No one in their right mind would design a kiosk that needs employee attention every 5-10 minutes. I mean, if the WalMart or BestBuy guy has to run over there to restart it constantly, then it's either a massive waste of his time or else there's the serious risk that the game will stay frozen for a long period of time. I did a little test last time I was in Best Buy. We saw that the PS3 was frozen when we walked in. 90 minutes later, we ambled out, and the PS3 was frozen at exactly the same screen.
A kiosk is supposed to be hands-off for employees. Requiring a employee-managed kiosk is a bad idea.
The problem is that 20 years, or 17 years, or even 10 years, is simply too long in the modern scientific world. It may have taken 20 years back in the 1950s or the 1970s for these sorts of things to (A) turn a profit while (B) not stagnating the scientific community, but that balance does not work well today. A more reasonable compromise might be one of the following:
A shorter term for the patent (5-8 years maybe?)
A statutory license, as we have with "cover songs". You get $X whenever someone uses your test, and that number is set by law (and set at a rather low level)
Abandon patents altogether, and the government pays you a set amount of money (either set by law, or by medical committee) as a reward for coming up with these sorts of tests.
Well, you see, that whole "FUD" thing is sort of a big deal. We may just dismiss FUD as spouting, but "OMG they might sue us" is going to scare the crap out of potential inventors, and also can dissuade people from taking on a browser or OS that they could get sued over. Just because we know that there's likely little to worry about doesn't mean that the Pointy-Haired Boss in the corner office knows that. It also has a level of risk-taking involved. Slashdotters have a higher risk tolerance than business people do with this sort of stuff. A.01% chance of a ten million dollar lawsuit is not something that a business wants to get behind.
If you use infringing software, there are two risks - the first is that you get sued (which is very, very unlikely), and the second is that the maintainer of your software folds because of legal pressure. That screws you over pretty badly because you have to migrate somewhere else.
You assume that average prices is the criteria. It might instead be "everyone needs some form of broadband". If the cable and phone companies have a requirement to serve everyone then that forces them to invest in cheaper ways to serve people efficiently. Additionally, it provides everyone with broadband access, and makes the Internet at high-speed a near assurance in America, just as the potential for phone service is now. That's more important than average price for customers, because "average price" ignores the fact that for some customers, the price is infinite.
If in a given field, a company is making excessive profits, the fact that that field is so profitable naturally leads it to draw in other companies. These new companies then undercut - just a little - the existing companies, to steal their customers. This is the beginning of the virtuous (for the customer) cycle of price cutting until companies cannot reduce prices any more.
There's one major problem with that. Without state regulation, a smaller company has almost no chance in that industry, since they'll eventually have to lay some of their own cables/fiber, and they can't afford that.
Not to mention that the problem in this instance isn't price, but availability. The federal government and the state governments gave the telecoms billions in tax breaks and favorable regulations with the promise that the telecoms would supply fast Internet access to all. Then we let it slip to "fast for some in profitable markets, but at least some broadband to everyone". Now it's "Just give broadband to whoever you want, and keep all that stuff we gave you". As someone who doesn't live in an urban area, I think we need the telecoms to live up to their promises. I should be able to get at least 256k/64k reliably over a wire. I can pay like $50 a month for variable-quality wireless at that speed, but I'd like a wired option from someone.
I don't think that the grandparent was talking about "overnight" in a literal sense. But if 20% or more of the population started using alternative OSes, then the motivations to buy MS stuff would shrink. If I can't communicate with 2% of the population (because they can't read.docx), then that's their problem, but 20% is my problem. Similarly, as someone else noted, most of the advantages for Windows in the office are the fact that migrating is expensive. That argument is cut when most of the world has to know Linux/OSX stuff anyways and when the increase in interest in the platform is furthering development of alternatives. If 10% of the world used Linux, then OpenOffice would be in a lot better shape.
Essentially what the GP is saying is that marketshare growth gets easier the more marketshare you have up to a point. It's impossible until you get to 2% or so, very hard up to about 5%, then it's a bit easier until you get to about 10-15% percent. Look at Firefox. IT struggled to get a few percent, and then BOOM, it jumped to 10-12 percent. If something provided that BOOM to Mac or Linux, they'd be hard to stop until they got to a lot higher of a position.
