I get what you're saying, I really do. It's a bit capricious to say "ok, this book was published by an author who apparently underwent no peer review so it does not get wikiprotection but this OTHER book was published by an author who was at least mentioned in this other book so it's valid." There's no rhyme nor reason for the choice, just someone saying that it isn't important enough for wikipedia just because either the moderators (or whatever they call themselves) didn't like the source or realized there weren't a lot of them.
Who are these people to say "oh, it's just one book? Then it doesn't count" and more importantly, are there any lines to be drawn? If it had been cited by a handful of websites, would that be enough viability for the theory? What if those websites only obtained the information from Wikipedia? If I go out tomorrow and print my own book about the concept, which I then get on Amazon, will that be enough to return the article?
But Wikipedia's argument, or at least that of the defenders of deletion, is that it was just one man on a pulpit. If I speak eloquently on how I think blank CDs are, in fact, a veritable mini-world and that burning them reprograms the people into data storage units, my theory would not pass muster and would not belong there. Just printing a pamphlet with my theory on it should not make it valid and does nothing to increase the scientific standing of my belief. Paying for a nice binding also does nothing to increase the scientific standing it just means I had an extra buck fifty per copy. If I make a website promoting my book, it does not make the theory any more credible. And finally, to the Wikipedia argumetn: if I just go to a website and add information about my book, it does not make the theory any more credible. And just because nobody has taken the time to publish an article saying that his theory has no basis and is probably false doesn't make it correct.
It seems like Wikipedia is trying to stand as the gatekeeper between "legitimate" information and a half-million articles that are nothing more than "hey, wouldn't it be cool if the world were, like, totally on the back of a turtle. I'm going to call it turtology and post it to Wikipedia."
As for this article, I personally think that Wikipedia should just own it. Post a new article saying "hey, this man published a book 20 years ago. It was never peer-reviewed, but was subsequently republished in a journal of fringe science in an issue also covering warp drives (although to be honest, I don't know what was actually in that issue, the warp drives was just mentioned in another comment.) In 200x, the author added his article to Wikipedia where it was deleted as an example of original research, prohibited by Wikipedia's terms. News of this long-lasting "error" and it's belated "correction" however had spread to various websites and led to some controversy over the policy against non-original research."
Insert links where appropriate. Maybe even start a list of famous wikipedia controversies. End of story, for now. For the most part, people will forget that this "long term vandalism" had ever happened and it'll be a yet another internet furor (hello YTMD, Star Wars kid, first post) that came, went and now is remembered only in the link tags of slashdotters. Discussing the controversy does not necessarily give the theory any more or less scientific credibility.
This is a new version of an urban legend. You'd be better off with the concept of police entering chat rooms as children and agreeing to have sex with nasty older men, then arresting them (ie, the Dateline scenario)
Don't make up stories and pass them as fact. This scenario wouldn't hold up in court and yes, the porn operator WOULD have legal representation and oh, yeah, the police have better things to do than set up a firefox window with every porn site they can find and then setting a child in front of it to click download on each tab.
Now we have some contrary opinion to the "lots of artists have been asked how much allofmp3 gives them and since they don't answer they must be fairly compensated" of a few posts up, we have ends to investigate if we so choose, etc.
In my post I wasn't trying to insist that I had secret insider knowledge into the world of allofmp3, just that the poster above me (who was basing his entire argument on "lots of artists" not making public denials that they don't get paid from a dubious Russian website) didn't have any knowledge either and probably shouldn't tell others to stick to the facts.
Thank you for actually having some facts to stick to.
And where's your list of poeple who say they HAVE been fairly compensated?
Lots of people (which is Internet for nobody but yourself, and even then only in your head) have asked the government why they killed Elvis and I have not seen one story to indicate they didn't kill him, so thus, it must be true.
You're just picking arbitrarily picking a side and saying "since I haven't seen any proof for either position, my way is right."
My opinion (and based on the same vacuum of official artists stance as yours) is that they lump allofmp3.com in with Kazaa and Limewire and Napster before it and so when they say "stealing our music means we don't get any reward for our work" they are including feel-good-piracy.
Don't tell others to stick to facts when you have none to go on. YOU stick to the facts which is that there is no proof any of this money goes to anyone but webmaster@allofmp3.com.
Because in the end they just pass along the costs to the consumer. Also, the lawsuits are surprisingly cost effective for them anyways. They have one group of attorneys who write up a form letter, costing approximately 500 an hour (assuming they're going for some decent lawyers) then the letters get mass mailed (bulk mailing rates knock the postage price per letter something close to 25 cents each) and then they wait for the Mom or whoever else gets the letter to go out, get a lawyer (at far more reasonable $150 an hour for some local bofunk) and they spend all this money filing motions, etc.
Meanwhile the RIAA has the process down to a science and the same time they file responses to Mom's motions, they're filling a half dozen motions of their own in proceedings against others who are actually guilty. Cost per transaction? Negligible.
The mom, meanwhile, has racked up roughly 2100 or so in legal fees (because it's unlikely her lawyer has handled many of these types of cases and thus spends more time researching and writing briefs) while the RIAA has spent surprisingly less (because they've done so many of these suits before filing the motions are a matter of fill-in-the-blanks now and they're down to roughly postage plus filing fees plus the cost of stuffing envelopes.)
Now, even better is that the average settlement in these cases is what? 5,000? Maybe 10? I've heard a few of the results, but conversely even fewer dismissals so my average may be high or low.
So basically the times they win or settle for a few thousand equal out to the costs they're spending.
And lets be honest for a minute here, in many of these cases there is no real defense. The dismissals I've heard of have been mostly "oh, we don't even own a computer so we couldn't have done it" or "you're suing me but I didn't do it so you should have been suing my child" type stuff.
None of the Slashdot friendly "oh, I run p2p because I think the prices are unfair" or "I use Limewire/Kazaa/the various torrent programs because I'm protesting the RIAA's unfair stand" cuts it in the courts.
The Legal Equation comes to something like
I did it because I don't like the prices = I did it.
So if half of the cases are dismissals (and I believe that number is rather high) and RIAA had to pay the legal fees for all these low-level lawyers out there (none of the Napsterites are hiring Biglaw lawyers) doesn't even scratch the pool of money they've gotten from every scare tactic settlement.
The problem with your analysis is that it's deeply flawed. You're basically taking the last milestone and saying "oh, so this must be what it'll look like now.
Using your logic, I predict that based on sales of the SNES and Sega Genesis that the N64 will win the console wars of it's time, Dreamcast will be a strong second in everyone's homes and this new fangled PS1 must be a new version of *insert failed console here* so it'll bottom out.
It's way too early to play the guessing game. Nintendo is counting on a system that is less than half the price of the other two (Gamecube has always been too close in price points to the XBox and PS2 to get the majority of gamers to say "hmm, for an extra 50 bucks I can get a system with a hard drive/online play/dvd playback/something else.) and actually has "catchy" games (not unlike the recent phenomena of young girls falling in love with Nintendogs and baby boomers enjoying Brain Age on the DS. Yes, they will also have the stigma of "oh, it's the kiddie console" and some people who are upset about it not having HD (but then again, the DS couldn't duplicate the graphics standards of the PSP but look who won there) but eh, some people see the Xbox as the drunk frat boy console too. Also keep in mind that there were many parents who looked at the 1000+ Ebay price tags of 360's last Christmas who will say "200-250? That's a much better value in my eye, and I can afford it too."
The 360 had the initial holy shit factor, followed by the it's-hard-to-find-so-it-must-be-cool factor. Now it has the wait-what-can-I-actually-play-on-it? factor, a bit of bad taste from the initial shortages, well publicized heating/cooling issues and sketchy backwards compatability where everyone's favorite games can't be played BUT stuff from the Olsen Twins is good to go. Depending on which rumor is out on any given days, the 360 either will or will not have a token $50 price drop sometime within the next year. Whether that will be enough to convince people not to upgrade to the Blu-Ray of PS3 or to upgrade from the ultra-cheap Wii who knows.
The PS3 has a bit of Blu-Ray anticipation (about half the price of an actual player) and backwards compatability) and the Playstation name. It's also had a lot of bad fan press from kids who associate Sony Music with Sony Everything Else, from DRM nuts and a little bit of Blu-Ray backlash (the "I can pay 5 bucks more than I originally paid to get a movie that looks a little better, and don't give me any of this oh HD is so great I can't stand to look at regular DVD quality stuff, on the really expensive tvs that only some people have" people.) ALso, I think a lot of people got burned on the 360's core unit/actually good unit dichotemy and will be wary of PS3 using the same strategy. Now they'll know "geez, I know it's only X dollars more than it's competitor, but that's for the bare bones unit and Jimmy insists that all the good stuff is in the higher end unit so it's actually 100+X dollars more than it's competitor."
If Nintendo can get the supply out there for Christmas and a bit of buzz, their sales should no doubt beat the 360's becuase of those early supply issues followed by the nothing-to-play and fire-starting backlash, and it's entirely too possible that they'll narrow down that user base significantly within its first few months out there. Plus, New Super Mario Bros selling tons and tons in it's first month of release has shown that there's still huge cache for nostalgia. Halo 3 may get the FPS/Xbox/Frat Boy demographic (IOW, those that already have the system), but tell today's late 20-somethings that for 200 or so they can play all their old school favorites and you'll be surprised. It's like the morons who pay $20 in Walmart for the joystick things that let tehm play Pacman on their TV... yeah we know you can emulate it on your computer for free, and yeah we know $20 is a bit much for just Pacman, but they still sell.
I realize that this sounds like a Nintendo fanboy post, but I just want to point out that basing predictions ENTIRELY on past sales and not on marketting, the product itself, the image, etc, is crap in deciding console wars.
Interesting, as far as I could tell your point was
"Copying of works is necessary for them to live on in perpetuity, it only becomes an issue worthy of prosecution when it eats into the copyright owners expected profits significantly." or, (1) unless you have a huge dollar figure, your rights are squat, and (2) there is a danger in things NOT living on in perpetuity unless copied profusely by bloggers.
"People who expect 100% of their copyrights are being both unreasonable and unfair to the greater population who deserve for these works of culture to be preserved for longer periods." or (3) nobody deserves complete control of what they make/create/own because others could benefit in a grand sense, (4) that the greater population *DESERVES* the right to copy+paste large chunks of other people's works, often without attribution because they're somehow bettered by it.
"I do not dispute the value of copyright, just the attitude that anyone deserves 100% of the right to produce copies, or that they are somehow hurt by a bunch of bloggers." or (5) that you agree copyright is good, you just don't like the protection it affords content creators and thus it's ok to disregard copyright.
So, those were the 5 points I picked out and I replied to. I'm sorry you can't be "arsed" to read, and that you're in general an arse. I'd explain copyright in terms of "software goods" for you but since you're just vague enough to say almost nothing other that "huh, no, I disagree with your argument because I may be somehow indirectly involved in some form of content creation."
