Maybe, although that is far from proven - all we have is the word of the spammers themselves, and you must remember rule #1 (spammers lie.)
Yeah, you're right that it has nothing to do with sales, but you're wrong that's it just because "they can." They do it because "they make money." Spam pays off even if nobody buys anything so long as they click-through to a web site. This model is becoming outdated rapidly, and is being replaced by phishing and fraud.
Bullshit. If this were true, then there would never have been spam to begin with, because the *very first* spammers got exactly zero orders.
They weren't selling anything at first. They were just advertising. Advertising is a subconscious phenomenon that works on most people, regardless of how hard they consciously work to resist its impact. Even seeing commercials that you hate because of their simplistic stupidity can often generate sales. Most people don't remember the company that a given commercial is for, but they did hear the name and subconsciously associate it with a memorable event. People are constantly walking out of grocery stores and shopping malls, badmouthing the "stupid" commercials for products that they just purchased. Advertising is attention, the sales don't have to be direct to be counted.
Nobody bought anything, and yet spammers still spammed - why? because they could.
They kept doing it because they were making money, they didn't give a shit if anybody bought anything or not, as long as they made money. Spammers are usually intermediaries for somebody else's business. The spammer doesn't care if that business makes money as long as they pay the spammer to distribute advertising.
It doesn't matter if nobody buys anything - as long as sociopaths believe someone *might* buy their crap, they will continue to do it, and new ones will pop up as the old ones run out of money.
Again, I don't believe this is entirely accurate. It doesn't matter if anybody buys anything, but spammers spam because they make money doing it. They are paid by somebody else to spam on their behalf, they generate some traffic, they scrape email addresses and resell them to other spammers, they phish for information for identity theft or resell to identity thieves, they try to defraud the ignorant.
What they see is lots of spam from other companies, and (just like others who lack critical thinking skills) believe that "someone must be buying", and start spamming.>
No, they see that spammers are making money and getting wealthy with little risk so they do it.
How are we going to do that when *YOU* buy into the self-perpetuating "someone must be buying" myth? Since *YOU* believe it, spammers will believe it, and they will keep spamming.
Wrong again. Spammers will keep spamming as long as they make money off of it. When it's not profitable, it'll end. That profit is not necessarily tied to sales. Big telecom companies are often complicit in spam dissemination, there's too much money to be made off of leasing transatlantic bandwidth to strategic clients.
Spam has to stop paying before it'll end. The question is where do you deal it, on the demand-side, or the supply-side? The demand is not from end users who want spam, it's from businesses who want to send it.
Lets be frank they eat Dogs there, and they LIKE them, we have a fellow here where I work that says the White or lighter ones tasted better than Darker ones, black being the least tasty, and you have to kill them right (cats also) otherwise the blood taints the meat.
Right, well, I live with a family of Koreans and they say that the practice of eating dogs is all but gone in most of Korea, except for the most remote and rural areas. They lament this, as well, as they view it as a form of cultural homogenization with the West as Koreans adopt European and American taboos. And yes, they've been there recently, have family there that they keep in touch with.
I live in St. Louis. A guy here was fired from his job for drinking at a bar while wearing his Anheister-Busch uniform. Not because he was drinking, but because he wasn't drinking an A-B product. Somebody saw him and word got around that an A-B employee was drinking Coors or Miller or something, and the guy got fired for it.
All scientific information should be heralded and released the community without due diligence. And we should immediately begin basing public policy on it. There's no harm.
At least, according to the article, Planet X is guessed to be 1500km, Sedna is 1700km, and Pluto is like 2200km, so it seems rather likely that Planet X is NOT bigger than Pluto, which means we have on more Slashdot headline that has about as much journalistic integrity as Fox News, and yet another post by an uptight user bitching about it.
Sales of CDs continue to decline, but overall music sales are climbing again, since the RIAA has finally embraced technology. All of this fully supports what the quoted survey is actually saying.
This happens when the economic model in use is fundamentally broken. People turn to the black market in large numbers. It isn't an ethical argument but a practical one.
The economical model is not broken. It works fine. It is based, at least partially, on human apathy and laziness. Joe Q. Consumer is going to tire of wasting his afternoons making tapes and burning CDs for his friends. You have to provide the media, the hardware, and the effort. The energy barrier has permitted the RIAA and MPAA to fight against stuff like VCRs, lose, and still make money. There's another difference, which is that when you buy a blank tape, you pay a royalty to the MPAA or RIAA, which is distributed to the industry as compensation for any illegal copying you may do.
There is no such royalty on hard drives (nor should there be). Suddenly, content can be stored on media whose primary purpose is not the storage of that specific media, and the model that is broken is not their business model (selling copies of CDs) but their compensation model for illegal activity. The reason you won your fair use rights is that the government agreed to make you pay a fee for blank tapes (this is oversimpifying it a lot, I realize, since you CAN buy blank tapes without paying that fee) to compensate the industry for any damage you do by being a naughty consumer.
Their business model works fine. What has broken down is the assumptions and agreements that settled the VCR/cassette tape case securing our fair use rights in the first place. The consumer started this by wantonly abusing those rights in the form of unmonitorable digital copies, and the industry is fighting back. I don't know how you can blame them for that.
It's obvious that people who commit copyright violation are criminals. So are people who jaywalk.
Copyright infringement is not a criminal offense until you do a lot of it (thousand and thousand of dollars worth). Jaywalking is also not a crime, so your analogy is ignorant and irrelevent..
So what? The only issue of interest is *why* so many people engage in the activity despite the penalties for doing so
Such as? What? You steal a CD from the local music store, they kick your ass out. They're not likely to call the cops. Trying to shoplift $15 of merchandise isn't worth it. You keep doing it week after week and you're going to end up arrested. You download a CD or two, and there's little reason to prosecute you for it. You've committed misdemeanor copyright infringement. Whoo hoo. You distribute thousands of copies of a song, and now you've commited criminal copyright infringement.
As far as I know, no amount of jaywalking will elevate your offense to criminal activity.
