I don't know if the EU *has* the right to do this. They can attempt to assign this right ot themselves, but surely Microsoft's US, Asian, Aus, etc. lawyers will protest. What if 21 political entities did the same thing as the EU, claiming for themselves 5% of Microsoft's *gross*?
Are there many real-world examples of corporations saying things like, "Well, we can't be bothered to print up another hundred copies of that textbook just so your students can buy it. Go ahead and make photocopies if you really want to teach the class using our book."? This came up in a linguistics class of mine, which used Shiro Hattori's phonetics book (retail price, about $50). The professor had been using it for 20 years and found that the publisher wasn't receiving much demand.
It seems to me that even if corporations *could* bury their unprofitable work, it would be good PR if they chose not to, and it wouldn't cost them a dime. Are any publishers known for doing this?
I agree with your chain of events, AC. It's the gratuitous swipe at Bush which bothers me -- many other politicians are capable of, and willing to, do the stuff he does.
How far do you think the dollar will collapse? That it will fall relative to the Chinese yuan seems unavoidable. But there are other overvalued currencies, PPP-wise. Japan in particular has even bigger debt problems than the US does.
It's not real estate that will be the problem, it will be the baby boomers retiring starting around 2016. Then, when they all expect to live on Social Security, and the money's just not there, and they're all poor and destitute, will the problem be evident.
They will not be poor and destitute. Having first made millions selling their overpriced real estate before moving into condos to watch Gen-Xers lose their shirts in the coming real estate slide, they'll have enough influence over the government (think AARP) to make those same Gen-Xers cough up whatever earning they have left in ludicrously high Social Security premiums.
It's the next generation which will bear the brunt of the baby boomers' greed.
1. Foreign countries decide propping up the dollar is a bad bet, and so start pulling out, slowly.
2. Other countries see this and the acceleration begins, with no country wanting to be the last one holding dollars.
3. The fall of the dollar continues, picking up speed.
4. Interest rates get raised quickly to encourage foreign investment despite the weak dollar.
5. The real estate market collapses.
6. Taking the stock market with it.
7. The U.S. economoy goes into recession.
8. Bush White House continues spending on wars.
Bush White House? Which means you see all of steps 1 through 7 occurring before 2008?
CD rental is a great idea. Charge $3 or so, and anyone who wants to gets to listen to the music (but not get the premium items like liner notes). The company producing the CD could find out the average number of rentals per CD and accordingly charge more than the retail price. CDs would then be labeled "for home use only" or "for rental".
Do any European countries have CD rental? Japan does, and you can buy copying media right there in the store (at inflated prices).
I don't have much of a desire to play games online if my friends in the "real" world also enjoy them and there are many chances to play in person.
But online play is a godsend if you're rediscovering some old 8-bit classic that nobody's interested in anymore. Same gooes for when you're very far from home and the people around you have different interests.
Now would a study like this one condemn online players more or less than they'd condemn someone who played solo for many hours (which is still more interactive than television)? Either you're addicted to playing with strangers, or you're anti-social. Seems to me that whoever is performing the study has free reign to criticize players no matter what they do.
In the future, people will be laughing at statistics like "the average [whatever] is online 20-30 hours per week". Already many people have jobs in which their computers are connected to the internet all the time, so that's 40 hours, plus any time spent at home surfing -- even 2 hours per day would bring the total to 50. Down the road, when people's cell phones are "connected" to the internet as they use GPS scanning to tell the user his exact location, that'll count as well.
At some point, people will be online 24 hours a day and think nothing of it.
Jabervon, this would make every piece of mail equivalent to a registered letter... giving the Post Office a perfect excuse to start charging $1.50 for every little envelope they send!
Just a few days ago there was a thread lamenting how the Japanese market gets all the futuristic, gee-whiz electronic gadgets first.
Perhaps this is because, given the consumer's ridiculously-weak position vis-a-vis the big corporations here in Japan, companies know they can get away with releasing buggy products, and not worrying about anything beyond a few mealy-mouthed apologies to customers who who'll have to jump through hoops to return their products. (Sony actually issued LOANER Playstations in the US!?) Customers = free beta testers.
I live in Japan and avoid new-release, x.0-generation cell phones, computers, etc. like the plague.