Now you're trying to be insulting and dismissive by saying I wasted my time thinking about what I was going to say instead of just posting an insulting slashtroll post saying "you're stupid, you talk too much and you're wasting your time because I have no intention of ever reading it (and I'm afraid that my argument doesn't hold up under any scrutiny and that you're right)", that I'm a greedy moron because I believe people have rights to their property (even though I do acknowledge that those rights will be infringed upon and that sometimes that infringment is for good reasons.)
You can't just insert "oh, I was only talking about infringments of 5% or less so it's useless for you to explain property rights to me, but not useless for me to say I disagree with them and thus they don't exist" and make it so.
Oddly enough, you're missing apparently the point of the original article which is that bloggers are block-quoting the hell out of other people's content, slapping "BTW, from CNN" on this SOMETIMES and that on these sites, the amount of original content is usually less than 50% (and from my experience much, MUCH less and often the attribution is the only original content) and considering the fact that most online news pieces are fewer than 1000 words (the number is somewhere closer to 500 words and you can check that by going to CNN and wordcounting an half-dozen or so articles) standard block quoting that may appear ok is actually well outside fair use.
Your little insult was, according to my wordcount, a little over 80 words. On almost any news article, something that size (5 sentances in 4 lines), directly lifted from the original source, is between 10 and 20%. Go down the front page of Slashdot alone and you'll see that just the ones that say "from the article" the stolen content is roughly 80-90 words, with one short one looking like it's around 50 words and one long one looking to be around 100. That's just the block quotes attributed to the article. Now, these people have stolen 10-20% of another person's content, directly lifting it from the full article, sometimes attributing it, adding nothing to it (although Slashdot is including "Reader says: Crack is bad. From the article: akdfjhakjghakljhglafde" and giving them a link to their website) and knowing that most of the Slashdot readers (apparently you included) won't actually read the full article before spouting off.
And who are you to decide what should live on in perpetuity? You have no right to decide what and how stuff should live on. I can go out and buy a rare Picasso painting (ok, well, I could with a few hundred million more dollars) and shred it. I could set fire to it and I pee on the ashes. That is my right as owner of that painting. I did not buy all the rights to it, except for the right to destroy it. I bought all the rights. If I write a book I have the write to publish AS WELL as the right to not publish. They don't create something with a bundle of rights EXCEPT the right to do as they want. If the owners of the rights wish a property to live on in perpetuity it is THEIR right to decide that and because THEY have the right to release their rights into the public domain they can make that decision.
Just because YOU don't like their rights doesn't mean they don't have them. If I'm a free spirited nu-hippy and I don't think you should have the right to tell people they can't sleep on your lawn (what? You're not hurt by me sleeping on your lawn. It's not depriving you of your lawn's use because you're not using it when I'm sleeping, it's better for the public that I sleep on a nice safe lawn than in a dangerous alley) it doesn't mean that I suddenly have the right. It may be unreasonable (you have to patrol your lawn at random times of the night when you would normally be sleeping to make sure I'm not sleeping on it) and it may be unfair to the general public (without having to pay for homes to sleep in we could funnel far more money into health care and scientific research) but it like it or not, them's the breaks.
Just because it's easy to copy and paste everyone's stuff doesn't mean it's legal.
And copying of works is not necessary to ensure things live on in perpetuity. BBC News can keep an article in their archives forever, preserving it as they have the right to seeing as how it's THEIR RIGHT, and it is in no way benefited or furthered by a hundred bloggers copying the same thing as they paid for (in content creation or in Feed Fees.) The New Yorker just released a mammoth collection of every issue up until February 2005 and they did so without the benefit of decades of bloggers "preserving" their work for them. Do they have to register their intent, 80 years earlier and well before the technology they're going to use, with YOU to ensure that in the meantime you don't "preserve" the profits from their work?
Yes, in some cases copying is a grand thing (Dr. Who episodes, reclaimed from BBC destruction, thanks to fan copies and other sources) and people sometimes wish that someone had preserved their stuff but eh, that's the breaks. Who are you or anyone else to decide that there stuff will be preserved, against their will, and often without attribution, simply because "society could benefit" (which is as generalized an argument as I've ever heard) and maybe they would have regretted it later.
If you owned a website you would think it's assinine if some kind of law was passed saying "anything you post to the internet must be archived for at least 10 years or mirrored on at least two seperate sites before you can delete it."
Another problem you're ignoring (other than the fact that property rights, including intellectual property, includes the right to not use it, that your "we need to copy it as far and wide as possible to save it" argument is unfounded) is that not everything deserves perpetuity. Yes, sometimes BBC and CNN go into articles and update them without creating a savelog or publishing a seperate correction page but these bloggers aren't "preserving history" as an impartial act (they too have the ability to go in and change things later) or in any kind of social protection scheme (ie, rechecking it against BBC alterations to ensure we don't have a 1984 situation with news being rewritten daily to reflect modern wars) but they're copying it for cheap content. If you even attempt to argue that bloggers are attempting to operate as this sort of watch
Other people always get around to saying what I was going to say only quicker and briefer. I was going to say that theft not equaling copyright infringement is, like most of the law, a matter of how you define the issue and I was going to go on about how the software company would say that you're buying a set of disks that enable you to play a particular game, while your argument would be that you bought the right to play the game.
There's all kinds of ways to define theft and the current intellectual theft movement tries to define it taking anything physical (you walk off with a CD = theft) while content producers argue it's taking something that you don't have the right to take (you download a copy of a song you have no right to download.) Your argument that you could not physically buy another copy from them, even though you were willing wouldn't necessarily save you in court. That is just like saying that as soon as a book or video goes out of print you have the right to download it from the internet. All squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares. My argument is that unauthorized takings are theft (rectangle). Your argument is that unauthorized takings are only theft if it's physical (square, fits inside nicely)
In law however, theft is pretty general and is defined as any unauthorized taking of someone else's property (and yes, intellectual property IS property) with the intent to keep it (rectangle.) Your "it's only theft if physical" argument comes from internet law ("you legally have 24 hours to delete anything you download from this site", "you can download this full version of MS Office if it's for educational purposes", which personally I find hilarious because if that were legal, MS probably wouldn't need to offer an edition aimed at students and teachers... you know, the educational market) and I would NOT recomend you use internet law in court. It is not accurate. It is wrong. It will not work. You will lose your case.
Repeat after me: Po-tay-to, po-tah-to. You can argue that theft is only physical deprivation all you want, just as I can argue that theft is any unauthorized taking all I want. I've found that most pirates (not that I'm accusing... hell, for all I know I'm more of a pirate than you) try to look for verbal loopholes ("educational purposes", "backup copies", "it only happens if you physically take it") but get VERY testy when you try to demonstrate that semantics aren't their best friends. In this case, it's more than semantics, it's a flat out misunderstanding of the elements of the law (which has some fluctuation between jurisdictions, but trust me, piracy is illegal.)
Now, copyright infringment is the issue here, and yes, it is violated in addition to general principles of theft. It brings up the old example of a guy on probation with a gun in his car. He's doing one action: keeping a gun in his car's glove box, but he's guilty of multiple crimes. Possession of a firearm while on probation, possession of a concealed weapon, possession of a concealed weapon while on probation. Which counts he gets nailed with only serve to determine how much time he spends in jail. Here, we have a variety of things we can call the crime, but it doesn't make it any less criminal and it doesn't make any individual charge less valid.
By your logic (it's ok to download a copy because it wasn't available to you), it would be ok to download any Hollywood blockbuster during the 6 months after it goes out of the theatre but before the DVD release just because you *would* see it in the theatre but darn it, it's not being shown anywhere and you *would* buy it on DVD but darn it, the DVD isn't out yet.
Now, you're going to argue "oh, but what I want is so old", they would argue "what's old?" If it's a movie Person A wants to see, and they'll either buy the DVD on release day or see it in the theatre opening weekend then to them, movies like King Kong are already old. Some TV shows still aren't out on DVD after 10, 20, 30 years and so arguably t
I spent a few minutes trying to call up the original article so I could respond with a thoughtful statement about how the original article says it's "the new plagiarism."
And then I read your bit and realized I didn't need to. It's amazing how many people don't seem to understand that the New Something shouldn't be the Old Something because then it would just be the Old Something. Maybe the article should try and coin a new phrase for the phenomena like "polypasting" or "prolificopy" or something. That way everyone would know it's something not quite plagiarism.
The original article isn't saying "to take someone's work is plagiarism" it's saying "there's a new wrinkle in plagiarism, one in which bloggers of all kinds are block quoting chunks of material and SOMETIMES attributing, sometimes not." (not an actual quote, but from what I managed to read it's the article's premise.)
Of course, now I'm going to add my take on the situation.
Yes, the majority of the news sites get information from their AP feed and paste it. It's what happens. Do we really need CBS, ABC, NBC, Fox News, CNN, BBC, and who knows who else each over at News Point A interviewing the same three guys involved in the same story or is it sometimes better to just have the AP or Reuters write the story, give them their cut and be done with it.
Justifying wholesale theft of copyrighted works as some people because "in two years" their link might go down is indistinguishable from the people who say it's "legal" to host their collection of roms because nobody makes the original Nintendo any more (I wonder how the rom-sites will change their justification now that virtually every major game company has some retrogaming solution available, whether it's those plug-n-play tv things, Xbox Live, Gametap, Nintendo's upcoming game-download thingie) or that it would be legal to download and torrent all of CNN's content (because after all, their logo indicates it's their content, right?) because they only air their articles for a day or so at most and after that it's gone.
Websites can go away, just like books go out of print, and movies and TV shows can go out of distribution. Whether you see copyright infingement of any of this as a good thing depends on what side of the coin you're on. For every "OMG! I can't believe I almost wasn't able to get this vital information because the original website was going to delete the article" person, there's another person saying "hey, I spent time reading, researching, maybe even interviewing the players for more perspective, all so that my readers would get content I created (and possibly click on my adsense), and Jimbo stole it all, slapped a quick *not my work* label on it (and possibly a click on his adsense) and I get bubkiss."
But back to my first point, I agree, New does not equal Old.
I was going to mention the book market when I first read his response! It pumps out stuff, from one extreme to another (erotica - romance - chick lit - memoirs - fiction - mysteries - thrillers - science fiction - horror, all with a few stops along the way) and if you've ever been to a library book sale you're going to see a wide selection of crud that's almost indistinguishable and a bunch of books that were either good or popular but have been discarded (this year I've seen more copies of Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood than I'd ever want to, a few years ago it was The Corrections.)
This is what a casual reader gets wehn surrounded by poorly organized/catagorized books, or what a manga fan finds in a comic shop that just alphabetizes everything or a comic fan finds in the 5 plus racks of manga at a B&N.
I can name more best sellers or critical supernovas in the book world than I can in comics because there's literally hundreds more book-books in print than comic book tales
To add to the list everyone else is making: Empire (dystopia), Wanted (anti-super-hero rated-mature-for-immature-language, action story), David Boring (or any Clowes stuff... it's just weird fiction), Sleeper for some espionage triller stuff, Strangehaven for a little of that old time Twin Peaks/League of Gentlemen type dark and edgy small town weirdness.
