The problem with your logic is that the subset of 2,000 songs you give a shit about changes with time. Something gets released, you become familiar with it, like it, listen to it a lot, eventually get bored with it and listen to it much, much less.
There's so much music that I "own" on CD and just don't listen to anymore, some albums I haven't played in years... ultimately, what benefit do I have for "owning" those CD's vs. simply subscribing to a rental service? Not much.
Your argument could be the same for Cable TV, Netflix, or sattelite radio, or anything that's tied to a subscription rental. I'm not sure why some people have such a hard time getting their heads around it applying the same model to music.
As I have no plans to ever purchase or view DRM'd content, the fact that they choose to include support for such doesn't bother me in the least. As long as the system continues to play un-DRMed files, then I don't care what they DRM schemes they include. Hollywood can go jump if they expect me to jump through those hoops just for the "privilege" of watching their crapola in high def.
Listening to the passion with which Cory Doctorow opines on these subjects gives me pause: after all, it's common that those most anxious to share the wealth are those who contribute least to its creation.
He helps run one of the most popular blogs on the internet, which he "gives away for free". It's fallacious to suggest that he's one of those "contributes least" people.
His fiction isn't the greatest (not bad, just not great), but it's a heck of a lot better than anything John Grisham or Danielle Steele ever wrote. If a DRM-free future means we have a few more Cory Doctorow's in the world and a little less cookie cutter formulaic crap cluttering up the shelves, then all the better IMHO.
Well, even during the Napster era, CD sales never dipped - they didn't start to take a dive until well after Napster was shut down, as I recall. And I'd argue that the cause of it has a lot more to do with a changing media landscape (games, dvds, the web) than the specter of filesharing. There's a lot of people (myself included) that never saw Napster as a "problem" for them, anymore than the VCR was in the 80's. It simply required a re-think of business models, which to this day they refuse to do.
I think Cory is dead on about the obscurity problem. If you're an independent or small artist, your biggest problem is exposure. You want people to go share your content with their friends. Viral marketing is the only path available to you, because you don't have a million dollar marketing campaign behind you. Strict copyright enforcement (DRM or otherwise) mean your fan's friends never hear your stuff and don't come along to your next gig.
Personally, I love the CC license, I put all my content under a CC license (my blog, semi-pro photography, and a novel I'm working on). I don't mind giving it away for free because I'm stoked just to have anyone compliment me on it, my audience is so small. I don't expect to make a living off of it - it'd be cool if I built an audience large enough that I could (which is why I protect my commercial rights with the license). Mostly, I make content for the love of doing so, I don't feel I'm entitled to make a living off of it.
And even if I did look to make money from it, I'd seek to monetize it through advertising - sell a portion of my audience's attention rather than sell the content directly. It's the only way you can hope to compete against other content which is just as good and free as in beer.
The other issue you raise is an interesting one. If I really am just buying a "license" to the content rather than a physical product, then they should make available to me that licensed content in whatever format I choose for as long as I hold that license. It seems to me that when its convenient to them they treat it as a license, but when its not then they treat it as a physical product. "Oh, you scratched that CD? Format got obsoleted? Too bad, you're screwed".
The difference is that a 7-8 year old would probably be either bored, disinterested, or perhaps intellectually curious. At that age, you're not a sexual being, so you won't "get it" - you'd view it the same way you'd view anything else, and there's really no harm that can come of it provided that a parent is available to provide information and context. Once you hit puberty though you're a sexual being and its likely to be a lot more interesting, in that it could potentially turn you on, you'd have innate desires to perform some of that stuff yourself, etc.
From that perspective you're probably better off with a 7 yo stumbling across it than a 14 yo.
From personal experience, we had HBO in my house growing up, where there really wasn't any shortage of nudity and sex to speak of. In general, I just thought that stuff was boring until I hit 13 or so, at which point I'd pay a lot more attention to it and actively went looking for it. Then I got internet access around when Netscape 2.0 came out, which made it a moot point.