People download music illegally because they can, the risk of getting caught and prosecuted is miniscule, and it doesn't feel like you're doing anything wrong. We know we're doing something wrong when we shoplight, because we have to go through all this trouble to hide the product and sneak out. Now, shoplifting isn't a great analogy either. That's theft of physical property, and as I said in my OP, copyright infringement is not theft.
The law doesn't work.
No, it doesn't. Because the law is based on assumptions about human behavior that are no longer true. Namely, that the energy barrier prevents copyrigh
Oh yeah well my professor was a NASA engineer and he says that you are not only wrong, but self-righteous and insecure (he has a psychology degree too). I'd tell you how to prove this but I already told somebody else once and anybody who is smart can look up anything they want.
So neener neener neener on you. Thbtbtbt.
Sincerely,
-Bill Clinton
A male congressmember can be an asshole and nobody complains, but as soon as Senator Clinton gets uppity, you all call her a bitch. Where the even-handedness here?
Did you just ask, with a straight face, why Slashdot posters aren't even-handed with their dealings of members of both political parties, and both genders?
Well, I'll assume you're in earnest and answer.
1. Democrats are better than Republicans by the slimmest of margins. Actually, most of us really adore Democrats but since we know they're just as slimey and two-faced as Republicans, we pretend not to. But we vote for them anyway, despite all of our talk of voting for Libertarians, who more closely resemble Republicans than Democrats. When you boil it all down, we didn't get up on time on election day to make it to the polls.
2. Women are weird creatures who don't think we're funny and who can't appreciate the subtle humor necessary to doggedly recite tired lines from British pop-culture trash from the 1970's. Since they shun us at social gatherings (like family reunions and GenCon), we harbor unspoken misogynistic tendancies that manifest at odd times. For as much as we hate George W. Bush, at least nobody of his gender has ever rolled their eyes when we quoted Jabberwocky!
I find it odd that Russia is at the forefront of commercial space travel. I mean they are capable of it, but I somehow thought that by now a public company could have pulled it off already. NASA f'ing up space travel with it's politics and disillusioning some about it likely has not helped.
Blame government hand-wringing. The last time they allowed a "space tourist" on a shuttle flight, it was a schoolteacher who won a contest, and she got killed. NASA is understandably reluctant to suffer such a disaster again. The Challenger incident set our space program back to such a serious degree that it's still never recovered. Before Challenger, talk was afoot of orbital space flight being the next wave of public transportation. Imagine flying from New York to Tokyo in a few hours!
NASA never really recovered from Challenger, and Columbia should have been to nail in NASA's coffin, as it was. And it may prove to have been in the end. We're well overdue to privatize American space exploration. That doesn't mean that government cannot engage in it, only that government shouldn't be the owners of American space initiatives. NASA ought to be split into two groups: a regulatory/oversight body to manage space projects and allocate research time on government-owned orbital platforms such as Hubble, and a second body that is purely scientific in nature. Private American spaceflight would be completely permissable on the grounds that telemetry, observations, and research conducted on such flights be made available to NASA for internal use (not republication).
Get NASA out of the hardware and flight businesses.
When I think liberal, I think no censorship, decriminalised drug use, free speech (inclusive of flag burning etc), right to trial, right to religious belief or lack thereof (including islam and atheism), sexual freedom, universal health care and education, heavy regulation of business, a pacifist foreign policy etc. I don't think the US has ever even come close to that.
Then you don't understand the tenants of classic liberalism (or just don't believe in them, but since all intelligent and open-minded people are liberal, whatever you believe has to be liberal too).
You're right on about 2/3 of those in terms of what the notion of "liberalism" is supposed to be about.
Funny thing, I reviewed a lot of other reports based on the same AP wire, and they lacked the sense of urgency and sensationalism that the Fox report did.
I've read the same words on several sites and failed to see any difference between the version accredited to the AP on FoxNews vs that on any other site.
See, Fox usually gets the same facts as everyone else, it's just the way they put them out there that makes them unbalanced.
For instance, I'm eating lunch and Fox News is on TV and their discussing a suspected sex offender and are repeatedly referring to him as PERVERT in print and speech. "PERVERT FOUND IN IDAHO," or something to that effect.
How is that fair and balanced? I have more examples, but I imagine that most of the readers here have had similar experiences.
Ok, you're talking about news commentary by Fox anchors about a story. I'm talking about an AP story that Fox received and reported verbatim on their web site. Like I said, Fox can and does report news objectively. Not always, but they do. It's fine to observe cases when they do not, but apply some elementary formal logic: because SOME stories have Fox bias inserted does not imply that ALL stories have Fox bias inserted. That is my point, which you don't appear to be arguing with. You're just... well hating on Fox because you hate Fox without really addressing my point except with irrelevent additional filler and red herrings.
The sad thing is, it's the little touches like these that have made their news reports so popular. It also puts them in a position to say that everyone else is sugarcoating the news, while they're bringing you the REAL THING. Even though their REAL THING isn't REAL either.
At least we can all agree that there's no such thing as "just the facts" news. Even reporting just the facts can be misleading, depending on which facts you elect to report.
Except, the tagline here is a complete and utter fabrication.
The BBC is reporting on a study by digital music research firm The Leading Question, which found that people who download music from peer to peer networks paid for four and a half times more music than regular music fans.
This is a lie. This is NOT what they found. They found that these people spend 4 and half times more on legal digital music purchases than non-downloaders. The way this is written, it sounds like the average downloader who spent $50 a year on CDs in 1995 is now spending $200 on music. This is not stated or supported by the article. Study after study after study has conclusively shown a net depressed impact on music sales, especially in Europe, due directly to downloading music illegally.
Also that most of these people "are extremely enthusiastic about paid-for services, as long as they are suitably compelling." What is nice is that the BPI welcomed the findings that not all file sharers are actually evil... they still pledged to carry on the 'carrot and stick' approach though.
No, not all file sharers are evil, nor should those of us who choose to obey the laws have to tolerate failed-from-birth concepts like DRM and copy protection schemes. But for you people to sit here and still insist after all this time that piracy is somehow generating revenue for the music industry is completely stupid. It's not. It's costing them more money than it's making them. You can sit here and recite your tired anecdotes about how you and your friends and everybody you know buys more music because you can sample it.
