Conservatives lose out, so why are they all for propping up unethical corporations? What about all the defense contractors that got fat under Reagan?
This may be a tough concept for you to grasp, but could it be that defense contractors made money because we were buying more product from them?
So, what is your point? That companies who offer products that the government need make money?
There's a difference in a line in the sand and the bottom falling out. If Enron hadn't killed themselves by faking everything about their business and spreading their revenue out among all the paper subsidiaries, they'd still be going. There was no great crackdown on them by righteous crusading Republicans, they went bankrupt. If they would have went bankrupt in 1999, you'd be saying Clinton drew the line in the sand. Oh wait, no you wouldn't.. everything that happens is the result of Reagan or one of the Bushes, Clinton didn't do anything - that's Republican doctrine, my bad.
Actually, if I recall from the 60 Minutes episode I saw, Enron should have gone bankrupt in 96 or 97, but they lobbied the Clinton administration and received a pass on their accounting audit, several years in a row.
So, until they took the White House in 2000, how does Enron involve the Republicans? Congress doesn't have their thumb up the ass of every corporation in America, there's plenty of government agencies under the President's control for that.
Re:Hack a computer, spend life in prison.
on
HomeSec In the News
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· Score: 2
Dude, how can you be a participant on this board and not understand the sweeping social changes in the world that are being brought about by technology?
Your post is a perfect example of my comment that the tech community needs to grow up and stop defending hackers.
I think the Democratic Party must be in absolute chaos, then... they just elected Nancy Peloski as Minority Speaker in the House, and I saw Tom Daschle on Meet The Press on Sunday saying that "the Bush presidency is far more divisive" than the the previous administration (Really? I would have thought that the government shutdowns during the Clinton administration would have signalled the peak of divisiveness between the parties....)
You know that Peloski is going to come at Bush with both guns blazing, and here is Daschle being as confrontational as ever. I suspect that we are about to see a big shift to the left in the Democratic party, further alienating the moderately conservative American mainstream. They may be setting themselves up to lose the next election as well.
Personally, I'm hoping it's another 3-way between Bush, Gore and Nader.:D
I got news for ya, pal... When corporations aren't ethical or responsible, conservatives lose out, too. You think there were any staunch conservatives with large holdings of Enron, or WorldCom, or Global Crossing? You better believe it.
And BTW, the reason Enron folded is because the Bush administration didn't give them the pass on their creative accounting that the Clinton administration had given them for several years. It's a documented fact. It was a Republican administration who drew the line in the sand and accepted the consequences.
"Idiot"? You don't even know my positions and here you are making an assumption about what and why I believe.
I happen to agree with the Republican party platform, so I have no problem supporting them. Yes, I care about the substance of the policy that is passed by the government, which is why I vote Republican.
OTOH, If I had wanted fiscally clueless, I would have voted Democratic.
Hey, I was just answering your question about why liberalism is a dirty word. Now you're all over the map and blowing up in my face. If you want to discuss the conditions in the US that shifted us from supply-side economic thinking to demand-side with the election of FDR, and back again to supply-side when Reagan was elected, we can do that. However, don't confuse a strong military with big government. The framers of the Consitution envisioned a military, but not the huge welfare infrastructure we have today.
I'm not against welfare. Most everyone needs a hand up at one point in their lives. It's excessive welfare that Dem's support that I oppose.
Ok, then reread my post and tell me why the Dem's are caving in to the Republican demands. Have they suddenly lost their collective spinal columns?
Re:Hack a computer, spend life in prison.
on
HomeSec In the News
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· Score: 2
Yeah, I could see life in prison for serious hacking offenses.
You need to understand the magnitude of the crime, put it in perspective. This is rather grand (and probably unlikely), but to illustrate: Let's say a hacker takes down the internet across the US for a 48 hour period. How many businesses depend on e-commerce? If you could put a dollar amount on the disruption of business caused would it be in the billions of dollars? You're talking about people's livelihoods here. Also consider the fact that the internet is global, so now any one of 6 billion people could get a wild hair up their ass to go cause some chaos on the net.
