Conversely, if you're withholding music from the public domain, you're also a thief, right?
For example: My mother knows many traditional folk songs of her particular ethnicity that were handed down at least from her grandmother's generation. Recently (late 1970s) somebody collected these songs and published them in a book. The rights to the book "arrangements" are now being vigorously defended by the copyright "owner" to the point that the larger church and social groups now refuse to sing them at campfires.
Who's stealing from whom?
The reality of the situation is that you cannot simultaneously expect total ownership and widespread distribution. Artists have always struggled with this: At what point do you let go and allow your art to become part of the world? But a painter who sells a picture can't expect to come into your house and verify that you haven't sketched a copy of it.
The long and the short of it is, if we allow copyright interests to become absolute, we destroy the engine that runs our culture. All art is fundamentally a form of copying in one way or another, because no man is an island.
These are important eighteenth-century issues. By the nineteenth century they were for all purposes solved to everyone's satisfaction. It's really amazing how far we've regressed.
You're absolutely correct that movies have become a social event: For many people, movies are where you go to sit and talk with your friends, often via cellphone. If theater operators have turned up the sound, it's so the handful of people who actually want to watch the movie can perhaps still do so.
If you don't like the movie-going experience, blame the moviegoers.
One of their magazines came with an inserted 45-rpm copy of "Camp Grenada" with different endings depending on where you put the needle. I think there were actually 4 endings, but I could be wrong.
If Jesus comes back and happens to make a slight positive comment regarding Linux, wouldn't you like to be holding some Red Hat stock at that moment?
Perhaps we should patent the "business process" of innovating by listening to and applying alien radio transmissions. That way you don't have to bother patenting any of the individual technologies.
But what constitutes "wasted" vs "valuable" spending?
If consumers spend a great deal of money on food at grocery stores, you get well-fed (perhaps even obese) consumers, as well as many jobs for grocery store employees and profits for grocery store shareholders.
If government spends a great deal of money on highways, you get improved business efficiency and social mobility, as well as many jobs for highway construction workers and profits for construction company shareholders.
If government spends a great deal of money on military adventures, you get lots of dead foreigners plus a few dead citizens, as well as many jobs for soldiers and civilian workers and profits for defense contractor shareholders.
If government spends a great deal of money on space exploration, you get lots of interesting space photos, as well as many jobs for geeks and rocket scientists and profits for aerospace company shareholders.
If I hadn't eaten in two days, I would still walk past a Hardees. I wouldn't even think twice about it. It would never enter my consciousness that going in and eating was a selectable option. This isn't out of spite or anger or anything, I just long ago dismissed the idea that I would ever get edible food from a Hardees.
The Hardees "Star" ad campaign was very memorable. I laughed at many of the ads, I clearly linked the ads to Hardees and not some other fast food chain or "fast food in general", and I even associated the ads with the Hardees star logo on the physical locations. Because of that campaign, Hardees locations now appear on my mental map. I even navigate by them: "Turn left at the Hardees on Swift Ave."
But I still haven't been inside one in 10+ years. I would have said there was nothing they could do about it at this point: My brand perception is fully developed, and it repels me from their restaurants.
This current campaign is a stroke of genius. They are spending millions to talk to me about the flaws with their products. As far as I know, no-one has ever done that before. And they are getting it right: The flaws they are talking about are in fact the reason I'm not going. When a major advertiser is prepared to speak openly and honestly about their own defects, they have my attention.
Most advertising is not trying to get you to run out and buy a product today. Late-night TV carries "Call Now!" ads, but this type of advertising is not suitable for product placement. (After all, you're not likely to run out in the middle of the movie to buy a Land Rover!)