Wow. You just compared a DRM boycott to Galileo, MLK, and Ghandi. Is this like some inverse of Godwin's law we're going for?
Sorry, but you're not sacrificing or suffering by foregoing the latest **AA cookie-cutter crapola. Arguably, its the people who listen to and watch that drivel who suffer a whole lot more.
The DRM in Windows Vista doesn't bother me because I simply have no plans to buy DRMed content. I'm sure it will continue to play un-DRMed content just fine, so I'm more than happy to wait for these jackasses to come around to the terms I'm willing to do business with them on.
I'll lay odds that Nintendo doesn't even view Sony and Microsoft as competition, except in a very narrow sense. The products are similar but the markets they're going after are completely different.
I don't know if Nintendo will "win" this round, but I think the strategy will work for them. There's a huge untapped market of casual gamers out there, that likely dwarfs the "hardcore" market. If Nintendo can reach even a fraction of it, they should do well.
Personally I have no problem with the original 14 + 14 year copyright term - that's more than enough time to recover the cost of production and make a nice profit on top of that. And there are very, very, very few works (as a percentage) that are still commercially viable after 28 years, and those that are have already made millions or even billions for the artist.
The other responders to this thread made valid points about movies, but there's other forms of media for which three years would be too short - books in particular come to mind... very few are instant bestsellers, in some cases it can take a year between the date of publication and the first reviews to get published in literary mags, and it can be a decade or more before its adapted into a movie.
Personally, I also wouldn't even mind if it was extendible to the lifetime of the artist. Someone created the work, that person does deserve some say in what happens happens to it, IMHO. So I'm in agreement with you there.
Copyright that goes beyond the lifetime of the artist is simply absurd on the face of it: what additional incentive does it give an artist to create to have it remain in copyright when they're dead? I also strongly object to the notion that a copyright is something that can be bought and sold, or even that a corporation can own them (and the way "work for hire" gets abused - it makes sense with respect to newspapers and magazines, but in music it makes no sense). And this trend away from fair use rights needs to be reversed.
What I'd like to see, ideally, is some kind of phased transition to the public domain. Say, after three years, people are free to remix and make derivatives of the work. After 14, private noncommercial distribution (P2P) is legal. The author retains full rights to commercial uses for the lifetime.
Personally I always hated integrated designs - makes the individual components too hard to upgrade. In particular, I like to keep my monitor(s) separate from the computer.
There are some pretty nice stylish PCs out there, Voodoo and Alienware come to mind as having that sense of style, and they're not lacking for those "10,000 nice touches", either. Windows is windows of course, but the boxes themselves are pretty nice.
But OSX has been out already for what? Over a year now? Or close to it, at least. Vista is still at least 6 months away from shipping, and the last I saw it was set for a December release. That's a lot of time for Apple to release an OS 11, or at least an upgrade to OSX that's capable of the same types of graphics.
Apple, from a marketing perspective, would be smart to try to grab users when the switch is being made away from XP. I'd expect them to have something shiny prepared to coincide with the vista release.
(Similarly, if Google or anyone else was ever going to release an alternative OS - that'd be the time to do it).
Doesn't this more or less happen every time we get a new version of Windows though? It's built to run on higher end computers, with the understanding that those high end systems will become low end systems over the course of the OS's lifetime. I recall when XP first launched that was about the system I was running at the time, 256 Mb RAM and something under 1 Ghz.
It would be cool if there was suddenly a market for low end PC's sporting some flavor of Linux... but I don't see why they wouldn't just continue to sell them with XP until it gets to the point that the low end $300 systems can run Vista instead. It seems unlikely that anyone buying a $300 computer would be concerned with running the latest and greatest with all the new features anyway.
The sad part about your post is the assumption (and I'm not sure I disagree with it) that being pro-consumer and pro-business are mutually exclusive properties for a society.
