Through a strange series of events we have ended up with unregulated monopolies.
For many observers, there's nothing strange about that at all. Many types of service favor a winner-take-all scenario in the market, and naturally tend towards monopoly. Operating systems are a good example: if you control 60 percent of the market, it is far easier to get the next 30 percent than it was to get the first thirty percent, because of network effects (networkability, standardization, etc.) Utilities, which usually have somewhere a bottleneck in distribution which can allow only one "gatekeeper," also fall into this category.
Which is painful irony. I'm sympathetic to Glaser's (nominal) ideals, but he's the poster boy for "do as I say, not as I do." If he had an ounce of self-respect, he'd clean up Real's business practices, open its technology (gee, Macromedia opened up the Flash format and they seem to be doing alright), stop his failed efforts to nickel-and-dime the desktop end-user to death, and work on a real (ha ha) business plan. I guess the silver lining is that if they can make their embedded-viewer business successful, they might start doing some of those very things.
I agree completely. As far as media formats, closed-ness, spaminess, hideous installs and such goes, Real is at the bottom of the pile. Apple comes next, and Microsoft is only slightly better than Apple. If Microsoft can do me the favor of wiping out real, I'd consider forgiving them for some of their other faults.
The optimum, of course, is free, open formats like MPEG. But no one sends cocaine and hookers to the hotel rooms of content providers and hardware manufacturers to support free and open formats, so it doesn't happen.
It would probably not work for film in general. They are different mediums, and flow and continuity and the ability to maintain different types of ideas in memory and reference them is distinct. Peter Greenaway has noted that, as compared to written text, film is really not very good at telling stories of any complexity; it is better at being a visual representation of the elements of simpler stories, like painting. Including Tom Bombodil might be truer to the structure of the story, but possibly at the cost of bringing over the feel of the story, and the palpable sense of time and place.
Most pundits have discussed video games with rhetoric that used to be applied to film, and later to recorded music. "What shall we do about video games?" Like film, television, and radio, video games were considered a pedagogical problem, seen as a problem of childrearing and generational difference.
Now, the average video-gamer is twenty-eight years old - people who grow up with a medium usually keep using it (with less frequency) throughout their lives. I'm an adult, and I play computer games. A lot of adults my age do - most of us started when we were kids - and somost of us don't problematize video games as a medium across the board. No one says now "what shall we do about cinema?" (During the early part of the twentieth century, the pre-cinema generation certainly asked this question a lot.) There may be criticism of violence in one media or another, but those media that have been completely integrated into cultural practice are not subject to this sort of scrutiny.
However, if genetic feature X can have different behavioural outputs based on some variable or another, and one or more of those behaviours enhances survival and reproduction even if one or more of the others do not, then feature X is adaptive.
Let's assume that X results in a non-reproducing behaviour 10 percent of the time, but that feature enables the group to improve its survival and reproduction two-fold. The proliferation of X in the 90% of those who do reproduce, based on the behavioral changes of the 10%, "justifies" X in terms of adaptation.
Dead on. The story is laughable, and sad. Supposedly he's defending Ion Storm against the critics, but all his defenses amount to are saying "oh, yes, it was like that, but it was cool!" The wastefulness of that kind of culture came from having a bunch of young fanboys who were so impervious to criticism, so sure that they couldn't do anything wrong, that they squandered every break they got and won few friends along the way. The fact that a childhood friend of Romero's had to right this content-free apologia is an indication of how hopeless they really were.
Re:One simple reason why it won't work:
on
The Euro
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· Score: 2
At this point, it is probably easier to get into the US than to get into the EU. There is no significant immigration from Western Europe into the US. US monolinguism discourages them from moving to the EU, but I still wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that the US->EU emigration rate surpassed the EU->US rate.
Most immigration into the US is from 3rd World countries; Japan does not have a significant emigration to the US either (a fact which is actually making US Nikkei communities become more isolated from Japan.)
Re:One simple reason why it won't work:
on
The Euro
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· Score: 1
On that note, scanning this thread one finds a mind-numbing array of ignorance and misconceptions about Europe (and, indeed, the rest of the world) from presumably American, presumably intelligent people. I guess it's the same combination of hubris and ignorance that leads a lot of Americans to simply assume that the US is the freest nation in the world, without either qualifying what "freedom" means or investigating how people all over the world live. It's sad, really.