You are not the people that are costing them money. It's the millions of high schoolers and young college students who are the problem. They have little to no disposable income (college kids especially) and so are downloading to get their music. I don't blame them, I don't even condemn their actions, but I also don't deny that what they're doing is unquestionably illegal and is costing the legal owners of those songs money.
This issue will not be resolved until the Hillary Rosens of the world stop castigating all of the internet for being the thieves she thinks we are (copy infringement is not theft, Hillary, we another law for theft and it's called...er...theft). And it won't be resolved until you self-righteous chest-pounding downloaders here stop defending your activity as some moralistic crusade against the evil content cartels who are determined to brand you as evil just because you have a guilty pleasure for "Dueling Banjos" and won't be caught dead at a Wal*mart at 3:00am buying the soundtrack to Deliverance.
You're both wrong, you're both oversimplifying the situation, and you're both motivated by completely self-serving interests.
I support open source, I support free software, I oppose DRM in general, I oppose anything that limits my ability to exercise the rights, freedoms, and privileges that I enjoy as a law-abiding citizen, especially the legislation of the RIAA's business model. But I don't deny that there are people who match my profile who engage in widespread copyright infringement and then either lie about it, pretend it's not illegal, or defend it with some holier-than-thou diatribe (much like this one) about why it's justified.
It's illegal, you're breaking the law, you're costing them money. Period. And although I don't blame anybody for downloading something illegally, I don't blame the people who are losing money from this activity for trying to put a stop to it. I don't agree with their tactics any more than I agree with the Slashdotters doggedly insisting that nobody is being harmed so what they're doing isn't wrong.
Despite your knee-jerk Slashdot groupthink response, Fox News can does report news objectively. You are only responding this way because it's Fox. The story itself was not written by Fox, only posted by them. Fox got it off the AP wire, just like EVERY OTHER FUCKING NEWS ORGANIZATION that posted it. God you're an idiot.
Funny how the government chose to prioritize piracy over adequate healthcare.
Piracy is illegal and unquestionably in violation of somebody else's intellectual property rights.
You having shitty health care isn't illegal.
You/me/I/we may not think this is smart prioritization, but the government's job isn't go fix all the problems in our lives that it has no legal obligation to deal with. Until and unless the government passes some kind of law (or SCOTUS determines it to be the case somehow), your government is under no obligation to deal with your health care costs. It is, however, obligated to deal with widespread and wanton violation of well-established legal statutes.
This law makes perfect sense being a federal law. Why? Because almost all telemarketing calls are crossing state or possibly national borders. Thus there's a natural complication when you have different laws in different states with different abilities to enforce those laws on others.
Given how much the Supreme Court enjoys invoking the "interstate commerce" clause to justify throwing out inconvenient parts of the constitution, you'd think this, at least, would be an open-and-shut case of interstate commerce.
I'd say "often", that's the case, even when Mommy is college-educated. But that's because it's easy for me to apply my morality to somebody else and proclaim that if that kid's mother doesn't do (blank) then she must be some kind of idiot.
Uncle Sam would be a better judge of what's right for little Johhny. The problem, of course, is that most of the time, Uncle Sam is also an alcoholic with a penchant for violent outbursts.
Exactly. Uncle Sam's Child-Rearing Service is likely to be like the rest of Uncle Sam's business ventures: an unaccountable filing cabinet for otherwise unemployable people. Don't get pissy if you work for the DMV and think I'm attacking you, it's a generalization, and all generalizations suffer the flaw of having exceptions. If they didn't, it'd be a fact, not a generalization.
Sometimes, the line should be drawn well before Mom says so. In this instance, I would argue that any parent that allowed a child to play this game was failing in their duty as a parent.
So would I, but that's not my point. What level of government involvement is appropriate here? Do you really think that it's the business of the government to go poking into people's lives to ensure that Mrs. and Mrs. Taxpayer are raising their children in a government-sanctioned manner? That's a bit too fascist for my tastes. It starts off sounding harmless ("it's for the child's own good and health"), but it tends to never stop, as aspiring, well-intentioned politicians enact and support more and more intrusive legislation "for your own good," and this is the path to subservience, not liberty.
Of course, that's my opinion. I might be wrong. The government might be wrong. Mom might be wrong. And we all have a fairly equal chance of being wrong.
Yes, we do. Which is why, since everybody is equally likely to be wrong, it's most efficient and sensible to allow the parent of the child to run that risk rather than having a bunch of hand-wringing busy-bodies running around and telling us all what to do. Provide information, by all means. I fully support rating systems and education. I even support disallowing stores to sell videos that are rated "M" to kids underage. That, at least, encourages produces to weigh carefully the decisions of what content to include. Choices for everybody.
I'm not saying or suggesting that a 6 year old should watch people screwing GTA or anything. I'm saying that in this particular article, and this particular quote, pretending to be somebody else is cited as some kind of evidence that games like GTA are highly damaging. Maybe a handful of people can't tell the difference but it's no reason to censor something for the millions of other people who are capable of moralistic determination.
That's why individual responsibility is so important.
It is indeed. As well educating people.
Not because individuals always make the right choice, but because people generally try to make the best choice, and having a lot of people making decisions, and thus many points of failure, is better than having one person or group making the decisions, and thus a single point of failure.
If you're alluding to government intervention in our personal lives, I disagree with the above argument. It's based on the assumption that when the government makes a decision, we still get to make one too, and that's often not the case. The government decides that at 16 I can't see a rated-R movie by myself. I don't have the option to make that decision for myself anymore. The governments of many states have decreed that navigating a box of steel and polymers on pavement at 75 miles per hour is something I'm capable of doing responsibly when I'm 16, but not betting six bucks at a casino. Th
Conservatism in America, until recently was much closer to classical liberalism than American liberalism. President Bush has shifted "American conservatism" decidedly to the left. Big government, big spending, lots of laws on the books telling you how you can and cannot live, government making decisions for you, etc. Even the ban on gay marriage is a shift to the Left, it just happens to, in America's reverse-political-polarity, placate those who self-associate with the political right. It is the policy of a leftist government that wishes to deprive people of the ability to make their own decisions.
Give people information.
Let them make their own decisions.
This is the most fundamental principle of liberty.
