market principles that has actually managed to sustain itself.
This is a false dilemma. Artists have no such rights other than those they are granted by the state in this matter. That is because copyrights have always been justified by consequentialist arguments. Artists are given copyrights because this is supposed to benefit the public. The public comes first, not the artists. If copyright starts to benefit artists at the expense of the public, it is time to revise the system.
In any case (and take this from someone who has taught Kant), Kantian arguments for property rights fail in obvious ways. In the context of music, they fail in extremely obvious ways, since almost all the music that is created depends on freely appropriating what others have done before (for example, Eddie Van Halen's style of guitar playing has been ripped off by millions). It would simply be pointless and inefficient to try to enforce all such "rights".
First, $1200 a year is too much. You have clearly exaggerated the likely costs of some things. Probably about half of that would do it. But even if that is not the case, it's still a good deal.
On the other hand. What would the benefits be, if every single book, film, piece of software, picture, etc. was yours to download whenever you wanted (because if it were legal, everyone would upload everything they had and there would be very few Bittorrent leechers).
Let's say you buy a Starbucks Latte for $3.50 every morning of every day. That would come out to roughly the same sort of money you are talking about. Now if someone told you that you could have the entirety of digitally reproducible human culture at your fingertips for the cost of one cup of coffee a day, wouldn't you be stark raving mad to turn them down?