Re:One simple reason why it won't work:
on
The Euro
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· Score: 5, Interesting
What are you talking about? What restrictions on moving and working in other European countries are you refering to?
One of the advantages that Europe has is that language and culture maintain national entities in such a way as to resist the "winner take all" scenario, in which all the educated professionals move to a tiny handful of economic supercenters. Economic growth can be distributed geographically more in Europe, but it has nothing to do with any restrictions on travel.
One of the ironies of economic popular wisdom in the 90's is apparent by the fact that Brazil, with its protectionist policies, is doing reasonably well, while Argentina, which did almost everything the IMF and the US banking establishment told it to it, is about to go toes-up. The Argentine disaster could spell the end of WTO-styled globalism far more than the protests of Seattle etc. ever could
The Republic of Ireland as a political entity has reasonably amicable relations with the UK, and its monetary policy is almost certainly not dictated by a need to distance itself from London. Ireland's current economic success depend partially on a very well-educated but less expensive English-speaking workforce, and some good economic policies. Ireland could have maintained its old currency and still have not a whit of dependence on the UK - it might, however, have lost its strength as a bridge between the European and the US economies.
Re:Will slashdot change?
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· Score: 5, Funny
After all, all they have to do is turn the Quake II icon sideways.
Re:Ireland *has* changed to the Euro
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ireland is more or less a part of britain
Wow, you could get so very very beaten up for saying that. It would be like saying "Texas is really just part of New York, and tends to follow their policies." Not only wrong, but it would piss off both a lot of New Yorkers and even more Texans.
Partially, I think you answered your own question: the stability of the pound, and the fact that it often outperforms the dollar, makes it easier to maintain as a separate currency.
Also, there's a lot of political resistence to Europeanization in the UK. Many there seem to still think of the Continent as chaotic, unreliable, and irrational. There is an ongoing political pressure to slow down the UK's entry into the EU.
Ireland, on the other hand, has done extraordinarily well with European integration, and the Irish pound has been replaced by the Euro.
I'm not a GPL-or-nothing type, but I think one can fairly say that, in some sense, the GPL is freer than the BSD license, because it guarantees freedom for more people.
If one national constitution allows any of the states, provinces, citys, counties, departments and what-not to enact laws that take away freedom of speech, religion, movement or what have you, does the fact that it does not make that restriction on subordinate governments make it freer than a constitution that guaranteed freedom of speech etc. and forbade other governments from abridging those freedoms? I don't think so. The restrictions placed on a few - specifically, the restrictions on the ability to restrict - mean greater freedom for all.
That said, I don't object to the BSD license in its own right - it may fairly be called a more useful or a more flexible license. But to call it "freer" would be misleading.
I think that KISS is no longer a part of the de facto Unix world. When you have hundreds of different ways of keeping things simple that have hundreds of simple kludges and workarounds to keep simply working together, the accumulated legacy cruft is, simply, no longer simple. It's a wonderful example of how incredible complex systems can emerge from the very simple behaviours of a few agents. Unfortunately, that makes it a royal pain in the ass sometimes.
The problem isn't the spam, or the pop-up ads, or even "branding" certain parts of the net. It's the fact that wealthy corporation have access to hordes of lawyers that they can send after anyone doing anything they don't like. "Things they don't like" include fan/anti-fan use of characters, trademarks and the like, reverse engineering, file sharing, distribution of patented algorithms, reporting of vulnerabilities, and such.
To put it under the rubric of the "commercialization of the Internet" is actually to miss the point. The problem is the concentration of political power in the hands of the wealthy, and the use of the court system to exercise that power - that was a problem before the internet, and it remains a problem now.
Ho hum -- in India I'm sure they don't have the US rights the US people all love and enjoy, so the Indians are going to just have to deal with it.