1) Merom came out in August. Conroe was out in July (in limited numbers), and Woodcrest was out in late June. All three are C2D parts. And the "Cedar Mill" Pentiums were also 65nm. The point is that Intel's entire line is currently 65nm, and AMD is only now moving to 65 nm (and won't be exclusively 65nm for several months), and Intel is moving fast on 45nm.
2) Chip architecture and feature size are not as related as you imply. I'm not blaming AMD for taking a while with Socket AM2. Frankly, they didn't seem to benefit much from it. You are correct in that they'll be slower to make memory changes as a result of the need for new chips instead of chipsets, but frankly, NUMA avoids the need for FB-DIMMs rather handily, and DDR3 support is coming surprisingly quickly from AMD. But feature size delays (or just longer transition times) are a manufacturing issue. AMD can't afford to retool factories as often, which is the problem.
I own a Mac Pro, and based on my own real-life testing of the model I've used (2.66 GHz, 3 GB RAM, RAID 0 of 160GB drives, X1900XT), I haven't noticed any sort of bandwidth issues at all. Additionally, Anandtech did some testing of a Mac Pro with two Xeon 53x0s dropped in, and their testing suggested that bandwidth wasn't a major issue there either.
Yeah, but if you add the level of funding that could come from having an R&D sugar-daddy in the computing industry (being AMD or someone looking for a Torrenza-based add-on) would help that out a bit. Additionally, there'd be a lot of incentive from the software makers to cooperate. If AMD has a H.264 encoder built-in, but not a DivX one, then people will jump to H.264 over DivX (or vice-versa) simply because the hardware-accelerated version is that much faster. I mean, if 20% of the market sees your product as 2-3 times faster, they'll go with your product, and that's not marketshare you want to concede willingly.
The TiVO (original Series1) used a 54 MHz PPC chip with 16 MB of RAM. Seem sort of slim for all the work it could do? That's because a lot of the work was done by dedicated chips. Similarly, most MP3 players have tiny CPUs, since they're mostly run by dedicated MP3 or AAC or whatever decoder chips.
If compression could be handled by a secondary dedicated chip, then that's an option to save a lot of space on hard drives, or with dedicated encryption cores, you get super-easy encryption of whatever you need. To encode to a high-quality (Mbps or so) DIVX from a MPEG-2 file (off my DVR) takes me upwards of 90 minutes on a Xeon 5150 (it's only optimized for 2 cores, sadly, as I have a total of 4) at the highest quality settings for 45 minutes of video. A dedicated core could push that way down.
FSB 1333 (333 QDR) seems to be holding up well for 4 cores at the moment. It only really seems to be much of an issue in the 4+ socket world (which is admittedly lucrative). You are correct in the sense that Intel stands to gain from a move to a hypertransport-like system, but that only raises the counter-issue: If Intel has the performance lead now, even with the FSB issues, then AMD's 07-08 products have to hit it out of the park to beat Intel's chips without that handicap.
The real issue is feature size. AMD is hurt badly by being consistently behind on that. Intel's been at 65 nm for a while now, and AMD is only now releasing 65 nm parts. Intel will be at 45 nm in some lines by this time next year, while AMD is a year behind them. Feature size brings with it higher yields (more chips per wafer) once you work the kinks out, lower heat, and more transistors per chip. That's the game winner right there, unless one of them shoots themselves in the foot again, like Netburst.
It boils down to "sex offenders can't have a myspace/facebook account. Of course, when you realize that other sites have profiles (like any forum I've seen), that could have a bit of a ripple effect.
I'm far from pro-sex-offender, but I think we have a problem when we're putting streakers and 18-year-olds hooking up with 17-year-olds in the same category as child molesters and rapists. You can't get away with the same restrictions on minor sex offenders as you could on major ones, in my opinion. I can see "If you're a rapist, then no MySpace", but I can't see "no Facebook for dumb drunks who streak in the dead of night".
