how much live content is there usually? with the huge capacity of dual-layer BDs wouldn't it be more efficient to just put the live content on the disc itself in the first place?
Without time travel ability, no. "Live content" means "That movie you bought 5 years ago is showing trailers for next summer's movie lineup."
You're claiming that in such a world, information about whether or not people buy products as a result of spam is difficult to dig up.
Just for clarification: I'm saying that that information is difficult to dig up today in the real world.
I don't think so. Even if it were, the thought process would run something like: "Hmm, will anyone actually buy this as a result of me employing someone to send out spam? Well, if they do, they'll be executed for it. I guess not, then."
Respectfully, I disagree. They wouldn't care if people were executed for it. The responsbility for that would be on the people making the purchase, it would be up to them to avoid being caught. Really, they don't even care now if they ruin somebody's life by transferring all their money out of their account. "Better you than me!"
On a planet in which they would also lose their lives, you wouldn't.
Ha. Yeah, that's why some states in the USA don't have people commiting murder anymore.
You must truly be the conman's dream, if you think that hindsight is the only way to evaluate a proposition.
That's a creative way to misinterpret what I said. Heh. Like I said, it's info that is difficult to dig up. It's a price low enough to not be too risky. Still, though, if I hadn't already pointed this out before, I'd understand why you'd say something like that.
Now, I have something you might be interested in. It only costs $20, and it'll net you thousands of dollars profit. Do we have a deal?
Not a very valid analogy here, but okay, let's run with it. Do you think out of 6 billion people on this planet, 0 would say yes to that? I admire the faith you have in the people that send out these messages, but they'd disappoint you. A few bucks and their message gets out. They're not going to spend 6 months researching the spammer, finding references, getting customer testimonials "My penis grew 3 inches!", and doing a risk analysis. If they're going to take it that seriously, why bother with SPAM at all?
Good. We are agreed that even the most idiotic, unscrupulous individuals still have their eye on the bottom line. Now, change the law so those 5 sales do not happen, and QED.
By the time the sales did or didn't happen, he's already given money to the spammer. What your saying would only be true if Doc Brown managed to commercialize his time machine. Hindsight is 20/20, you know.;)
Heh. What exactly are you expecting, here? "Hey Mr. Nigerian scammer, how much money did you get from all the SPAM you had sent out? " Seriously, we're not talking about companies or customers who want to talk about it. Read some of those messages. The goods are usually ill-gotten, scams, or just plain the sort of thing you'd never get from a reputable company.
And if nothing gets sold, ever, via spam, sellers will no more use the services of spammers than they use the services of apothecaries to turn lead into gold.
Wrong. First off, we're not talking about people with business degrees or candidates for the Apprentice. Secondly, when the price is cheap enough, there's always that temptation. "Well, we'd only have to sell 5 to break even." Third, you're assuming no new naieve businesses/individuals with stuff to sell are ever going to appear again. The world's constantly generating new conniving people to fill our inboxes.
Your rationale works fine when talking about McDonald's or Coca Cola, that's because the demand is for their actual products. In the case of SPAM, the demand isn't for products, it's for the advertising. Plain and simple. You don't need successful sales for SPAM to be attractive. All you need is somebody without a lot of money and something to offload.
I'll send the same amount of business your way as a spammer would have done if responding to spam carried the death penalty.
I'd still get SPAM, lots of it. It costs the spammer virtually nothing to send lots of people messages. He doesn't even care if I've got a SPAM filter on because he can tell his potential clients "I can get it to a million addresses out there". He gets paid long before a single sale could ever possibly get back to the client. His pay is not dependent on success. He can just keep making lots of noise and racking in the money. The only possible way the death penalty idea could ever work is if all the spammers out there have a conscience. Heh.
What I can't understand is why you think there'll be profitability when only, say, one in ten billion eyeballs will take the risk to buy viagra upon pain of death.
Two reasons:
1.) SPAM is really really cheap. 2.) There'll always be stuff people want to sell.
It's not like a spammer would have to provide any records that utterly and without a doubt prove that stuff actually gets sold in order to get any business.
Reading it is not enough. If 1% of 50,000 people read it, but no-one ever buys anything, do you honestly think the people sending the message will continue to employ the spammers?
