Not the same-- you are taking a physical item there.
"It's a Wonderful Life" is a better example. While free, it was a huge and growing event every christmas. It was on several stations- sometimes on the same night.
Once someone figured out some slimy backhanded way to gain copyright over it (and this is what-- almost 50 years old now?) and charge for it, it has almost completely vanished from TV in less than 8 years.
Basic fact is.. there is more entertainment than we can consume now. So entertainment is becoming a commodity and commodities just get cheaper. Riaa will fight this- but we can do our part by not buying riaa products. There are more non-riaa products out there than you can watch or listen to in your lifetime these days.
Spread them to your friends-- and now you still have the watercooler buzz-- just over non riaa stuff.
Stores don't charge for background music but they have to pay for it anyway.
If you charge and even play copyrighted material incidental to your activity, then the music business wants to charge you a fee. One example would be the barbershop that got sued-- others would be numerous small bars that had the radio on.
Of course as recently as 20 years ago this wasn't the case (it was very common to for places to have a radio tuned in and not pay a music fee)- so the music business has really expanded the definition of what people have to pay for a lot in the last couple decades.
Even fairly reasonable sites like Magnatune have specific liscenses for playing music this way.
And the problem is the "hard" copy gives you no protection these days. You can't copy from the new formats so if your original is stolen, obsoleted, cracked then you are SOL.
One reason why I'll be staying with DVD. Last vacation, I lost too *backup* copies of my originals. No sweat- I just tossed the shards in the airport trashcan and then made new backups when I got home. The originals stay in stable binders and never come out except for copying.
I can see why you might think I'm trolling given the numbers others posted!
But the difference between 750 and 10,000 isn't that great when you consider that the target audience is in the tens of millions (and hundreds of millions for international shows).
I was aware of mininova-- "That 70's Show" links there had about 130s / 100L numbers at max.
I don't follow Lost (tried but it "lost" me about 3 episodes into the second season after a really good first season).
Anyway... I'll amend to the post to say..
While a few shows may hit as much as 10,000 seeders and leechers ( with a potential audience of 70 million that is about.03% of the audience ), most show torrents max out at about 20 to 100 leechers. In most cases you are not trading with the a large number of people.
Even in the case of the largest torrents, you are trading with less than 1% of the audience. Of those 1%, a large number will delete them after viewing and *may* buy them on DVD provided the DVD's are reasonably priced compared to the person's time and money to burn them to DVD and file them.
The largest content torrent that I've seen had about 750 leechers on it.
The *typical* large torrent has bout 120 seeders to 120 leechers. This is usually anime or a 1st run television show that was just shown.
However 99% of content torrents that I've seen has 1 to 2 seeders and 8 to 20 leechers.
It costs money and time to store downloaded material- and there is *always* a chance you will lose it.
There is a *solid* market for a copy (Vongo perhaps?) that sells me a lifetime license to a song/show/movie/book/etc. and stores a copy on their end. They then charge a *reasonable* re-download fee (say 10% of the minimum wage), a reasonable annual storage fee (say 2 cents per gigabyte- a typical 400 movie library is about 1600 gigabytes- but they only have to keep 1 copy of each for "N" users) and allow me to re-download the song/show/movie/book/etc. a reasonable number of times per year (say once per year) with a small number of floating downloads which allow me to download twice for when things go wrong (an exceptions for cases where I can show them a police report).
But seriously--- most torrents are very small and it takes days (weeks...) to download things. There were a few things on emule (not a torrent) that took literally almost 3 month to download. I think almost anyone would pay some money to get it *now* vs getting it 3 months from now (or 12 days from now).
If the media cartel had not driven prices up so high (-- $20 mil for an actor? Should be more like $500,000-- with similar reductions all along the food chain with movies costing $5 to see as a result). However, they have raised their prices so high that people are finding many other less expensive forms of entertainment.
I read speculation that fungus develops anti-microbial toxins because it competes with bacteria for living space.
Soooo... in addition to searching deep sea reefs, how about putting various kinds of cancer cells into competition with fungi and bacteria until some develop randomly that kill the cancer. Then see what they did to achieve that.
... the american brain thinks it needs magnitudes more money to live....
No.
The american brain *knows* it needs magnitudes more money to live.
This will even out-- a) Their cost of living will rise so they cease to be such a bargain. b) our cost of living will drop c) or we will have a revolution/ jack up taxes/ lose the safety premium people pay to live here.
Make no mistake, the only reason it costs $3 million for beach front property here and $30,000 in mexico is because here you know you will not be killed and you won't have your property taken by a corrupt government.
