Not to mention it's a country that's easy to embargo since they have nothing we need. Rest assured, if they strike oil there we'll find every reason under the sun to be the best of allies.
That's funny. Even in your own statement, you change from "I would have paid" to "if I have to pay, I might." You simply cannot say someone would have bought something until they actually do so. Personally, I don't listen to much music but I do enjoy movies and television shows. I have purchased thousands of DVDs (HD-DVD's and Blu-rays, too) because I enjoy them. Currently, there are hundreds of others that I would buy but I haven't and may never actually purchase them. I'll only spend within my alloted budget so many things I would buy will never actually be purchased.
As far as your belief that low prices trump everything else, there are many successful luxury brands that prove this is not true. The iPhone and iPod are not the cheapest devices of their class but they seem to sell well. Many people pay to see movies on an IMAX screen when they could pay less and watch on a smaller screen.
One of the things I always find missing in these discussions, though, is the actual cost of piracy to those who participate in it. Setting issues of morality aside, I'd like to say that file sharing is rife with problems: downloads that never finish, bad quality files, files that aren't what they claim to be, etc. If you place any value on your time and available bandwidth, the cost of copying the file is often as high as simply buying it in the first place. The only reason people are willing to expend so much of their time in this endeavor is because they lack the funds to purchase the item in the first place. So it's unlikely that the studios are losing much money in any case. But then, maybe I place a higher value on inconvenience than most people, after all, I purchased a couple of Apple TVs and ripped all my DVDs to iTunes so that I wouldn't need to go look for the disc or be forced to watch those FBI warnings that purchasers of DVDs are not allowed to skip but those pirating movies are blissfully spared from watching.
I like the convenience of buying DVDs, so I do. However, I would like to mention that Netflix is providing a service almost identical to to what the file-sharers do: allowing you to watch any number of movies without paying money to the studios for the rights to do so. But it's perfectly legal for them to do so. In addition, my local library lets people borrow movies for free and it's perfectly legal, too. Maybe those who watched movies from those services would have bought the movie if the service wasn't available. Seriously, what's the difference?
I was just thinking we need a WikiText project that would create textbooks by grade and subject. The elementary school textbook publishers already only grab various prewritten texts and compile them into textbooks and the results are pretty poor but I'm certain Wikipedia contributors could do a better job.
People have always been able to obtain the knowledge of books for free in libraries. Recently, though, everyone seems to think that they are owed money by every person who read a word in their book or heard a note from their song. Just because someone pirates something does not mean they would have purchased it if a pirated copy was not available. Your book has a small audience of likely purchasers and will likely never be a NY Times top seller.
I, myself, am even marginally interested in the subject matter but not so much so that I would actually purchase a copy at the cover price. I'm about $5 interested in your book and if I saw it in a local bookstore bin at that price I might buy it. I further suspect that if I bought the book at that price I'd be more inclined to only skim through the book reading only the parts that catch my interest. I'm sure you'll sell copies to those who are interested enough in the subject that they'll invest the cover price and the time required to read the book but I'm fairly certain that those people are a very small percentage of society at large.
If your primary concern is how many copies you sell then choose a subject matter that will be popular. If, as a I suspect, you prefer writing about the areas you choose and you can make an acceptable living from the sales of the book then certainly you should do that. Which seems to be the case since you continue to be such a prolific writer. However, to complain because people who won't buy your book are passing around copies amongst themselves is silly and taking time away from the writing of new content that may sell better.
Don't get me wrong, I don't condone piracy and it is wrong for people to pirate anything. However, if the book is worth the cover price to any given person then they will undoubtedly purchase it. The pirates were unlikely to ever buy a copy in the first place. Just because people are trading the book online does not mean they value it enough to even read the book. I'm certain that pirates' hard drives are filled with books they've never even read.
As a simple thought exercise, think about the books that friends have given to you. How many of them have you read completely and enjoyed? How many would you purchase at the cover price if they hadn't given it to you? In my own experience, I would only have purchased and read about 1% of the books that have been given to me by friends. Sadly, I only get a chance to read about 90% of the books I purchase for myself. There are only so many hours in a day and I suggest that you engage more productively by writing new material rather than chasing pirates who would never have paid anyway.
We have a financial system that is built upon the government, huge corporations and consumers borrowing insane amounts of money to keep the myth of a strong US going. The TSA's primary purpose is to create a show designed to make the public-at-large feel safe and keep spending their money by flying. If a significant percentage of people stopped flying because of fear, the entire airline industry would collapse.
After 9/11, Bush was all over the airwaves telling people to continue to go to work and not stop spending their money because we need to keep the economy strong. Of course, when an anthrax tainted letter was found in a congressional mail sorting facility, congress closed its doors. But we simple consumers need to just keep borrowing money and consuming to keep the economy strong and if that means creating a government agency to create a theater show, then that's just what our government will do.