See, this is why I don't understand why/. (by and large) is siding with the hackers on these issues. Yes, the legislation is rough and draconian, but it represents a first step in Congress understanding the issues. But, you and me, average citizens who make a living off of technology... If some shmuck decides he's going to nuke my web server so he can laugh about it with his friends, and meanwhile my bills are going unpaid because he's killed my business, you better believe I'd want his ass in a sling.
It's time for the tech industry to mature, and it can't do that if it doesn't take assaults seriously. If we're soft on tech crime, there's no incentive not to do it.
Last night, I watched Robert Reich on TV saying, "What's right and left? I don't know what that means!" Nancy Pelosi on NPR this morning, when confronted with 3 specific examples of a very liberal voting record said, "Why do you want to bundle those votes together? I don't understand what that means!"
Why are liberals so afraid of the word liberal? If you want to find out why liberal is a dirty word, answer that one. It's a simple branding issue; if you allow your competitor to define your brand for you, then don't be surprised when everyone thinks your brand sucks.
On the other hand, maybe liberalism truely is indefensible, so the only way for liberal candidates to win elections is through obfuscation and redirection. Why don't liberals just come out and say, "I'm for tax increases, vast welfare spending and bigger government!"
that the opposition to the Homeland Security Bill by the Democrats was nothing more than election year posturing. Doing what was best for the Dem's and not what they thought was in the best interest of the nation.
Obviously, they believe this bill to be in the best interest of the nation because here they are passing it. "Well, why oppose it now when the Republicans will take over and pass it anyway," you might say. Indeed, but if they truely believed it to be bad legislation, they should be fighting it to their dying breath. For them to support a bill now that they oppose would mean that they are checking their backbones at the door before they enter the Senate, which looks even worse.
I wouldn't call a 51-49 breakout in the Senate a "hefty margin" by ANY stretch of the imagination. Before you start painting with that broad brush, you should realize that, while Republicans TEND towards conservativism and Democrats TEND towards liberalism, each party has a spectrum of beliefs within. Republicans have liberals like Lincoln Chaffee and John McCain; Democrats have conservatives like Zell Miller.
What it boils down to is that Republicans are going to have enough division in their own party that Democratic votes will be required on many initiatives.
Anyway... given all that... I only have one thing to say...
Re:Hack a computer, spend life in prison.
on
HomeSec In the News
·
· Score: 2
Sarcasm aside, you are on the right track. That is, the punishment should fit the crime. Therefore, the question is, How broad is the impact?
If I hack into your home computer, then my punishment should be comparable to any breaking and entering charge. Maybe a little more severe, because of the increased opportunity for hackers to attack you from any location on the planet.
If I hack into Bank of America's servers, bring them down for a day, and cause a good amount of financial chaos for BoA and their customers for a 24 hour period, then, yeah, a severe penalty is warranted.
the Line Item Veto would be narrowly defined to vetoing budget items, and probably wouldn't apply here.
Also, there's some debate that the Line Item Veto is yet another way that we are increasing presidential power. Some point out that the office of the president has gradually been accruing more and more power, and that it is upseting the balance of power in the government.
Personally, I support the Line Item Veto, but I can also see where it's detractors are coming from.
I say that this technology is as dead as the old Divx format. Blockbuster is counting on two things for increased revenue: 1) the many late fees that they collect, and 2) your coming back to their store and picking up a new movie when you return the old one.
I don't know what the numbers are, but I know that those two points were significant enough financially for Blockbuster to move against Divx. So, what does this format offer that Divx does not?
If the MPAA is insistent on video stores using this technology, I forsee a lot of video stores closing down.
is that the PC industry has greatly matured since the heyday of the Amiga. Today it would be laughable to think that Hyperion could simply stick audio or video chips on the motherboard and call it a superior system. I would dare to say that the computer industry in 2002 has assimilated or surpassed most every advantage that made the Amiga great.