Which raises a new question. How long before trolls with throwaway emails spam lists or websites with illegal images (or even links to them), forcing the poor webmaster/admin to file a report every day. 5 minutes of the troll's time = 50 minutes of the admin's time. It wouldn't take more than 2-3 trolls to kill a list or site.
The problem with moving to "singles-only" is that a lot of bands have B material already, or still need it? When I work with bands (from Dave Matthews to Brand New to sub-$500 bands), they play 60-90 minute sets at concerts. Someone like DMB, maybe 120 minutes. Most bands have about 3-5 good songs, which take about 4 minutes each. So for the rest of the time, they spend maybe 10 minutes talking while they tune stuff or get ready for the next song, but a lot of the time, they're playing the stuff that they wouldn't make into singles. That's not to say that it's bad, just to say that it's non-notable. When you have a one-hit wonder, like Jason Mraz (ok, 2 hits), the audience doesn't know most of the songs. Only when a band has been around for a while, like the Rolling Stones or U2 or the Dave Matthews Band do you have enough material to do a 60-90 minute set of hits.
Point is, bands need to keep doing filler. So while they could squeeze out 1-2 more singles, it's unlikely that you'll get a band to do 6-8 singles and no filler in a release.
Most games are GPU-bound anyways. And most games are single threaded. Add it up, and you find that most people who can afford a $250 NIC have CPU power to spare (most likely dual core, too). Therefore, it'd be useful if you were on a budget system, but at $250, you would almost always spend that on the GPU or RAM.
First of all, you knew this was coming. Copyright was only supposed to last for a limited time anyways. "I was counting on continued extensions" is not a defense, because a smart person would prepare for something like this, since it's easy to work around if you're smart.
If you're making the exact same table for 50 consecutive years, then yeah, you're screwed. But in all likelyhood, either:
A) You've made a crap-ton of money over 50 years on the world's most popular table design B) You're not selling well at all, in which case you should have switched designs a while ago anyway C) This is but one of many table designs you make. About 10 years in, you took some profits and reinvested them into making new types of tables.
The only people making profits off stuff 50 years down the line are mega-bands like the Beatles or the Rolling Stones (and maybe U2 eventually). Most music/movie/book copyright holders don't get benefits off their work after 5 years. Most music is either never profitable or is only profitable for a short time (when it's the hit-of-the-month on the radio, or dumb thriller #274). The rest is only really profitable over 10-20 years (hits with a generation that gradually make less money). Only extremely popular music and movies are going to be making money 50 years down the line. And the people making those movies and music are likely either dead, rich, or still producing. If Disney lost Snow White or Cinderella, it still has Lion King and Pirates of the Carribbean for 50 years to help support it making more movies.
We're not talking about stealing the table. We're talking about copying the table. There's a large difference. If someone copies the table, all you lose is the uniqueness of your table. You still have your table.
Except this is 50 years ex post facto. If anyone can copy your table after 50, would that make you go back and uncreate it? I mean, after 50 years, if you haven't turned a profit on your first table, either by selling it or appreciating its exclusivity, you're not going to. I think we can count on two hands the number of songs that are still making money after 50 years. And most of the people who made them are dead. So the question isn't "Do I have enough incentive to create this table?" because removing copyright extension takes no rights from you, it just doesn't give you extra rights. So the argument here is that artists will arise from the dead, build a time machine, and then go back and stop themselves from entering the recording business, because their kids and grandkids are only making thousands instead of tens of thousands.
The people who get caught by the RIAA are the "low hanging fruit" most of the time. They're either hitting ten year olds or they're hitting the superseeders (or the guys who run the sites). People with IT degrees who pirate would use safer, and harder to trace, methods. Even just using PeerGuardian or pirating via proxy (or stealing wireless) is going to help you a great deal in terms of not getting caught. Additionally, they "stay in the middle" in terms of threat level.
Same for these hackers. They're semi-safe because they're smarter than the average script-kiddie, and they're not quite as dangerous as the guys who hack the Pentagon or whatever. Law enforcement will feel two pressures: Go after the major crimes and close a lot of cases. They close the easy cases quickly, and catch the high-profile cases for the headlines. These guys probably feel safe since they're neither.
That said, the reason crime doesn't pay is that a cops only needs to get lucky once, but the criminal needs to be lucky everytime.