Now, the average non-comic person isn't going to pick up Wanted and say "oh, this is interested, let's pick up Kingdom Come too because it's like the mirror image story" but it's likely that I'm going to pick up Berserk, let's say, and then scratch my head before realizing AH! Rave Master would go great with that! Your store has all the Mecha stuff together? Awesome, my old store had all the Vertigo together, then all the other mature stuff next shelf over. Currently, I get my stuff online so if I don't know something's out there in the smae vein, I don't get it but because I know what I like, I usually find about it quickly.
Is it easy to get lost in the not-so-good stuff? Yeah, just like everywhere else. It's easier to find a book if you know about it, easier to find a TV-show if you're looking for it.
Was going to mod on this but decided to reply instead. Almost everything you said is a mirror image of why many comic fans think manga is... well... bleh. The whole "inteligent stories only get read by a few people" argument can be tossed right back at you. I've seen some anime that was pretty good, and some that was pretty bad and nope, no way to tell it apart on the shelf. Most book stores (where the majority of fans get it from) don't even seperate the borderline porno/mature readers from the regular stuff so parents depend on the mercy of shrink wrap remaining on to tell them their son who likes Naruto might be a little too young Eden (although I'm sure there's worse stuff).
Comic fans say we read western comics because we're sick of the tournament of the book manga stuff. It's worse in anime I know, but Christmas! do you know how annoying the character wakes up, learns he has a great destiny/stumbles into a great destiny, steps out the door, makes 3 or four lifelong friends and sets out on his quest to find all the increasingly powerful magic playing cards, collect the increasingly colorful crystals, win each rung of the increasingly dangerous tournament, battle bigger robots, collect prettier creatures stories get?
You know you like Gundam? Great, some people know they like X-titles, some know they like IDW horror, some know they like DC's Vertigo line. For the general non-comic reader, they all look a like and Astonishing X-Men could just be Fables in a new cover but understand that for the non-manga reader Fruits Basket and Vampire Game all look alike.
Manga thrives because it throws content at readers by the bucketload with TONS of derivitives (Gundam knock-offs, tournament books, romance books of varying combinations (guy-girl, girl-guy, guy-girl-girl-girl-girl, guy-guy-guy, guy/girl-girl-guy-girl, etc) in a cheap disposable format and then what's well received gets collected and THEN the stuff from that lot that gets well received gets translated and brought over.
The American comic market works the opposite, by only pumping out stuff that either (a) gets good reviews/press so they can market themselves as highbrow or (b) sells big numbers. If it does neither, and sometimes if it only does one or the other, it gets axed. The stuff that goes international tends to be Ultimate stuff (good reviews by and large, good sellers), Sandman type stuff (critical darlings-turned-best sellers) and the like with the rest shaking out.
9 times from 10, the guy saying "western comics" need to be more like the Manga market doesn't know what the Manga market is like. They think it's just a hundred awesome writers pumping out hit series after hit series and pretend that whatever they're not reading MUST be just as good as what they are reading by virtue of being the same format. I think comic fans are at least a triffle more realistic and understand that there's still some crap out there that's only published because the author's thumb goes up the right butts or the publisher realizes that a particular copyright is more important than the content.
As for the marketing mature stuff/non-super-hero to the public, yeah, that's what the industry is trying with League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Hellboy, Road to Perdition, V for Vendetta, History of Violence, etc, etc. For every Spider-Man, there's a Ghost World, for every Superman Returns, there's an American Splendor. Actually, I think there's MORE, but you get the point. Manga isn't cross-demographic either. It sells mainly to (a) 30-year-old dork-type guys, (b) teen girls, (c) teen boys. Comics sell mainly to (a) 30-year-old dork type guys and (b) teen boys. The major companies always try a girl campaign and it never works.
And if your argument is that Americans aping manga style is what needs to die then that comes up short too because MOST companies tried to ape it, realized it wasn't the art that translated to sales, and dropped it. Compare most works pumped out in the past 3 years to thier 2000 counterparts and
"had been on at me as regards doing what he coined 'HTML Ezine' for a long time - I had been a bit of a purist about it but he finally won me around to his mode of thinking. "
"people had tried to produce a site along these lines but had either become totally bias, or been maintained badly (lack of updates etc)."
I make more than enough mistakkes (I'm going to leave the extra k because of the irony of writing a complaint about editing and non-edited stuff) but this is simple copy (in the industry sense of referring to bulk wordage as copy) with mistakes that could be caught on an easy pass-through.
And, as a personal issue, I hate when people use a cliche but try to cover it up with some "clever" avoidance. The cliche (should have an accent, but doesn't, just to continue pointinng out my own mistakes) is "way of thinking", but by changing way to mode, you're not hiding the cliche or making a unique phrase, you're just drawing attention to how awkward the cover-up is.
Now, as far as cliches are concerned, they are a perfectly fine form of verbal (and non-verbal) shorthand that convey a commonly held notion (ie, it's easier to say "way of thinking" than "the collection of my own thought processes on that particular issue") and not nearly as bad as high school teachers will lead you to believe (or, "try to convince your thoughtstream that this is a proper, and in some cases, the only proper, way") but if you're still so set against using them, you have to hide them a little better.
I apologize for excessive comma usage, and the abuse of parenthetical phrases, but I'm not putting out a thinly veiled press release posing as a community awareness feature.
Oh good god man. Don't post about how we are supposed to look not at a person's dress but at their actions and then give a summary of Einstein based solely on a picture from Slashdot and your own view of how hard his life as a pre-Slashdot Slashdotter must have been.
I can't remember which college off hand, but didn't he teach at a "straight-laced, suit-and-tie" college full of clean-cut students that didn't lynch him? And didn't he interact with a ton of "straight-laced" fine gents in just about everything he did, from publishing to research to government work? Isn't he the guy famous for always wearing a suit, even though they were all the same style because he didn't want to waste the brain energy?
Of course, Einstein was theoretically "worth" putting up with. His hair being wild was ok becuase his product was worth more than his haircut. The product many of these sandel-wearers are peddling is not so much. Oh, sure, it may have it's benefits but with Einstein you had a trade off:
Good: Beyond his time theoretician Bad: Wild hair
But with teh sandel-wearers of this argument the trade-off isn't quite so one sided Good: Theoretical benefits to implimenting a system that does what they think their current system can already do. Bad: A parasitic tech-division that can't be erased or laid off (yet) because they sold us on this software that only they could fix when something goes wrong, and wait, why can't we do that with what we already have? Oh, and all the other problems (breakign employees of the Microsoft learning curve for some end-user stuff, can't just send teh office manager in to hit reboot when something goes wrong because nobody's sure what that'll do)
Now, when companies can get someone willing to what the sandal-wearing hippie who can't be replaced becuase he's just so damn good at his job (a) cheaper, (b) faster, (c) in "the company spirit" (meaning dressed with some self-respect, willing to help his fellow co-workers instead of looking down at them for not knowing how to Mozillafox while cc'ing a distro of Buntutu) they'll say "hmm... well Larry's done the work OK so far but, well, I think John can do it better/cheaper/faster/with a better fit"
You're ignoring the fact that the article is using "the look" (ie, sandals and ponytails) to evoke a certain stereotype of worker. It's not saying that people with ponytails and sandals are bad workers, just that "you know... that type of guy... the hippie type" is a type of mindset that is harmful to the movement. It's the same way when you're talking about corporate structure you say a "suit and tie" kind of description, and when you're talking about the American youth you might use a Good Charlotte description (if the year were 2005) or talk about "the shaggy-haired iPod wearing bastards."
And whether the sandal and ponytail set will admit it or not, they have thier own preconceptions. They're not going to go to the doctor with his ears distended to his jaw line, and they probably wouldn't like being stuck on a project with MC Jazzy Jahsay who's got on more metal than the server.
As for your list, I would shutter to think of your preconceptions. I would rather have a suit-and-tie set do focus groups and research and say "here's something interesting that's just taking off... lets throw money at it and see if it catches fire" (ie, the foundation of the internet and everything from Amazon to Ebay) than to have a Slashdotter (at least hte one your list conjures up for me) bust into my office and say "Dude! I just saw on freshmeat this new paleoraid-dashboard-torrent-wiki that would look so shagged if we implement it!" "What's it do?" "It parses the binhex-numerology through Seti@home to project a poly-linear gateway for overclocking, and it might cut down on server load according to Bob who tried it on an office of 3 and doesn't have to babysit it any more."
I would also like to have the dumb-jock who knows that if he doesn't meet the standards of the rest of the team, he's likely to
What you fail to realize despite your immense brain and god-like powers is that your competitors, who are smarter than you, know what I and people like me want (and what you need us to want to pay for) and are more than willing to put on some damn shoes and "play the part" it takes to impress us. Colleges are crapping out computer folk every May and December and just becaue you haven't noticed any closed doors in your 20 years in the future doesn't mean that there haven't been (a) better opportunities you weren't ever even in the running for, and (b) opportunities you're never going to be in the running for.
Things like need and demnad are two way streets that NOBODY on Slashdot seems to understand. Yes, in your view of things you're a vendor able to charge X for what you have to offer (Y) and we're willing to pay. In our view of things, you are willing to pay us in so many hours/programs/whatever of Y for all that X we have standing around in our bank accounts. You're only as valuable as we make you and you're just as we're as valuable as you let us be. You set your prices, we set ours and in the end babies get made.
You've probably got another 20 years minimum before you can retire (You do have a 401k or an IRA right? You did think about savings plans for retirement right? You did hook yourself up with a nice company offering a brilliant pension after 40 years right? Course you did... smart fellow like you...) so I wish you well and I hope you don't get replaced in too ironic a manner.
PS, you don't even know what half of our jobs are, just like we don't care what yours is. Many of us love seeing people who "can do our jobs" come crawling when they actually need our help. When your arteries harden, you find yourself in jail, you have some tricky tax question or your car is making a skree-pump-pump-eeeerrrrrkkkk sound, I'm glad to know that you won't need any of our help.
Linux users are the clients for Dell computers (ok, not really, but they're a market Dell would apparently like) because Linux users can conusme Dell's product so yes, in some way the Dell is the vendor. The post way up was in reference to Dell being the client for the Linux community's product (ie, various distros) becasue they are the ones that are consuming (I don't want to say purchasing or using since they're really not doing that) and so yes, you are both making points, but need to understand the context before you disagree.
This entire article was about how Dell, in the role of client, trying to decide how best to serve their own clients, thinks that Linux needs to be more "user friendly" I guess is the term and that if Linux as a vendor of the Linux environment could make it a little more compatable, etc, they would happily jump on and that maybe, just maybe the ordinary home user, Dell's actual market, would be more likely to jump on, while what is beign argued is that Dell, as the vender, needs to offer more distros, more this, more that.
The problem is that we're dealing with two seperate user bases, the linux and the non... to please the non, Dell would have to sell more user friendly ones, easier to configure, whatever other reasons he listed and to please the linux ones he'd ahve to do the opposite and so like any business that hopes to stay alive, it tries to keep the customers it has trying to embrace new ones to the best of it's ability, thus it goes up the chain to ITS vendors asking for what it wants to serve those needs.
Just because something is both a painting and a map it doesn't mean that only one label applies or that it only serves one role.