Hyperion's challenge, then, is to come up with a computer that fills a large market need in a way that currently isn't being met. And until they can do that, they are just watering down the Amiga brand.
Re:What's everyone doing?
on
Howl-o-ween
·
· Score: 2
In the long run, I'm dead but my heirs aren't. When my daughter is elected President in 2046, I don't want her to have to deal with the economic collapse caused by silly isolationist policies.
Logically, where does it stop? We tax their imports, they tax our exports at a higher rate. Inflation skyrockets, black markets are created, we try to force them to lower tariffs by raising ours, they raise theirs in response.
You can avoid a game like this, but you can't ignore it, nor can you keep your kids from playing it at the neighbor's house. The millions that Rockstar is going to spend on marketing will ensure that EVERY kid in America will be talking about it.
So, what's a parent's recourse when they think that their kids are being unethically targeted with an adult game? Write a letter to Rockstar? Yeah, so it can get passed around the studio for laughs; Rockstar already knows that the "under 18" market is a big chunk of their sales. Write a letter to Sony? Hey, Sony's main concern is the financials, not the ethics, of game marketing; and if a game only sells to 10% of PS2 owners, it's a hit and the majority is overruled. So, write a letter to your congressperson and get govenrment involved? That would appear to be the only recourse.
Is that so shocking a course of action, considering the above?
Adweek had a write-up a while back about an ad agency that did a twist on the "Casual Friday" fad... They announced "Formal Fridays"; everyone was required to wear either a tuxedo or an evening gown to work. The accompanying picture showed a woman in a glittering floor-length dress, pearls around her neck, and long, white gloves while standing at the copy machine.
Exactly. Buying an album is like buying a Grab Bag; there's some good and some bad, but the perceived value is that you are getting 10 songs by an artist you really like, so the consumer is enticed to buy all 10 songs in the hopes that the good outweighs the bad.
Once you start breaking it out and pricing it, as you suggested, according to the quality of the song, then you start running into problems. First off, there's a marketing term called "price signalling"; that means that the price, itself, is used to create the perception of value in the consumer's mind. If you sell three songs off an album for $1.50, and the rest for.50, you are signalling to the consumer that, yes, we know that 7 of the 10 songs are crap, and it works against the label. It also means that the record company is going to look to replace the income lost from not selling a whole album. They will either do this by increasing the volume of music sold (a likely possibility, given that industry revenues were up before the RIAA started cracking down on P2P), or by increasing the price of individual songs to compensate. If it's the latter, then hit songs should really be priced around $3 - $5 and crappy songs around.50 - $1, recognizing that only rarely will they actually sell an entire album. Most people will buy one song at a time, from the best to the worst, until they reach a point where the perceived value is nil.
Why $0.99 per song? That seems excessively high to me.
No,.99 is about right; it follows the standard pricing rules of any other retail product.
Next time you go to your grocery store, take a calculator and go to the soda aisle. Notice that they have four sizes of Coke; a 3 liter bottle, a 2 liter, a 16 oz., and a 12 oz. can. With your calculator, you can see that the 2 liter costs a little more per ounce than the 3 liter; the 16 oz costs more than the 2 liter, and the 12 oz is the most expensive of all.
It's just standard pricing policy in retail that, as you break out a product into smaller units, you increase the price. Even beyond the increased packaging costs. It's not unusual for a manufacturer's smallest product units to be the most profitable.
Granted, you don't have the extra packaging and all to pay for with digital music, but consider that there is a lot of profit built into selling a whole album for $17; but if you only buy one song off an album of 10 songs, and price/profit remains constant, then the manufacturer has done the same amount of marketing for 1/10th the profit he used to get. He now needs to increase his marketing budget tenfold to get the same amount of sales he used to get. (Of course, even with this example, you're still getting a deal because 1/10th of the album should cost $1.70, and you're getting it for.99.)
Besdies,.99 is the starting point for music pricing. If the internet manages to break up the RIAA cartel, then that price should come down over time.