I'm not underestimating the role of publishers, I'm just saying that from my point of view (which involves a lot of work with the music industry, including booking bands and working at a radio station), record labels aren't necessarily the best fit. If they weren't essentially a cartel, and if bands realized exactly what selling the rights to their songs meant, I really think that more traditional organizations could take the place of record labels, like specialized financial groups or more powerful agents, bands can probably do better without labels. Getting them out of the picture to make that possible, however, is unlikely to happen.
This is very true. However, the grandparent seemed to be implying too no copyrights at all, meaning people might skip theaters altogether. You are correct that some current movies are profitable at the box office. I'm just pointing out that with moderate cost-cutting, more films could be profitable at the box office, or at least not lose much due to piracy.
You overestimate the problem. Movie and music production costs are simply out of hand. The difference between a $250,000 performance fee and a $25,000 performance fee is at best a 2x quality increase. The increased attendance was due not to musical quality, but due to brand (in this case band) promotion. On the low-end, all you pay for between $300 and $3000 is experience.
Since we're talking about the movie industry though, the issue there is actor salaries and OMG-VFX!!1!1! Realistically speaking, if one used good actors who would do a movie for $250,000 instead of ones who demand $2.5 million, we'd save a lot of money for little quality loss (honestly, tell me couldn't find someone who could replace Lindsey Lohan for under $3.5 million). Additionally, if people settled for "great" VFX instead of awe-inspiring, it'd help the bottom lines. Additionally, people seem to act as though budgets don't matter in Hollywood. Even a slight bit of fiscal sense would help a lot. I met (and did a charity screening of a movie for) a director who shot a movie for $1.4 million. He's a decent writer/director/producer, and the movie was "not that bad" on the technical side for $1.4 million. If he had 5 times that much, he could have likely made a movie that would rival most $30 million movies.
You misunderstand. If the company doesn't own the copyright on their work, when the company lets them go, it has to pay them royalties for their work, the same royalties its competitors have to pay. In this instance, that's unfair, because it actually paid the people to do the "work-for-hire" a real salary. By contrast, an artist makes their money touring, not from anything the label does. All the label does is promote.
I must have written that in a hurry, because I completely agree with you. I'm glad he's off Digg. I'm just saying it was a community reaction as opposed to some sort of TPTB smackdown.
Slashdot Mirror
No one in their right mind would design a kiosk that needs employee attention every 5-10 minutes. I mean, if the WalMart or BestBuy guy has to run over there to restart it constantly, then it's either a massive waste of his time or else there's the serious risk that the game will stay frozen for a long period of time. I did a little test last time I was in Best Buy. We saw that the PS3 was frozen when we walked in. 90 minutes later, we ambled out, and the PS3 was frozen at exactly the same screen.
A kiosk is supposed to be hands-off for employees. Requiring a employee-managed kiosk is a bad idea.
Well, you see, that whole "FUD" thing is sort of a big deal. We may just dismiss FUD as spouting, but "OMG they might sue us" is going to scare the crap out of potential inventors, and also can dissuade people from taking on a browser or OS that they could get sued over. Just because we know that there's likely little to worry about doesn't mean that the Pointy-Haired Boss in the corner office knows that. It also has a level of risk-taking involved. Slashdotters have a higher risk tolerance than business people do with this sort of stuff. A .01% chance of a ten million dollar lawsuit is not something that a business wants to get behind.
If you use infringing software, there are two risks - the first is that you get sued (which is very, very unlikely), and the second is that the maintainer of your software folds because of legal pressure. That screws you over pretty badly because you have to migrate somewhere else.
You assume that average prices is the criteria. It might instead be "everyone needs some form of broadband". If the cable and phone companies have a requirement to serve everyone then that forces them to invest in cheaper ways to serve people efficiently. Additionally, it provides everyone with broadband access, and makes the Internet at high-speed a near assurance in America, just as the potential for phone service is now. That's more important than average price for customers, because "average price" ignores the fact that for some customers, the price is infinite.
