I agree with you personally. There is a huge entertainment glut and I simply bypass entertainment that is too expensive (la femme nikita-- $80/season, X-Files, $75/ season) until it goes on sale ($15/season for both-- a reasonable price).
However, artists have a right to a living, not a right to enormous wealth. Prices currently charge reflect out-dated models and it will probably take another 20 years for them to become reasonable. J.K. Rowling is an excellent example- no creative work justifies a billion dollar income- it's not a fair outcome to society as a whole. Millions of people are starving to death who would not be if the money were routed their way instead of to book creation. I believe that anything much over a lifetime's income for a single work is absurd and you should fight it anyway you can. So that would be about 40k*80 years or about 3.2 million maximum for a given creative work.
Copyright is intended to encourage creation of works- not to make creators and their heirs and the corporation they sold the rights to impossibly wealthy forever.
---
No one is forcing you-- but never in history has it been such an artificial restriction. It is literally a choice of "rent at a very high price this broken DRM'd very expensive product from us until we change formats again" or "get a superior unbroken copy you can keep forever for free". It is literally a choice between not getting the product at all (so they get no money) or getting a copy which takes nothing from them (so they also get no money). So it comes across more as sour grapes on their part than reasonable demands.
They have set the price so high that it is a mockery and the cost of production and illegal acquisition is so low that obeying the law is widely perceived as stupid. Hell, even their own children are copying their products illegally in their own houses.
If you had to pay $20 for a macmuffin and 6 cheeseburgers OR you could spend $20 once and then put the macmuffin into your magical replicator to make infinite perfect, fresh copies of it for about 10 cents... and you KNOW that McDonalds has even better technology than you so is making their copies for 5 cents... so you feel like a real sucker for dropping $20 for breakfast every morning that they are making for 5 cents and forcing you to pay $20 instead of $3.
It were reasonably priced so that people in the music industry made good solid $80k to $100k per year salaries instead of millions of dollars ( so CD's would cost about $3 bucks for 15 songs).
I suspect you might not but a lot would.
The problem that RIAA has created is that people were averse to stealing but the recording industry put up huge inducements (extremely high price, unreasonable, almost infinately long copyright periods) while also falling victim to new technology (easy to crack, virtually free physical production). Once people started stealing under unreasonable conditions, then it becomes easy to constantly redefine reasonable down. There are now people who will steal brand new material, that they would have purchased, that they could buy inexpensively after three months (often $9.99). In fact, some people are so mad, they don't care if it was free or cheaper to purchase than to download and burn their own.
And... it's not stealing. It's infringement-- unauthorized copying. They still have their physical property. Hell a lot of them are still getting unreasonably wealthy from the "tiny" legal sales they are making.
Copyright was intended to be just enough to encourage creation of works for the public. It was not intended to be corporate or artist welfare/lottery-- produce one popular work and get a billion dollars (like rowling for example). Prices currently reflect the reality of 50 years ago and are probably an order of magnitude too high now.
I know a lot of vb guys were pissed over that. Some got over it and went on to.net but others quit microsoft as an environment.
And i know some who are mad that microsoft charges them $1,000 for software but charges their competitors in china and india under $100. So they are looking for environments that cost the same in both locations.
I remember the pepsi commercials back in the late 70's/early 80's. They tracked where guys were looking and it was not at the product. In fact, they frequently didn't remember the product. Very popular commercial of a girl exiting the water in a little suit holding a can of pepsi.
The Macgyver character is a younger character unless we are making a movie about "Old Macgyver".
So it would need to be a younger actor.
The character is smart and a little light so you would need a younger actor who has a smart/little light persona or someone new.
And RDA has a certain way of talking that he carries through all his characters (sort of the, heck i'm just a country bumpkin (while really being quite smart)). Do you take that away and re-envision macgyver or do you keep it and come across like a poor imitation of RDA?
How many parrots are in this picture? (audio). Picture of 1-7 parrots mixed with other birds.
How many miles over the speedlimit is this car going? (audio) Picture of a car speedometer at 35 to 95 with a Speed sign through window of 35 to 95 mph.
What letter is missing from the second word? (audio) Habit (picture) Hait
The audio could be a separate text box instead of audio.