Wrong on both counts. I'm just a guy who likes to set things right. I fix the world, one slashdot post at a time. If Slashdot had a Bullshit Brigade, I would be it's president.
Ok, that's high-fallutin' but the point is, it's not something personal (except when it is) I just feel the need to right wrongs and make the world a better place.
You have your uses. For instance, right now all I can think of is Riff Raff saying "He didn't like me. He NEVER liked me!" And what a wonderful gift that is, given freely from you to me. I'll treasure this.
What? No, I actually like MS. I use Office all the time just because I'm familiar with it and so are most of the people that will be on the receiving end of anything I send. I think Bill Gates is doing some good things with his untold wealth and I'm very comfortable staying on Windows because it does everything I need it to. Granted, I haven't enjoyed the X-Box, but that's a different matter altogether.
Caveat emptor means the buyer beware. It's a general disclosure principle in most aspects of the law, specifically in real property and contracts, that says the buyer is not under a duty to make sure YOU know everything that could possibly concern that which you are buying. It's the court's way of saying YOU as the buyer needs to take some initiative to make sure you're getting a good product because YOU as the buyer are the one that will be harmed if you didn't make a prudent and informed decision.
As for ethics, nobody is buying stock on your word. NOBODY. You don't have a duty to disclose your ownership of MS stock because you're not creating some kind of reliance in us upon your word wherein your status as an MS stockholder makes us suspicious of conflict of interest. It's not like we have reason to believe you're neutral or that otherwise you'd be misrepresenting yourself by not telling us.
It's not relevant at all. You want to pretend it's relevant because you want us to be impressed. That's why you're throwing out that BS 15k range of stock value.
The ethical thing is to tell us truth about a situation when that truth has an impact on the situation. Supreme Court justices tell us their stock holdings when there's a potential conflict of interest because their decision may have some effect on the US. YOU telling us how much money you'd like to have invested in MS is equal to me posting "PS, I own a Ford and plan to buy another when this one dies" every time I mention cars because hey, that was a huge 5k-20k investment I made in that company, or that I took out student loans through one bank (becuase hey, that's a huge 16k-130k investment in that company) or that I took out a mortgage through another bank (because hey, that's a huge 1k-250k investment in that company.)
Your logic is so illogical it's like, I'm having trouble even semi-seriously attempting to take your concept of ethics seriously, it's like a doctor walking in, seeing that you have Nikes on and then telling you he prefers Converse and just wants you to know that despite his preference in shoes, he's going to try to not kill you on the operating table.
This costco http://www.costco.com/ ? Because looking around (and granted it wasn't an all encompassing survey of the landscape or anything) but they don't have all that great a price. PS2 with roughly $100 in addons: 219. On Amazon, PS2 individually 129, plus roughly $100 for the add-ons.
Mostly it looked like the standard $5 off on video games you can get at any of the warehouse stores. The only thing that I saw that WERE good deals.
Also, the video game industry has the power to set its own price for (a) games and (b) consoles. That's why when the PS2 went down to $200, it went down everywhere. Same with it's drop to 150, and now it's apparent drop to 129. Same thing happened when every store in every town dropped the Dreamcast to $100, and then down to $50. Happens with most games too.
Video games aren't a price competition model. If it was, then the stores would rely more on selling the units (selling units means selling at least a few more games) instead of selling bundles (with the high mark-up accessories like joysticks and memory cards) then when the X-Box 360 came out, Walmart or some other store would have marked the price down $25 and reaped thousands upon thousands more pre-orders (which would have been filled proportionatly because of the shortage yes, but at the same proportion they would have at any other store)
You must have just been very lucky to get that bundle, but I wouldn't expect anyone else to duplicate that with a PS3 for a while. I'd use the 360 price for comparison, but they're not offering it on their website so I can't check it against other stores.
Sony saw that with the holidays and a moderate buzz for the hardware (because nobody was talking about its games) that XBox sold quite through its (yes under-shipped) quantities and even managed to drive a huge secondary market, thus Sony knows that they can price their PS3 at
(a) the same price the 360 started for (because by then the people spending money on these gamers would have saved enough money to go back out and get the newest plattform) OR (b) more than that becuase they're going to (at least say they are) offering features/bonuses the Xbox doesn't.
Not less than. They're can't afford to go for in-home saturation with this thing becuase that's a huge loss that would take them oodles to recoup, not with those features and that price. They're going to sell the unit for the highest price their analysts predict the market will pay for it WITH the understanding that they want to sell through the units they'll be able to produce. Shortages and overages are both things that Sony won't benefit from. The bad press and sour taste of a shortage (360's are all marketting, the Best Buy bundles are a rip-off, they're selling for how much on Ebay? etc) equal out the good press of a shortage (uhm... ok, so good press is a little harder to come up with, but I know a lot of people used them as holiday promotions) and technology has never been known for its appreciation over time so an overage hurts just as much.
It will do them no good to have a $900 machine on the shelf with a million machines in the warehouse because the price is just high enough to make the majority (and not the few hundred who paid that much or more for an Xbox) buy it, just as it would do them no good to take a $250-$500 (depending on what speculations you prefer) hit on the machines to generate a 360-like secondary market that they (contrary to conspiracy theorists) don't profit from on Ebay.
It would also do them no good to start with such an artificially low price point because for decades now gamers know the machines start high (and you only buy it because you're really into it, or you get it as a gift, etc) and then start to lower until it gets to the point that practically every household has an installed user base. To start off with that artificially low price point, they'd bork themselves because they couldn't raise the prices to almost-profitable levels without getting HUGE backlash and they would be hard pressed to make up that loss based on software sales.
After all, how much money per disk can Sony possibly make? Then see how many times that number goes into the 250-500 price hit they're supposedly taking and THAT is the average number of games the individual console owner will have to buy, first run (because Sony makes nothing on the used game market.) Lets suppose they make 50%, and I'm pretty sure that's a little inflated considering they're really only getting a cut of the licensing I believe and I'd hope the developers and various levels of retail would soak up most of that $50, of the sale price of $50 (screw the 360's 60 prices) then they would make $25 per disk sold and EACH AVERAGE USER would have to buy 10 first run games, for a total outlay of $500 per user, before they break even on the cost of the console. Thus, the more consoles out there at this ridiculously low price, the more users they would need to buy 10 first run games before the profit kicks in. I'm not representative of the masses I know, but I've never had a console with more than 10 games (except for the NES, but lots of those games were close-outs and second-hand jobs)
Keep in mind, I don't htink that Sony makes anywhere near $25 per game (once you divide the cost of the dev kits per units made and licensing fees how much can they really make? And then what about the thousands, maybe millions, of first run disks that are going to get sold as $20 Greatest Hits) and so that runs the number of games that need to be sold even higher to make up for the hardware loss, the limited time they have to sell the units befor
I had Verizon DSL for about 5 months. I used to have cable a few years ago, and would have had it again in this apartment but because Cable told me they may or may not be able to give me service once they've had 3 weeks for a site check, and even then it would be about 3 months before they'd have the phone service running (part of their all-in-one package they advertise) in my area so I'd still have to go with Verizon for phone.
So I said screw that, Verizon here I come. Phone and some DSL and I'll live without the cable. Then I had to move again 5 months later (sewage pipe break) and told Verizon. They told me that I'd wait about 2 weeks for then to test and see if DSL service would stretch to my new place even though it's only 3 HOUSES FROM WHERE I JUST HAD SERVICE. Half a block. Whatever. The neighbor has a moderately reliable wireless connection for me to use until those two weeks are up.
After those two weeks came and went I checked the order status telling me I placed the order 12 days after I had actually placed it but that it didn't matter because THANKFULLY my service started a couple nights ago after 6 p.m. according to them. Regardless, I didn't have service.
I called the customer service and was told that yeah, they gave away my connection because even though I was just moving, it puts my slot in line out for the next shmuck to get. "yeah, they've been trying to get you in for a few days... even after we cancelled you and started you back up. We really shouldn't have even placed that order for you, I don't know why the sales staff did."
WTF! Couldn't they have told me that ahead of time, like maybe as soon as they discovered that there was no way they could fulfill my order because they had no visible upcoming slots and had to restart my order? Apparently not.
Thankfully my landlord is an ass and informed us that less than a month after we moved in to this replacement apartment that what he meant by "I'll give it to you for $25 less than what I planned on renting it for because you guys are great tenants" was "in less than a month I'm going to inform you of a 20% rent increase (20% like we'd rent this dump for a penny more than what we're paying) so we informed him of our not staying.
So on the phone to the Verizon people: Oh, why do you want to discontinue service? - Because when we moved there was a... - Oh, that's too bad but we enjoyed your patronage - I didn't finish. You gave away our... - I'm sure we didn't mean to but if you ever want to come back to us. - I still haven't finished answering WHY we're not coming back. - Oh, I'm sorry about that sir. So when do you want service shut off?
Some customer service. So when shopping around for cell phones, we went with T-Mobile (wife's choice... the guy offered her a "sweet deal" on a free phone that was maybe a third as good as the other free phones offered by these random companies and with service we can barely use half an hour outside of town... you know, where we live and travel from each day), we're getting the all-in-one service at our new place (where it's only a 6 day wait for installation because we're a little closer to town) and we'll probably do our best to never go back to Verizon, specifically because they SAID they could give us DSL, and their service wasn't that horrible so long as I didn't need them for anything bu they couldn't even be bothered to tell me they couldn't carry through with their offer.
I'd have to disagree with you here... when there is a premium paid for something there is even more incentive to create new supply. People tend to flood a premium market with ever-lower costing product until that market has been flooded and the premium has gone down to the point where it's no longer cost effective to produce it. If widgets are selling for $1,000 and you can make that widget for $20 bucks, you'll start selling them for $500 and get some cash out of it. Then Bill realizes he can create $20 widgets and sell them for $100 and eventually the Widgets are down to $25 and it's no longer valuable for people to enter the market because the profit margin is so low.
The problem here is that the product is usually free (through various forms of P2P, Usenet, websites) because lets be honest, most people realize there's such a paper trail in trying to sell porn (credit cards, server records... once the gov't finds the server BOOM, they have the credit info for all these people that purchased it. Once the gov't finds the porn-owner BOOM, they've got his bookmarks/sources) that it's too risky for money.
Without this money giving KP a price-tag, there's no real incentive to make more other than an underlying desire to create (and distribute) KP. KP creators aren't making the stuff to earn a profit but because they want to.
The sad thing with the industry is that as much as we'd like to see it end, targetting end-users is only effective when it nets connections to distributors and from there the creators. Criminalizing the back-up of KP isn't stopping children from being photographed, it's just giving the end-user another few years in (theoretical) jail (or more likely probation.) It's as effective as making the use of spoons in drug use illegal. You add a few years of jail to the end user but in the end when they get out they're just going to know not to use a spoon/burn a cd.
It's not like the KP end users are sitting at home saying "ah hell, *looking* at KP was as illegal as I can go. Now that making a CD of it is illegal I'm just going to have to quit."