If in a given field, a company is making excessive profits, the fact that that field is so profitable naturally leads it to draw in other companies. These new companies then undercut - just a little - the existing companies, to steal their customers. This is the beginning of the virtuous (for the customer) cycle of price cutting until companies cannot reduce prices any more.
There's one major problem with that. Without state regulation, a smaller company has almost no chance in that industry, since they'll eventually have to lay some of their own cables/fiber, and they can't afford that.
Not to mention that the problem in this instance isn't price, but availability. The federal government and the state governments gave the telecoms billions in tax breaks and favorable regulations with the promise that the telecoms would supply fast Internet access to all. Then we let it slip to "fast for some in profitable markets, but at least some broadband to everyone". Now it's "Just give broadband to whoever you want, and keep all that stuff we gave you". As someone who doesn't live in an urban area, I think we need the telecoms to live up to their promises. I should be able to get at least 256k/64k reliably over a wire. I can pay like $50 a month for variable-quality wireless at that speed, but I'd like a wired option from someone.
I don't think that the grandparent was talking about "overnight" in a literal sense. But if 20% or more of the population started using alternative OSes, then the motivations to buy MS stuff would shrink. If I can't communicate with 2% of the population (because they can't read .docx), then that's their problem, but 20% is my problem. Similarly, as someone else noted, most of the advantages for Windows in the office are the fact that migrating is expensive. That argument is cut when most of the world has to know Linux/OSX stuff anyways and when the increase in interest in the platform is furthering development of alternatives. If 10% of the world used Linux, then OpenOffice would be in a lot better shape.
Essentially what the GP is saying is that marketshare growth gets easier the more marketshare you have up to a point. It's impossible until you get to 2% or so, very hard up to about 5%, then it's a bit easier until you get to about 10-15% percent. Look at Firefox. IT struggled to get a few percent, and then BOOM, it jumped to 10-12 percent. If something provided that BOOM to Mac or Linux, they'd be hard to stop until they got to a lot higher of a position.
1) Merom came out in August. Conroe was out in July (in limited numbers), and Woodcrest was out in late June. All three are C2D parts. And the "Cedar Mill" Pentiums were also 65nm. The point is that Intel's entire line is currently 65nm, and AMD is only now moving to 65 nm (and won't be exclusively 65nm for several months), and Intel is moving fast on 45nm.
2) Chip architecture and feature size are not as related as you imply. I'm not blaming AMD for taking a while with Socket AM2. Frankly, they didn't seem to benefit much from it. You are correct in that they'll be slower to make memory changes as a result of the need for new chips instead of chipsets, but frankly, NUMA avoids the need for FB-DIMMs rather handily, and DDR3 support is coming surprisingly quickly from AMD. But feature size delays (or just longer transition times) are a manufacturing issue. AMD can't afford to retool factories as often, which is the problem.
I own a Mac Pro, and based on my own real-life testing of the model I've used (2.66 GHz, 3 GB RAM, RAID 0 of 160GB drives, X1900XT), I haven't noticed any sort of bandwidth issues at all. Additionally, Anandtech did some testing of a Mac Pro with two Xeon 53x0s dropped in, and their testing suggested that bandwidth wasn't a major issue there either.
Yeah, but if you add the level of funding that could come from having an R&D sugar-daddy in the computing industry (being AMD or someone looking for a Torrenza-based add-on) would help that out a bit. Additionally, there'd be a lot of incentive from the software makers to cooperate. If AMD has a H.264 encoder built-in, but not a DivX one, then people will jump to H.264 over DivX (or vice-versa) simply because the hardware-accelerated version is that much faster. I mean, if 20% of the market sees your product as 2-3 times faster, they'll go with your product, and that's not marketshare you want to concede willingly.
The TiVO (original Series1) used a 54 MHz PPC chip with 16 MB of RAM. Seem sort of slim for all the work it could do? That's because a lot of the work was done by dedicated chips. Similarly, most MP3 players have tiny CPUs, since they're mostly run by dedicated MP3 or AAC or whatever decoder chips.