The information is a self-explanatory game ratings.
The decision is whether or not to buy this or allow your child to play it.
I know, I know. Precious Little Johnny (er.. Taylor or Tyler or Hayden or whatever the hell you people name your kids these days) leaves and goes over to his friend's house and plays GTA on little Mikey's (er... Connor or Tanner) computers, and he's out of your control. Well, it's your job as the parent to go meet Mikey's mother and find out if you can trust her to oversee your child for a few hours.
My girlfriend's son came home the other day and bragged about how his aunt let him play a game that was rating "M". He wanted to throw it in Mom's face that he got to play one. That landed his ass banned from his Game Boy for about a week and then she didn't know what to do. "How do I get him to make good decisions?" I suggested that the KID be made to go talk to Aunt Ignorant and that HE explains to her that he's not allowed to play rated M games and that he should have told her the game was rating M, but he made a bad choice. The kid did it, Aunt Ignorant was horrified at her transgression, and said that it just never crossed her mind.
I promise you that if it was a movie, Aunt Ignorant would have thought about it, but video games are "kid's stuff" to that generation, so it's not part of their decision-making to consider that the game could be inappropriate.
Anyway, the point is that my old lady is responsible for her child and trying to teach him how to make good decisions by turning situations like this into learning opportunities for her son. And that's a hell of a lot better for a kid than having some paternal-minded windbag like Senator Clinton spending our tax money on investigating how in the world a video game that is intended and rated for adults ended up having adult-only content.
If a child decides to emulate the antics of a character in a video game, it is not the game's fault...
Most of childhood play revolves around such fantasy, look at the games that children play. "House" - emulating their own parents. "War" - emulating generals. "Cops and robbers" - emulating criminals and law enforcement. "Cowboys and Indians" - emulating... well, cowboys and Indians. When you introduce toys, it's just a new level. My girlfriend's son recently got a toy lightsabre from his uncle, and he runs around whacking my dog with it and chattering about the Force. He's emulating a Jedi. When he plays with actions figures, he gives them lines and moves them around - it's only different from a video game in that he uses a bit more imagination and there's on controller. Transformers, GI Joes, Batman, Pokemon, almost all of childhood play is emulation. It's called "playing pretend" and it's one of the most common forms of self-entertainment among children. And frankly, I think it's far healthier than rotting in front of a television set watching cartoons.
When does "playing pretend" go to far? When Mom says so, not when Uncle Sam says so. It's called individual liberty, and individual responsibility. It's called Enlightement liberalism.
?Typical. You mention factual statements and you get nailed as flamebait because it goes against the liberal/. groupthink. You should know better than to insult two prominent libs here.
Although I agree that there's a liberal groupthink on Slashdot, my post wasn't going against it. I was providing a counter-example to the standard line that it's only conservatives that want to legislate their morality upon people and make a stink about boobs at the Super Bowl.
It's not liberals vs conservatives, it's our parents vs us. Most us in the 20-35 range have a much more tolerate view of human sexuality in the public eye than do the baby boomers, regardless of their political affiliation. To characterize the differing opinions on the matter as conservative nuts vs enlightened liberals is wrong. Clinton doesn't even care, in her case, she just wants soccer moms in the suburbs to think that she (Clinton) gives a shit about their their (the mom's) precious Tanners, Taylors, Tylers, and Connors are seeing when they play video games. We've got a rating system on games, one that is NOT mandated by the government. Don't think for a minute that Clinton and her ilk wouldn't love to get government involved in telling you which games are ok for your kids.
Tipper was one of the main activists who was responsible for the Senate hearings regarding language/violence/drugs in music several years back
The "censorship" issue bounces back and forth between the two parties. Sort of like the abortion issue. Al Gore was pro-life until he was on somebody's vice-presidential ticket. And Bush 41 was pro-choice until he found himself having to pick up Christian swing votes.
tell me once again where conservatives are causing the problem with the GTA3 issue?
Conservatives are causing problems with media censorship, but my point is that the phenomenon is not unique to conservatives. We just readily leap to blame them because we already don't like them. It's a psychological flaw in the human mind. See Hayakawa for an explanation of why this happens. While you're at it, Hayakawa can provide the answer to questions many of you have. Like when you meet somebody that is totally brilliant and highly educated and then you say, "God I hate George Bush" and your newfound brilliant, educated friend says, "Why? He's a good guy, I voted for him." And your jaw drops and you think two things, Pavlov-style: (1) How can somebody this smart like Bush? (2) He's not that smart, he's a fucking idiot.
Go read that book and get the answer #1, and see why you're wrong about #2. While you're at it, learn why everybody else you disagree with isn't evil and stupid.
Now, if that moron John Ashcroft was still in office, then you liberal, knee-jerk reactionaries might have cause to bitch about conservatives.
I think the liberal, knee-jerk reactionaries have cause to bitch about them now, even regarding censorship and morality in media. However, I think it's misguided, unfair, and self-serving to bitch about it while ignoring what liberals are doing on this front as well. Clinton may only be appealing to conservative voters, but as I mentioned above, that's the same reason a lot of Republicans buy into this bullshit too. To just assume Republicans are all Christian nutjobs who embrace this stuff sincerely because you hate them is unhelpful.
considering that he couldn't deal with a nude breast on a freakin' statue.
I wonder if he showers in the dark so he can't see his own genitals.
Even so, the democratic party has been trying to pander to the republican and conservative interests as of late. I'm ashamed to say that Dean was right when he was on the Daily Show saying that the party doesn't have the balls to stand up for itself.
He's right, and the Democrats are right to eschew the platform they've been preaching since Vietnam, because it's alienated voters. They're losing black voters, women voters, gay voters, union voters, they're loser voters in every dmeographic because at the end of the day, people want to make their own decisions, and the mantra of the Democratic has been, since LBJ, that a paternal government is a good government. It sounds great until you spend 6 hours renewing your license plates and getting emissions and roadworthiness inspections and property tax receipts, and an entire day of your weekend is shot. Then why a guy gets up and basically says, "The government can solve your problems," people say, "the government can't sell me a fucking sticker for the sheet of aluminum on the back of my car without making it take all afternoon and forcing me to deal with the disinterested condescension of 6 different state employees. Fuck that."