Slashdot Mirror
I get what you're saying, I really do. It's a bit capricious to say "ok, this book was published by an author who apparently underwent no peer review so it does not get wikiprotection but this OTHER book was published by an author who was at least mentioned in this other book so it's valid." There's no rhyme nor reason for the choice, just someone saying that it isn't important enough for wikipedia just because either the moderators (or whatever they call themselves) didn't like the source or realized there weren't a lot of them.
Who are these people to say "oh, it's just one book? Then it doesn't count" and more importantly, are there any lines to be drawn? If it had been cited by a handful of websites, would that be enough viability for the theory? What if those websites only obtained the information from Wikipedia? If I go out tomorrow and print my own book about the concept, which I then get on Amazon, will that be enough to return the article?
But Wikipedia's argument, or at least that of the defenders of deletion, is that it was just one man on a pulpit. If I speak eloquently on how I think blank CDs are, in fact, a veritable mini-world and that burning them reprograms the people into data storage units, my theory would not pass muster and would not belong there. Just printing a pamphlet with my theory on it should not make it valid and does nothing to increase the scientific standing of my belief. Paying for a nice binding also does nothing to increase the scientific standing it just means I had an extra buck fifty per copy. If I make a website promoting my book, it does not make the theory any more credible. And finally, to the Wikipedia argumetn: if I just go to a website and add information about my book, it does not make the theory any more credible. And just because nobody has taken the time to publish an article saying that his theory has no basis and is probably false doesn't make it correct.
It seems like Wikipedia is trying to stand as the gatekeeper between "legitimate" information and a half-million articles that are nothing more than "hey, wouldn't it be cool if the world were, like, totally on the back of a turtle. I'm going to call it turtology and post it to Wikipedia."
As for this article, I personally think that Wikipedia should just own it. Post a new article saying "hey, this man published a book 20 years ago. It was never peer-reviewed, but was subsequently republished in a journal of fringe science in an issue also covering warp drives (although to be honest, I don't know what was actually in that issue, the warp drives was just mentioned in another comment.) In 200x, the author added his article to Wikipedia where it was deleted as an example of original research, prohibited by Wikipedia's terms. News of this long-lasting "error" and it's belated "correction" however had spread to various websites and led to some controversy over the policy against non-original research."
Insert links where appropriate. Maybe even start a list of famous wikipedia controversies. End of story, for now. For the most part, people will forget that this "long term vandalism" had ever happened and it'll be a yet another internet furor (hello YTMD, Star Wars kid, first post) that came, went and now is remembered only in the link tags of slashdotters. Discussing the controversy does not necessarily give the theory any more or less scientific credibility.
This is a new version of an urban legend. You'd be better off with the concept of police entering chat rooms as children and agreeing to have sex with nasty older men, then arresting them (ie, the Dateline scenario)
Don't make up stories and pass them as fact. This scenario wouldn't hold up in court and yes, the porn operator WOULD have legal representation and oh, yeah, the police have better things to do than set up a firefox window with every porn site they can find and then setting a child in front of it to click download on each tab.
Now we have some contrary opinion to the "lots of artists have been asked how much allofmp3 gives them and since they don't answer they must be fairly compensated" of a few posts up, we have ends to investigate if we so choose, etc.
In my post I wasn't trying to insist that I had secret insider knowledge into the world of allofmp3, just that the poster above me (who was basing his entire argument on "lots of artists" not making public denials that they don't get paid from a dubious Russian website) didn't have any knowledge either and probably shouldn't tell others to stick to the facts.
Thank you for actually having some facts to stick to.
And where's your list of poeple who say they HAVE been fairly compensated?
Lots of people (which is Internet for nobody but yourself, and even then only in your head) have asked the government why they killed Elvis and I have not seen one story to indicate they didn't kill him, so thus, it must be true.
You're just picking arbitrarily picking a side and saying "since I haven't seen any proof for either position, my way is right."
My opinion (and based on the same vacuum of official artists stance as yours) is that they lump allofmp3.com in with Kazaa and Limewire and Napster before it and so when they say "stealing our music means we don't get any reward for our work" they are including feel-good-piracy.
Don't tell others to stick to facts when you have none to go on. YOU stick to the facts which is that there is no proof any of this money goes to anyone but webmaster@allofmp3.com.
Because in the end they just pass along the costs to the consumer. Also, the lawsuits are surprisingly cost effective for them anyways. They have one group of attorneys who write up a form letter, costing approximately 500 an hour (assuming they're going for some decent lawyers) then the letters get mass mailed (bulk mailing rates knock the postage price per letter something close to 25 cents each) and then they wait for the Mom or whoever else gets the letter to go out, get a lawyer (at far more reasonable $150 an hour for some local bofunk) and they spend all this money filing motions, etc.
Meanwhile the RIAA has the process down to a science and the same time they file responses to Mom's motions, they're filling a half dozen motions of their own in proceedings against others who are actually guilty. Cost per transaction? Negligible.
The mom, meanwhile, has racked up roughly 2100 or so in legal fees (because it's unlikely her lawyer has handled many of these types of cases and thus spends more time researching and writing briefs) while the RIAA has spent surprisingly less (because they've done so many of these suits before filing the motions are a matter of fill-in-the-blanks now and they're down to roughly postage plus filing fees plus the cost of stuffing envelopes.)
Now, even better is that the average settlement in these cases is what? 5,000? Maybe 10? I've heard a few of the results, but conversely even fewer dismissals so my average may be high or low.
So basically the times they win or settle for a few thousand equal out to the costs they're spending.
And lets be honest for a minute here, in many of these cases there is no real defense. The dismissals I've heard of have been mostly "oh, we don't even own a computer so we couldn't have done it" or "you're suing me but I didn't do it so you should have been suing my child" type stuff.
None of the Slashdot friendly "oh, I run p2p because I think the prices are unfair" or "I use Limewire/Kazaa/the various torrent programs because I'm protesting the RIAA's unfair stand" cuts it in the courts.
The Legal Equation comes to something like
I did it because I don't like the prices = I did it.
So if half of the cases are dismissals (and I believe that number is rather high) and RIAA had to pay the legal fees for all these low-level lawyers out there (none of the Napsterites are hiring Biglaw lawyers) doesn't even scratch the pool of money they've gotten from every scare tactic settlement.
The problem with your analysis is that it's deeply flawed. You're basically taking the last milestone and saying "oh, so this must be what it'll look like now.
Using your logic, I predict that based on sales of the SNES and Sega Genesis that the N64 will win the console wars of it's time, Dreamcast will be a strong second in everyone's homes and this new fangled PS1 must be a new version of *insert failed console here* so it'll bottom out.
It's way too early to play the guessing game. Nintendo is counting on a system that is less than half the price of the other two (Gamecube has always been too close in price points to the XBox and PS2 to get the majority of gamers to say "hmm, for an extra 50 bucks I can get a system with a hard drive/online play/dvd playback/something else.) and actually has "catchy" games (not unlike the recent phenomena of young girls falling in love with Nintendogs and baby boomers enjoying Brain Age on the DS. Yes, they will also have the stigma of "oh, it's the kiddie console" and some people who are upset about it not having HD (but then again, the DS couldn't duplicate the graphics standards of the PSP but look who won there) but eh, some people see the Xbox as the drunk frat boy console too. Also keep in mind that there were many parents who looked at the 1000+ Ebay price tags of 360's last Christmas who will say "200-250? That's a much better value in my eye, and I can afford it too."
The 360 had the initial holy shit factor, followed by the it's-hard-to-find-so-it-must-be-cool factor. Now it has the wait-what-can-I-actually-play-on-it? factor, a bit of bad taste from the initial shortages, well publicized heating/cooling issues and sketchy backwards compatability where everyone's favorite games can't be played BUT stuff from the Olsen Twins is good to go. Depending on which rumor is out on any given days, the 360 either will or will not have a token $50 price drop sometime within the next year. Whether that will be enough to convince people not to upgrade to the Blu-Ray of PS3 or to upgrade from the ultra-cheap Wii who knows.
The PS3 has a bit of Blu-Ray anticipation (about half the price of an actual player) and backwards compatability) and the Playstation name. It's also had a lot of bad fan press from kids who associate Sony Music with Sony Everything Else, from DRM nuts and a little bit of Blu-Ray backlash (the "I can pay 5 bucks more than I originally paid to get a movie that looks a little better, and don't give me any of this oh HD is so great I can't stand to look at regular DVD quality stuff, on the really expensive tvs that only some people have" people.) ALso, I think a lot of people got burned on the 360's core unit/actually good unit dichotemy and will be wary of PS3 using the same strategy. Now they'll know "geez, I know it's only X dollars more than it's competitor, but that's for the bare bones unit and Jimmy insists that all the good stuff is in the higher end unit so it's actually 100+X dollars more than it's competitor."
If Nintendo can get the supply out there for Christmas and a bit of buzz, their sales should no doubt beat the 360's becuase of those early supply issues followed by the nothing-to-play and fire-starting backlash, and it's entirely too possible that they'll narrow down that user base significantly within its first few months out there. Plus, New Super Mario Bros selling tons and tons in it's first month of release has shown that there's still huge cache for nostalgia. Halo 3 may get the FPS/Xbox/Frat Boy demographic (IOW, those that already have the system), but tell today's late 20-somethings that for 200 or so they can play all their old school favorites and you'll be surprised. It's like the morons who pay $20 in Walmart for the joystick things that let tehm play Pacman on their TV... yeah we know you can emulate it on your computer for free, and yeah we know $20 is a bit much for just Pacman, but they still sell.
I realize that this sounds like a Nintendo fanboy post, but I just want to point out that basing predictions ENTIRELY on past sales and not on marketting, the product itself, the image, etc, is crap in deciding console wars.
Interesting, as far as I could tell your point was
"Copying of works is necessary for them to live on in perpetuity, it only becomes an issue worthy of prosecution when it eats into the copyright owners expected profits significantly." or, (1) unless you have a huge dollar figure, your rights are squat, and (2) there is a danger in things NOT living on in perpetuity unless copied profusely by bloggers.
"People who expect 100% of their copyrights are being both unreasonable and unfair to the greater population who deserve for these works of culture to be preserved for longer periods." or (3) nobody deserves complete control of what they make/create/own because others could benefit in a grand sense, (4) that the greater population *DESERVES* the right to copy+paste large chunks of other people's works, often without attribution because they're somehow bettered by it.
"I do not dispute the value of copyright, just the attitude that anyone deserves 100% of the right
to produce copies, or that they are somehow hurt by a bunch of bloggers." or (5) that you agree copyright is good, you just don't like the protection it affords content creators and thus it's ok to disregard copyright.
So, those were the 5 points I picked out and I replied to. I'm sorry you can't be "arsed" to read, and that you're in general an arse. I'd explain copyright in terms of "software goods" for you but since you're just vague enough to say almost nothing other that "huh, no, I disagree with your argument because I may be somehow indirectly involved in some form of content creation."
Now you're trying to be insulting and dismissive by saying I wasted my time thinking about what I was going to say instead of just posting an insulting slashtroll post saying "you're stupid, you talk too much and you're wasting your time because I have no intention of ever reading it (and I'm afraid that my argument doesn't hold up under any scrutiny and that you're right)", that I'm a greedy moron because I believe people have rights to their property (even though I do acknowledge that those rights will be infringed upon and that sometimes that infringment is for good reasons.)