A spammer (or an advertiser, for that matter) cannot promise anybody'll do anything but see the spam/ad. And to answer your question, no, but now you're talking about repeat business, here. You said spam would stop if people quit buying stuff, that's what I'm contesting. There's always somebody trying to sell something without spending a lot of money. There will always be demand for that no matter what the people receiving the SPAM do. Execute a bunch of people? You'll still have people wanting to get messages out there. As long as there's demand, there'll always be supply. That is why your approach won't work. It's like trying to stop prostitution by going after the customers, only without it being plainly clear what the person arrested did wrong.
Seriously, if you don't expect a return on your investments, I'd love to do business with you sometime.
We're talking impulse prices, here. There aren't any new or foreign concepts here, no point in acting like there area.
I don't have any hard numbers, but I can say that out of the 15 or so people I know with a nintendo DS, 13 have an R4DS or equivalent flash card. I go to a university with lots of asian people, but still, 13/15 is pretty bad for nintendo.
Unfortunately those numbers are pretty meaningless to me. I don't mean that to be insulting or anything, I'm just saying that your local group of people doesn't really speak for a larger group. For example: Out of 20 or so coworkers I have, something like 17 of them have XBOX 360's and 2 of them have Wii's. That's an interesting number considering Nintendo has sold more consoles than 360's, right?
Thankfully, though, somebody else in this thread did get some info I was able to find out a little bit more on. 500k units of DS software were sold in South Korea, but 800k DS's were sold. Weird, huh? That's the first real number I've seen. Even that is questionable. Maybe the used market is really strong there? Maybe they primarily purchase imports that aren't tracked via Nintendo's official channels? Who knows? But it is weird, and it's the first time I've ever seen an actual discrepency potentially caused by piracy.
I'm not trying to give you a hard time, here. Lately I've seen a lot of extreme conclusions drawn that, if you take a step back, don't make that much sense. One guy yesterday was saying that the whole reason for this new DS is to combat piracy. He genuinely thinks millions of people are actively NOT buying DS games. Okay, fair enough. But why would Nintendo fight piracy with a machine featuring an added SD-card slot? Isn't that like waving a red cape at the people who like to tinker with this stuff?
Okay, I'll get off my soap-box. I think I've gotten a little too close to this topic.
The point is that if people cease to buy things as a result of spam, spam will dry up. Are you seriously claiming I'm wrong about that?
Yes.
Here's how it works: You pay spammer money, he delivers messages to n-thousand addresses. That's it. There is no "I'll pay you when I make money." That's how these guys make their living. They get paid something like $200 to deliver a message to like 50,000 people. The people sending the message a.) don't think that's too much to spend just to try it in case b.) they get just 1% of those 50,000 people to read it. The spammer cannot say "I can guarantee you sales", he can just say "I can guarantee a certain percentage will look at it." That's how it works. It doesn't require success. Heck, why would it? All somebody'd have to do is say it works. If the price is low enough, it falls under "what the hell? What do I have to lose?"
Much like advertising, SPAM is driven by potential, not by actual sales.
*** If nobody bought anything as a result of reading spam, spam would cease to exist. ***
To put it another way:
*** People expect some sort of return from an advertising budget. ***
Do you understand it yet?
I've understood what you're saying the whole time. You're just wrong. The money has changed hands before anything's actually sold. The only promise they're made is n thousand people will receieve the message. That's it. It has nothing to do with actual sales.
Right, that page agrees with me. The operative word being 'similar'.
Are you really denying that punishment has no deterrent effect?
No. I didn't make any general statements about punishment and deterrents. I said that suggestion won't work.
Where do you think the advertising revenue for spam comes from? That's right: sales!
Wrong. It comes from somebody having something they want to sell. They don't pay the spammer after the sales are made. They pay him/her to send x number of messages out. That's it. It's just like advertising in the New York Times.
Killing people buying stuff from spam, besides being a patently dumb idea, won't do one thing to stop it. You need to understand what a problem is before trying to solve it.
How about a death penalty for anyone that buys anything from spam?