I guess in my fantasyland, businesses would all be pro-consumer and function comfortably in a environment where pro-consumer laws were the norm, rather than seeking out the countries where they can get away with the most to the detriment of both consumers and the larger society.
It's a subscription model for music, no different than paying for cable TV, except you get the bonus of having content "on demand" rather than being limited by networks and time slots.
Not everyone gives a hoot about "owning" the music. Especially given that you get sick of any given track after a while anyway. It also makes DRM a lot more palatable - I don't think I can ever really *own* anything with DRM on it, but I'd care a lot less if all I'm doing is subscribing to a service.
Personally, I think all these services in their current state suck and it'll be a long time coming before I spend a dime on one - but when I do I'd be a lot more likely to go for a subscription service than something like iTunes.
Private jets and top-flight schools are still just different forms of caviar.
Really you need to work only as much as it takes to meet your basic necesseties. If I'm not too mistake, Agriculture takes up about 2% of our economic output, housing and related sectors (construction) take up about 10%. Theoretically, to eat and put a roof over our heads, you only need to work about 12% of what the typical person does now... about 5 hours a week.
Everything else is a luxury, though our shared consumerist culture might brainwash us otherwise. The question of where to set this magic "cut off" is really a question of how much in terms of luxury items one person should be allowed to have. The thing is, people don't react well to being limited in that way, even if the limit is set absurdly high.
Personally, I liked the trailers for Finding Nemo and The Incredibles. The only ones that I can say didn't immediately grab me was for the original Toy Story and Cars. In the case of Cars, I'm not even sure my apathy relates to the content of the movie - it just seems like a film targetted at Nascar fans... which I understand is a huge base, but doesn't hold any appeal for me personally.
Of course - you can't ever judge a movie by its trailer. I'll be sure to give it a fair shot when it comes out, just based on their track record.
As ebooks go, they will take off one of these days - they did suddenly get a lot of attention with the Soney e-Reader technology, and Google's already done all the legwork necessary to build such a store. And I don't think that Apple's current dominance in the video/music store area is anything close to a permanent state of affairs. As for Google Paypal - I wonder where it is myself, as its been rumored for quite some time.
In any case - my point wasn't really to disagree with you, but simply to say that they're very aware of the problem with having one revenue stream. And that by the end of the year, they'll have a lot more. Whether or not any will be successful and can provide a significant source of additional revenue remains to be seen.
Yahoo is well-designed, engaging, caters to novices, and is a portal to many things that she wants to do on the Internet.
I don't disagree with the gist of what you said... but you can't go to www.yahoo.com and tell me that the page is "well designed". I have to use Google to find the links to services that I know Yahoo offers. And there's some parts of Yahoo that just *desperately* need an overhaul (Geocities), or have become spam-ridden peices of garbage (Yahoo Groups). In general, their interfaces are terrible and the ads are obnoxiously placed.
I think Yahoo has a lot of potential. Google seems determined to use algorithms to do everything, Yahoo seems to be pursuing network effects and group wisdom, but at least for right now, they seem to be stuck in the 1990's. I like the idea of the social web - but Yahoo has an uphill climb to get there, and has a lot of legacy stuff to fix first.
At the risk of stating the obvious, that seems to be the biggest motivation behind Google Video. I don't think that Google PayPal, Google Ebook, and some kind of Google music store are that far off either. I also think that a clash of the Titans is pre-destined for some point in the future, and that Google will eventually directly challenge Microsoft Windows and Office.
It's also quite obvious that Google is moving to diversify its advertising business. They have two killer apps - search and AdSense/AdWords. There's a lot of money to be made in applying the latter to print, radio, and TV.
The problem with many corps, is that they are selfish, self-centered, and greedy, just like the individuals that own and/or run them. There are exceptions. To this date, I believe Google is still an exception there. The concerns I have with them, is how much control will they be able to maintain now that the company is publicly traded and their stock is very overvalued.