First... let me say that I agree with you that the evolution argument corrupts christians. It gets their goat and drives them to inappropriate behavior (lying being a big one).
Second...Slashdot is not a scholarly journal. To have to provide footnotes and references would be silly.
So there are two questions...
1) Ignoring the plagerism argument- is his argument sound or full of holes. 2) Did he copy so much that he really HAS no argument (it sounds like he did). Since I think this is the case, I really think even by slashdot's lax standards for scholarly conduct, he would have crossed the plagerism line.
If properly trained, you can kill or at least disable another human with a pencil in a few seconds. Air marshals must be anonymous or behind a protective wall so they have time to react.
If you do the math, the article says the odds of these mutations occuring are
millions:700 dead:live
So something like 99.9999% of mutations were useless.
They could have done the same experiment with a) increasing acidity b) increasing salinity c) longer periods of starvation
And the odds are probably 99.9999% of the mutations would be useless for surviving those environments (including the nifty "survive in heat" mutation which would be useless in a saline environment).
Actually, I'm reading about people going to india for surgery which is cheaper without insurance than it is here *with* insurance and of the same quality. The only difference is the doctors and staff cost 10% of the price given the same experience- (and I'm betting you are SOL if they screw up (being human they will.001% of the time) at the same rate as 1st world doctors. Then when you can't sue them, you will be the one in 1,000 that regrets the decision. The other 999 will rave about how wonderful it is.
I've considered it for cosmetic surgery but i'll probably go to oklahoma instead-- $10k vs $4k in ok vs $2k + $2k airfare.
Then came the day that all technicians were busy fixing things at other companies and so the service company just paid them the penalty and said they would send out a tech when one became available. It was a couple days later. It cost them a couple hundred grand in those two days and they were lucky at that.
If the failure had been around tax time, the service agreement fines they had with their own customers for failure to produce required documents could have been quite large.
So if you are going to do your business this way, you need to legally account for the fact that if there is a big spike, your entire company could be down for over 24 hours until your "time-share" tech becomes available.
When we see a headline titled "Management outsourced to India" then we will finally see some kind of pressure put to stop this.
But seriously, why wouldn't a 30k per year, indian masters in business administration manager be able to manage just as effectively as a 4 million dollar per year manager (and hey- he'd have better contacts with the new movers and shakers).
quote: When I asked a professor point blank why the need for art and culture would develop through the course of evolution, he responded that he doesn't believe those traits would stem from evolution.
--- What was he thinking? Of course it stems from evolution.
Art may be the equivalent of stronger muscles for the mind. Artists may make it possible to do completely new and useful activities.
Or easier to understand bee dances- artists may figure out new ways to communicate ideas for the rest of the social group.
Or a peacock's tail- artists may have sex & reproduce more than non-artists.
Or just another way of gathering food. "Rich" members of society give food & resources to artists allowing artists to survive and reproduce. So artists are a successful symbiote or parasite on powerful or rich members of society.
---
Some things like "perfect" pitch or a "four octive range" are rare but basic talents run strong in some families just as talent for football runs strong in others.
---
As soon as a creature has the ability to be happy or unhappy (and even dogs can do this) then you can train them to behave differently without having to give them real food or resources. How is a painting of a rich patron that different from a pat on the head and praise to your dog that fetched the dead pigeon for you (or rolled over and played dead).
Art could start randomly-- a joke or story or picture that stimulates the brain of barely intelligent apes could definately have value (and cost to produce). Once it has value and cost, then it will be selected for or against by natural selection.
A worst case example- if you spend your people's grain to build a big statue of yourself, they may all starve and then you will be killed by them or enemy soldiers.
So art can vary from the little ruffle of yellow on the back of a bird's neck to the gaudy and expensive peacock's tail (and it does-- people somewhere probably died because of the money and resources spent on the orange gateway art project in central park).
True-- and/but it is also about how fit your line is.
If you have a dozen kids and they fail to reproduce (and they fail to help any of your relative's lines reproduce) then you were unfit even tho you made a lot of kids. This extends downstream too.
If you reproduce and your kids reproduce but your entire line starves out 200 years later by overbreeding, then you were all unfit as well. However, given a larger pool of offspring, it is more likely that a few might (either randomly or due to genetic reasons) survive plagues, famines, etc.
The couple that cocoons and lives a rich life and never reproduces is unfit.
I think you forgot, that every one in RIAAland also has enough money to rebuy all that content repeatedly when it is stolen, breaks, or becomes obsolete because of a format change.
You have one or more central seed servers (which could be attacked) and everyone else using the client also acted as a secondary server. When a central server was attacked, they could set up a new server on a new IP and attach to the network and still upload new banned spam.