Instead, the purpose of most advertising is to create or increase brand equity. The idea is to affect your thinking months or years from now, when you (or someone like you) are actually in the market for a new SUV. If your final choice is between a Land Rover and a Glurnmobile, you will presumably have a sense of familiarity and relative comfort attached to the Land Rover. It's not that you agreed with the points the ad was making, or that you felt particularly attached to the Land Rover at the time you saw the ad - it's that if you keep hearing about Land Rover over and over, through the years you will eventually accept that Land Rover is a longstanding and reputable brand of SUV. But nobody ever heard of Glurnmobile before today, so you will probably want to do a more careful analysis of the Glurnmobile product before you buy it. Which in turn means you're more likely to buy a Land Rover.
Of course, in the automotive market, there are no Glurnmobiles. It's inconceivable that someone could jump through all the investor and regulatory hoops to bring out a new type of car, and not make sure people knew about it. Nevertheless, brand equity still depends on the amount of advertising and the length of time it has been going on. What do you think of Kia vs. Land Rover? What are your reasons for thinking what you think?
Note that human beings are wired to defend their conceptual systems against (whatever they perceive as) assault. If you believe X and someone comes along preaching not-X then you attack them, or at least defend yourself. If you believe X and Y and someone comes along preaching that X implies not-Y, the effect is the same. So: Many Slashdotters no doubt believe that (a) Land Rovers are of higher quality than Kias, and (b) that their own thinking is not affected by advertising. I am saying that the major reason to believe that a Land Rover is better is in fact the advertising, particularly the length of time they have been advertising. This challenges (b) unless you can prove that Land Rovers are objectively better. Therefore it is to be expected that many people will jump in and insist that Land Rovers have variable (blurble) with intermittently assisted (gnashing of teeth).
Instead, consider this: Insisting that you are unaffected by advertising is the same as claiming you have never been had by a troll. This is false: You are a social mammal with fairly predictable responses. This gives the trolls and advertisers their edge. No matter how l33t you may be, there's always a smarter troll (or a better advertiser) who has your number.
Well, perhaps a human could have beaten him in game three *IF* he played the same anti-computer chess against the human in question. Presumably he would know he was playing against a human, and not waste moves on anti-computer techniques like that pawn move on the king's side.
It would be interesting to do a chess-based Turing Test. Have Kasparov play an exhibition with three simultaneous games, where he doesn't know which one is the computer. See if he can pick it out.
Most of them don't have 911 service at all. Vonage has pseudo-911 service, like a cell phone. This is the major reason why I haven't switched my home phone to VOIP yet. Hopefully in a few years time, we'll have appropriate 911 service for VOIP carriers, but it won't happen without government involvement. I actually support reasonably "lightweight" regulation of ISPs - if my phone line goes dead and the carrier refuses to fix the problem, I have recourse to the PUC; if the same thing happens with my Road Runner service, it's really just tough. I don't see why Internet is any less "critical infrastructure" than voice, and it should be regulated as such.
If the native species that were outcompeted by the cane toad are already extinct or severely depleted, then killing all the cane toads will mean a total lack of servicing of that niche. Whatever the cane toad eats will be everywhere, in your house, your car, your soup. You can't roll back the clock.
Sorry, what? I don't understand how Napster being tied to Windows means that they are any more or less "stuck between the sweaty balls" of the majors. Isn't Apple just as stuck?
-Graham
Re:Prepaid card show who the market is
on
Napster Pre-Paid Cards
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Yep, it's called the Visa BUXX card. It's been around for about three or four years now.
(1) The equipment operator, who always knew that equipment has a finite lifespan, implements the contingency plan they put in place when the system was designed. Nothing too bad happens.
(2) The system fails catastrophically, causing massive damage to third parties. The damaged parties can correctly assert that the equipment operator should have been aware that the equipment had a finite lifespan. Those parties or their heirs gain legal standing to sue for negligence, and eventually receive some sort of financial compensation.
(3) The gates of hell open and rain fire down upon the earth, smiting its inhabitants with ghastly plague and horrible injury. All life as we know it ends. Cockroaches mutate into dinosaurs and rule the earth. Eventually space aliens discover archeological evidence of our existence. Integrated circuits are described in their literature as 'ritual objects.'
You have reached a totality of oneness with incomprehensibility. Soon your material form will fade and you will achieve Nirvana.