Google says "we're not evil", but I'm not sure I've seen any real evidence of that to date. To look at it cynically, it seems more like a way to get PR than anything they're really taking seriously. They do collect *a lot* of user data, and their license agreement is such that they can do whatever they want with it in the future. Doing business in China was certainly worth compromising their "don't be evil" policy. Then there's Google DRM now. Even saying "no" to the federal government the other day could be interpreted as protecting trade secrets rather than any serious concerns for civil liberties. For all the talk of openneess, their services more or less remain a black box, and their source code is as fiercely guarded as Microsoft's.
In short, I struggle to think of anything that Google has so far done differently that a company without the "don't be evil" policy would have done. Pretty much everything they've done makes good business sense; it's hard to find any areas where ethics or morals have trumped that when the two were really in conflict.
And I'm speaking as someone that loves Google and what they've done. I just try to be fair minded about it. Google isn't any different from any other corporation - the system doesn't allow for anything different.
The most frustrating thing about Star Trek is when you think about how good it could have, should have been. Especially the newer series.
Voyager? A ship tossed 75 years from home, with no way to resupply, two crews with opposing ideals forced to work together for sheer survival? That should have been a fantastic series, the number of stories that could be told from that premise is practically infinite. But by the third episode it was a standard federation happy crew with a token reference to running out of supplies and energy rations. Bleh.
Enterprise? Mankind's first interstellar ship, exploring an younger galaxy, with untested technologies like transporters and warp drives, meaning that they'd be technologically inferior to just about everyone we met - with a series long plot arc revolving around the origins of the federation, starfleet, and the prime directive? Again, there's an infinite amount of story potential there, but none of it ever came close to being realized, and instead we got some nonsense about a "temporal cold war" with an episode about the borg when they ran out of ideas?
The problem with Star Trek clearly lies in the producers and writers. Give the franchise to *anyone* else, please. Kevin Smith, Joss Whedon, anyone that'll take it. Reboot the whole thing. Do it right, let the series live up to its potential for once.
Honestly, I never liked Star Trek when it got all soap opera-ish. It's not a character show, that's not why I ever watched it. It's a show about ideas, and the characters only served to show how the traits they represented dealt with those ideas. (When done right, anyway)
Not that I have any problem with real character driven shows. But love triangles in Star Trek never felt right to me - it was never a show about the characters, it was just a thinly veiled philosophy class.
Here's reality: Most 14 year olds look for porn. Most of them find it. This was as true in the 1950's as it is today, although for kids back then it usually involved some sort of stealing, today its far easier. There's no demonstrable harm that results from this.
My question to the anti-porn crusaders whose mantra is "Protect the children!" is: protect them from what, exactly?
If a parent is dead-set against their kid ever seeing anything related to sex or porn... fine, I don't agree with that, but I won't tell you how to raise your kid. In exchange for that, don't put the burden of raising your kid on me.
This was already used years ago to try to shut down the mail order porn industry - a DA would order something (via mail) to some county with a sympathetic judge and file suit there for violating community standards where it was recieved. It's an unacceptable burden to require someong fulfilling a request to first analyze the community standards of the reciepient, and the problem is even worse on the internet.
You seem to be laboring under the misperception that that's not exactly the idea. They're not looking for a reasonable solution or compromose, nor will they look at it logically as you just did. These people simply don't believe that consenting adults should be able to make, buy, or sell anything that offends their sensibilities. Period. Because an outright ban is unattainable, they seek to make it as burdensome as possible for anyone to engage in those activities.
The "community standards" thing is simply a violation of first ammendment rights, albeit one most people don't seem to have a problem with. It gives "communities" the power to restrict the free speech rights over certain citizens. Communities already have the power to regulate businesses through zoning and other means if they simply didn't want porn shops opening up; instead, they had to go further and criminalize "obscenity", which by any definition is a form of speech.