My experience is that the US is not really freer than a lot of other countries, and it is selective in which "freedoms" are really available. The US probably has as much or more economic freedom than most any other first-world place - that is, lower taxes and fewer bureaucratic obstacles to doing business. But in other freedoms, the US lags behind. The Sklyarov case is a good indication of that, as is the war on drugs and the rights that the police have to sieze property they even suspect is related to it, without so much as a court order. In much of Europe, small-scale drug use and possession is tolerated openly. In most other countries, there is more freedom of speech when such freedom threatens corporate "property".
I guess you're talking about procedural protections for people suspected of a crime; in that regard, the US has, or at least used to have, a number of safeguards that most other countries lacked. But that's changing.
You're right, of course - the numbers are probably being pumped up by the fanboy contingent, who have probably never seen a Tarkovsky or Kurosawa film. But LOTR is probably a fair bet for a fistful of Oscars in 2002. And it is definitely the highest quality blockbuster/epic film to come out in a long, long time. Far superior to, say, Titanic.
Slashdot Mirror
That's your problem right there. Howard the Duck was a horrible movie. The software was just trying to protect you.
For many observers, there's nothing strange about that at all. Many types of service favor a winner-take-all scenario in the market, and naturally tend towards monopoly. Operating systems are a good example: if you control 60 percent of the market, it is far easier to get the next 30 percent than it was to get the first thirty percent, because of network effects (networkability, standardization, etc.) Utilities, which usually have somewhere a bottleneck in distribution which can allow only one "gatekeeper," also fall into this category.
Yes. Or do you think that the Internet was built by McDonald's?
Unfortunately, your broadband providers seem to be restricting content related to statistics and geography. You may want to check into that.
Which is painful irony. I'm sympathetic to Glaser's (nominal) ideals, but he's the poster boy for "do as I say, not as I do." If he had an ounce of self-respect, he'd clean up Real's business practices, open its technology (gee, Macromedia opened up the Flash format and they seem to be doing alright), stop his failed efforts to nickel-and-dime the desktop end-user to death, and work on a real (ha ha) business plan. I guess the silver lining is that if they can make their embedded-viewer business successful, they might start doing some of those very things.
The optimum, of course, is free, open formats like MPEG. But no one sends cocaine and hookers to the hotel rooms of content providers and hardware manufacturers to support free and open formats, so it doesn't happen.
Because it gets your panties in a bunch. That's worth it all by itself.
It would probably not work for film in general. They are different mediums, and flow and continuity and the ability to maintain different types of ideas in memory and reference them is distinct. Peter Greenaway has noted that, as compared to written text, film is really not very good at telling stories of any complexity; it is better at being a visual representation of the elements of simpler stories, like painting. Including Tom Bombodil might be truer to the structure of the story, but possibly at the cost of bringing over the feel of the story, and the palpable sense of time and place.
Do you have any idea how tiny the NEA (and the associated NEH) is? Why this gets trotted out as an example of government waste is a mystery to me.
Now, the average video-gamer is twenty-eight years old - people who grow up with a medium usually keep using it (with less frequency) throughout their lives. I'm an adult, and I play computer games. A lot of adults my age do - most of us started when we were kids - and somost of us don't problematize video games as a medium across the board. No one says now "what shall we do about cinema?" (During the early part of the twentieth century, the pre-cinema generation certainly asked this question a lot.) There may be criticism of violence in one media or another, but those media that have been completely integrated into cultural practice are not subject to this sort of scrutiny.
Let's assume that X results in a non-reproducing behaviour 10 percent of the time, but that feature enables the group to improve its survival and reproduction two-fold. The proliferation of X in the 90% of those who do reproduce, based on the behavioral changes of the 10%, "justifies" X in terms of adaptation.
Jabber is great if you want IM without those pesky "friends" or "family."
Dead on. The story is laughable, and sad. Supposedly he's defending Ion Storm against the critics, but all his defenses amount to are saying "oh, yes, it was like that, but it was cool!" The wastefulness of that kind of culture came from having a bunch of young fanboys who were so impervious to criticism, so sure that they couldn't do anything wrong, that they squandered every break they got and won few friends along the way. The fact that a childhood friend of Romero's had to right this content-free apologia is an indication of how hopeless they really were.