Slashdot Mirror
Conservatives lose out, so why are they all for propping up unethical corporations? What about all the defense contractors that got fat under Reagan?
This may be a tough concept for you to grasp, but could it be that defense contractors made money because we were buying more product from them?
So, what is your point? That companies who offer products that the government need make money?
There's a difference in a line in the sand and the bottom falling out. If Enron hadn't killed themselves by faking everything about their business and spreading their revenue out among all the paper subsidiaries, they'd still be going. There was no great crackdown on them by righteous crusading Republicans, they went bankrupt. If they would have went bankrupt in 1999, you'd be saying Clinton drew the line in the sand. Oh wait, no you wouldn't.. everything that happens is the result of Reagan or one of the Bushes, Clinton didn't do anything - that's Republican doctrine, my bad.
Actually, if I recall from the 60 Minutes episode I saw, Enron should have gone bankrupt in 96 or 97, but they lobbied the Clinton administration and received a pass on their accounting audit, several years in a row.
So, until they took the White House in 2000, how does Enron involve the Republicans? Congress doesn't have their thumb up the ass of every corporation in America, there's plenty of government agencies under the President's control for that.
Dude, how can you be a participant on this board and not understand the sweeping social changes in the world that are being brought about by technology?
Your post is a perfect example of my comment that the tech community needs to grow up and stop defending hackers.
I think the Democratic Party must be in absolute chaos, then... they just elected Nancy Peloski as Minority Speaker in the House, and I saw Tom Daschle on Meet The Press on Sunday saying that "the Bush presidency is far more divisive" than the the previous administration (Really? I would have thought that the government shutdowns during the Clinton administration would have signalled the peak of divisiveness between the parties....)
:D
You know that Peloski is going to come at Bush with both guns blazing, and here is Daschle being as confrontational as ever. I suspect that we are about to see a big shift to the left in the Democratic party, further alienating the moderately conservative American mainstream. They may be setting themselves up to lose the next election as well.
Personally, I'm hoping it's another 3-way between Bush, Gore and Nader.
I got news for ya, pal... When corporations aren't ethical or responsible, conservatives lose out, too. You think there were any staunch conservatives with large holdings of Enron, or WorldCom, or Global Crossing? You better believe it.
And BTW, the reason Enron folded is because the Bush administration didn't give them the pass on their creative accounting that the Clinton administration had given them for several years. It's a documented fact. It was a Republican administration who drew the line in the sand and accepted the consequences.
That's another thing... why are liberals so anti-business? Liberals are bent on turning the word "corporate" into a vulgarity.
How do liberals propose to provide jobs to people if not by creating an environment for corporate America to thrive?
No, let's persecute corporate America and drive these capitalists out of business, the bastards!!!
"Idiot"? You don't even know my positions and here you are making an assumption about what and why I believe.
I happen to agree with the Republican party platform, so I have no problem supporting them. Yes, I care about the substance of the policy that is passed by the government, which is why I vote Republican.
OTOH, If I had wanted fiscally clueless, I would have voted Democratic.
Hey, I was just answering your question about why liberalism is a dirty word. Now you're all over the map and blowing up in my face. If you want to discuss the conditions in the US that shifted us from supply-side economic thinking to demand-side with the election of FDR, and back again to supply-side when Reagan was elected, we can do that. However, don't confuse a strong military with big government. The framers of the Consitution envisioned a military, but not the huge welfare infrastructure we have today.
I'm not against welfare. Most everyone needs a hand up at one point in their lives. It's excessive welfare that Dem's support that I oppose.
Anyway, have a nice day. And try to calm down.
Ok, then reread my post and tell me why the Dem's are caving in to the Republican demands. Have they suddenly lost their collective spinal columns?
Yeah, I could see life in prison for serious hacking offenses.