Generate a million simple but unique questions that require thought and each one has multiple possible answers (1-9 or a-z or 00 to 99).
Suddenly your odds of getting a question you know drops to 1/million so you require a few hundred thousand unique routines to calculate the correct answer for each one.
Among the crowd that is now 60, basically everyone drove drunk multiple times a week.
Fact is that being drunk only raises your chance of an accident and you can mostly compensate for it.
Most really bad accidents happen at the blind drunk level (.18 to.2+) or because the person is feeling happy and acting like an uninhibited idiot and driving 20mph over the speed-limit.
Yes- driving at.12 or.14 is going to impair your judgement, stearing, and stopping but if you are a sensible drunk your likely hood of a serious accident is low.
The average person who goes to the neighborhood bar, gets to.14 and then carefully drives home slowly both gets away with it and doesn't get in serious accidents. Being at.10 is probably equivalent to being extremely tired-- and for now we let extremely tired people drive.
Despite all the laws, dubious constitutional positions, people still get to.2 and kill other people.
There has to be a "senate" of some kind to block the excesses.
Pure direct vote democracy is probably the second quickest ways to pure evil.
Give everyone a certain number of Veto votes per year. If any election has a 10% veto vote count, then the issue is cancelled. Problem-- the radical masses then just put the same issue up with slightly different wording for another vote.
They've done this a few times now with various content (Divx, Fairplay, etc.) -- and every time the company eventually takes down the central registry.
In terms of the spirit, it doesn't matter if you are a well kept house slave or a beat up field slave. You are still a slave and you know it.
With our productivity gains over even just the last 20 years (much less the last 50 years), we should be working 4 hours a day-- but somehow we are not able to. Somehow... we always seem to end up giving 10 hours a day of our lives as wage slaves.
The way health care is set up, even if you saved up millions of dollars, you can be wiped out almost instantly. With the tax set up, you rent your stuff from the government- you never own it.
This is a little bit of a tangent to your post but...
The interesting thing is so many women in this industry now that it depresses wages (well.. unless you have a new york governor as a client).
The rate for an hour of a pretty girl's time is staying the same while everything else goes up in price. In terms of gasoline... they've gone from 400 gallons for an hour to under 50 gallons for an hour.
Of course the price for real love continues to escalate since child support and alimony are tied to your income as a percentage.
---
The computer field was absolutely killed by sarbanes oxley in my opinion. It's like taking a fighter pilot and telling him he needs to do 3 months of paper work for 8 hours of airtime.
Hi... I'm a rich guy. I'll give you the money to produce but I want a cut.
Hi... I'm an accountant. I'll help both of you keep track of the money, costs, profits, and taxes.
This is how it has always been.
No producer is an island. MOST of what producers make is based on things other prior producers made.. just tweaked a bit. Everyone doesn't pay royalties to the person that "invented" the "mystery" story or the "action" story or the "hooker with a heart of gold" archetype.
Most producers start out with nothing. *Someone* has to front them enough money to live for a couple years so they can actually focus on producing instead of getting food and rent money.
Neither producers or the rich deserve a permanent lock-in for things they make. Anything over a couple hundred grand a year is excessive. So if you make something that sells to 3 billion people even a penny a consumer would give you more than a lifetime's income.
Competition is a squirrelly thing.... in this case, you would be able to create certain types of creatures (and maybe name them or get credit as the creator?) before other players.
You might be able to found successful blogs/websites about the game that would earn you cash when later players came to read about your advance knowledge to save time.
And really, it is like paying a measly $10 to completely pwn other Spore players who do not for the first 3 to 6 months of the game.
I got to do this kind of thing (pre-release Beta- keep your characters) on a MMorgg. Even folks putting in 20 hours a day didn't catch up for months because I was always in empty areas with a few other experts to group with while they were in zones so packed you could barely move, got hideous lag, couldn't find any resources/mobs, and had to deal with a bunch of other clueless types that got you killed.
A small minority think it is okay to take your stuff without compensation, period.
However, a large majority would say that you do not have a right to make money off of those creations as is currently legal. Corporations have twisted copyright to the point that you are losing support for it short term. The fact is that by the original reasonable laws, any songs or movies made prior to 1980 would now be in the public domain.