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The problem with your logic is that the subset of 2,000 songs you give a shit about changes with time. Something gets released, you become familiar with it, like it, listen to it a lot, eventually get bored with it and listen to it much, much less.
There's so much music that I "own" on CD and just don't listen to anymore, some albums I haven't played in years... ultimately, what benefit do I have for "owning" those CD's vs. simply subscribing to a rental service? Not much.
Your argument could be the same for Cable TV, Netflix, or sattelite radio, or anything that's tied to a subscription rental. I'm not sure why some people have such a hard time getting their heads around it applying the same model to music.
As I have no plans to ever purchase or view DRM'd content, the fact that they choose to include support for such doesn't bother me in the least. As long as the system continues to play un-DRMed files, then I don't care what they DRM schemes they include. Hollywood can go jump if they expect me to jump through those hoops just for the "privilege" of watching their crapola in high def.
Listening to the passion with which Cory Doctorow opines on these subjects gives me pause: after all, it's common that those most anxious to share the wealth are those who contribute least to its creation.
He helps run one of the most popular blogs on the internet, which he "gives away for free". It's fallacious to suggest that he's one of those "contributes least" people.
His fiction isn't the greatest (not bad, just not great), but it's a heck of a lot better than anything John Grisham or Danielle Steele ever wrote. If a DRM-free future means we have a few more Cory Doctorow's in the world and a little less cookie cutter formulaic crap cluttering up the shelves, then all the better IMHO.
Well, even during the Napster era, CD sales never dipped - they didn't start to take a dive until well after Napster was shut down, as I recall. And I'd argue that the cause of it has a lot more to do with a changing media landscape (games, dvds, the web) than the specter of filesharing. There's a lot of people (myself included) that never saw Napster as a "problem" for them, anymore than the VCR was in the 80's. It simply required a re-think of business models, which to this day they refuse to do.
I think Cory is dead on about the obscurity problem. If you're an independent or small artist, your biggest problem is exposure. You want people to go share your content with their friends. Viral marketing is the only path available to you, because you don't have a million dollar marketing campaign behind you. Strict copyright enforcement (DRM or otherwise) mean your fan's friends never hear your stuff and don't come along to your next gig.
Personally, I love the CC license, I put all my content under a CC license (my blog, semi-pro photography, and a novel I'm working on). I don't mind giving it away for free because I'm stoked just to have anyone compliment me on it, my audience is so small. I don't expect to make a living off of it - it'd be cool if I built an audience large enough that I could (which is why I protect my commercial rights with the license). Mostly, I make content for the love of doing so, I don't feel I'm entitled to make a living off of it.
And even if I did look to make money from it, I'd seek to monetize it through advertising - sell a portion of my audience's attention rather than sell the content directly. It's the only way you can hope to compete against other content which is just as good and free as in beer.
The other issue you raise is an interesting one. If I really am just buying a "license" to the content rather than a physical product, then they should make available to me that licensed content in whatever format I choose for as long as I hold that license. It seems to me that when its convenient to them they treat it as a license, but when its not then they treat it as a physical product. "Oh, you scratched that CD? Format got obsoleted? Too bad, you're screwed".
The difference is that a 7-8 year old would probably be either bored, disinterested, or perhaps intellectually curious. At that age, you're not a sexual being, so you won't "get it" - you'd view it the same way you'd view anything else, and there's really no harm that can come of it provided that a parent is available to provide information and context. Once you hit puberty though you're a sexual being and its likely to be a lot more interesting, in that it could potentially turn you on, you'd have innate desires to perform some of that stuff yourself, etc.
From that perspective you're probably better off with a 7 yo stumbling across it than a 14 yo.
From personal experience, we had HBO in my house growing up, where there really wasn't any shortage of nudity and sex to speak of. In general, I just thought that stuff was boring until I hit 13 or so, at which point I'd pay a lot more attention to it and actively went looking for it. Then I got internet access around when Netscape 2.0 came out, which made it a moot point.
Also known as the "Dick Cheney" approach.