So the spammers would essentially be taking on the entire world.
--- (The games on the Channel F system were $20 tho)
I remembered consoles being $100 when I was growing up in the 70's and 80's.
I remembered consoles being $200 to $300 in the late 90's (which is the period I was thinking of in the parent post).
Computers were $3000 in 1974 (Sol 3000 and Altair type) and would cost $12,000 today if they had gone up as much as game consoles. Since consoles are a mass produced identical computer, I would expect that they would be cheaper. I think the early price you quote was a bit of an extreme more like the first DVD players (which would fit with it being the first blu-ray players). But all I want in a game console is to play games. I don't want to also play movies.
I would expect that the game console doesn't have the highest quality electronic parts and you are going to get noise (buzzing, screen lines) as soon as you hook it up with your entire system (i.e. your tv, dvd recorder, cable box, and stereo system). So I want my consoles to be just a console and my dvd players (or blue ray players/HD players) to be just that and I expect no noise when I hook them up.
Besides all that, I have no intention of buying bluray or HD. On my 55" screen, 480p (and 720p from my upconverting player) look super sharp. The DRM on bluray and HD are ridiculous and unsupportable. The movie titles for Bluray and HD are going to be $20+ (vs $7.50 for DVD). The quality difference is minimal.
I foresee another Sony failed proprietary standard.
(And p.s. I *really* hate Sony for some terrible customer service they gave me in 2001 and I haven't bought a single Sony product since then. They are the only company in 45 years that has pissed me off this badly).
---
I think minimum wage should probably be on the order of $7.00 to $8.00 (which is what the mcdonalds in my area seem to start people at).
Slashdot Mirror
Gross abuse by the Mods.
You may disagree with parent post but it is not flamebait.
Not the same-- you are taking a physical item there.
"It's a Wonderful Life" is a better example. While free, it was a huge and growing event every christmas. It was on several stations- sometimes on the same night.
Once someone figured out some slimy backhanded way to gain copyright over it (and this is what-- almost 50 years old now?) and charge for it, it has almost completely vanished from TV in less than 8 years.
Basic fact is.. there is more entertainment than we can consume now. So entertainment is becoming a commodity and commodities just get cheaper. Riaa will fight this- but we can do our part by not buying riaa products. There are more non-riaa products out there than you can watch or listen to in your lifetime these days.
Spread them to your friends-- and now you still have the watercooler buzz-- just over non riaa stuff.
Actually,
You can't do that either.
Stores don't charge for background music but they have to pay for it anyway.
If you charge and even play copyrighted material incidental to your activity, then the music business wants to charge you a fee. One example would be the barbershop that got sued-- others would be numerous small bars that had the radio on.
Of course as recently as 20 years ago this wasn't the case (it was very common to for places to have a radio tuned in and not pay a music fee)- so the music business has really expanded the definition of what people have to pay for a lot in the last couple decades.
Even fairly reasonable sites like Magnatune have specific liscenses for playing music this way.
As fair as it is, I've had multiple workmates lose the ability to play songs after moving them five times. (bad hard drives, new computers, etc.)
They will never buy an iTune again since they know now that in just a few years they can lose the ability to play the song they paid *real* money for.
And the problem is the "hard" copy gives you no protection these days. You can't copy from the new formats so if your original is stolen, obsoleted, cracked then you are SOL.
One reason why I'll be staying with DVD. Last vacation, I lost too *backup* copies of my originals. No sweat- I just tossed the shards in the airport trashcan and then made new backups when I got home. The originals stay in stable binders and never come out except for copying.
I did get mysterious cities of gold. B)
Battlestar peaked at about 300 people on the sites where I saw links to it.
I can see why you might think I'm trolling given the numbers others posted!
.03% of the audience ), most show torrents max out at about 20 to 100 leechers. In most cases you are not trading with the a large number of people.
But the difference between 750 and 10,000 isn't that great when you consider that the target audience is in the tens of millions (and hundreds of millions for international shows).
I was aware of mininova-- "That 70's Show" links there had about 130s / 100L numbers at max.
I don't follow Lost (tried but it "lost" me about 3 episodes into the second season after a really good first season).
Anyway... I'll amend to the post to say..
While a few shows may hit as much as 10,000 seeders and leechers ( with a potential audience of 70 million that is about
Even in the case of the largest torrents, you are trading with less than 1% of the audience. Of those 1%, a large number will delete them after viewing and *may* buy them on DVD provided the DVD's are reasonably priced compared to the person's time and money to burn them to DVD and file them.
Yes and no.
The largest content torrent that I've seen had about 750 leechers on it.