Every time they pass a law extending the copyright on material whose creators have been dead for over a generation, a lot of people lose respect for all of copyright and lose the feeling that it is fair and should be complied with.
Likewise, the 28 year period was based on conditions closing on three centuries ago. The intent was just enough of a right to encourage creation so that works would be created for the public good. After making a reasonable amount of wealth, the work would go into the public domain. I do not think that the amount of money generated by the beatles catalog qualifies as "reasonable". My opinion is that about an average lifetime's income (1.2-3 million) for one work is reasonable. At that point- create something else.
And given the incredible glut of creators at this point, I do not think they need that much encouragement. Already, I have the choice between a season (22 hours) of an entertaining show for $16 or for $79. Since both are equally entertaining, I choose the $16- because later the $79 will be cheaper. You creators are competing for the $20 in my pocket-- the days of a captive market are over. The days of 1,000 items competing for the $100 in my pocket are here. I know those items physical cost of creation is 30 cents. I know your labor cost of creation was worth perhaps $3,000. I know the market sizes is now in billions. If you only sell 300,000 copies at.10 cents profit a piece you are making a year's income.
I guess for small micro-markets a higher price is justified. But when you are talking about selling a billion copies of something (like Harry Potter), I think giving you $5 a copy is a bit absurd.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with you personally. There is a huge entertainment glut and I simply bypass entertainment that is too expensive (la femme nikita-- $80/season, X-Files, $75/ season) until it goes on sale ($15/season for both-- a reasonable price).
However, artists have a right to a living, not a right to enormous wealth. Prices currently charge reflect out-dated models and it will probably take another 20 years for them to become reasonable. J.K. Rowling is an excellent example- no creative work justifies a billion dollar income- it's not a fair outcome to society as a whole. Millions of people are starving to death who would not be if the money were routed their way instead of to book creation. I believe that anything much over a lifetime's income for a single work is absurd and you should fight it anyway you can. So that would be about 40k*80 years or about 3.2 million maximum for a given creative work.
Copyright is intended to encourage creation of works- not to make creators and their heirs and the corporation they sold the rights to impossibly wealthy forever.
---
No one is forcing you-- but never in history has it been such an artificial restriction. It is literally a choice of "rent at a very high price this broken DRM'd very expensive product from us until we change formats again" or "get a superior unbroken copy you can keep forever for free". It is literally a choice between not getting the product at all (so they get no money) or getting a copy which takes nothing from them (so they also get no money). So it comes across more as sour grapes on their part than reasonable demands.
They have set the price so high that it is a mockery and the cost of production and illegal acquisition is so low that obeying the law is widely perceived as stupid. Hell, even their own children are copying their products illegally in their own houses.
You could alternate the fonts instead of zebra striping.
Say a serif vs a non-serif font.
Bold vs non-bold.
Italic vs non-italic.
So you could have every other row be bold and every other column be italic.
I see this in business all the time.
It's only a 1% difference so they cut it.
And they cut 15 other 1% things.
And the result is a cardboard tomato, a useless piece of software, an inferior product.
It is the 80/20 rule defined. You spend 80% of your time on 20% of the product to get a good product.
The result of their attitude is a product that is 80% as good as what you really wanted and needed.
Courts were ignorant of technology but you really can't do better than circumstantial evidence for I.P. -> user.
There are no witnesses and no photographic records.
Slashdot... soo..
It's like if your car was used in a bank robbery.
And you are picked up the next day driving your car to work.
Can they prove that you the bank robber with no other evidence?
I mean, you didn't report the car stolen.
It's your car.
You are driving it after the crime was committed.
And with computers, it's even possible that your car was being driven remotely from another country (if you've been pwned by malware).
I think an even better analogy is
If you had to pay $20 for a macmuffin and 6 cheeseburgers OR you could spend $20 once and then put the macmuffin into your magical replicator to make infinite perfect, fresh copies of it for about 10 cents... and you KNOW that McDonalds has even better technology than you so is making their copies for 5 cents... so you feel like a real sucker for dropping $20 for breakfast every morning that they are making for 5 cents and forcing you to pay $20 instead of $3.
So would you steal it if...
... it's not stealing. It's infringement-- unauthorized copying. They still have their physical property.