"Services?" WTF?
And if it cost less than $10,000, then by definition the included fonts are not worth $10,000, because they are widely offered for sale for whatever you paid for them.
For what architecture? Not all cpus have a decrement and branch if zero. For that matter, on modern cpus, efficiency depends far more on keeping mutlipe pipelines filled than on reducing instruction count.
Running Office for the first time does NOT require administrator privileges. I don't know what weirdly damaged environment you're operating in, but rest assured that it isn't like that for the rest of us.
Now, a lot of applications do have this problem. Games are the worst. For example, Age of Mythology *absolutely* *requires* administrator access or it won't run at all. But apps that are intended for use in a business office generally don't require local admin - because if they did, big corporates wouldn't buy them.
I've always wondered about this - I know they don't have the right to search you if you decline to allow them. How much grief do they give you? If more people did this would they end this intrusive process?
When there's a bad car crash, do we shut down the Interstate system? When there's a bad air accident, do we ground all flights? While tragic, it's also expected, normal and routine that there will be occasional safety problems with all forms of transportation.
But in space travel - which is nose-on-your-face obviously the most dangerous transportation system - we get all freaked out whenever there's an accident, and burn down entire programs.
Is it because 1950s NASA engineers sold us the dream that we could have perfectly safe space flight because of our modern technological superiority? Why is it that the most dangerous way of traveling can't be satisfied with the same safety record as its mundane counterparts?
Okay, so the original poster's point was that he already warezed those programs for Windows, and the Mac versions are really hard to find on Kazaa.
Seriously. If Apple went out of their way to create a vibrant warez scene for all the third-party OS X apps, they would sell much more hardware. I've seen worse business strategies.
Slashdot Mirror
Conversely, if you're withholding music from the public domain, you're also a thief, right?
For example: My mother knows many traditional folk songs of her particular ethnicity that were handed down at least from her grandmother's generation. Recently (late 1970s) somebody collected these songs and published them in a book. The rights to the book "arrangements" are now being vigorously defended by the copyright "owner" to the point that the larger church and social groups now refuse to sing them at campfires.
Who's stealing from whom?
The reality of the situation is that you cannot simultaneously expect total ownership and widespread distribution. Artists have always struggled with this: At what point do you let go and allow your art to become part of the world? But a painter who sells a picture can't expect to come into your house and verify that you haven't sketched a copy of it.
The long and the short of it is, if we allow copyright interests to become absolute, we destroy the engine that runs our culture. All art is fundamentally a form of copying in one way or another, because no man is an island.
These are important eighteenth-century issues. By the nineteenth century they were for all purposes solved to everyone's satisfaction. It's really amazing how far we've regressed.
-Graham
You're absolutely correct that movies have become a social event: For many people, movies are where you go to sit and talk with your friends, often via cellphone. If theater operators have turned up the sound, it's so the handful of people who actually want to watch the movie can perhaps still do so.
If you don't like the movie-going experience, blame the moviegoers.
-Graham
One of their magazines came with an inserted 45-rpm copy of "Camp Grenada" with different endings depending on where you put the needle. I think there were actually 4 endings, but I could be wrong.
-Graham
If Jesus comes back and happens to make a slight positive comment regarding Linux, wouldn't you like to be holding some Red Hat stock at that moment?
Perhaps we should patent the "business process" of innovating by listening to and applying alien radio transmissions. That way you don't have to bother patenting any of the individual technologies.
-Graham
But what constitutes "wasted" vs "valuable" spending?
If consumers spend a great deal of money on food at grocery stores, you get well-fed (perhaps even obese) consumers, as well as many jobs for grocery store employees and profits for grocery store shareholders.
If government spends a great deal of money on highways, you get improved business efficiency and social mobility, as well as many jobs for highway construction workers and profits for construction company shareholders.
If government spends a great deal of money on military adventures, you get lots of dead foreigners plus a few dead citizens, as well as many jobs for soldiers and civilian workers and profits for defense contractor shareholders.