/. (by and large) is siding with the hackers on these issues. Yes, the legislation is rough and draconian, but it represents a first step in Congress understanding the issues. But, you and me, average citizens who make a living off of technology... If some shmuck decides he's going to nuke my web server so he can laugh about it with his friends, and meanwhile my bills are going unpaid because he's killed my business, you better believe I'd want his ass in a sling.
You need to understand the magnitude of the crime, put it in perspective. This is rather grand (and probably unlikely), but to illustrate: Let's say a hacker takes down the internet across the US for a 48 hour period. How many businesses depend on e-commerce? If you could put a dollar amount on the disruption of business caused would it be in the billions of dollars? You're talking about people's livelihoods here. Also consider the fact that the internet is global, so now any one of 6 billion people could get a wild hair up their ass to go cause some chaos on the net.
See, this is why I don't understand why
It's time for the tech industry to mature, and it can't do that if it doesn't take assaults seriously. If we're soft on tech crime, there's no incentive not to do it.
Last night, I watched Robert Reich on TV saying, "What's right and left? I don't know what that means!" Nancy Pelosi on NPR this morning, when confronted with 3 specific examples of a very liberal voting record said, "Why do you want to bundle those votes together? I don't understand what that means!"
;-D
Why are liberals so afraid of the word liberal? If you want to find out why liberal is a dirty word, answer that one. It's a simple branding issue; if you allow your competitor to define your brand for you, then don't be surprised when everyone thinks your brand sucks.
On the other hand, maybe liberalism truely is indefensible, so the only way for liberal candidates to win elections is through obfuscation and redirection. Why don't liberals just come out and say, "I'm for tax increases, vast welfare spending and bigger government!"
Oh, cuz they gotta win elections.
that the opposition to the Homeland Security Bill by the Democrats was nothing more than election year posturing. Doing what was best for the Dem's and not what they thought was in the best interest of the nation.
Obviously, they believe this bill to be in the best interest of the nation because here they are passing it. "Well, why oppose it now when the Republicans will take over and pass it anyway," you might say. Indeed, but if they truely believed it to be bad legislation, they should be fighting it to their dying breath. For them to support a bill now that they oppose would mean that they are checking their backbones at the door before they enter the Senate, which looks even worse.
What it boils down to is that Republicans are going to have enough division in their own party that Democratic votes will be required on many initiatives.
Anyway... given all that... I only have one thing to say... GO DUBYA GO!!! WOOO HOOO!!!
Sarcasm aside, you are on the right track. That is, the punishment should fit the crime. Therefore, the question is, How broad is the impact?
If I hack into your home computer, then my punishment should be comparable to any breaking and entering charge. Maybe a little more severe, because of the increased opportunity for hackers to attack you from any location on the planet.
If I hack into Bank of America's servers, bring them down for a day, and cause a good amount of financial chaos for BoA and their customers for a 24 hour period, then, yeah, a severe penalty is warranted.
the Line Item Veto would be narrowly defined to vetoing budget items, and probably wouldn't apply here.
Also, there's some debate that the Line Item Veto is yet another way that we are increasing presidential power. Some point out that the office of the president has gradually been accruing more and more power, and that it is upseting the balance of power in the government.
Personally, I support the Line Item Veto, but I can also see where it's detractors are coming from.
I say that this technology is as dead as the old Divx format. Blockbuster is counting on two things for increased revenue: 1) the many late fees that they collect, and 2) your coming back to their store and picking up a new movie when you return the old one.
I don't know what the numbers are, but I know that those two points were significant enough financially for Blockbuster to move against Divx. So, what does this format offer that Divx does not?
If the MPAA is insistent on video stores using this technology, I forsee a lot of video stores closing down.
is that the PC industry has greatly matured since the heyday of the Amiga. Today it would be laughable to think that Hyperion could simply stick audio or video chips on the motherboard and call it a superior system. I would dare to say that the computer industry in 2002 has assimilated or surpassed most every advantage that made the Amiga great.
Hyperion's challenge, then, is to come up with a computer that fills a large market need in a way that currently isn't being met. And until they can do that, they are just watering down the Amiga brand.