Yet domestic abuse cases shoot up during the Superbowl...so someone must be getting excited about it. My neighbors got into a shouting match because somone turned off the TV while the game was on. Luckily the "sports" craze missed all the men in my family.
Rude Turnip, this myth is the result of a feminist group's dishonest attempt to swindle some free advertising time out of TV networks.
http://www.snopes.com/crime/statistics/superbowl.a sp
http://www.ahsc.arizona.edu/acainfo/articles/super.htm
Football fans get looked down upon as being violent louts more than enough, even without fabricated nonsense like this drivel being accepted by the media.
My passwords rotate every three weeks, and often I do just what AC above suggests and write my password in an obscure combination of Cyrillic, Arabic, and names of baseball players (position the guy plays = number).
The biggest problem I find when your passwords change frequently is that your account will be locked up after THREE errors. Someone running some kind of script would be able to make many more than four attempts; three mis-types does NOT mean you're a nefarious hacker!
1. accidentally using old password
2. recall what you think is the new one, but the system won't accept it; maybe your finger slipped
3. get it right this time, or else!
(And in my company, "or else" means asking a logged-in co-worker to go to the intra-company database and let you fill in a form asking for a password reset. This is then printed our and stamped by your immediate boss and the head of the systems department. Given the lost time and productivity for all parties involved, the humiliation is enough to keep people from ever forgetting or mis-typing!)
Litigation-happy is the right word. Here in Japan, companies can release really cool, but buggy and defective, technology without the fear of customers returning it in droves. It's just too difficult to return any product in Japan that people give up and buy new ones. Contrast that with the US where you can sometimes return a book to the store even after obviously reading it, or returning clothing. Inconceivable in Japan, sometimes even when the defect is the company's fault -- the army of lawyers in the US would never allow such a state of affairs.
It certainly should. Indeed, since we viewers would be downloading them using our own resources and consequently exposing ourselves to their advertising without any additional expenses on their part, studios whould be cheering us on.
If I were a network executive, I'd be ecstatic that people are using their own media to view my ads without any investment from me. And of course I would be tracking downloads and raising rates to various advertisers accordingly.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know if the EU *has* the right to do this. They can attempt to assign this right ot themselves, but surely Microsoft's US, Asian, Aus, etc. lawyers will protest. What if 21 political entities did the same thing as the EU, claiming for themselves 5% of Microsoft's *gross*?
Are there many real-world examples of corporations saying things like, "Well, we can't be bothered to print up another hundred copies of that textbook just so your students can buy it. Go ahead and make photocopies if you really want to teach the class using our book."? This came up in a linguistics class of mine, which used Shiro Hattori's phonetics book (retail price, about $50). The professor had been using it for 20 years and found that the publisher wasn't receiving much demand.
It seems to me that even if corporations *could* bury their unprofitable work, it would be good PR if they chose not to, and it wouldn't cost them a dime. Are any publishers known for doing this?
I agree with your chain of events, AC. It's the gratuitous swipe at Bush which bothers me -- many other politicians are capable of, and willing to, do the stuff he does.
How far do you think the dollar will collapse? That it will fall relative to the Chinese yuan seems unavoidable. But there are other overvalued currencies, PPP-wise. Japan in particular has even bigger debt problems than the US does.
It's not real estate that will be the problem, it will be the baby boomers retiring starting around 2016. Then, when they all expect to live on Social Security, and the money's just not there, and they're all poor and destitute, will the problem be evident.
They will not be poor and destitute. Having first made millions selling their overpriced real estate before moving into condos to watch Gen-Xers lose their shirts in the coming real estate slide, they'll have enough influence over the government (think AARP) to make those same Gen-Xers cough up whatever earning they have left in ludicrously high Social Security premiums.
It's the next generation which will bear the brunt of the baby boomers' greed.
2. Other countries see this and the acceleration begins, with no country wanting to be the last one holding dollars.
3. The fall of the dollar continues, picking up speed.
4. Interest rates get raised quickly to encourage foreign investment despite the weak dollar.
5. The real estate market collapses.
6. Taking the stock market with it.
7. The U.S. economoy goes into recession.
8. Bush White House continues spending on wars.
Bush White House? Which means you see all of steps 1 through 7 occurring before 2008?