That wouldn't do anything. By the time a SPAM message has reached your inbox, even before you've decided to filter it or read it and say 'no', the spammer has already been paid. The money comes from advertisers, not customers.
And as for GTA, I don't aim for the pedestrians like some people do, so that has to count for something:)
IF you want to beat that game, you'll spend time learning not to hit pedestrians. That's why I'd rather have a kid of mine play GTA instead of Crazy Taxi. You can't hit pedestrians in CT, but if you hit the in GTA, the cops chase you, thus delaying the ending of the game. Vice City was particularly bad about that with its "Let's race through the city with lots of drunk pedestrians!" mission.
If rules are art, could not one just as easily publish a rulebook, and leave it at that?
Yes, and instead of paintings, we should just have coloring books, which give you rules for how to get the same image by coloring within the lines.
You're right. It's funny that the question was even asked. Even outside of art, we value creative solutions that work within the rules. Movies are a big example of this. Sports, comedy, programming, first posts on Slashdot, you name it and somebody's done something amazing yet well within the rules.
The dude you're responding to does have a small point, though. We cannot really solidly and scientifically define what art is. Here's a weird thing: If a computer randomly puts different colored pixels together, that's not art. If somebody writes a program to randomly generate art (fractals, for example... or even Spore, for that matter) then their work there IS considered art. Fun, mm?
Internationally? Yes. Eastern European and Southeast Asian users alone probably take care of those figures easily. If you have not lived in or visited either of these general regions, perhaps you would not understand the real scope of the situation.
You're right, I don't get it. I'd like to see some actual numbers somewhere, like one of these companies making money hand over fist. The reason I'm bugging you about this is that it's easy to see a bunch of people and come up with an estimate. Let me give you an example: If I were go to by the people I know and see everyday, I'd say that 70% of the people in America own an XBOX 360 and 90% own an iPhone. Both numbers are horseshit. If a company sold even a million of these that'd be quite astonishing and easy to track.
And don't be so naive as to lump hardware sales in with that penny count. Sure Nintendo makes a profit from their hardware sales, per unit; they are renown for this. But that does not mean they can not or do not want to protect their software sales.
It's already been well established that Nintendo will pounce, given the chance. They fired shots at Lik-Sang long before Sony finally wiped them out. What Nintendo did not do was put in an upgradable BIOS that needs to be updated every 6 months when some big new game comes along so they can disable those devices.
I'd really like to see some numbers. I'm not challenging you, I just haven't heard much about it before it was brought up today.
Actually, it makes perfect sense. They wanted to distance themselves from the old brand - just by dint of the name, GameBoy has connotations of a (male) child's toy. The DS has seen success in much broader markets, just as the Wii has, and at least some fraction of that is due to the more approachable branding. Yes, people really do get hung up on names that much.
Heh. Well you're partially right. They did want to distance themselves from the GameBoy brand. But it's not because it was a deterrent. If anything, calling it a GameBoy would have been helpful. The problem, though, was they weren't sure if it was going to take off or not. It may not seem like it today, but the DS was very risky. Nintendo didn't know if it'd excel or flop and they didn't want to take out the GameBoy brand with it. So they gave it a different name: DS. (Which didn't become 'dual screen' until close to launch.)
Nintendo was VERY nervous with the DS's launch so close to the PSP's.
I sincerely hope that they do not take the iPhone/PSP "Let's continually patch to kill homebrew" stance.
Sadly, Nintendo has a colorful history of attacking home-brew. The only reason I can think of that they haven't been as over-zealous of it lately is that they actually make money on the systems from the beginning, unlikey a certain competitor of theirs whose name rhymes with baloney.
Slashdot Mirror
how much live content is there usually? with the huge capacity of dual-layer BDs wouldn't it be more efficient to just put the live content on the disc itself in the first place?
Without time travel ability, no. "Live content" means "That movie you bought 5 years ago is showing trailers for next summer's movie lineup."
You're claiming that in such a world, information about whether or not people buy products as a result of spam is difficult to dig up.
Just for clarification: I'm saying that that information is difficult to dig up today in the real world.
I don't think so. Even if it were, the thought process would run something like: "Hmm, will anyone actually buy this as a result of me employing someone to send out spam? Well, if they do, they'll be executed for it. I guess not, then."