If government spends a great deal of money on space exploration, you get lots of interesting space photos, as well as many jobs for geeks and rocket scientists and profits for aerospace company shareholders.
What difference does it make?
-Graham
And equally to Democrats, Unionists, liberals, atheists, strict-constructionists, etc...
Yes. But keep in mind that the definition of social mammal is basically "the females have breasts and the males want them."
If I hadn't eaten in two days, I would still walk past a Hardees. I wouldn't even think twice about it. It would never enter my consciousness that going in and eating was a selectable option. This isn't out of spite or anger or anything, I just long ago dismissed the idea that I would ever get edible food from a Hardees.
The Hardees "Star" ad campaign was very memorable. I laughed at many of the ads, I clearly linked the ads to Hardees and not some other fast food chain or "fast food in general", and I even associated the ads with the Hardees star logo on the physical locations. Because of that campaign, Hardees locations now appear on my mental map. I even navigate by them: "Turn left at the Hardees on Swift Ave."
But I still haven't been inside one in 10+ years. I would have said there was nothing they could do about it at this point: My brand perception is fully developed, and it repels me from their restaurants.
This current campaign is a stroke of genius. They are spending millions to talk to me about the flaws with their products. As far as I know, no-one has ever done that before. And they are getting it right: The flaws they are talking about are in fact the reason I'm not going. When a major advertiser is prepared to speak openly and honestly about their own defects, they have my attention.
-Graham
Most advertising is not trying to get you to run out and buy a product today. Late-night TV carries "Call Now!" ads, but this type of advertising is not suitable for product placement. (After all, you're not likely to run out in the middle of the movie to buy a Land Rover!)
Instead, the purpose of most advertising is to create or increase brand equity. The idea is to affect your thinking months or years from now, when you (or someone like you) are actually in the market for a new SUV. If your final choice is between a Land Rover and a Glurnmobile, you will presumably have a sense of familiarity and relative comfort attached to the Land Rover. It's not that you agreed with the points the ad was making, or that you felt particularly attached to the Land Rover at the time you saw the ad - it's that if you keep hearing about Land Rover over and over, through the years you will eventually accept that Land Rover is a longstanding and reputable brand of SUV. But nobody ever heard of Glurnmobile before today, so you will probably want to do a more careful analysis of the Glurnmobile product before you buy it. Which in turn means you're more likely to buy a Land Rover.
Of course, in the automotive market, there are no Glurnmobiles. It's inconceivable that someone could jump through all the investor and regulatory hoops to bring out a new type of car, and not make sure people knew about it. Nevertheless, brand equity still depends on the amount of advertising and the length of time it has been going on. What do you think of Kia vs. Land Rover? What are your reasons for thinking what you think?
Note that human beings are wired to defend their conceptual systems against (whatever they perceive as) assault. If you believe X and someone comes along preaching not-X then you attack them, or at least defend yourself. If you believe X and Y and someone comes along preaching that X implies not-Y, the effect is the same. So: Many Slashdotters no doubt believe that (a) Land Rovers are of higher quality than Kias, and (b) that their own thinking is not affected by advertising. I am saying that the major reason to believe that a Land Rover is better is in fact the advertising, particularly the length of time they have been advertising. This challenges (b) unless you can prove that Land Rovers are objectively better. Therefore it is to be expected that many people will jump in and insist that Land Rovers have variable (blurble) with intermittently assisted (gnashing of teeth).
Instead, consider this: Insisting that you are unaffected by advertising is the same as claiming you have never been had by a troll. This is false: You are a social mammal with fairly predictable responses. This gives the trolls and advertisers their edge. No matter how l33t you may be, there's always a smarter troll (or a better advertiser) who has your number.
-Graham
Well, perhaps a human could have beaten him in game three *IF* he played the same anti-computer chess against the human in question. Presumably he would know he was playing against a human, and not waste moves on anti-computer techniques like that pawn move on the king's side.