If compression could be handled by a secondary dedicated chip, then that's an option to save a lot of space on hard drives, or with dedicated encryption cores, you get super-easy encryption of whatever you need. To encode to a high-quality (Mbps or so) DIVX from a MPEG-2 file (off my DVR) takes me upwards of 90 minutes on a Xeon 5150 (it's only optimized for 2 cores, sadly, as I have a total of 4) at the highest quality settings for 45 minutes of video. A dedicated core could push that way down.
FSB 1333 (333 QDR) seems to be holding up well for 4 cores at the moment. It only really seems to be much of an issue in the 4+ socket world (which is admittedly lucrative). You are correct in the sense that Intel stands to gain from a move to a hypertransport-like system, but that only raises the counter-issue: If Intel has the performance lead now, even with the FSB issues, then AMD's 07-08 products have to hit it out of the park to beat Intel's chips without that handicap.
The real issue is feature size. AMD is hurt badly by being consistently behind on that. Intel's been at 65 nm for a while now, and AMD is only now releasing 65 nm parts. Intel will be at 45 nm in some lines by this time next year, while AMD is a year behind them. Feature size brings with it higher yields (more chips per wafer) once you work the kinks out, lower heat, and more transistors per chip. That's the game winner right there, unless one of them shoots themselves in the foot again, like Netburst.
It boils down to "sex offenders can't have a myspace/facebook account. Of course, when you realize that other sites have profiles (like any forum I've seen), that could have a bit of a ripple effect.
I'm far from pro-sex-offender, but I think we have a problem when we're putting streakers and 18-year-olds hooking up with 17-year-olds in the same category as child molesters and rapists. You can't get away with the same restrictions on minor sex offenders as you could on major ones, in my opinion. I can see "If you're a rapist, then no MySpace", but I can't see "no Facebook for dumb drunks who streak in the dead of night".
Which raises a new question. How long before trolls with throwaway emails spam lists or websites with illegal images (or even links to them), forcing the poor webmaster/admin to file a report every day. 5 minutes of the troll's time = 50 minutes of the admin's time. It wouldn't take more than 2-3 trolls to kill a list or site.
The problem with moving to "singles-only" is that a lot of bands have B material already, or still need it? When I work with bands (from Dave Matthews to Brand New to sub-$500 bands), they play 60-90 minute sets at concerts. Someone like DMB, maybe 120 minutes. Most bands have about 3-5 good songs, which take about 4 minutes each. So for the rest of the time, they spend maybe 10 minutes talking while they tune stuff or get ready for the next song, but a lot of the time, they're playing the stuff that they wouldn't make into singles. That's not to say that it's bad, just to say that it's non-notable. When you have a one-hit wonder, like Jason Mraz (ok, 2 hits), the audience doesn't know most of the songs. Only when a band has been around for a while, like the Rolling Stones or U2 or the Dave Matthews Band do you have enough material to do a 60-90 minute set of hits.
Point is, bands need to keep doing filler. So while they could squeeze out 1-2 more singles, it's unlikely that you'll get a band to do 6-8 singles and no filler in a release.
Most games are GPU-bound anyways. And most games are single threaded. Add it up, and you find that most people who can afford a $250 NIC have CPU power to spare (most likely dual core, too). Therefore, it'd be useful if you were on a budget system, but at $250, you would almost always spend that on the GPU or RAM.
First of all, you knew this was coming. Copyright was only supposed to last for a limited time anyways. "I was counting on continued extensions" is not a defense, because a smart person would prepare for something like this, since it's easy to work around if you're smart.
If you're making the exact same table for 50 consecutive years, then yeah, you're screwed. But in all likelyhood, either:
A) You've made a crap-ton of money over 50 years on the world's most popular table design
B) You're not selling well at all, in which case you should have switched designs a while ago anyway
C) This is but one of many table designs you make. About 10 years in, you took some profits and reinvested them into making new types of tables.
The only people making profits off stuff 50 years down the line are mega-bands like the Beatles or the Rolling Stones (and maybe U2 eventually). Most music/movie/book copyright holders don't get benefits off their work after 5 years. Most music is either never profitable or is only profitable for a short time (when it's the hit-of-the-month on the radio, or dumb thriller #274). The rest is only really profitable over 10-20 years (hits with a generation that gradually make less money). Only extremely popular music and movies are going to be making money 50 years down the line. And the people making those movies and music are likely either dead, rich, or still producing. If Disney lost Snow White or Cinderella, it still has Lion King and Pirates of the Carribbean for 50 years to help support it making more movies.