The *typical* large torrent has bout 120 seeders to 120 leechers. This is usually anime or a 1st run television show that was just shown.
However 99% of content torrents that I've seen has 1 to 2 seeders and 8 to 20 leechers.
It costs money and time to store downloaded material- and there is *always* a chance you will lose it.
There is a *solid* market for a copy (Vongo perhaps?) that sells me a lifetime license to a song/show/movie/book/etc. and stores a copy on their end.
They then charge a *reasonable* re-download fee (say 10% of the minimum wage), a reasonable annual storage fee (say 2 cents per gigabyte- a typical 400 movie library is about 1600 gigabytes- but they only have to keep 1 copy of each for "N" users) and allow me to re-download the song/show/movie/book/etc. a reasonable number of times per year (say once per year) with a small number of floating downloads which allow me to download twice for when things go wrong (an exceptions for cases where I can show them a police report).
But seriously--- most torrents are very small and it takes days (weeks...) to download things. There were a few things on emule (not a torrent) that took literally almost 3 month to download. I think almost anyone would pay some money to get it *now* vs getting it 3 months from now (or 12 days from now).
If the media cartel had not driven prices up so high (-- $20 mil for an actor? Should be more like $500,000-- with similar reductions all along the food chain with movies costing $5 to see as a result). However, they have raised their prices so high that people are finding many other less expensive forms of entertainment.
I read speculation that fungus develops anti-microbial toxins because it competes with bacteria for living space.
Soooo... in addition to searching deep sea reefs, how about putting various kinds of cancer cells into competition with fungi and bacteria until some develop randomly that kill the cancer. Then see what they did to achieve that.
It might be cheaper.
... the american brain thinks it needs magnitudes more money to live. ...
No.
The american brain *knows* it needs magnitudes more money to live.
This will even out--
a) Their cost of living will rise so they cease to be such a bargain.
b) our cost of living will drop
c) or we will have a revolution/ jack up taxes/ lose the safety premium people pay to live here.
Make no mistake, the only reason it costs $3 million for beach front property here and $30,000 in mexico is because here you know you will not be killed and you won't have your property taken by a corrupt government.
If we place the ability to predict under extreme selective pressure, the humans will either go extinct or become very good at predicting things.
First... let me say that I agree with you that the evolution argument corrupts christians. It gets their goat and drives them to inappropriate behavior (lying being a big one).
Second...Slashdot is not a scholarly journal. To have to provide footnotes and references would be silly.
So there are two questions...
1) Ignoring the plagerism argument- is his argument sound or full of holes.
2) Did he copy so much that he really HAS no argument (it sounds like he did). Since I think this is the case, I really think even by slashdot's lax standards for scholarly conduct, he would have crossed the plagerism line.
If properly trained, you can kill or at least disable another human with a pencil in a few seconds. Air marshals must be anonymous or behind a protective wall so they have time to react.
If you do the math, the article says the odds of these mutations occuring are
millions:700
dead:live
So something like 99.9999% of mutations were useless.
They could have done the same experiment with
a) increasing acidity
b) increasing salinity
c) longer periods of starvation
And the odds are probably 99.9999% of the mutations would be useless for surviving those environments (including the nifty "survive in heat" mutation which would be useless in a saline environment).
Or more likely.. the work will be done in china by chinese employees of a us contractor...AND lenevo computers will still be forbidden.
Actually, I'm reading about people going to india for surgery which is cheaper without insurance than it is here *with* insurance and of the same quality. The only difference is the doctors and staff cost 10% of the price given the same experience- (and I'm betting you are SOL if they screw up (being human they will .001% of the time) at the same rate as 1st world doctors. Then when you can't sue them, you will be the one in 1,000 that regrets the decision. The other 999 will rave about how wonderful it is.
I've considered it for cosmetic surgery but i'll probably go to oklahoma instead-- $10k vs $4k in ok vs $2k + $2k airfare.
I have a friend who had such a contract.
They had nice service penalties for bad service.
Then came the day that all technicians were busy fixing things at other companies and so the service company just paid them the penalty and said they would send out a tech when one became available. It was a couple days later. It cost them a couple hundred grand in those two days and they were lucky at that.
If the failure had been around tax time, the service agreement fines they had with their own customers for failure to produce required documents could have been quite large.
So if you are going to do your business this way, you need to legally account for the fact that if there is a big spike, your entire company could be down for over 24 hours until your "time-share" tech becomes available.
When we see a headline titled "Management outsourced to India" then we will finally see some kind of pressure put to stop this.
But seriously, why wouldn't a 30k per year, indian masters in business administration manager be able to manage just as effectively as a 4 million dollar per year manager (and hey- he'd have better contacts with the new movers and shakers).