You can't just insert "oh, I was only talking about infringments of 5% or less so it's useless for you to explain property rights to me, but not useless for me to say I disagree with them and thus they don't exist" and make it so.
Oddly enough, you're missing apparently the point of the original article which is that bloggers are block-quoting the hell out of other people's content, slapping "BTW, from CNN" on this SOMETIMES and that on these sites, the amount of original content is usually less than 50% (and from my experience much, MUCH less and often the attribution is the only original content) and considering the fact that most online news pieces are fewer than 1000 words (the number is somewhere closer to 500 words and you can check that by going to CNN and wordcounting an half-dozen or so articles) standard block quoting that may appear ok is actually well outside fair use.
Your little insult was, according to my wordcount, a little over 80 words. On almost any news article, something that size (5 sentances in 4 lines), directly lifted from the original source, is between 10 and 20%. Go down the front page of Slashdot alone and you'll see that just the ones that say "from the article" the stolen content is roughly 80-90 words, with one short one looking like it's around 50 words and one long one looking to be around 100. That's just the block quotes attributed to the article. Now, these people have stolen 10-20% of another person's content, directly lifting it from the full article, sometimes attributing it, adding nothing to it (although Slashdot is including "Reader says: Crack is bad. From the article: akdfjhakjghakljhglafde" and giving them a link to their website) and knowing that most of the Slashdot readers (apparently you included) won't actually read the full article before spouting off.
Now, let's see... to get
And who are you to decide what should live on in perpetuity? You have no right to decide what and how stuff should live on. I can go out and buy a rare Picasso painting (ok, well, I could with a few hundred million more dollars) and shred it. I could set fire to it and I pee on the ashes. That is my right as owner of that painting. I did not buy all the rights to it, except for the right to destroy it. I bought all the rights. If I write a book I have the write to publish AS WELL as the right to not publish. They don't create something with a bundle of rights EXCEPT the right to do as they want. If the owners of the rights wish a property to live on in perpetuity it is THEIR right to decide that and because THEY have the right to release their rights into the public domain they can make that decision.
Just because YOU don't like their rights doesn't mean they don't have them. If I'm a free spirited nu-hippy and I don't think you should have the right to tell people they can't sleep on your lawn (what? You're not hurt by me sleeping on your lawn. It's not depriving you of your lawn's use because you're not using it when I'm sleeping, it's better for the public that I sleep on a nice safe lawn than in a dangerous alley) it doesn't mean that I suddenly have the right. It may be unreasonable (you have to patrol your lawn at random times of the night when you would normally be sleeping to make sure I'm not sleeping on it) and it may be unfair to the general public (without having to pay for homes to sleep in we could funnel far more money into health care and scientific research) but it like it or not, them's the breaks.
Just because it's easy to copy and paste everyone's stuff doesn't mean it's legal.
And copying of works is not necessary to ensure things live on in perpetuity. BBC News can keep an article in their archives forever, preserving it as they have the right to seeing as how it's THEIR RIGHT, and it is in no way benefited or furthered by a hundred bloggers copying the same thing as they paid for (in content creation or in Feed Fees.) The New Yorker just released a mammoth collection of every issue up until February 2005 and they did so without the benefit of decades of bloggers "preserving" their work for them. Do they have to register their intent, 80 years earlier and well before the technology they're going to use, with YOU to ensure that in the meantime you don't "preserve" the profits from their work?
Yes, in some cases copying is a grand thing (Dr. Who episodes, reclaimed from BBC destruction, thanks to fan copies and other sources) and people sometimes wish that someone had preserved their stuff but eh, that's the breaks. Who are you or anyone else to decide that there stuff will be preserved, against their will, and often without attribution, simply because "society could benefit" (which is as generalized an argument as I've ever heard) and maybe they would have regretted it later.
If you owned a website you would think it's assinine if some kind of law was passed saying "anything you post to the internet must be archived for at least 10 years or mirrored on at least two seperate sites before you can delete it."
Another problem you're ignoring (other than the fact that property rights, including intellectual property, includes the right to not use it, that your "we need to copy it as far and wide as possible to save it" argument is unfounded) is that not everything deserves perpetuity. Yes, sometimes BBC and CNN go into articles and update them without creating a savelog or publishing a seperate correction page but these bloggers aren't "preserving history" as an impartial act (they too have the ability to go in and change things later) or in any kind of social protection scheme (ie, rechecking it against BBC alterations to ensure we don't have a 1984 situation with news being rewritten daily to reflect modern wars) but they're copying it for cheap content. If you even attempt to argue that bloggers are attempting to operate as this sort of watch
Other people always get around to saying what I was going to say only quicker and briefer. I was going to say that theft not equaling copyright infringement is, like most of the law, a matter of how you define the issue and I was going to go on about how the software company would say that you're buying a set of disks that enable you to play a particular game, while your argument would be that you bought the right to play the game.
There's all kinds of ways to define theft and the current intellectual theft movement tries to define it taking anything physical (you walk off with a CD = theft) while content producers argue it's taking something that you don't have the right to take (you download a copy of a song you have no right to download.) Your argument that you could not physically buy another copy from them, even though you were willing wouldn't necessarily save you in court. That is just like saying that as soon as a book or video goes out of print you have the right to download it from the internet. All squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares. My argument is that unauthorized takings are theft (rectangle). Your argument is that unauthorized takings are only theft if it's physical (square, fits inside nicely)
In law however, theft is pretty general and is defined as any unauthorized taking of someone else's property (and yes, intellectual property IS property) with the intent to keep it (rectangle.) Your "it's only theft if physical" argument comes from internet law ("you legally have 24 hours to delete anything you download from this site", "you can download this full version of MS Office if it's for educational purposes", which personally I find hilarious because if that were legal, MS probably wouldn't need to offer an edition aimed at students and teachers... you know, the educational market) and I would NOT recomend you use internet law in court. It is not accurate. It is wrong. It will not work. You will lose your case.
Repeat after me: Po-tay-to, po-tah-to. You can argue that theft is only physical deprivation all you want, just as I can argue that theft is any unauthorized taking all I want. I've found that most pirates (not that I'm accusing... hell, for all I know I'm more of a pirate than you) try to look for verbal loopholes ("educational purposes", "backup copies", "it only happens if you physically take it") but get VERY testy when you try to demonstrate that semantics aren't their best friends. In this case, it's more than semantics, it's a flat out misunderstanding of the elements of the law (which has some fluctuation between jurisdictions, but trust me, piracy is illegal.)
Now, copyright infringment is the issue here, and yes, it is violated in addition to general principles of theft. It brings up the old example of a guy on probation with a gun in his car. He's doing one action: keeping a gun in his car's glove box, but he's guilty of multiple crimes. Possession of a firearm while on probation, possession of a concealed weapon, possession of a concealed weapon while on probation. Which counts he gets nailed with only serve to determine how much time he spends in jail. Here, we have a variety of things we can call the crime, but it doesn't make it any less criminal and it doesn't make any individual charge less valid.
By your logic (it's ok to download a copy because it wasn't available to you), it would be ok to download any Hollywood blockbuster during the 6 months after it goes out of the theatre but before the DVD release just because you *would* see it in the theatre but darn it, it's not being shown anywhere and you *would* buy it on DVD but darn it, the DVD isn't out yet.
Now, you're going to argue "oh, but what I want is so old", they would argue "what's old?" If it's a movie Person A wants to see, and they'll either buy the DVD on release day or see it in the theatre opening weekend then to them, movies like King Kong are already old. Some TV shows still aren't out on DVD after 10, 20, 30 years and so arguably t
I spent a few minutes trying to call up the original article so I could respond with a thoughtful statement about how the original article says it's "the new plagiarism."
And then I read your bit and realized I didn't need to. It's amazing how many people don't seem to understand that the New Something shouldn't be the Old Something because then it would just be the Old Something. Maybe the article should try and coin a new phrase for the phenomena like "polypasting" or "prolificopy" or something. That way everyone would know it's something not quite plagiarism.
The original article isn't saying "to take someone's work is plagiarism" it's saying "there's a new wrinkle in plagiarism, one in which bloggers of all kinds are block quoting chunks of material and SOMETIMES attributing, sometimes not." (not an actual quote, but from what I managed to read it's the article's premise.)
Of course, now I'm going to add my take on the situation.
Yes, the majority of the news sites get information from their AP feed and paste it. It's what happens. Do we really need CBS, ABC, NBC, Fox News, CNN, BBC, and who knows who else each over at News Point A interviewing the same three guys involved in the same story or is it sometimes better to just have the AP or Reuters write the story, give them their cut and be done with it.
Justifying wholesale theft of copyrighted works as some people because "in two years" their link might go down is indistinguishable from the people who say it's "legal" to host their collection of roms because nobody makes the original Nintendo any more (I wonder how the rom-sites will change their justification now that virtually every major game company has some retrogaming solution available, whether it's those plug-n-play tv things, Xbox Live, Gametap, Nintendo's upcoming game-download thingie) or that it would be legal to download and torrent all of CNN's content (because after all, their logo indicates it's their content, right?) because they only air their articles for a day or so at most and after that it's gone.
Websites can go away, just like books go out of print, and movies and TV shows can go out of distribution. Whether you see copyright infingement of any of this as a good thing depends on what side of the coin you're on. For every "OMG! I can't believe I almost wasn't able to get this vital information because the original website was going to delete the article" person, there's another person saying "hey, I spent time reading, researching, maybe even interviewing the players for more perspective, all so that my readers would get content I created (and possibly click on my adsense), and Jimbo stole it all, slapped a quick *not my work* label on it (and possibly a click on his adsense) and I get bubkiss."
But back to my first point, I agree, New does not equal Old.
I was going to mention the book market when I first read his response! It pumps out stuff, from one extreme to another (erotica - romance - chick lit - memoirs - fiction - mysteries - thrillers - science fiction - horror, all with a few stops along the way) and if you've ever been to a library book sale you're going to see a wide selection of crud that's almost indistinguishable and a bunch of books that were either good or popular but have been discarded (this year I've seen more copies of Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood than I'd ever want to, a few years ago it was The Corrections.)
This is what a casual reader gets wehn surrounded by poorly organized/catagorized books, or what a manga fan finds in a comic shop that just alphabetizes everything or a comic fan finds in the 5 plus racks of manga at a B&N.
I can name more best sellers or critical supernovas in the book world than I can in comics because there's literally hundreds more book-books in print than comic book tales
To add to the list everyone else is making: Empire (dystopia), Wanted (anti-super-hero rated-mature-for-immature-language, action story), David Boring (or any Clowes stuff... it's just weird fiction), Sleeper for some espionage triller stuff, Strangehaven for a little of that old time Twin Peaks/League of Gentlemen type dark and edgy small town weirdness.