It were reasonably priced so that people in the music industry made good solid $80k to $100k per year salaries instead of millions of dollars ( so CD's would cost about $3 bucks for 15 songs).
I suspect you might not but a lot would.
The problem that RIAA has created is that people were averse to stealing but the recording industry put up huge inducements (extremely high price, unreasonable, almost infinately long copyright periods) while also falling victim to new technology (easy to crack, virtually free physical production). Once people started stealing under unreasonable conditions, then it becomes easy to constantly redefine reasonable down. There are now people who will steal brand new material, that they would have purchased, that they could buy inexpensively after three months (often $9.99). In fact, some people are so mad, they don't care if it was free or cheaper to purchase than to download and burn their own.
And
Hell a lot of them are still getting unreasonably wealthy from the "tiny" legal sales they are making.
Copyright was intended to be just enough to encourage creation of works for the public. It was not intended to be corporate or artist welfare/lottery-- produce one popular work and get a billion dollars (like rowling for example).
Prices currently reflect the reality of 50 years ago and are probably an order of magnitude too high now.
I know a lot of vb guys were pissed over that. .net but others quit microsoft as an environment.
Some got over it and went on to
And i know some who are mad that microsoft charges them $1,000 for software but charges their competitors in china and india under $100. So they are looking for environments that cost the same in both locations.
I remember the pepsi commercials back in the late 70's/early 80's.
They tracked where guys were looking and it was not at the product.
In fact, they frequently didn't remember the product.
Very popular commercial of a girl exiting the water in a little suit holding a can of pepsi.
Look at area,
say "click"
or
say "nudge [right|left|up|down|north|northwest|west|..." , then say "click|pow|go|do it".
So it would be 10kK, O.K.?
The Macgyver character is a younger character unless we are making a movie about "Old Macgyver".
So it would need to be a younger actor.
The character is smart and a little light so you would need a younger actor who has a smart/little light persona or someone new.
And RDA has a certain way of talking that he carries through all his characters (sort of the, heck i'm just a country bumpkin (while really being quite smart)). Do you take that away and re-envision macgyver or do you keep it and come across like a poor imitation of RDA?
That's a good adaption of my basic idea.
You have a zillion different clips of famous people too.
Or well known scenes from movies.
Okay.. how about a question...
And a picture.
How many parrots are in this picture? (audio).
Picture of 1-7 parrots mixed with other birds.
How many miles over the speedlimit is this car going? (audio)
Picture of a car speedometer at 35 to 95 with a Speed sign through window of 35 to 95 mph.
What letter is missing from the second word? (audio)
Habit (picture)
Hait
The audio could be a separate text box instead of audio.
Generate a million simple but unique questions that require thought and each one has multiple possible answers (1-9 or a-z or 00 to 99).
Suddenly your odds of getting a question you know drops to 1/million so you require a few hundred thousand unique routines to calculate the correct answer for each one.
Drunk driving has dropped enormously.
.2+) or because the person is feeling happy and acting like an uninhibited idiot and driving 20mph over the speed-limit.
.12 or .14 is going to impair your judgement, stearing, and stopping but if you are a sensible drunk your likely hood of a serious accident is low.
.14 and then carefully drives home slowly both gets away with it and doesn't get in serious accidents. Being at .10 is probably equivalent to being extremely tired-- and for now we let extremely tired people drive.
.2 and kill other people.
Among the crowd that is now 60, basically everyone drove drunk multiple times a week.
Fact is that being drunk only raises your chance of an accident and you can mostly compensate for it.
Most really bad accidents happen at the blind drunk level (.18 to
Yes- driving at
The average person who goes to the neighborhood bar, gets to
Despite all the laws, dubious constitutional positions, people still get to
There has to be a "senate" of some kind to block the excesses.
Pure direct vote democracy is probably the second quickest ways to pure evil.
Give everyone a certain number of Veto votes per year. If any election has a 10% veto vote count, then the issue is cancelled. Problem-- the radical masses then just put the same issue up with slightly different wording for another vote.
They've done this a few times now with various content (Divx, Fairplay, etc.) -- and every time the company eventually takes down the central registry.
In terms of the spirit, it doesn't matter if you are a well kept house slave or a beat up field slave. You are still a slave and you know it.