Why do you think Clinton won? He ran to the center. In many ways, he was a conservative president. Like it or not, the nation has been trending conservative for decades, and is likely to continue to do so for probably another 5-10 years, until the Republicans, drunk with their newfound support, turn into the exactly the kind of paternalistic "we know better than you how to live your own life" socialists that the Democrats became, and the Democrats will start winning elections once they re-embrace classic liberalism and stop running through the same playback ("all Republicans are racist and want tax breaks for the rich").
The Republicans turned into assholes MUCH faster than the Democrats did. The difference was that, after Barry Goldwater, the Republicans changed their tune. The Democrats have been running against Ronald Reagan for 15 years.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, you're right that it has nothing to do with sales, but you're wrong that's it just because "they can." They do it because "they make money." Spam pays off even if nobody buys anything so long as they click-through to a web site. This model is becoming outdated rapidly, and is being replaced by phishing and fraud.
Bullshit. If this were true, then there would never have been spam to begin with, because the *very first* spammers got exactly zero orders.
They weren't selling anything at first. They were just advertising. Advertising is a subconscious phenomenon that works on most people, regardless of how hard they consciously work to resist its impact. Even seeing commercials that you hate because of their simplistic stupidity can often generate sales. Most people don't remember the company that a given commercial is for, but they did hear the name and subconsciously associate it with a memorable event. People are constantly walking out of grocery stores and shopping malls, badmouthing the "stupid" commercials for products that they just purchased. Advertising is attention, the sales don't have to be direct to be counted.
Nobody bought anything, and yet spammers still spammed - why? because they could.
They kept doing it because they were making money, they didn't give a shit if anybody bought anything or not, as long as they made money. Spammers are usually intermediaries for somebody else's business. The spammer doesn't care if that business makes money as long as they pay the spammer to distribute advertising.
It doesn't matter if nobody buys anything - as long as sociopaths believe someone *might* buy their crap, they will continue to do it, and new ones will pop up as the old ones run out of money.
Again, I don't believe this is entirely accurate. It doesn't matter if anybody buys anything, but spammers spam because they make money doing it. They are paid by somebody else to spam on their behalf, they generate some traffic, they scrape email addresses and resell them to other spammers, they phish for information for identity theft or resell to identity thieves, they try to defraud the ignorant.
What they see is lots of spam from other companies, and (just like others who lack critical thinking skills) believe that "someone must be buying", and start spamming.>
No, they see that spammers are making money and getting wealthy with little risk so they do it.
How are we going to do that when *YOU* buy into the self-perpetuating "someone must be buying" myth? Since *YOU* believe it, spammers will believe it, and they will keep spamming.
Wrong again. Spammers will keep spamming as long as they make money off of it. When it's not profitable, it'll end. That profit is not necessarily tied to sales. Big telecom companies are often complicit in spam dissemination, there's too much money to be made off of leasing transatlantic bandwidth to strategic clients.
Spam has to stop paying before it'll end. The question is where do you deal it, on the demand-side, or the supply-side? The demand is not from end users who want spam, it's from businesses who want to send it.
Right, well, I live with a family of Koreans and they say that the practice of eating dogs is all but gone in most of Korea, except for the most remote and rural areas. They lament this, as well, as they view it as a form of cultural homogenization with the West as Koreans adopt European and American taboos. And yes, they've been there recently, have family there that they keep in touch with.
I live in St. Louis. A guy here was fired from his job for drinking at a bar while wearing his Anheister-Busch uniform. Not because he was drinking, but because he wasn't drinking an A-B product. Somebody saw him and word got around that an A-B employee was drinking Coors or Miller or something, and the guy got fired for it.
This is a great idea, seriously. I'm going to change my site to pick out people running IE and explain to them why it blows and how they can fix it.
All scientific information should be heralded and released the community without due diligence. And we should immediately begin basing public policy on it. There's no harm.
At least, according to the article, Planet X is guessed to be 1500km, Sedna is 1700km, and Pluto is like 2200km, so it seems rather likely that Planet X is NOT bigger than Pluto, which means we have on more Slashdot headline that has about as much journalistic integrity as Fox News, and yet another post by an uptight user bitching about it.
I been saying this for YEARS. Windows will have a Linux core by 2015. It's the Microsoft way. Can't beat 'em? Consume them.
Gradual decline in Canadian music sales.
Illegal downloads impacts CD sales.
Sales of CDs continue to decline, but overall music sales are climbing again, since the RIAA has finally embraced technology. All of this fully supports what the quoted survey is actually saying.
This happens when the economic model in use is fundamentally broken. People turn to the black market in large numbers. It isn't an ethical argument but a practical one.
The economical model is not broken. It works fine. It is based, at least partially, on human apathy and laziness. Joe Q. Consumer is going to tire of wasting his afternoons making tapes and burning CDs for his friends. You have to provide the media, the hardware, and the effort. The energy barrier has permitted the RIAA and MPAA to fight against stuff like VCRs, lose, and still make money. There's another difference, which is that when you buy a blank tape, you pay a royalty to the MPAA or RIAA, which is distributed to the industry as compensation for any illegal copying you may do.
There is no such royalty on hard drives (nor should there be). Suddenly, content can be stored on media whose primary purpose is not the storage of that specific media, and the model that is broken is not their business model (selling copies of CDs) but their compensation model for illegal activity. The reason you won your fair use rights is that the government agreed to make you pay a fee for blank tapes (this is oversimpifying it a lot, I realize, since you CAN buy blank tapes without paying that fee) to compensate the industry for any damage you do by being a naughty consumer.
Their business model works fine. What has broken down is the assumptions and agreements that settled the VCR/cassette tape case securing our fair use rights in the first place. The consumer started this by wantonly abusing those rights in the form of unmonitorable digital copies, and the industry is fighting back. I don't know how you can blame them for that.
It's obvious that people who commit copyright violation are criminals. So are people who jaywalk.
Copyright infringement is not a criminal offense until you do a lot of it (thousand and thousand of dollars worth). Jaywalking is also not a crime, so your analogy is ignorant and irrelevent..