Now, the average non-comic person isn't going to pick up Wanted and say "oh, this is interested, let's pick up Kingdom Come too because it's like the mirror image story" but it's likely that I'm going to pick up Berserk, let's say, and then scratch my head before realizing AH! Rave Master would go great with that! Your store has all the Mecha stuff together? Awesome, my old store had all the Vertigo together, then all the other mature stuff next shelf over. Currently, I get my stuff online so if I don't know something's out there in the smae vein, I don't get it but because I know what I like, I usually find about it quickly.
Is it easy to get lost in the not-so-good stuff? Yeah, just like everywhere else. It's easier to find a book if you know about it, easier to find a TV-show if you're looking for it.
Was going to mod on this but decided to reply instead. Almost everything you said is a mirror image of why many comic fans think manga is... well... bleh. The whole "inteligent stories only get read by a few people" argument can be tossed right back at you. I've seen some anime that was pretty good, and some that was pretty bad and nope, no way to tell it apart on the shelf. Most book stores (where the majority of fans get it from) don't even seperate the borderline porno/mature readers from the regular stuff so parents depend on the mercy of shrink wrap remaining on to tell them their son who likes Naruto might be a little too young Eden (although I'm sure there's worse stuff).
Comic fans say we read western comics because we're sick of the tournament of the book manga stuff. It's worse in anime I know, but Christmas! do you know how annoying the character wakes up, learns he has a great destiny/stumbles into a great destiny, steps out the door, makes 3 or four lifelong friends and sets out on his quest to find all the increasingly powerful magic playing cards, collect the increasingly colorful crystals, win each rung of the increasingly dangerous tournament, battle bigger robots, collect prettier creatures stories get?
You know you like Gundam? Great, some people know they like X-titles, some know they like IDW horror, some know they like DC's Vertigo line. For the general non-comic reader, they all look a like and Astonishing X-Men could just be Fables in a new cover but understand that for the non-manga reader Fruits Basket and Vampire Game all look alike.
Manga thrives because it throws content at readers by the bucketload with TONS of derivitives (Gundam knock-offs, tournament books, romance books of varying combinations (guy-girl, girl-guy, guy-girl-girl-girl-girl, guy-guy-guy, guy/girl-girl-guy-girl, etc) in a cheap disposable format and then what's well received gets collected and THEN the stuff from that lot that gets well received gets translated and brought over.
The American comic market works the opposite, by only pumping out stuff that either (a) gets good reviews/press so they can market themselves as highbrow or (b) sells big numbers. If it does neither, and sometimes if it only does one or the other, it gets axed. The stuff that goes international tends to be Ultimate stuff (good reviews by and large, good sellers), Sandman type stuff (critical darlings-turned-best sellers) and the like with the rest shaking out.
9 times from 10, the guy saying "western comics" need to be more like the Manga market doesn't know what the Manga market is like. They think it's just a hundred awesome writers pumping out hit series after hit series and pretend that whatever they're not reading MUST be just as good as what they are reading by virtue of being the same format. I think comic fans are at least a triffle more realistic and understand that there's still some crap out there that's only published because the author's thumb goes up the right butts or the publisher realizes that a particular copyright is more important than the content.
As for the marketing mature stuff/non-super-hero to the public, yeah, that's what the industry is trying with League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Hellboy, Road to Perdition, V for Vendetta, History of Violence, etc, etc. For every Spider-Man, there's a Ghost World, for every Superman Returns, there's an American Splendor. Actually, I think there's MORE, but you get the point. Manga isn't cross-demographic either. It sells mainly to (a) 30-year-old dork-type guys, (b) teen girls, (c) teen boys. Comics sell mainly to (a) 30-year-old dork type guys and (b) teen boys. The major companies always try a girl campaign and it never works.
And if your argument is that Americans aping manga style is what needs to die then that comes up short too because MOST companies tried to ape it, realized it wasn't the art that translated to sales, and dropped it. Compare most works pumped out in the past 3 years to thier 2000 counterparts and
then something tells me your girlfriend isn't as satisfied as you'd like to think. Then again, the fact that she's your girlfriend tells me that.
"had been on at me as regards doing what he coined 'HTML Ezine' for a long time - I had been a bit of a purist about it but he finally won me around to his mode of thinking. "
"people had tried to produce a site along these lines but had either become totally bias, or been maintained badly (lack of updates etc)."
I make more than enough mistakkes (I'm going to leave the extra k because of the irony of writing a complaint about editing and non-edited stuff) but this is simple copy (in the industry sense of referring to bulk wordage as copy) with mistakes that could be caught on an easy pass-through.
And, as a personal issue, I hate when people use a cliche but try to cover it up with some "clever" avoidance. The cliche (should have an accent, but doesn't, just to continue pointinng out my own mistakes) is "way of thinking", but by changing way to mode, you're not hiding the cliche or making a unique phrase, you're just drawing attention to how awkward the cover-up is.
Now, as far as cliches are concerned, they are a perfectly fine form of verbal (and non-verbal) shorthand that convey a commonly held notion (ie, it's easier to say "way of thinking" than "the collection of my own thought processes on that particular issue") and not nearly as bad as high school teachers will lead you to believe (or, "try to convince your thoughtstream that this is a proper, and in some cases, the only proper, way") but if you're still so set against using them, you have to hide them a little better.
I apologize for excessive comma usage, and the abuse of parenthetical phrases, but I'm not putting out a thinly veiled press release posing as a community awareness feature.
Oh good god man. Don't post about how we are supposed to look not at a person's dress but at their actions and then give a summary of Einstein based solely on a picture from Slashdot and your own view of how hard his life as a pre-Slashdot Slashdotter must have been.
I can't remember which college off hand, but didn't he teach at a "straight-laced, suit-and-tie" college full of clean-cut students that didn't lynch him? And didn't he interact with a ton of "straight-laced" fine gents in just about everything he did, from publishing to research to government work? Isn't he the guy famous for always wearing a suit, even though they were all the same style because he didn't want to waste the brain energy?
Of course, Einstein was theoretically "worth" putting up with. His hair being wild was ok becuase his product was worth more than his haircut. The product many of these sandel-wearers are peddling is not so much. Oh, sure, it may have it's benefits but with Einstein you had a trade off:
Good: Beyond his time theoretician
Bad: Wild hair
But with teh sandel-wearers of this argument the trade-off isn't quite so one sided
Good: Theoretical benefits to implimenting a system that does what they think their current system can already do.
Bad: A parasitic tech-division that can't be erased or laid off (yet) because they sold us on this software that only they could fix when something goes wrong, and wait, why can't we do that with what we already have? Oh, and all the other problems (breakign employees of the Microsoft learning curve for some end-user stuff, can't just send teh office manager in to hit reboot when something goes wrong because nobody's sure what that'll do)
Now, when companies can get someone willing to what the sandal-wearing hippie who can't be replaced becuase he's just so damn good at his job (a) cheaper, (b) faster, (c) in "the company spirit" (meaning dressed with some self-respect, willing to help his fellow co-workers instead of looking down at them for not knowing how to Mozillafox while cc'ing a distro of Buntutu) they'll say "hmm... well Larry's done the work OK so far but, well, I think John can do it better/cheaper/faster/with a better fit"
You're ignoring the fact that the article is using "the look" (ie, sandals and ponytails) to evoke a certain stereotype of worker. It's not saying that people with ponytails and sandals are bad workers, just that "you know... that type of guy... the hippie type" is a type of mindset that is harmful to the movement. It's the same way when you're talking about corporate structure you say a "suit and tie" kind of description, and when you're talking about the American youth you might use a Good Charlotte description (if the year were 2005) or talk about "the shaggy-haired iPod wearing bastards."
And whether the sandal and ponytail set will admit it or not, they have thier own preconceptions. They're not going to go to the doctor with his ears distended to his jaw line, and they probably wouldn't like being stuck on a project with MC Jazzy Jahsay who's got on more metal than the server.
As for your list, I would shutter to think of your preconceptions. I would rather have a suit-and-tie set do focus groups and research and say "here's something interesting that's just taking off... lets throw money at it and see if it catches fire" (ie, the foundation of the internet and everything from Amazon to Ebay) than to have a Slashdotter (at least hte one your list conjures up for me) bust into my office and say "Dude! I just saw on freshmeat this new paleoraid-dashboard-torrent-wiki that would look so shagged if we implement it!" "What's it do?" "It parses the binhex-numerology through Seti@home to project a poly-linear gateway for overclocking, and it might cut down on server load according to Bob who tried it on an office of 3 and doesn't have to babysit it any more."
I would also like to have the dumb-jock who knows that if he doesn't meet the standards of the rest of the team, he's likely to
What you fail to realize despite your immense brain and god-like powers is that your competitors, who are smarter than you, know what I and people like me want (and what you need us to want to pay for) and are more than willing to put on some damn shoes and "play the part" it takes to impress us. Colleges are crapping out computer folk every May and December and just becaue you haven't noticed any closed doors in your 20 years in the future doesn't mean that there haven't been (a) better opportunities you weren't ever even in the running for, and (b) opportunities you're never going to be in the running for.
Things like need and demnad are two way streets that NOBODY on Slashdot seems to understand. Yes, in your view of things you're a vendor able to charge X for what you have to offer (Y) and we're willing to pay. In our view of things, you are willing to pay us in so many hours/programs/whatever of Y for all that X we have standing around in our bank accounts. You're only as valuable as we make you and you're just as we're as valuable as you let us be. You set your prices, we set ours and in the end babies get made.
You've probably got another 20 years minimum before you can retire (You do have a 401k or an IRA right? You did think about savings plans for retirement right? You did hook yourself up with a nice company offering a brilliant pension after 40 years right? Course you did... smart fellow like you...) so I wish you well and I hope you don't get replaced in too ironic a manner.
PS, you don't even know what half of our jobs are, just like we don't care what yours is. Many of us love seeing people who "can do our jobs" come crawling when they actually need our help. When your arteries harden, you find yourself in jail, you have some tricky tax question or your car is making a skree-pump-pump-eeeerrrrrkkkk sound, I'm glad to know that you won't need any of our help.
Linux users are the clients for Dell computers (ok, not really, but they're a market Dell would apparently like) because Linux users can conusme Dell's product so yes, in some way the Dell is the vendor. The post way up was in reference to Dell being the client for the Linux community's product (ie, various distros) becasue they are the ones that are consuming (I don't want to say purchasing or using since they're really not doing that) and so yes, you are both making points, but need to understand the context before you disagree.
This entire article was about how Dell, in the role of client, trying to decide how best to serve their own clients, thinks that Linux needs to be more "user friendly" I guess is the term and that if Linux as a vendor of the Linux environment could make it a little more compatable, etc, they would happily jump on and that maybe, just maybe the ordinary home user, Dell's actual market, would be more likely to jump on, while what is beign argued is that Dell, as the vender, needs to offer more distros, more this, more that.
The problem is that we're dealing with two seperate user bases, the linux and the non... to please the non, Dell would have to sell more user friendly ones, easier to configure, whatever other reasons he listed and to please the linux ones he'd ahve to do the opposite and so like any business that hopes to stay alive, it tries to keep the customers it has trying to embrace new ones to the best of it's ability, thus it goes up the chain to ITS vendors asking for what it wants to serve those needs.
Just because something is both a painting and a map it doesn't mean that only one label applies or that it only serves one role.