Respectfully, I disagree. They wouldn't care if people were executed for it. The responsbility for that would be on the people making the purchase, it would be up to them to avoid being caught. Really, they don't even care now if they ruin somebody's life by transferring all their money out of their account. "Better you than me!"
On a planet in which they would also lose their lives, you wouldn't.
Ha. Yeah, that's why some states in the USA don't have people commiting murder anymore.
You must truly be the conman's dream, if you think that hindsight is the only way to evaluate a proposition.
That's a creative way to misinterpret what I said. Heh. Like I said, it's info that is difficult to dig up. It's a price low enough to not be too risky. Still, though, if I hadn't already pointed this out before, I'd understand why you'd say something like that.
Now, I have something you might be interested in. It only costs $20, and it'll net you thousands of dollars profit. Do we have a deal?
Not a very valid analogy here, but okay, let's run with it. Do you think out of 6 billion people on this planet, 0 would say yes to that? I admire the faith you have in the people that send out these messages, but they'd disappoint you. A few bucks and their message gets out. They're not going to spend 6 months researching the spammer, finding references, getting customer testimonials "My penis grew 3 inches!", and doing a risk analysis. If they're going to take it that seriously, why bother with SPAM at all?
Those poor people, executed for nothing.
Good. We are agreed that even the most idiotic, unscrupulous individuals still have their eye on the bottom line. Now, change the law so those 5 sales do not happen, and QED.
By the time the sales did or didn't happen, he's already given money to the spammer. What your saying would only be true if Doc Brown managed to commercialize his time machine. Hindsight is 20/20, you know. ;)
The seller can determine that for themselves.
Heh. What exactly are you expecting, here? "Hey Mr. Nigerian scammer, how much money did you get from all the SPAM you had sent out? " Seriously, we're not talking about companies or customers who want to talk about it. Read some of those messages. The goods are usually ill-gotten, scams, or just plain the sort of thing you'd never get from a reputable company.
And if nothing gets sold, ever, via spam, sellers will no more use the services of spammers than they use the services of apothecaries to turn lead into gold.
Wrong. First off, we're not talking about people with business degrees or candidates for the Apprentice. Secondly, when the price is cheap enough, there's always that temptation. "Well, we'd only have to sell 5 to break even." Third, you're assuming no new naieve businesses/individuals with stuff to sell are ever going to appear again. The world's constantly generating new conniving people to fill our inboxes.
Your rationale works fine when talking about McDonald's or Coca Cola, that's because the demand is for their actual products. In the case of SPAM, the demand isn't for products, it's for the advertising. Plain and simple. You don't need successful sales for SPAM to be attractive. All you need is somebody without a lot of money and something to offload.
I'll send the same amount of business your way as a spammer would have done if responding to spam carried the death penalty.
I'd still get SPAM, lots of it. It costs the spammer virtually nothing to send lots of people messages. He doesn't even care if I've got a SPAM filter on because he can tell his potential clients "I can get it to a million addresses out there". He gets paid long before a single sale could ever possibly get back to the client. His pay is not dependent on success. He can just keep making lots of noise and racking in the money. The only possible way the death penalty idea could ever work is if all the spammers out there have a conscience. Heh.
What I can't understand is why you think there'll be profitability when only, say, one in ten billion eyeballs will take the risk to buy viagra upon pain of death.
Two reasons:
1.) SPAM is really really cheap.
2.) There'll always be stuff people want to sell.
It's not like a spammer would have to provide any records that utterly and without a doubt prove that stuff actually gets sold in order to get any business.
Reading it is not enough. If 1% of 50,000 people read it, but no-one ever buys anything, do you honestly think the people sending the message will continue to employ the spammers?
A spammer (or an advertiser, for that matter) cannot promise anybody'll do anything but see the spam/ad. And to answer your question, no, but now you're talking about repeat business, here. You said spam would stop if people quit buying stuff, that's what I'm contesting. There's always somebody trying to sell something without spending a lot of money. There will always be demand for that no matter what the people receiving the SPAM do. Execute a bunch of people? You'll still have people wanting to get messages out there. As long as there's demand, there'll always be supply. That is why your approach won't work. It's like trying to stop prostitution by going after the customers, only without it being plainly clear what the person arrested did wrong.