So what? The only issue of interest is *why* so many people engage in the activity despite the penalties for doing so
Such as? What? You steal a CD from the local music store, they kick your ass out. They're not likely to call the cops. Trying to shoplift $15 of merchandise isn't worth it. You keep doing it week after week and you're going to end up arrested. You download a CD or two, and there's little reason to prosecute you for it. You've committed misdemeanor copyright infringement. Whoo hoo. You distribute thousands of copies of a song, and now you've commited criminal copyright infringement.
As far as I know, no amount of jaywalking will elevate your offense to criminal activity.
People download music illegally because they can, the risk of getting caught and prosecuted is miniscule, and it doesn't feel like you're doing anything wrong. We know we're doing something wrong when we shoplight, because we have to go through all this trouble to hide the product and sneak out. Now, shoplifting isn't a great analogy either. That's theft of physical property, and as I said in my OP, copyright infringement is not theft.
The law doesn't work.
No, it doesn't. Because the law is based on assumptions about human behavior that are no longer true. Namely, that the energy barrier prevents copyrigh
Oh yeah well my professor was a NASA engineer and he says that you are not only wrong, but self-righteous and insecure (he has a psychology degree too). I'd tell you how to prove this but I already told somebody else once and anybody who is smart can look up anything they want. So neener neener neener on you. Thbtbtbt. Sincerely, -Bill Clinton
Did you just ask, with a straight face, why Slashdot posters aren't even-handed with their dealings of members of both political parties, and both genders?
Well, I'll assume you're in earnest and answer.
1. Democrats are better than Republicans by the slimmest of margins. Actually, most of us really adore Democrats but since we know they're just as slimey and two-faced as Republicans, we pretend not to. But we vote for them anyway, despite all of our talk of voting for Libertarians, who more closely resemble Republicans than Democrats. When you boil it all down, we didn't get up on time on election day to make it to the polls.
2. Women are weird creatures who don't think we're funny and who can't appreciate the subtle humor necessary to doggedly recite tired lines from British pop-culture trash from the 1970's. Since they shun us at social gatherings (like family reunions and GenCon), we harbor unspoken misogynistic tendancies that manifest at odd times. For as much as we hate George W. Bush, at least nobody of his gender has ever rolled their eyes when we quoted Jabberwocky!
Blame government hand-wringing. The last time they allowed a "space tourist" on a shuttle flight, it was a schoolteacher who won a contest, and she got killed. NASA is understandably reluctant to suffer such a disaster again. The Challenger incident set our space program back to such a serious degree that it's still never recovered. Before Challenger, talk was afoot of orbital space flight being the next wave of public transportation. Imagine flying from New York to Tokyo in a few hours!
NASA never really recovered from Challenger, and Columbia should have been to nail in NASA's coffin, as it was. And it may prove to have been in the end. We're well overdue to privatize American space exploration. That doesn't mean that government cannot engage in it, only that government shouldn't be the owners of American space initiatives. NASA ought to be split into two groups: a regulatory/oversight body to manage space projects and allocate research time on government-owned orbital platforms such as Hubble, and a second body that is purely scientific in nature. Private American spaceflight would be completely permissable on the grounds that telemetry, observations, and research conducted on such flights be made available to NASA for internal use (not republication).
Get NASA out of the hardware and flight businesses.
Then you don't understand the tenants of classic liberalism (or just don't believe in them, but since all intelligent and open-minded people are liberal, whatever you believe has to be liberal too).
You're right on about 2/3 of those in terms of what the notion of "liberalism" is supposed to be about.
I've read the same words on several sites and failed to see any difference between the version accredited to the AP on FoxNews vs that on any other site.
See, Fox usually gets the same facts as everyone else, it's just the way they put them out there that makes them unbalanced.
For instance, I'm eating lunch and Fox News is on TV and their discussing a suspected sex offender and are repeatedly referring to him as PERVERT in print and speech. "PERVERT FOUND IN IDAHO," or something to that effect.
How is that fair and balanced? I have more examples, but I imagine that most of the readers here have had similar experiences.
Ok, you're talking about news commentary by Fox anchors about a story. I'm talking about an AP story that Fox received and reported verbatim on their web site. Like I said, Fox can and does report news objectively. Not always, but they do. It's fine to observe cases when they do not, but apply some elementary formal logic: because SOME stories have Fox bias inserted does not imply that ALL stories have Fox bias inserted. That is my point, which you don't appear to be arguing with. You're just ... well hating on Fox because you hate Fox without really addressing my point except with irrelevent additional filler and red herrings.
The sad thing is, it's the little touches like these that have made their news reports so popular. It also puts them in a position to say that everyone else is sugarcoating the news, while they're bringing you the REAL THING. Even though their REAL THING isn't REAL either.
At least we can all agree that there's no such thing as "just the facts" news. Even reporting just the facts can be misleading, depending on which facts you elect to report.
The BBC is reporting on a study by digital music research firm The Leading Question, which found that people who download music from peer to peer networks paid for four and a half times more music than regular music fans.
This is a lie. This is NOT what they found. They found that these people spend 4 and half times more on legal digital music purchases than non-downloaders. The way this is written, it sounds like the average downloader who spent $50 a year on CDs in 1995 is now spending $200 on music. This is not stated or supported by the article. Study after study after study has conclusively shown a net depressed impact on music sales, especially in Europe, due directly to downloading music illegally.
Also that most of these people "are extremely enthusiastic about paid-for services, as long as they are suitably compelling." What is nice is that the BPI welcomed the findings that not all file sharers are actually evil... they still pledged to carry on the 'carrot and stick' approach though.
No, not all file sharers are evil, nor should those of us who choose to obey the laws have to tolerate failed-from-birth concepts like DRM and copy protection schemes. But for you people to sit here and still insist after all this time that piracy is somehow generating revenue for the music industry is completely stupid. It's not. It's costing them more money than it's making them. You can sit here and recite your tired anecdotes about how you and your friends and everybody you know buys more music because you can sample it.
You are not the people that are costing them money. It's the millions of high schoolers and young college students who are the problem. They have little to no disposable income (college kids especially) and so are downloading to get their music. I don't blame them, I don't even condemn their actions, but I also don't deny that what they're doing is unquestionably illegal and is costing the legal owners of those songs money.