Most immigration into the US is from 3rd World countries; Japan does not have a significant emigration to the US either (a fact which is actually making US Nikkei communities become more isolated from Japan.)
On that note, scanning this thread one finds a mind-numbing array of ignorance and misconceptions about Europe (and, indeed, the rest of the world) from presumably American, presumably intelligent people. I guess it's the same combination of hubris and ignorance that leads a lot of Americans to simply assume that the US is the freest nation in the world, without either qualifying what "freedom" means or investigating how people all over the world live. It's sad, really.
One of the advantages that Europe has is that language and culture maintain national entities in such a way as to resist the "winner take all" scenario, in which all the educated professionals move to a tiny handful of economic supercenters. Economic growth can be distributed geographically more in Europe, but it has nothing to do with any restrictions on travel.
One of the ironies of economic popular wisdom in the 90's is apparent by the fact that Brazil, with its protectionist policies, is doing reasonably well, while Argentina, which did almost everything the IMF and the US banking establishment told it to it, is about to go toes-up. The Argentine disaster could spell the end of WTO-styled globalism far more than the protests of Seattle etc. ever could
The Republic of Ireland as a political entity has reasonably amicable relations with the UK, and its monetary policy is almost certainly not dictated by a need to distance itself from London. Ireland's current economic success depend partially on a very well-educated but less expensive English-speaking workforce, and some good economic policies. Ireland could have maintained its old currency and still have not a whit of dependence on the UK - it might, however, have lost its strength as a bridge between the European and the US economies.
After all, all they have to do is turn the Quake II icon sideways.
Wow, you could get so very very beaten up for saying that. It would be like saying "Texas is really just part of New York, and tends to follow their policies." Not only wrong, but it would piss off both a lot of New Yorkers and even more Texans.
Also, there's a lot of political resistence to Europeanization in the UK. Many there seem to still think of the Continent as chaotic, unreliable, and irrational. There is an ongoing political pressure to slow down the UK's entry into the EU.
Ireland, on the other hand, has done extraordinarily well with European integration, and the Irish pound has been replaced by the Euro.
If one national constitution allows any of the states, provinces, citys, counties, departments and what-not to enact laws that take away freedom of speech, religion, movement or what have you, does the fact that it does not make that restriction on subordinate governments make it freer than a constitution that guaranteed freedom of speech etc. and forbade other governments from abridging those freedoms? I don't think so. The restrictions placed on a few - specifically, the restrictions on the ability to restrict - mean greater freedom for all.
That said, I don't object to the BSD license in its own right - it may fairly be called a more useful or a more flexible license. But to call it "freer" would be misleading.
I think that KISS is no longer a part of the de facto Unix world. When you have hundreds of different ways of keeping things simple that have hundreds of simple kludges and workarounds to keep simply working together, the accumulated legacy cruft is, simply, no longer simple. It's a wonderful example of how incredible complex systems can emerge from the very simple behaviours of a few agents. Unfortunately, that makes it a royal pain in the ass sometimes.
To put it under the rubric of the "commercialization of the Internet" is actually to miss the point. The problem is the concentration of political power in the hands of the wealthy, and the use of the court system to exercise that power - that was a problem before the internet, and it remains a problem now.
My experience is that the US is not really freer than a lot of other countries, and it is selective in which "freedoms" are really available. The US probably has as much or more economic freedom than most any other first-world place - that is, lower taxes and fewer bureaucratic obstacles to doing business. But in other freedoms, the US lags behind. The Sklyarov case is a good indication of that, as is the war on drugs and the rights that the police have to sieze property they even suspect is related to it, without so much as a court order. In much of Europe, small-scale drug use and possession is tolerated openly. In most other countries, there is more freedom of speech when such freedom threatens corporate "property".
I guess you're talking about procedural protections for people suspected of a crime; in that regard, the US has, or at least used to have, a number of safeguards that most other countries lacked. But that's changing.
You're right, of course - the numbers are probably being pumped up by the fanboy contingent, who have probably never seen a Tarkovsky or Kurosawa film. But LOTR is probably a fair bet for a fistful of Oscars in 2002. And it is definitely the highest quality blockbuster/epic film to come out in a long, long time. Far superior to, say, Titanic.