Interesting because my post was meant to be slightly misrepresentative so that I could root out the hidden MS fans... the battle begins.
Wrong on both counts. I'm just a guy who likes to set things right. I fix the world, one slashdot post at a time. If Slashdot had a Bullshit Brigade, I would be it's president.
Ok, that's high-fallutin' but the point is, it's not something personal (except when it is) I just feel the need to right wrongs and make the world a better place.
You have your uses. For instance, right now all I can think of is Riff Raff saying "He didn't like me. He NEVER liked me!" And what a wonderful gift that is, given freely from you to me. I'll treasure this.
What? No, I actually like MS. I use Office all the time just because I'm familiar with it and so are most of the people that will be on the receiving end of anything I send. I think Bill Gates is doing some good things with his untold wealth and I'm very comfortable staying on Windows because it does everything I need it to. Granted, I haven't enjoyed the X-Box, but that's a different matter altogether.
Caveat emptor means the buyer beware. It's a general disclosure principle in most aspects of the law, specifically in real property and contracts, that says the buyer is not under a duty to make sure YOU know everything that could possibly concern that which you are buying. It's the court's way of saying YOU as the buyer needs to take some initiative to make sure you're getting a good product because YOU as the buyer are the one that will be harmed if you didn't make a prudent and informed decision.
As for ethics, nobody is buying stock on your word. NOBODY. You don't have a duty to disclose your ownership of MS stock because you're not creating some kind of reliance in us upon your word wherein your status as an MS stockholder makes us suspicious of conflict of interest. It's not like we have reason to believe you're neutral or that otherwise you'd be misrepresenting yourself by not telling us.
It's not relevant at all. You want to pretend it's relevant because you want us to be impressed. That's why you're throwing out that BS 15k range of stock value.
The ethical thing is to tell us truth about a situation when that truth has an impact on the situation. Supreme Court justices tell us their stock holdings when there's a potential conflict of interest because their decision may have some effect on the US. YOU telling us how much money you'd like to have invested in MS is equal to me posting "PS, I own a Ford and plan to buy another when this one dies" every time I mention cars because hey, that was a huge 5k-20k investment I made in that company, or that I took out student loans through one bank (becuase hey, that's a huge 16k-130k investment in that company) or that I took out a mortgage through another bank (because hey, that's a huge 1k-250k investment in that company.)
Your logic is so illogical it's like, I'm having trouble even semi-seriously attempting to take your concept of ethics seriously, it's like a doctor walking in, seeing that you have Nikes on and then telling you he prefers Converse and just wants you to know that despite his preference in shoes, he's going to try to not kill you on the operating table.
This costco http://www.costco.com/ ? Because looking around (and granted it wasn't an all encompassing survey of the landscape or anything) but they don't have all that great a price. PS2 with roughly $100 in addons: 219. On Amazon, PS2 individually 129, plus roughly $100 for the add-ons.
Mostly it looked like the standard $5 off on video games you can get at any of the warehouse stores. The only thing that I saw that WERE good deals.
Also, the video game industry has the power to set its own price for (a) games and (b) consoles. That's why when the PS2 went down to $200, it went down everywhere. Same with it's drop to 150, and now it's apparent drop to 129. Same thing happened when every store in every town dropped the Dreamcast to $100, and then down to $50. Happens with most games too.
Video games aren't a price competition model. If it was, then the stores would rely more on selling the units (selling units means selling at least a few more games) instead of selling bundles (with the high mark-up accessories like joysticks and memory cards) then when the X-Box 360 came out, Walmart or some other store would have marked the price down $25 and reaped thousands upon thousands more pre-orders (which would have been filled proportionatly because of the shortage yes, but at the same proportion they would have at any other store)
You must have just been very lucky to get that bundle, but I wouldn't expect anyone else to duplicate that with a PS3 for a while. I'd use the 360 price for comparison, but they're not offering it on their website so I can't check it against other stores.
Sony saw that with the holidays and a moderate buzz for the hardware (because nobody was talking about its games) that XBox sold quite through its (yes under-shipped) quantities and even managed to drive a huge secondary market, thus Sony knows that they can price their PS3 at
(a) the same price the 360 started for (because by then the people spending money on these gamers would have saved enough money to go back out and get the newest plattform)
OR
(b) more than that becuase they're going to (at least say they are) offering features/bonuses the Xbox doesn't.
Not less than. They're can't afford to go for in-home saturation with this thing becuase that's a huge loss that would take them oodles to recoup, not with those features and that price. They're going to sell the unit for the highest price their analysts predict the market will pay for it WITH the understanding that they want to sell through the units they'll be able to produce. Shortages and overages are both things that Sony won't benefit from. The bad press and sour taste of a shortage (360's are all marketting, the Best Buy bundles are a rip-off, they're selling for how much on Ebay? etc) equal out the good press of a shortage (uhm... ok, so good press is a little harder to come up with, but I know a lot of people used them as holiday promotions) and technology has never been known for its appreciation over time so an overage hurts just as much.
It will do them no good to have a $900 machine on the shelf with a million machines in the warehouse because the price is just high enough to make the majority (and not the few hundred who paid that much or more for an Xbox) buy it, just as it would do them no good to take a $250-$500 (depending on what speculations you prefer) hit on the machines to generate a 360-like secondary market that they (contrary to conspiracy theorists) don't profit from on Ebay.
It would also do them no good to start with such an artificially low price point because for decades now gamers know the machines start high (and you only buy it because you're really into it, or you get it as a gift, etc) and then start to lower until it gets to the point that practically every household has an installed user base. To start off with that artificially low price point, they'd bork themselves because they couldn't raise the prices to almost-profitable levels without getting HUGE backlash and they would be hard pressed to make up that loss based on software sales.
After all, how much money per disk can Sony possibly make? Then see how many times that number goes into the 250-500 price hit they're supposedly taking and THAT is the average number of games the individual console owner will have to buy, first run (because Sony makes nothing on the used game market.) Lets suppose they make 50%, and I'm pretty sure that's a little inflated considering they're really only getting a cut of the licensing I believe and I'd hope the developers and various levels of retail would soak up most of that $50, of the sale price of $50 (screw the 360's 60 prices) then they would make $25 per disk sold and EACH AVERAGE USER would have to buy 10 first run games, for a total outlay of $500 per user, before they break even on the cost of the console. Thus, the more consoles out there at this ridiculously low price, the more users they would need to buy 10 first run games before the profit kicks in. I'm not representative of the masses I know, but I've never had a console with more than 10 games (except for the NES, but lots of those games were close-outs and second-hand jobs)
Keep in mind, I don't htink that Sony makes anywhere near $25 per game (once you divide the cost of the dev kits per units made and licensing fees how much can they really make? And then what about the thousands, maybe millions, of first run disks that are going to get sold as $20 Greatest Hits) and so that runs the number of games that need to be sold even higher to make up for the hardware loss, the limited time they have to sell the units befor
I had Verizon DSL for about 5 months. I used to have cable a few years ago, and would have had it again in this apartment but because Cable told me they may or may not be able to give me service once they've had 3 weeks for a site check, and even then it would be about 3 months before they'd have the phone service running (part of their all-in-one package they advertise) in my area so I'd still have to go with Verizon for phone.
So I said screw that, Verizon here I come. Phone and some DSL and I'll live without the cable. Then I had to move again 5 months later (sewage pipe break) and told Verizon. They told me that I'd wait about 2 weeks for then to test and see if DSL service would stretch to my new place even though it's only 3 HOUSES FROM WHERE I JUST HAD SERVICE. Half a block. Whatever. The neighbor has a moderately reliable wireless connection for me to use until those two weeks are up.
After those two weeks came and went I checked the order status telling me I placed the order 12 days after I had actually placed it but that it didn't matter because THANKFULLY my service started a couple nights ago after 6 p.m. according to them. Regardless, I didn't have service.
I called the customer service and was told that yeah, they gave away my connection because even though I was just moving, it puts my slot in line out for the next shmuck to get. "yeah, they've been trying to get you in for a few days... even after we cancelled you and started you back up. We really shouldn't have even placed that order for you, I don't know why the sales staff did."
WTF! Couldn't they have told me that ahead of time, like maybe as soon as they discovered that there was no way they could fulfill my order because they had no visible upcoming slots and had to restart my order? Apparently not.
Thankfully my landlord is an ass and informed us that less than a month after we moved in to this replacement apartment that what he meant by "I'll give it to you for $25 less than what I planned on renting it for because you guys are great tenants" was "in less than a month I'm going to inform you of a 20% rent increase (20% like we'd rent this dump for a penny more than what we're paying) so we informed him of our not staying.
So on the phone to the Verizon people: Oh, why do you want to discontinue service?
- Because when we moved there was a...
- Oh, that's too bad but we enjoyed your patronage
- I didn't finish. You gave away our...
- I'm sure we didn't mean to but if you ever want to come back to us.
- I still haven't finished answering WHY we're not coming back.
- Oh, I'm sorry about that sir. So when do you want service shut off?
Some customer service. So when shopping around for cell phones, we went with T-Mobile (wife's choice... the guy offered her a "sweet deal" on a free phone that was maybe a third as good as the other free phones offered by these random companies and with service we can barely use half an hour outside of town... you know, where we live and travel from each day), we're getting the all-in-one service at our new place (where it's only a 6 day wait for installation because we're a little closer to town) and we'll probably do our best to never go back to Verizon, specifically because they SAID they could give us DSL, and their service wasn't that horrible so long as I didn't need them for anything bu they couldn't even be bothered to tell me they couldn't carry through with their offer.
I'd have to disagree with you here... when there is a premium paid for something there is even more incentive to create new supply. People tend to flood a premium market with ever-lower costing product until that market has been flooded and the premium has gone down to the point where it's no longer cost effective to produce it. If widgets are selling for $1,000 and you can make that widget for $20 bucks, you'll start selling them for $500 and get some cash out of it. Then Bill realizes he can create $20 widgets and sell them for $100 and eventually the Widgets are down to $25 and it's no longer valuable for people to enter the market because the profit margin is so low.
The problem here is that the product is usually free (through various forms of P2P, Usenet, websites) because lets be honest, most people realize there's such a paper trail in trying to sell porn (credit cards, server records... once the gov't finds the server BOOM, they have the credit info for all these people that purchased it. Once the gov't finds the porn-owner BOOM, they've got his bookmarks/sources) that it's too risky for money.
Without this money giving KP a price-tag, there's no real incentive to make more other than an underlying desire to create (and distribute) KP. KP creators aren't making the stuff to earn a profit but because they want to.
The sad thing with the industry is that as much as we'd like to see it end, targetting end-users is only effective when it nets connections to distributors and from there the creators. Criminalizing the back-up of KP isn't stopping children from being photographed, it's just giving the end-user another few years in (theoretical) jail (or more likely probation.) It's as effective as making the use of spoons in drug use illegal. You add a few years of jail to the end user but in the end when they get out they're just going to know not to use a spoon/burn a cd.
It's not like the KP end users are sitting at home saying "ah hell, *looking* at KP was as illegal as I can go. Now that making a CD of it is illegal I'm just going to have to quit."