It would be interesting to do a chess-based Turing Test. Have Kasparov play an exhibition with three simultaneous games, where he doesn't know which one is the computer. See if he can pick it out.
-Graham
Most of them don't have 911 service at all. Vonage has pseudo-911 service, like a cell phone. This is the major reason why I haven't switched my home phone to VOIP yet. Hopefully in a few years time, we'll have appropriate 911 service for VOIP carriers, but it won't happen without government involvement. I actually support reasonably "lightweight" regulation of ISPs - if my phone line goes dead and the carrier refuses to fix the problem, I have recourse to the PUC; if the same thing happens with my Road Runner service, it's really just tough. I don't see why Internet is any less "critical infrastructure" than voice, and it should be regulated as such.
-Grahan
-Graham
No, they have a point. This really might be an issue for the Joe Millionaire audience.
If the native species that were outcompeted by the cane toad are already extinct or severely depleted, then killing all the cane toads will mean a total lack of servicing of that niche. Whatever the cane toad eats will be everywhere, in your house, your car, your soup. You can't roll back the clock.
Sorry, what? I don't understand how Napster being tied to Windows means that they are any more or less "stuck between the sweaty balls" of the majors. Isn't Apple just as stuck?
-Graham
Yep, it's called the Visa BUXX card. It's been around for about three or four years now.
-Graham
One of three things happens.
(1) The equipment operator, who always knew that equipment has a finite lifespan, implements the contingency plan they put in place when the system was designed. Nothing too bad happens.
(2) The system fails catastrophically, causing massive damage to third parties. The damaged parties can correctly assert that the equipment operator should have been aware that the equipment had a finite lifespan. Those parties or their heirs gain legal standing to sue for negligence, and eventually receive some sort of financial compensation.
(3) The gates of hell open and rain fire down upon the earth, smiting its inhabitants with ghastly plague and horrible injury. All life as we know it ends. Cockroaches mutate into dinosaurs and rule the earth. Eventually space aliens discover archeological evidence of our existence. Integrated circuits are described in their literature as 'ritual objects.'
-Graham
Damn! If only I was purple, I'd be rich!
-Graham
How were you involved with SourceSafe before Microsoft bought them?
You have reached a totality of oneness with incomprehensibility. Soon your material form will fade and you will achieve Nirvana.
"Services?" WTF?
And if it cost less than $10,000, then by definition the included fonts are not worth $10,000, because they are widely offered for sale for whatever you paid for them.
-Graham
For what architecture? Not all cpus have a decrement and branch if zero. For that matter, on modern cpus, efficiency depends far more on keeping mutlipe pipelines filled than on reducing instruction count.
Running Office for the first time does NOT require administrator privileges. I don't know what weirdly damaged environment you're operating in, but rest assured that it isn't like that for the rest of us.
Now, a lot of applications do have this problem. Games are the worst. For example, Age of Mythology *absolutely* *requires* administrator access or it won't run at all. But apps that are intended for use in a business office generally don't require local admin - because if they did, big corporates wouldn't buy them.
-Graham
I've always wondered about this - I know they don't have the right to search you if you decline to allow them. How much grief do they give you? If more people did this would they end this intrusive process?
When there's a bad car crash, do we shut down the Interstate system? When there's a bad air accident, do we ground all flights? While tragic, it's also expected, normal and routine that there will be occasional safety problems with all forms of transportation.
But in space travel - which is nose-on-your-face obviously the most dangerous transportation system - we get all freaked out whenever there's an accident, and burn down entire programs.
Is it because 1950s NASA engineers sold us the dream that we could have perfectly safe space flight because of our modern technological superiority? Why is it that the most dangerous way of traveling can't be satisfied with the same safety record as its mundane counterparts?
-Graham
Does that work for you?
Okay, so the original poster's point was that he already warezed those programs for Windows, and the Mac versions are really hard to find on Kazaa.
Seriously. If Apple went out of their way to create a vibrant warez scene for all the third-party OS X apps, they would sell much more hardware. I've seen worse business strategies.
-Graham