I wouldn't say that its always marginal.
Securitywise, the difference is the size of the grand canyon.
Wow. You just compared a DRM boycott to Galileo, MLK, and Ghandi. Is this like some inverse of Godwin's law we're going for?
Sorry, but you're not sacrificing or suffering by foregoing the latest **AA cookie-cutter crapola. Arguably, its the people who listen to and watch that drivel who suffer a whole lot more.
The DRM in Windows Vista doesn't bother me because I simply have no plans to buy DRMed content. I'm sure it will continue to play un-DRMed content just fine, so I'm more than happy to wait for these jackasses to come around to the terms I'm willing to do business with them on.
I'll lay odds that Nintendo doesn't even view Sony and Microsoft as competition, except in a very narrow sense. The products are similar but the markets they're going after are completely different.
I don't know if Nintendo will "win" this round, but I think the strategy will work for them. There's a huge untapped market of casual gamers out there, that likely dwarfs the "hardcore" market. If Nintendo can reach even a fraction of it, they should do well.
Personally I have no problem with the original 14 + 14 year copyright term - that's more than enough time to recover the cost of production and make a nice profit on top of that. And there are very, very, very few works (as a percentage) that are still commercially viable after 28 years, and those that are have already made millions or even billions for the artist.
The other responders to this thread made valid points about movies, but there's other forms of media for which three years would be too short - books in particular come to mind... very few are instant bestsellers, in some cases it can take a year between the date of publication and the first reviews to get published in literary mags, and it can be a decade or more before its adapted into a movie.
Personally, I also wouldn't even mind if it was extendible to the lifetime of the artist. Someone created the work, that person does deserve some say in what happens happens to it, IMHO. So I'm in agreement with you there.
Copyright that goes beyond the lifetime of the artist is simply absurd on the face of it: what additional incentive does it give an artist to create to have it remain in copyright when they're dead? I also strongly object to the notion that a copyright is something that can be bought and sold, or even that a corporation can own them (and the way "work for hire" gets abused - it makes sense with respect to newspapers and magazines, but in music it makes no sense). And this trend away from fair use rights needs to be reversed.
What I'd like to see, ideally, is some kind of phased transition to the public domain. Say, after three years, people are free to remix and make derivatives of the work. After 14, private noncommercial distribution (P2P) is legal. The author retains full rights to commercial uses for the lifetime.
Personally I always hated integrated designs - makes the individual components too hard to upgrade. In particular, I like to keep my monitor(s) separate from the computer.
There are some pretty nice stylish PCs out there, Voodoo and Alienware come to mind as having that sense of style, and they're not lacking for those "10,000 nice touches", either. Windows is windows of course, but the boxes themselves are pretty nice.
Alright - that's fair enough to say.
But OSX has been out already for what? Over a year now? Or close to it, at least. Vista is still at least 6 months away from shipping, and the last I saw it was set for a December release. That's a lot of time for Apple to release an OS 11, or at least an upgrade to OSX that's capable of the same types of graphics.
Apple, from a marketing perspective, would be smart to try to grab users when the switch is being made away from XP. I'd expect them to have something shiny prepared to coincide with the vista release.
(Similarly, if Google or anyone else was ever going to release an alternative OS - that'd be the time to do it).
Doesn't this more or less happen every time we get a new version of Windows though? It's built to run on higher end computers, with the understanding that those high end systems will become low end systems over the course of the OS's lifetime. I recall when XP first launched that was about the system I was running at the time, 256 Mb RAM and something under 1 Ghz.
It would be cool if there was suddenly a market for low end PC's sporting some flavor of Linux... but I don't see why they wouldn't just continue to sell them with XP until it gets to the point that the low end $300 systems can run Vista instead. It seems unlikely that anyone buying a $300 computer would be concerned with running the latest and greatest with all the new features anyway.
The sad part about your post is the assumption (and I'm not sure I disagree with it) that being pro-consumer and pro-business are mutually exclusive properties for a society.