CD rental is a great idea. Charge $3 or so, and anyone who wants to gets to listen to the music (but not get the premium items like liner notes). The company producing the CD could find out the average number of rentals per CD and accordingly charge more than the retail price. CDs would then be labeled "for home use only" or "for rental".
Do any European countries have CD rental? Japan does, and you can buy copying media right there in the store (at inflated prices).
I don't have much of a desire to play games online if my friends in the "real" world also enjoy them and there are many chances to play in person. But online play is a godsend if you're rediscovering some old 8-bit classic that nobody's interested in anymore. Same gooes for when you're very far from home and the people around you have different interests. Now would a study like this one condemn online players more or less than they'd condemn someone who played solo for many hours (which is still more interactive than television)? Either you're addicted to playing with strangers, or you're anti-social. Seems to me that whoever is performing the study has free reign to criticize players no matter what they do.
Yeah, Slashdot! There are people here with thousands of posts and replies who haven't yet once RTFA. And you want to ruin their streaks?
In the future, people will be laughing at statistics like "the average [whatever] is online 20-30 hours per week". Already many people have jobs in which their computers are connected to the internet all the time, so that's 40 hours, plus any time spent at home surfing -- even 2 hours per day would bring the total to 50. Down the road, when people's cell phones are "connected" to the internet as they use GPS scanning to tell the user his exact location, that'll count as well. At some point, people will be online 24 hours a day and think nothing of it.
Jabervon, this would make every piece of mail equivalent to a registered letter... giving the Post Office a perfect excuse to start charging $1.50 for every little envelope they send!
Just a few days ago there was a thread lamenting how the Japanese market gets all the futuristic, gee-whiz electronic gadgets first.
Perhaps this is because, given the consumer's ridiculously-weak position vis-a-vis the big corporations here in Japan, companies know they can get away with releasing buggy products, and not worrying about anything beyond a few mealy-mouthed apologies to customers who who'll have to jump through hoops to return their products. (Sony actually issued LOANER Playstations in the US!?) Customers = free beta testers.
I live in Japan and avoid new-release, x.0-generation cell phones, computers, etc. like the plague.
Yet domestic abuse cases shoot up during the Superbowl...so someone must be getting excited about it. My neighbors got into a shouting match because somone turned off the TV while the game was on. Luckily the "sports" craze missed all the men in my family. Rude Turnip, this myth is the result of a feminist group's dishonest attempt to swindle some free advertising time out of TV networks. http://www.snopes.com/crime/statistics/superbowl.a sp
http://www.ahsc.arizona.edu/acainfo/articles/super .htm
Football fans get looked down upon as being violent louts more than enough, even without fabricated nonsense like this drivel being accepted by the media.
My passwords rotate every three weeks, and often I do just what AC above suggests and write my password in an obscure combination of Cyrillic, Arabic, and names of baseball players (position the guy plays = number). The biggest problem I find when your passwords change frequently is that your account will be locked up after THREE errors. Someone running some kind of script would be able to make many more than four attempts; three mis-types does NOT mean you're a nefarious hacker! 1. accidentally using old password 2. recall what you think is the new one, but the system won't accept it; maybe your finger slipped 3. get it right this time, or else! (And in my company, "or else" means asking a logged-in co-worker to go to the intra-company database and let you fill in a form asking for a password reset. This is then printed our and stamped by your immediate boss and the head of the systems department. Given the lost time and productivity for all parties involved, the humiliation is enough to keep people from ever forgetting or mis-typing!)
Litigation-happy is the right word. Here in Japan, companies can release really cool, but buggy and defective, technology without the fear of customers returning it in droves. It's just too difficult to return any product in Japan that people give up and buy new ones. Contrast that with the US where you can sometimes return a book to the store even after obviously reading it, or returning clothing. Inconceivable in Japan, sometimes even when the defect is the company's fault -- the army of lawyers in the US would never allow such a state of affairs.
It certainly should. Indeed, since we viewers would be downloading them using our own resources and consequently exposing ourselves to their advertising without any additional expenses on their part, studios whould be cheering us on. If I were a network executive, I'd be ecstatic that people are using their own media to view my ads without any investment from me. And of course I would be tracking downloads and raising rates to various advertisers accordingly.