This issue will not be resolved until the Hillary Rosens of the world stop castigating all of the internet for being the thieves she thinks we are (copy infringement is not theft, Hillary, we another law for theft and it's called...er...theft). And it won't be resolved until you self-righteous chest-pounding downloaders here stop defending your activity as some moralistic crusade against the evil content cartels who are determined to brand you as evil just because you have a guilty pleasure for "Dueling Banjos" and won't be caught dead at a Wal*mart at 3:00am buying the soundtrack to Deliverance.
You're both wrong, you're both oversimplifying the situation, and you're both motivated by completely self-serving interests.
I support open source, I support free software, I oppose DRM in general, I oppose anything that limits my ability to exercise the rights, freedoms, and privileges that I enjoy as a law-abiding citizen, especially the legislation of the RIAA's business model. But I don't deny that there are people who match my profile who engage in widespread copyright infringement and then either lie about it, pretend it's not illegal, or defend it with some holier-than-thou diatribe (much like this one) about why it's justified.
It's illegal, you're breaking the law, you're costing them money. Period. And although I don't blame anybody for downloading something illegally, I don't blame the people who are losing money from this activity for trying to put a stop to it. I don't agree with their tactics any more than I agree with the Slashdotters doggedly insisting that nobody is being harmed so what they're doing isn't wrong.
I'm skeptical of the objectivity of this study. Just as sketpical as I am of the objectivity of the studies paid for the RIAA and their ilk.
Despite your knee-jerk Slashdot groupthink response, Fox News can does report news objectively. You are only responding this way because it's Fox. The story itself was not written by Fox, only posted by them. Fox got it off the AP wire, just like EVERY OTHER FUCKING NEWS ORGANIZATION that posted it. God you're an idiot.
Piracy is illegal and unquestionably in violation of somebody else's intellectual property rights.
You having shitty health care isn't illegal.
You/me/I/we may not think this is smart prioritization, but the government's job isn't go fix all the problems in our lives that it has no legal obligation to deal with. Until and unless the government passes some kind of law (or SCOTUS determines it to be the case somehow), your government is under no obligation to deal with your health care costs. It is, however, obligated to deal with widespread and wanton violation of well-established legal statutes.
I am interested in adequate healthcare ... and other quality of life issues for which our state and federal governments are primarily responsible.
The government is not primarily responsible for providing you with health care. Not yet, anyway.
Given how much the Supreme Court enjoys invoking the "interstate commerce" clause to justify throwing out inconvenient parts of the constitution, you'd think this, at least, would be an open-and-shut case of interstate commerce.
I'd say "often", that's the case, even when Mommy is college-educated. But that's because it's easy for me to apply my morality to somebody else and proclaim that if that kid's mother doesn't do (blank) then she must be some kind of idiot.
Uncle Sam would be a better judge of what's right for little Johhny. The problem, of course, is that most of the time, Uncle Sam is also an alcoholic with a penchant for violent outbursts.
Exactly. Uncle Sam's Child-Rearing Service is likely to be like the rest of Uncle Sam's business ventures: an unaccountable filing cabinet for otherwise unemployable people. Don't get pissy if you work for the DMV and think I'm attacking you, it's a generalization, and all generalizations suffer the flaw of having exceptions. If they didn't, it'd be a fact, not a generalization.
Sometimes, the line should be drawn well before Mom says so. In this instance, I would argue that any parent that allowed a child to play this game was failing in their duty as a parent.
So would I, but that's not my point. What level of government involvement is appropriate here? Do you really think that it's the business of the government to go poking into people's lives to ensure that Mrs. and Mrs. Taxpayer are raising their children in a government-sanctioned manner? That's a bit too fascist for my tastes. It starts off sounding harmless ("it's for the child's own good and health"), but it tends to never stop, as aspiring, well-intentioned politicians enact and support more and more intrusive legislation "for your own good," and this is the path to subservience, not liberty.
Of course, that's my opinion. I might be wrong. The government might be wrong. Mom might be wrong. And we all have a fairly equal chance of being wrong.
Yes, we do. Which is why, since everybody is equally likely to be wrong, it's most efficient and sensible to allow the parent of the child to run that risk rather than having a bunch of hand-wringing busy-bodies running around and telling us all what to do. Provide information, by all means. I fully support rating systems and education. I even support disallowing stores to sell videos that are rated "M" to kids underage. That, at least, encourages produces to weigh carefully the decisions of what content to include. Choices for everybody.
I'm not saying or suggesting that a 6 year old should watch people screwing GTA or anything. I'm saying that in this particular article, and this particular quote, pretending to be somebody else is cited as some kind of evidence that games like GTA are highly damaging. Maybe a handful of people can't tell the difference but it's no reason to censor something for the millions of other people who are capable of moralistic determination.
That's why individual responsibility is so important.
It is indeed. As well educating people.
Not because individuals always make the right choice, but because people generally try to make the best choice, and having a lot of people making decisions, and thus many points of failure, is better than having one person or group making the decisions, and thus a single point of failure.
If you're alluding to government intervention in our personal lives, I disagree with the above argument. It's based on the assumption that when the government makes a decision, we still get to make one too, and that's often not the case. The government decides that at 16 I can't see a rated-R movie by myself. I don't have the option to make that decision for myself anymore. The governments of many states have decreed that navigating a box of steel and polymers on pavement at 75 miles per hour is something I'm capable of doing responsibly when I'm 16, but not betting six bucks at a casino. Th
Conservatism in America, until recently was much closer to classical liberalism than American liberalism. President Bush has shifted "American conservatism" decidedly to the left. Big government, big spending, lots of laws on the books telling you how you can and cannot live, government making decisions for you, etc. Even the ban on gay marriage is a shift to the Left, it just happens to, in America's reverse-political-polarity, placate those who self-associate with the political right. It is the policy of a leftist government that wishes to deprive people of the ability to make their own decisions.
Let them make their own decisions.
This is the most fundamental principle of liberty.
The information is a self-explanatory game ratings.
The decision is whether or not to buy this or allow your child to play it.