No way, that would be like people making up a new word for p0rn. Can't see that happening.
quote: When I asked a professor point blank why the need for art and culture would develop through the course of evolution, he responded that he doesn't believe those traits would stem from evolution.
---
What was he thinking? Of course it stems from evolution.
Art may be the equivalent of stronger muscles for the mind. Artists may make it possible to do completely new and useful activities.
Or easier to understand bee dances- artists may figure out new ways to communicate ideas for the rest of the social group.
Or a peacock's tail- artists may have sex & reproduce more than non-artists.
Or just another way of gathering food. "Rich" members of society give food & resources to artists allowing artists to survive and reproduce. So artists are a successful symbiote or parasite on powerful or rich members of society.
---
Some things like "perfect" pitch or a "four octive range" are rare but basic talents run strong in some families just as talent for football runs strong in others.
---
As soon as a creature has the ability to be happy or unhappy (and even dogs can do this) then you can train them to behave differently without having to give them real food or resources. How is a painting of a rich patron that different from a pat on the head and praise to your dog that fetched the dead pigeon for you (or rolled over and played dead).
Art could start randomly-- a joke or story or picture that stimulates the brain of barely intelligent apes could definately have value (and cost to produce). Once it has value and cost, then it will be selected for or against by natural selection.
A worst case example- if you spend your people's grain to build a big statue of yourself, they may all starve and then you will be killed by them or enemy soldiers.
So art can vary from the little ruffle of yellow on the back of a bird's neck to the gaudy and expensive peacock's tail (and it does-- people somewhere probably died because of the money and resources spent on the orange gateway art project in central park).
True-- and/but it is also about how fit your line is.
If you have a dozen kids and they fail to reproduce (and they fail to help any of your relative's lines reproduce) then you were unfit even tho you made a lot of kids. This extends downstream too.
If you reproduce and your kids reproduce but your entire line starves out 200 years later by overbreeding, then you were all unfit as well. However, given a larger pool of offspring, it is more likely that a few might (either randomly or due to genetic reasons) survive plagues, famines, etc.
The couple that cocoons and lives a rich life and never reproduces is unfit.
I think you forgot, that every one in RIAAland also has enough money to rebuy all that content repeatedly when it is stolen, breaks, or becomes obsolete because of a format change.
So instead of one central server...
You have one or more central seed servers (which could be attacked) and everyone else using the client also acted as a secondary server. When a central server was attacked, they could set up a new server on a new IP and attach to the network and still upload new banned spam.
So the spammers would essentially be taking on the entire world.
I could make a movie of GWB performing oral sex on the duke lacrosse team given 5 years.
I'm sure the videotape is real but come on- who in the conspiracy crowd is going to believe it after five years.
I agree with some of your points-- especially those on the minimum wages tho I was not going back as far as you did.
However, I had no problem finding references to lower prices for game consoles in the 1970s by googling for "console game history prices".
1974 - "By Christmas, Atari's US$100 home PONG console becomes Sears biggest selling item"
1979 - Channel F System II $99.95.
---
(The games on the Channel F system were $20 tho)
I remembered consoles being $100 when I was growing up in the 70's and 80's.
I remembered consoles being $200 to $300 in the late 90's (which is the period I was thinking of in the parent post).
Computers were $3000 in 1974 (Sol 3000 and Altair type) and would cost $12,000 today if they had gone up as much as game consoles. Since consoles are a mass produced identical computer, I would expect that they would be cheaper. I think the early price you quote was a bit of an extreme more like the first DVD players (which would fit with it being the first blu-ray players). But all I want in a game console is to play games. I don't want to also play movies.
I would expect that the game console doesn't have the highest quality electronic parts and you are going to get noise (buzzing, screen lines) as soon as you hook it up with your entire system (i.e. your tv, dvd recorder, cable box, and stereo system). So I want my consoles to be just a console and my dvd players (or blue ray players/HD players) to be just that and I expect no noise when I hook them up.
Besides all that, I have no intention of buying bluray or HD. On my 55" screen, 480p (and 720p from my upconverting player) look super sharp. The DRM on bluray and HD are ridiculous and unsupportable. The movie titles for Bluray and HD are going to be $20+ (vs $7.50 for DVD). The quality difference is minimal.
I foresee another Sony failed proprietary standard.
(And p.s. I *really* hate Sony for some terrible customer service they gave me in 2001 and I haven't bought a single Sony product since then. They are the only company in 45 years that has pissed me off this badly).
---
I think minimum wage should probably be on the order of $7.00 to $8.00 (which is what the mcdonalds in my area seem to start people at).