I just checked my library an I have an American Heritage Dictionary with over 1,500 pages and a Bible with over 1,300 pages. At full size, you should be able to print the entire 13,500-15,000 pages in nine or ten volumes. You could mass produce these with acid-free paper and sell them to every library in the world for under $500/set. Or, you could print 10 reduced size pages on each page and produce a single volume for under $25 which would require only moderate magnification (and probably could be read without magnification for someone with good eyes.) At that price it would even have a home in my own home library. Paper can last just as long and will be much more readily usable and at a low price it would ensure that millions of copies could be distributed making it even more likely that a copy would still exist in thousands of years.
Also, what incentive does this scheme offer for the labels to create new music? If you pay a fee to get access to the library of existing music with a hundred year copyright then making new music is just an expense category. It pays the same even if they never create new music. Think about it, what has basic cable done to improve it's service now that everyone must have it to get the premium channels? Nothing they keep adding new tiers for you to pay for.
To do a similar search, I went to images.google.com and searched for "japanese painting wave" because I figured that would be the most obvious keywords you could use f you don't know anything about the painting except what you see. The first hit tells the name and the painter without needing to chug through lots of results.
Actually, it's almost impossible for a household not to be breaking this law. If you own a glass container and a heating device (say a coffee pot) and any substance such as allergy medicine or acetone (nail polish remover, anyone) then you have three items on the list and are in violation of the law. In addition, the law states that the act of owning any combination of three items proves intent to manufacture drugs. This law is so broad that everyone has a drug lab and the intent to produce drugs in Texas.
Airlines have been decreasing the services to their customers: Overcrowding planes, ever smaller seats, less leg room, fewer in-flight amenities, increased overbooking, ever more delayed flights and a myriad of new fees.
In addition, the TSA has made air travel more cumbersome with security theater (remove your shoes, don't bring liquids, etc.) with unspecified policies so that you never know if the policies in place when you fly somewhere will be the same policies in place for your return trip. For example, I know I would have been very upset if I travelled to London before the big liquid scare and had to put my laptop in the belly of the beast with the baggage gorillas when I returned.
In addition, the airlines also implemented a pricing policy for their tickets to try to maximize the price charged for each passenger. The whole "why sell a ticket for $200 if the customer would be willing to pay $500" philosophy. So customers began using services that would help them decrease their ticket prices because the airlines would overcharge them if at all possible.
So now the airlines are offering the minimum service possible and are surprised that passengers want to pay the minimum amount possible for this service. When you abuse your customers for your own financial gain, the customers will lose respect for your company and when they have the power to stop feeding your greed they will do so. Once this happens, getting these customers to business with you again will be incredibly costly and may very well bankrupt the company. This is true for airlines and will also be true for phone companies, ISPs, Microsoft and the music industry. Ultimately, customers will punish usurious greed, it just may take them a while to have the power to do so.
Actually, I think the biggest change is that we've lost social norms. There used to be many rules and morals in society that people were expected to obey and people breaking these norms were admonished by others in society. Of course, these norms were often largely arbitrary, like a man shouldn't wear a hat indoors, but the act of society self-policing these behaviors helped to reinforce the following of society's rules. Today, however, political-correctness has made people stop criticizing people for these minor infractions so people stop worrying about morals and what fellow members of society might think and instead only judge themselves by what can be proven against them in court.
The concept of "legal but immoral" has largely disappeared in society. It was replaced with "what actually breaks the law" and was then followed by "how can I game the legal system to get away with doing what I want even though it's illegal." If people feel that the society does not watch what they do then they'll start breaking the laws in greater numbers. Our legal system was designed to complement a self-policing society that would immediately punish minor infractions, with a tongue-lashing or dirty-look, and then legal action was only required when more egregious infractions took place. Now, though, we no longer self-police so the first complaint is a legal one and is tried through the courts. Today there are even cases of parents who call the police to control their children because they aren't in control of their own households. Our legal system was not designed for the societal norms of today and it shows.
Not to mention colored contacts that basically have a colored iris printed on them. Which means many people are using the same printed iris. Leading to the question, "what happens when someone steals my iris?" If I lose a password it's easy to create a new one but I can't grow a new iris if people copy mine and use it on a printed contact lens. Also, I'll leave a potentially identical iris photo on every machine that checks my iris.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention it's a country that's easy to embargo since they have nothing we need. Rest assured, if they strike oil there we'll find every reason under the sun to be the best of allies.
That's funny. Even in your own statement, you change from "I would have paid" to "if I have to pay, I might." You simply cannot say someone would have bought something until they actually do so. Personally, I don't listen to much music but I do enjoy movies and television shows. I have purchased thousands of DVDs (HD-DVD's and Blu-rays, too) because I enjoy them. Currently, there are hundreds of others that I would buy but I haven't and may never actually purchase them. I'll only spend within my alloted budget so many things I would buy will never actually be purchased.