I know, I know. Precious Little Johnny (er.. Taylor or Tyler or Hayden or whatever the hell you people name your kids these days) leaves and goes over to his friend's house and plays GTA on little Mikey's (er... Connor or Tanner) computers, and he's out of your control. Well, it's your job as the parent to go meet Mikey's mother and find out if you can trust her to oversee your child for a few hours.
My girlfriend's son came home the other day and bragged about how his aunt let him play a game that was rating "M". He wanted to throw it in Mom's face that he got to play one. That landed his ass banned from his Game Boy for about a week and then she didn't know what to do. "How do I get him to make good decisions?" I suggested that the KID be made to go talk to Aunt Ignorant and that HE explains to her that he's not allowed to play rated M games and that he should have told her the game was rating M, but he made a bad choice. The kid did it, Aunt Ignorant was horrified at her transgression, and said that it just never crossed her mind.
I promise you that if it was a movie, Aunt Ignorant would have thought about it, but video games are "kid's stuff" to that generation, so it's not part of their decision-making to consider that the game could be inappropriate.
Anyway, the point is that my old lady is responsible for her child and trying to teach him how to make good decisions by turning situations like this into learning opportunities for her son. And that's a hell of a lot better for a kid than having some paternal-minded windbag like Senator Clinton spending our tax money on investigating how in the world a video game that is intended and rated for adults ended up having adult-only content.
Most of childhood play revolves around such fantasy, look at the games that children play. "House" - emulating their own parents. "War" - emulating generals. "Cops and robbers" - emulating criminals and law enforcement. "Cowboys and Indians" - emulating ... well, cowboys and Indians. When you introduce toys, it's just a new level. My girlfriend's son recently got a toy lightsabre from his uncle, and he runs around whacking my dog with it and chattering about the Force. He's emulating a Jedi. When he plays with actions figures, he gives them lines and moves them around - it's only different from a video game in that he uses a bit more imagination and there's on controller. Transformers, GI Joes, Batman, Pokemon, almost all of childhood play is emulation. It's called "playing pretend" and it's one of the most common forms of self-entertainment among children. And frankly, I think it's far healthier than rotting in front of a television set watching cartoons.
When does "playing pretend" go to far? When Mom says so, not when Uncle Sam says so. It's called individual liberty, and individual responsibility. It's called Enlightement liberalism.
It's not liberals vs conservatives, it's our parents vs us. Most us in the 20-35 range have a much more tolerate view of human sexuality in the public eye than do the baby boomers, regardless of their political affiliation. To characterize the differing opinions on the matter as conservative nuts vs enlightened liberals is wrong. Clinton doesn't even care, in her case, she just wants soccer moms in the suburbs to think that she (Clinton) gives a shit about their their (the mom's) precious Tanners, Taylors, Tylers, and Connors are seeing when they play video games. We've got a rating system on games, one that is NOT mandated by the government. Don't think for a minute that Clinton and her ilk wouldn't love to get government involved in telling you which games are ok for your kids.
Tipper was one of the main activists who was responsible for the Senate hearings regarding language/violence/drugs in music several years back
The "censorship" issue bounces back and forth between the two parties. Sort of like the abortion issue. Al Gore was pro-life until he was on somebody's vice-presidential ticket. And Bush 41 was pro-choice until he found himself having to pick up Christian swing votes.
tell me once again where conservatives are causing the problem with the GTA3 issue?
Conservatives are causing problems with media censorship, but my point is that the phenomenon is not unique to conservatives. We just readily leap to blame them because we already don't like them. It's a psychological flaw in the human mind. See Hayakawa for an explanation of why this happens. While you're at it, Hayakawa can provide the answer to questions many of you have. Like when you meet somebody that is totally brilliant and highly educated and then you say, "God I hate George Bush" and your newfound brilliant, educated friend says, "Why? He's a good guy, I voted for him." And your jaw drops and you think two things, Pavlov-style: (1) How can somebody this smart like Bush? (2) He's not that smart, he's a fucking idiot.
Go read that book and get the answer #1, and see why you're wrong about #2. While you're at it, learn why everybody else you disagree with isn't evil and stupid.
Now, if that moron John Ashcroft was still in office, then you liberal, knee-jerk reactionaries might have cause to bitch about conservatives.
I think the liberal, knee-jerk reactionaries have cause to bitch about them now, even regarding censorship and morality in media. However, I think it's misguided, unfair, and self-serving to bitch about it while ignoring what liberals are doing on this front as well. Clinton may only be appealing to conservative voters, but as I mentioned above, that's the same reason a lot of Republicans buy into this bullshit too. To just assume Republicans are all Christian nutjobs who embrace this stuff sincerely because you hate them is unhelpful.
considering that he couldn't deal with a nude breast on a freakin' statue.
I wonder if he showers in the dark so he can't see his own genitals.
He's right, and the Democrats are right to eschew the platform they've been preaching since Vietnam, because it's alienated voters. They're losing black voters, women voters, gay voters, union voters, they're loser voters in every dmeographic because at the end of the day, people want to make their own decisions, and the mantra of the Democratic has been, since LBJ, that a paternal government is a good government. It sounds great until you spend 6 hours renewing your license plates and getting emissions and roadworthiness inspections and property tax receipts, and an entire day of your weekend is shot. Then why a guy gets up and basically says, "The government can solve your problems," people say, "the government can't sell me a fucking sticker for the sheet of aluminum on the back of my car without making it take all afternoon and forcing me to deal with the disinterested condescension of 6 different state employees. Fuck that."
Why do you think Clinton won? He ran to the center. In many ways, he was a conservative president. Like it or not, the nation has been trending conservative for decades, and is likely to continue to do so for probably another 5-10 years, until the Republicans, drunk with their newfound support, turn into the exactly the kind of paternalistic "we know better than you how to live your own life" socialists that the Democrats became, and the Democrats will start winning elections once they re-embrace classic liberalism and stop running through the same playback ("all Republicans are racist and want tax breaks for the rich").
The Republicans turned into assholes MUCH faster than the Democrats did. The difference was that, after Barry Goldwater, the Republicans changed their tune. The Democrats have been running against Ronald Reagan for 15 years.