With our productivity gains over even just the last 20 years (much less the last 50 years), we should be working 4 hours a day-- but somehow we are not able to. Somehow... we always seem to end up giving 10 hours a day of our lives as wage slaves.
The way health care is set up, even if you saved up millions of dollars, you can be wiped out almost instantly.
With the tax set up, you rent your stuff from the government- you never own it.
And so on.
This is a little bit of a tangent to your post but...
The interesting thing is so many women in this industry now that it depresses wages (well.. unless you have a new york governor as a client).
The rate for an hour of a pretty girl's time is staying the same while everything else goes up in price. In terms of gasoline... they've gone from 400 gallons for an hour to under 50 gallons for an hour.
Of course the price for real love continues to escalate since child support and alimony are tied to your income as a percentage.
---
The computer field was absolutely killed by sarbanes oxley in my opinion. It's like taking a fighter pilot and telling him he needs to do 3 months of paper work for 8 hours of airtime.
Hi...
I'm a producer. I have no money.
Hi...
I'm a rich guy. I'll give you the money to produce but I want a cut.
Hi...
I'm an accountant. I'll help both of you keep track of the money, costs, profits, and taxes.
This is how it has always been.
No producer is an island. MOST of what producers make is based on things other prior producers made.. just tweaked a bit. Everyone doesn't pay royalties to the person that "invented" the "mystery" story or the "action" story or the "hooker with a heart of gold" archetype.
Most producers start out with nothing. *Someone* has to front them enough money to live for a couple years so they can actually focus on producing instead of getting food and rent money.
Neither producers or the rich deserve a permanent lock-in for things they make. Anything over a couple hundred grand a year is excessive. So if you make something that sells to 3 billion people even a penny a consumer would give you more than a lifetime's income.
Competition is a squirrelly thing.... in this case, you would be able to create certain types of creatures (and maybe name them or get credit as the creator?) before other players.
You might be able to found successful blogs/websites about the game that would earn you cash when later players came to read about your advance knowledge to save time.
It's Hardy Herron, not Hardon Harry.
And really, it is like paying a measly $10 to completely pwn other Spore players who do not for the first 3 to 6 months of the game.
I got to do this kind of thing (pre-release Beta- keep your characters) on a MMorgg. Even folks putting in 20 hours a day didn't catch up for months because I was always in empty areas with a few other experts to group with while they were in zones so packed you could barely move, got hideous lag, couldn't find any resources/mobs, and had to deal with a bunch of other clueless types that got you killed.
The majority would probably agree with you.
.10 cents profit a piece you are making a year's income.
A small minority think it is okay to take your stuff without compensation, period.
However, a large majority would say that you do not have a right to make money off of those creations as is currently legal. Corporations have twisted copyright to the point that you are losing support for it short term. The fact is that by the original reasonable laws, any songs or movies made prior to 1980 would now be in the public domain.
Every time they pass a law extending the copyright on material whose creators have been dead for over a generation, a lot of people lose respect for all of copyright and lose the feeling that it is fair and should be complied with.
Likewise, the 28 year period was based on conditions closing on three centuries ago. The intent was just enough of a right to encourage creation so that works would be created for the public good. After making a reasonable amount of wealth, the work would go into the public domain. I do not think that the amount of money generated by the beatles catalog qualifies as "reasonable". My opinion is that about an average lifetime's income (1.2-3 million) for one work is reasonable. At that point- create something else.
And given the incredible glut of creators at this point, I do not think they need that much encouragement. Already, I have the choice between a season (22 hours) of an entertaining show for $16 or for $79. Since both are equally entertaining, I choose the $16- because later the $79 will be cheaper. You creators are competing for the $20 in my pocket-- the days of a captive market are over. The days of 1,000 items competing for the $100 in my pocket are here. I know those items physical cost of creation is 30 cents. I know your labor cost of creation was worth perhaps $3,000. I know the market sizes is now in billions. If you only sell 300,000 copies at
I guess for small micro-markets a higher price is justified. But when you are talking about selling a billion copies of something (like Harry Potter), I think giving you $5 a copy is a bit absurd.
That's how I think about it.
Well at least he didn't talk about terrorists or bombs while mentioning five year old, ponies, or getting laid.
I mean, only openly talking about president bush's planned assassination would be more risky.