As far as your belief that low prices trump everything else, there are many successful luxury brands that prove this is not true. The iPhone and iPod are not the cheapest devices of their class but they seem to sell well. Many people pay to see movies on an IMAX screen when they could pay less and watch on a smaller screen.
One of the things I always find missing in these discussions, though, is the actual cost of piracy to those who participate in it. Setting issues of morality aside, I'd like to say that file sharing is rife with problems: downloads that never finish, bad quality files, files that aren't what they claim to be, etc. If you place any value on your time and available bandwidth, the cost of copying the file is often as high as simply buying it in the first place. The only reason people are willing to expend so much of their time in this endeavor is because they lack the funds to purchase the item in the first place. So it's unlikely that the studios are losing much money in any case. But then, maybe I place a higher value on inconvenience than most people, after all, I purchased a couple of Apple TVs and ripped all my DVDs to iTunes so that I wouldn't need to go look for the disc or be forced to watch those FBI warnings that purchasers of DVDs are not allowed to skip but those pirating movies are blissfully spared from watching.
I like the convenience of buying DVDs, so I do. However, I would like to mention that Netflix is providing a service almost identical to to what the file-sharers do: allowing you to watch any number of movies without paying money to the studios for the rights to do so. But it's perfectly legal for them to do so. In addition, my local library lets people borrow movies for free and it's perfectly legal, too. Maybe those who watched movies from those services would have bought the movie if the service wasn't available. Seriously, what's the difference?
I thought they meant Tipper Gore had started trying to get game ratings again.
And... where's the TSA Porn?
I was just thinking we need a WikiText project that would create textbooks by grade and subject. The elementary school textbook publishers already only grab various prewritten texts and compile them into textbooks and the results are pretty poor but I'm certain Wikipedia contributors could do a better job.
You're probably reading he wrong end of the needle.
People have always been able to obtain the knowledge of books for free in libraries. Recently, though, everyone seems to think that they are owed money by every person who read a word in their book or heard a note from their song. Just because someone pirates something does not mean they would have purchased it if a pirated copy was not available. Your book has a small audience of likely purchasers and will likely never be a NY Times top seller.
I, myself, am even marginally interested in the subject matter but not so much so that I would actually purchase a copy at the cover price. I'm about $5 interested in your book and if I saw it in a local bookstore bin at that price I might buy it. I further suspect that if I bought the book at that price I'd be more inclined to only skim through the book reading only the parts that catch my interest. I'm sure you'll sell copies to those who are interested enough in the subject that they'll invest the cover price and the time required to read the book but I'm fairly certain that those people are a very small percentage of society at large.
If your primary concern is how many copies you sell then choose a subject matter that will be popular. If, as a I suspect, you prefer writing about the areas you choose and you can make an acceptable living from the sales of the book then certainly you should do that. Which seems to be the case since you continue to be such a prolific writer. However, to complain because people who won't buy your book are passing around copies amongst themselves is silly and taking time away from the writing of new content that may sell better.
Don't get me wrong, I don't condone piracy and it is wrong for people to pirate anything. However, if the book is worth the cover price to any given person then they will undoubtedly purchase it. The pirates were unlikely to ever buy a copy in the first place. Just because people are trading the book online does not mean they value it enough to even read the book. I'm certain that pirates' hard drives are filled with books they've never even read.
As a simple thought exercise, think about the books that friends have given to you. How many of them have you read completely and enjoyed? How many would you purchase at the cover price if they hadn't given it to you? In my own experience, I would only have purchased and read about 1% of the books that have been given to me by friends. Sadly, I only get a chance to read about 90% of the books I purchase for myself. There are only so many hours in a day and I suggest that you engage more productively by writing new material rather than chasing pirates who would never have paid anyway.
We have a financial system that is built upon the government, huge corporations and consumers borrowing insane amounts of money to keep the myth of a strong US going. The TSA's primary purpose is to create a show designed to make the public-at-large feel safe and keep spending their money by flying. If a significant percentage of people stopped flying because of fear, the entire airline industry would collapse.
After 9/11, Bush was all over the airwaves telling people to continue to go to work and not stop spending their money because we need to keep the economy strong. Of course, when an anthrax tainted letter was found in a congressional mail sorting facility, congress closed its doors. But we simple consumers need to just keep borrowing money and consuming to keep the economy strong and if that means creating a government agency to create a theater show, then that's just what our government will do.
Sure, good idea. That way a greater number of corporate entities can have an opportunity to censor your message if they're so inclined.
Yeah, but it doesn't work with my Apple TV. :(
Apple's Preview does this when you select "Previous" or "Next" and their keyboard shortcut can be mapped to any key you wish. How is this innovation?