Seriously, if you don't expect a return on your investments, I'd love to do business with you sometime.
We're talking impulse prices, here. There aren't any new or foreign concepts here, no point in acting like there area.
I don't have any hard numbers, but I can say that out of the 15 or so people I know with a nintendo DS, 13 have an R4DS or equivalent flash card. I go to a university with lots of asian people, but still, 13/15 is pretty bad for nintendo.
Unfortunately those numbers are pretty meaningless to me. I don't mean that to be insulting or anything, I'm just saying that your local group of people doesn't really speak for a larger group. For example: Out of 20 or so coworkers I have, something like 17 of them have XBOX 360's and 2 of them have Wii's. That's an interesting number considering Nintendo has sold more consoles than 360's, right?
Thankfully, though, somebody else in this thread did get some info I was able to find out a little bit more on. 500k units of DS software were sold in South Korea, but 800k DS's were sold. Weird, huh? That's the first real number I've seen. Even that is questionable. Maybe the used market is really strong there? Maybe they primarily purchase imports that aren't tracked via Nintendo's official channels? Who knows? But it is weird, and it's the first time I've ever seen an actual discrepency potentially caused by piracy.
I'm not trying to give you a hard time, here. Lately I've seen a lot of extreme conclusions drawn that, if you take a step back, don't make that much sense. One guy yesterday was saying that the whole reason for this new DS is to combat piracy. He genuinely thinks millions of people are actively NOT buying DS games. Okay, fair enough. But why would Nintendo fight piracy with a machine featuring an added SD-card slot? Isn't that like waving a red cape at the people who like to tinker with this stuff?
Okay, I'll get off my soap-box. I think I've gotten a little too close to this topic.
The point is that if people cease to buy things as a result of spam, spam will dry up. Are you seriously claiming I'm wrong about that?
Yes.
Here's how it works: You pay spammer money, he delivers messages to n-thousand addresses. That's it. There is no "I'll pay you when I make money." That's how these guys make their living. They get paid something like $200 to deliver a message to like 50,000 people. The people sending the message a.) don't think that's too much to spend just to try it in case b.) they get just 1% of those 50,000 people to read it. The spammer cannot say "I can guarantee you sales", he can just say "I can guarantee a certain percentage will look at it." That's how it works. It doesn't require success. Heck, why would it? All somebody'd have to do is say it works. If the price is low enough, it falls under "what the hell? What do I have to lose?"
Much like advertising, SPAM is driven by potential, not by actual sales.
Let me spell this out for you:
*** If nobody bought anything as a result of reading spam, spam would cease to exist. ***
To put it another way:
*** People expect some sort of return from an advertising budget. ***
Do you understand it yet?
I've understood what you're saying the whole time. You're just wrong. The money has changed hands before anything's actually sold. The only promise they're made is n thousand people will receieve the message. That's it. It has nothing to do with actual sales.
See http://www.answers.com/analogy
Right, that page agrees with me. The operative word being 'similar'.
Are you really denying that punishment has no deterrent effect?
No. I didn't make any general statements about punishment and deterrents. I said that suggestion won't work.
Where do you think the advertising revenue for spam comes from? That's right: sales!
Wrong. It comes from somebody having something they want to sell. They don't pay the spammer after the sales are made. They pay him/her to send x number of messages out. That's it. It's just like advertising in the New York Times.
Killing people buying stuff from spam, besides being a patently dumb idea, won't do one thing to stop it. You need to understand what a problem is before trying to solve it.
That's like saying "we shouldn't have laws for murder, because by the time it's been committed, the victim is already dead".
Uh, no, that's nothing like what I said at all.
It's more like arresting the guy that bought a video of said victim's murder and wanting him to sit in the chair for it.
How about a death penalty for anyone that buys anything from spam?
That wouldn't do anything. By the time a SPAM message has reached your inbox, even before you've decided to filter it or read it and say 'no', the spammer has already been paid. The money comes from advertisers, not customers.
One of the driving forces behind the development of the DSi is the rampant piracy in the DS market.