I guess in my fantasyland, businesses would all be pro-consumer and function comfortably in a environment where pro-consumer laws were the norm, rather than seeking out the countries where they can get away with the most to the detriment of both consumers and the larger society.
It's a subscription model for music, no different than paying for cable TV, except you get the bonus of having content "on demand" rather than being limited by networks and time slots.
Not everyone gives a hoot about "owning" the music. Especially given that you get sick of any given track after a while anyway. It also makes DRM a lot more palatable - I don't think I can ever really *own* anything with DRM on it, but I'd care a lot less if all I'm doing is subscribing to a service.
Personally, I think all these services in their current state suck and it'll be a long time coming before I spend a dime on one - but when I do I'd be a lot more likely to go for a subscription service than something like iTunes.
Private jets and top-flight schools are still just different forms of caviar.
Really you need to work only as much as it takes to meet your basic necesseties. If I'm not too mistake, Agriculture takes up about 2% of our economic output, housing and related sectors (construction) take up about 10%. Theoretically, to eat and put a roof over our heads, you only need to work about 12% of what the typical person does now... about 5 hours a week.
Everything else is a luxury, though our shared consumerist culture might brainwash us otherwise. The question of where to set this magic "cut off" is really a question of how much in terms of luxury items one person should be allowed to have. The thing is, people don't react well to being limited in that way, even if the limit is set absurdly high.
Personally, I liked the trailers for Finding Nemo and The Incredibles. The only ones that I can say didn't immediately grab me was for the original Toy Story and Cars. In the case of Cars, I'm not even sure my apathy relates to the content of the movie - it just seems like a film targetted at Nascar fans... which I understand is a huge base, but doesn't hold any appeal for me personally.
Of course - you can't ever judge a movie by its trailer. I'll be sure to give it a fair shot when it comes out, just based on their track record.
As ebooks go, they will take off one of these days - they did suddenly get a lot of attention with the Soney e-Reader technology, and Google's already done all the legwork necessary to build such a store. And I don't think that Apple's current dominance in the video/music store area is anything close to a permanent state of affairs. As for Google Paypal - I wonder where it is myself, as its been rumored for quite some time.
In any case - my point wasn't really to disagree with you, but simply to say that they're very aware of the problem with having one revenue stream. And that by the end of the year, they'll have a lot more. Whether or not any will be successful and can provide a significant source of additional revenue remains to be seen.
Yahoo is well-designed, engaging, caters to novices, and is a portal to many things that she wants to do on the Internet.
I don't disagree with the gist of what you said... but you can't go to www.yahoo.com and tell me that the page is "well designed". I have to use Google to find the links to services that I know Yahoo offers. And there's some parts of Yahoo that just *desperately* need an overhaul (Geocities), or have become spam-ridden peices of garbage (Yahoo Groups). In general, their interfaces are terrible and the ads are obnoxiously placed.
I think Yahoo has a lot of potential. Google seems determined to use algorithms to do everything, Yahoo seems to be pursuing network effects and group wisdom, but at least for right now, they seem to be stuck in the 1990's. I like the idea of the social web - but Yahoo has an uphill climb to get there, and has a lot of legacy stuff to fix first.
At the risk of stating the obvious, that seems to be the biggest motivation behind Google Video. I don't think that Google PayPal, Google Ebook, and some kind of Google music store are that far off either. I also think that a clash of the Titans is pre-destined for some point in the future, and that Google will eventually directly challenge Microsoft Windows and Office.
It's also quite obvious that Google is moving to diversify its advertising business. They have two killer apps - search and AdSense/AdWords. There's a lot of money to be made in applying the latter to print, radio, and TV.
The problem with many corps, is that they are selfish, self-centered, and greedy, just like the individuals that own and/or run them. There are exceptions. To this date, I believe Google is still an exception there. The concerns I have with them, is how much control will they be able to maintain now that the company is publicly traded and their stock is very overvalued.