At least you didn't say Arthur Anderson, I hear they aren't so honest.
Typical government pork. Do we really need to waste a bullet after they've drowned?
I just checked my library an I have an American Heritage Dictionary with over 1,500 pages and a Bible with over 1,300 pages. At full size, you should be able to print the entire 13,500-15,000 pages in nine or ten volumes. You could mass produce these with acid-free paper and sell them to every library in the world for under $500/set. Or, you could print 10 reduced size pages on each page and produce a single volume for under $25 which would require only moderate magnification (and probably could be read without magnification for someone with good eyes.) At that price it would even have a home in my own home library. Paper can last just as long and will be much more readily usable and at a low price it would ensure that millions of copies could be distributed making it even more likely that a copy would still exist in thousands of years.
The headline could have been:
"New Species of Bug Discovered on eBay"
Yeah, but that OMG Ponies!!! pink background still wasn't attractive. ;)
Also, what incentive does this scheme offer for the labels to create new music? If you pay a fee to get access to the library of existing music with a hundred year copyright then making new music is just an expense category. It pays the same even if they never create new music. Think about it, what has basic cable done to improve it's service now that everyone must have it to get the premium channels? Nothing they keep adding new tiers for you to pay for.
To do a similar search, I went to images.google.com and searched for "japanese painting wave" because I figured that would be the most obvious keywords you could use f you don't know anything about the painting except what you see. The first hit tells the name and the painter without needing to chug through lots of results.
I like quicktime on the Mac quite a bit more than I like Media Player on a Windows box. Quicktime on Windows is just a clash of different cultures.
Actually, it's almost impossible for a household not to be breaking this law. If you own a glass container and a heating device (say a coffee pot) and any substance such as allergy medicine or acetone (nail polish remover, anyone) then you have three items on the list and are in violation of the law. In addition, the law states that the act of owning any combination of three items proves intent to manufacture drugs. This law is so broad that everyone has a drug lab and the intent to produce drugs in Texas.
Wait till they start to explain how the Trinity works...
After converting to meters, NASA has confirmed the earth is a torus.
Airlines have been decreasing the services to their customers: Overcrowding planes, ever smaller seats, less leg room, fewer in-flight amenities, increased overbooking, ever more delayed flights and a myriad of new fees.
In addition, the TSA has made air travel more cumbersome with security theater (remove your shoes, don't bring liquids, etc.) with unspecified policies so that you never know if the policies in place when you fly somewhere will be the same policies in place for your return trip. For example, I know I would have been very upset if I travelled to London before the big liquid scare and had to put my laptop in the belly of the beast with the baggage gorillas when I returned.
In addition, the airlines also implemented a pricing policy for their tickets to try to maximize the price charged for each passenger. The whole "why sell a ticket for $200 if the customer would be willing to pay $500" philosophy. So customers began using services that would help them decrease their ticket prices because the airlines would overcharge them if at all possible. So now the airlines are offering the minimum service possible and are surprised that passengers want to pay the minimum amount possible for this service. When you abuse your customers for your own financial gain, the customers will lose respect for your company and when they have the power to stop feeding your greed they will do so. Once this happens, getting these customers to business with you again will be incredibly costly and may very well bankrupt the company. This is true for airlines and will also be true for phone companies, ISPs, Microsoft and the music industry. Ultimately, customers will punish usurious greed, it just may take them a while to have the power to do so.
Actually, I think the biggest change is that we've lost social norms. There used to be many rules and morals in society that people were expected to obey and people breaking these norms were admonished by others in society. Of course, these norms were often largely arbitrary, like a man shouldn't wear a hat indoors, but the act of society self-policing these behaviors helped to reinforce the following of society's rules. Today, however, political-correctness has made people stop criticizing people for these minor infractions so people stop worrying about morals and what fellow members of society might think and instead only judge themselves by what can be proven against them in court.
The concept of "legal but immoral" has largely disappeared in society. It was replaced with "what actually breaks the law" and was then followed by "how can I game the legal system to get away with doing what I want even though it's illegal." If people feel that the society does not watch what they do then they'll start breaking the laws in greater numbers. Our legal system was designed to complement a self-policing society that would immediately punish minor infractions, with a tongue-lashing or dirty-look, and then legal action was only required when more egregious infractions took place. Now, though, we no longer self-police so the first complaint is a legal one and is tried through the courts. Today there are even cases of parents who call the police to control their children because they aren't in control of their own households. Our legal system was not designed for the societal norms of today and it shows.
Not to mention colored contacts that basically have a colored iris printed on them. Which means many people are using the same printed iris. Leading to the question, "what happens when someone steals my iris?" If I lose a password it's easy to create a new one but I can't grow a new iris if people copy mine and use it on a printed contact lens. Also, I'll leave a potentially identical iris photo on every machine that checks my iris.