How rampant? Thousands? Millions? Got some numbers?
And as for GTA, I don't aim for the pedestrians like some people do, so that has to count for something :)
IF you want to beat that game, you'll spend time learning not to hit pedestrians. That's why I'd rather have a kid of mine play GTA instead of Crazy Taxi. You can't hit pedestrians in CT, but if you hit the in GTA, the cops chase you, thus delaying the ending of the game. Vice City was particularly bad about that with its "Let's race through the city with lots of drunk pedestrians!" mission.
Care to point us at a project you work on in your spare time so that we can mock it?
If you can't stand the heat...
does :) mean you're lying? Cause it certainly doesn't indicate what you said is funny.
You're either a lair or you're a freak, choose.
What do you call somebody who misinterprets an emoticon?
RealNetworks is saying "Hey look at me everyone! Why doesn't anyone ever notice me?"
Yes, they're saying to the people that'll spend ridiculous amounts of money fighting them in court "Look at me!" Attention whores.
Hey! I thought I was a real woman (and people with your point of view were extinct by now)
--
laura.
Pics or you didn't happen.
If rules are art, could not one just as easily publish a rulebook, and leave it at that?
Yes, and instead of paintings, we should just have coloring books, which give you rules for how to get the same image by coloring within the lines.
You're right. It's funny that the question was even asked. Even outside of art, we value creative solutions that work within the rules. Movies are a big example of this. Sports, comedy, programming, first posts on Slashdot, you name it and somebody's done something amazing yet well within the rules.
The dude you're responding to does have a small point, though. We cannot really solidly and scientifically define what art is. Here's a weird thing: If a computer randomly puts different colored pixels together, that's not art. If somebody writes a program to randomly generate art (fractals, for example... or even Spore, for that matter) then their work there IS considered art. Fun, mm?
Internationally? Yes. Eastern European and Southeast Asian users alone probably take care of those figures easily. If you have not lived in or visited either of these general regions, perhaps you would not understand the real scope of the situation.
You're right, I don't get it. I'd like to see some actual numbers somewhere, like one of these companies making money hand over fist. The reason I'm bugging you about this is that it's easy to see a bunch of people and come up with an estimate. Let me give you an example: If I were go to by the people I know and see everyday, I'd say that 70% of the people in America own an XBOX 360 and 90% own an iPhone. Both numbers are horseshit. If a company sold even a million of these that'd be quite astonishing and easy to track.
And don't be so naive as to lump hardware sales in with that penny count. Sure Nintendo makes a profit from their hardware sales, per unit; they are renown for this. But that does not mean they can not or do not want to protect their software sales.
It's already been well established that Nintendo will pounce, given the chance. They fired shots at Lik-Sang long before Sony finally wiped them out. What Nintendo did not do was put in an upgradable BIOS that needs to be updated every 6 months when some big new game comes along so they can disable those devices.
I'd really like to see some numbers. I'm not challenging you, I just haven't heard much about it before it was brought up today.
Now who's projecting? ;)
And such carts have certainly sold millions of units.
Citation, please?
Actually, it makes perfect sense. They wanted to distance themselves from the old brand - just by dint of the name, GameBoy has connotations of a (male) child's toy. The DS has seen success in much broader markets, just as the Wii has, and at least some fraction of that is due to the more approachable branding. Yes, people really do get hung up on names that much.
Heh. Well you're partially right. They did want to distance themselves from the GameBoy brand. But it's not because it was a deterrent. If anything, calling it a GameBoy would have been helpful. The problem, though, was they weren't sure if it was going to take off or not. It may not seem like it today, but the DS was very risky. Nintendo didn't know if it'd excel or flop and they didn't want to take out the GameBoy brand with it. So they gave it a different name: DS. (Which didn't become 'dual screen' until close to launch.)
Nintendo was VERY nervous with the DS's launch so close to the PSP's.
I sincerely hope that they do not take the iPhone/PSP "Let's continually patch to kill homebrew" stance.
Sadly, Nintendo has a colorful history of attacking home-brew. The only reason I can think of that they haven't been as over-zealous of it lately is that they actually make money on the systems from the beginning, unlikey a certain competitor of theirs whose name rhymes with baloney.