Google says "we're not evil", but I'm not sure I've seen any real evidence of that to date. To look at it cynically, it seems more like a way to get PR than anything they're really taking seriously. They do collect *a lot* of user data, and their license agreement is such that they can do whatever they want with it in the future. Doing business in China was certainly worth compromising their "don't be evil" policy. Then there's Google DRM now. Even saying "no" to the federal government the other day could be interpreted as protecting trade secrets rather than any serious concerns for civil liberties. For all the talk of openneess, their services more or less remain a black box, and their source code is as fiercely guarded as Microsoft's.
In short, I struggle to think of anything that Google has so far done differently that a company without the "don't be evil" policy would have done. Pretty much everything they've done makes good business sense; it's hard to find any areas where ethics or morals have trumped that when the two were really in conflict.
And I'm speaking as someone that loves Google and what they've done. I just try to be fair minded about it. Google isn't any different from any other corporation - the system doesn't allow for anything different.
The most frustrating thing about Star Trek is when you think about how good it could have, should have been. Especially the newer series.
Voyager? A ship tossed 75 years from home, with no way to resupply, two crews with opposing ideals forced to work together for sheer survival? That should have been a fantastic series, the number of stories that could be told from that premise is practically infinite. But by the third episode it was a standard federation happy crew with a token reference to running out of supplies and energy rations. Bleh.
Enterprise? Mankind's first interstellar ship, exploring an younger galaxy, with untested technologies like transporters and warp drives, meaning that they'd be technologically inferior to just about everyone we met - with a series long plot arc revolving around the origins of the federation, starfleet, and the prime directive? Again, there's an infinite amount of story potential there, but none of it ever came close to being realized, and instead we got some nonsense about a "temporal cold war" with an episode about the borg when they ran out of ideas?
The problem with Star Trek clearly lies in the producers and writers. Give the franchise to *anyone* else, please. Kevin Smith, Joss Whedon, anyone that'll take it. Reboot the whole thing. Do it right, let the series live up to its potential for once.
Honestly, I never liked Star Trek when it got all soap opera-ish. It's not a character show, that's not why I ever watched it. It's a show about ideas, and the characters only served to show how the traits they represented dealt with those ideas. (When done right, anyway)
Not that I have any problem with real character driven shows. But love triangles in Star Trek never felt right to me - it was never a show about the characters, it was just a thinly veiled philosophy class.
Exactly.
Here's reality: Most 14 year olds look for porn. Most of them find it. This was as true in the 1950's as it is today, although for kids back then it usually involved some sort of stealing, today its far easier. There's no demonstrable harm that results from this.
My question to the anti-porn crusaders whose mantra is "Protect the children!" is: protect them from what, exactly?
If a parent is dead-set against their kid ever seeing anything related to sex or porn... fine, I don't agree with that, but I won't tell you how to raise your kid. In exchange for that, don't put the burden of raising your kid on me.
This was already used years ago to try to shut down the mail order porn industry - a DA would order something (via mail) to some county with a sympathetic judge and file suit there for violating community standards where it was recieved. It's an unacceptable burden to require someong fulfilling a request to first analyze the community standards of the reciepient, and the problem is even worse on the internet.
You seem to be laboring under the misperception that that's not exactly the idea. They're not looking for a reasonable solution or compromose, nor will they look at it logically as you just did. These people simply don't believe that consenting adults should be able to make, buy, or sell anything that offends their sensibilities. Period. Because an outright ban is unattainable, they seek to make it as burdensome as possible for anyone to engage in those activities.
The "community standards" thing is simply a violation of first ammendment rights, albeit one most people don't seem to have a problem with. It gives "communities" the power to restrict the free speech rights over certain citizens. Communities already have the power to regulate businesses through zoning and other means if they simply didn't want porn shops opening up; instead, they had to go further and criminalize "obscenity", which by any definition is a form of speech.