We're not talking about stealing the table. We're talking about copying the table. There's a large difference. If someone copies the table, all you lose is the uniqueness of your table. You still have your table.
Except this is 50 years ex post facto. If anyone can copy your table after 50, would that make you go back and uncreate it? I mean, after 50 years, if you haven't turned a profit on your first table, either by selling it or appreciating its exclusivity, you're not going to. I think we can count on two hands the number of songs that are still making money after 50 years. And most of the people who made them are dead. So the question isn't "Do I have enough incentive to create this table?" because removing copyright extension takes no rights from you, it just doesn't give you extra rights. So the argument here is that artists will arise from the dead, build a time machine, and then go back and stop themselves from entering the recording business, because their kids and grandkids are only making thousands instead of tens of thousands.
The people who get caught by the RIAA are the "low hanging fruit" most of the time. They're either hitting ten year olds or they're hitting the superseeders (or the guys who run the sites). People with IT degrees who pirate would use safer, and harder to trace, methods. Even just using PeerGuardian or pirating via proxy (or stealing wireless) is going to help you a great deal in terms of not getting caught. Additionally, they "stay in the middle" in terms of threat level.
Same for these hackers. They're semi-safe because they're smarter than the average script-kiddie, and they're not quite as dangerous as the guys who hack the Pentagon or whatever. Law enforcement will feel two pressures: Go after the major crimes and close a lot of cases. They close the easy cases quickly, and catch the high-profile cases for the headlines. These guys probably feel safe since they're neither.
That said, the reason crime doesn't pay is that a cops only needs to get lucky once, but the criminal needs to be lucky everytime.
But what stops the theater from keeping that money?
I'm not underestimating the role of publishers, I'm just saying that from my point of view (which involves a lot of work with the music industry, including booking bands and working at a radio station), record labels aren't necessarily the best fit. If they weren't essentially a cartel, and if bands realized exactly what selling the rights to their songs meant, I really think that more traditional organizations could take the place of record labels, like specialized financial groups or more powerful agents, bands can probably do better without labels. Getting them out of the picture to make that possible, however, is unlikely to happen.
This is very true. However, the grandparent seemed to be implying too no copyrights at all, meaning people might skip theaters altogether. You are correct that some current movies are profitable at the box office. I'm just pointing out that with moderate cost-cutting, more films could be profitable at the box office, or at least not lose much due to piracy.
You overestimate the problem. Movie and music production costs are simply out of hand. The difference between a $250,000 performance fee and a $25,000 performance fee is at best a 2x quality increase. The increased attendance was due not to musical quality, but due to brand (in this case band) promotion. On the low-end, all you pay for between $300 and $3000 is experience.
Since we're talking about the movie industry though, the issue there is actor salaries and OMG-VFX!!1!1! Realistically speaking, if one used good actors who would do a movie for $250,000 instead of ones who demand $2.5 million, we'd save a lot of money for little quality loss (honestly, tell me couldn't find someone who could replace Lindsey Lohan for under $3.5 million). Additionally, if people settled for "great" VFX instead of awe-inspiring, it'd help the bottom lines. Additionally, people seem to act as though budgets don't matter in Hollywood. Even a slight bit of fiscal sense would help a lot. I met (and did a charity screening of a movie for) a director who shot a movie for $1.4 million. He's a decent writer/director/producer, and the movie was "not that bad" on the technical side for $1.4 million. If he had 5 times that much, he could have likely made a movie that would rival most $30 million movies.
You misunderstand. If the company doesn't own the copyright on their work, when the company lets them go, it has to pay them royalties for their work, the same royalties its competitors have to pay. In this instance, that's unfair, because it actually paid the people to do the "work-for-hire" a real salary. By contrast, an artist makes their money touring, not from anything the label does. All the label does is promote.
I must have written that in a hurry, because I completely agree with you. I'm glad he's off Digg. I'm just saying it was a community reaction as opposed to some sort of TPTB smackdown.