You could always go as Crazy Teabag Mouth...
Only if King Bowser Koopa was presiding over the court and threw a turtle shell at him...
I predict Barney would go medieval on his ass...
In the long run, I'm dead but my heirs aren't. When my daughter is elected President in 2046, I don't want her to have to deal with the economic collapse caused by silly isolationist policies.
Logically, where does it stop? We tax their imports, they tax our exports at a higher rate. Inflation skyrockets, black markets are created, we try to force them to lower tariffs by raising ours, they raise theirs in response.
You can avoid a game like this, but you can't ignore it, nor can you keep your kids from playing it at the neighbor's house. The millions that Rockstar is going to spend on marketing will ensure that EVERY kid in America will be talking about it.
So, what's a parent's recourse when they think that their kids are being unethically targeted with an adult game? Write a letter to Rockstar? Yeah, so it can get passed around the studio for laughs; Rockstar already knows that the "under 18" market is a big chunk of their sales. Write a letter to Sony? Hey, Sony's main concern is the financials, not the ethics, of game marketing; and if a game only sells to 10% of PS2 owners, it's a hit and the majority is overruled. So, write a letter to your congressperson and get govenrment involved? That would appear to be the only recourse.
Is that so shocking a course of action, considering the above?
It sounds like that Oog is a very insightful guy...
Adweek had a write-up a while back about an ad agency that did a twist on the "Casual Friday" fad... They announced "Formal Fridays"; everyone was required to wear either a tuxedo or an evening gown to work. The accompanying picture showed a woman in a glittering floor-length dress, pearls around her neck, and long, white gloves while standing at the copy machine.
Exactly. Buying an album is like buying a Grab Bag; there's some good and some bad, but the perceived value is that you are getting 10 songs by an artist you really like, so the consumer is enticed to buy all 10 songs in the hopes that the good outweighs the bad.
.50, you are signalling to the consumer that, yes, we know that 7 of the 10 songs are crap, and it works against the label. It also means that the record company is going to look to replace the income lost from not selling a whole album. They will either do this by increasing the volume of music sold (a likely possibility, given that industry revenues were up before the RIAA started cracking down on P2P), or by increasing the price of individual songs to compensate. If it's the latter, then hit songs should really be priced around $3 - $5 and crappy songs around .50 - $1, recognizing that only rarely will they actually sell an entire album. Most people will buy one song at a time, from the best to the worst, until they reach a point where the perceived value is nil.
Once you start breaking it out and pricing it, as you suggested, according to the quality of the song, then you start running into problems. First off, there's a marketing term called "price signalling"; that means that the price, itself, is used to create the perception of value in the consumer's mind. If you sell three songs off an album for $1.50, and the rest for
Why $0.99 per song? That seems excessively high to me.
.99 is about right; it follows the standard pricing rules of any other retail product.
.99.)
.99 is the starting point for music pricing. If the internet manages to break up the RIAA cartel, then that price should come down over time.
No,
Next time you go to your grocery store, take a calculator and go to the soda aisle. Notice that they have four sizes of Coke; a 3 liter bottle, a 2 liter, a 16 oz., and a 12 oz. can. With your calculator, you can see that the 2 liter costs a little more per ounce than the 3 liter; the 16 oz costs more than the 2 liter, and the 12 oz is the most expensive of all.
It's just standard pricing policy in retail that, as you break out a product into smaller units, you increase the price. Even beyond the increased packaging costs. It's not unusual for a manufacturer's smallest product units to be the most profitable.
Granted, you don't have the extra packaging and all to pay for with digital music, but consider that there is a lot of profit built into selling a whole album for $17; but if you only buy one song off an album of 10 songs, and price/profit remains constant, then the manufacturer has done the same amount of marketing for 1/10th the profit he used to get. He now needs to increase his marketing budget tenfold to get the same amount of sales he used to get. (Of course, even with this example, you're still getting a deal because 1/10th of the album should cost $1.70, and you're getting it for
Besdies,