True, true... but is having multiple handwriting profiles out of the question?
I think a lot of effort has been put into it, but it seems as though it's not average software; it's up there with writing a seriously optimizing compiler in that it's a lot of heuristics (or guesswork). But, having multiple handwriting profiles would be a start... making the software 'adaptive' so that the more you use it (and the more you have to correct it) it gets better and better at recognizing 'your' handwriting.
Also, the issue is different from a tablet or PDA to someting that's already written on paper and scanned, as another poster (that I saw) pointed out; a tablet or PDA can make use of pen pressure, number and direction of strokes, timing, etc.
Even from a PDA to a tablet there are varying issues; a tablet could (and does?) support cursive, whereas that's almost out of the question on a PDA.
At the very least, adapting between your own varying styles would be easier than trying to adapt to the software's, no matter what mood you're in.
Most of the responses seem to be missing the point of the post.
Okay. I'm attacking the point of the post.
There's no reason to reinvent the alphabet any more than there is reinvent the wheel.
If we change the alphabet so machines can read it, other people stop being able to read it. It's the wrong solution for the problem.
If my handwriting is good enough that I can read it two weeks later, and my peers and friends and family can read it perfectly (i've been told I have particularly good handwriting) then why should I have to change it so that my PC can understand it, but nobody else can?
I could memorize a second alphabet, having one for me and one for my PC... but why?
If I could tell the software "This is how I write a 'k' and this is how I write an 'R'", that would improve things a lot IMO. My 'k' might look like someone else's 'R'; but my 'k' and 'R' look absolutely nothing alike. My ampersand kind of looks like a plus sign; but it's totally distinguishable from my plus sign. If I could dawn this on the software...
An alphabet based on entirely straight lines would be easy enough for a computer to read if letters never touched. The software would first detect the line of text, then along the row of letters, find the first black pixel, then find all the lines touching the line containing that pixel. Bonus points if all characters had a single vertical line (making this sort of a barcode of its own).
You took us from having a human-readable, non-machine-readable alphabet to the exact opposite. I don't want to be a barcode scanner!! Hehe.
Graffiti on palms doesn't really work that well. I've tried to get fast at it; but if I'm trying to write down something someone is saying on the phone, I usually resort to the on-screen keyboard. It just doesn't get much faster than that no matter how fast you can write.
Ultimately, handwriting recognition systems need a way to be customized; I should be able to make my own alphabet up from scratch and tell my OCR software about it. Sometimes my palm mistakes a 'k' for an 'R'; when in fact my 'k' and 'R' are all totally different looking.
Having one system that works with every human being's style is unrealistic and just won't work as well as everyone wishes; humans can adapt a little, but even after years of "adapting", my Palm still hiccups on about every 5th word that I try to write.
How is it that we can produce software that can recall your face, but handwritten OCR is still so error-prone? It's 2006 already! 10 years ago I hoped it would be further along by now.
I should note that I've only tried my handwriting on Palm's Graffiti and my scanner's bundled OCR (which is worse). Are tablet PCs or Pocket PC's any better?
You want the heat to leave the case. It doesn't matter how big a fan or heatsink or what method is used to apply the thermal compound if the heat stays in the case. Then everything that isn't actively cooled (the rest of your hardware in your tiny little Macbook Pro or whatever) "takes the heat" so to speak.
My ThinkPad has a vent on the left side that, when obstructed, will nuke anything in its path... the rest of it stays pretty cool unless you're playing a game or something.
Michael Jackson had front-page articles for a long time. I don't think it helped him sell records.
I realize you're either kidding, or you're an idiot.
If he was in the headlines simply because of his outlandish name change (had he done so), it would indicate that he was already so huge that changing his name to something considerably stupid was headline news; if the music was good, he would then subsequently sell a substantial amount of records just because of all the publicity.
If Nintendo was in the headlines because they allegedly molested children, they would undoubtedly never sell another console or game again.
For that matter, Nintendo should have called it "The Entertainment System Formerly Known as Revolution".
Well, if you also turn off SSID broadcasting, people won't see your router from the list of available ones; if some WiFi troll comes along looking for routers that don't broadcast their SSID, 'default' would be a pretty obvious one to try, if not using special tools designed to look for such networks (you may be able to see the SSID in WiFi packets, although I have no idea for sure)
Plus, anyone who has a network profile for a router called 'default' may inadvertantly connect to it if they wander into the same airspace (SSID broadcasting on or not).
Really pretty negligible considering that encryption alone would prevent all of this, although is not bulletproof itself.
In most hard goods industries, the manufacturing cost is not the majority of the cost of sale. In the computer peripherals industry, the manufacturing cost is perhaps 10% - 30% of the final sticker price. We -- as do the DVD manufacturers -- must deal with many things that cost real dollars and cannot be ignored.
You're right, I guess my point wasn't clear. If all players in the chain cut their markup (i.e. profit) per item so as to regain a huge part of the lost market (and then some of it which they never had to begin with, even before pirating was so rampant) their profit will go up, by selling more copies.
My question is, how much of the $25 you spend goes to this unadjustable cost that you refer to? My $0.03 DVD manufacturing example was a bad; consider distributing. A truck holds so many units. It costs so much to have a company ship your goods to retailers and warehouses. Obviously, you can't take their cut out of the $25, unless you make the box smaller (which is doable).
The producer, artist, studio and engineer, etc. are who I'm referring to; their product, regardless of how many CDs sell, is a grand total of one unit, so to speak. If more units sell subsequently achieving more profit simply because the price per unit decreased, they get their "lost revenue" back. If they could cut this down such that the end consumer pays $3 or $4 per disk (apparently, if they can survive selling them for $1.50 in China, they probably can) by making just-over-DVD-sized cases, no pretty little inserts, generic disks, etc. then (almost) everybody wins.
just because you don't want to pay x amount of money to consume product y, how does this entitle you to pirate it?
It doesn't legally entitle you, most certainly.
The original point of my post was to point out the common justification for pirating. Ultimately, if you really resented the price of buying the product but didn't want to "clone" it for moral reasons, you could send what you thought it was worth to the producer. That's silly! So most people justify this by saying that "well, I didn't take anything from anybody, money or otherwise... I wouldn't have bought it... and I'm not going to redistribute it, so..."
I also think the issue could be minimized if they'd come up with a modern pricing scale for this stuff, that will actually get a lot more people to start buying stuff again, particularly people who download anything and everything (yes, we all know the guy whose entire 256 CD book is entirely White CDs with sharpy writing on every single one... the ones who really cost the industries so much... are there any here now?) and people who wouldn't have gone out to buy this stuff anyway because it's too expensive.
[offtopic] Movies always have good seasons and bad seasons. But I have found almost no music worth even downloading in the last few years, let alone purchase/go see live. You have your Staind clones, the bands that write music for iPod commercials (Jet, the new U2, etc.), the 12 year old girl music... certainly, this encourages the issue a bit. But what do I know, I'm still waiting for the next Led Zeppelin or Stevie Ray Vaughn or Jimi Hendrix (or even the next Nirvana or Tupac). [/offtopic]
I'm not sure what you're saying, exactly. Certainly distributing things you copy is out of the moral question - you might well give it to somebody who would go out and buy it.
And, the argument certainly doesn't work for things you depend on. Because you absolutely would go out and buy them if you couldn't copy them. Bread, for instance. But nobody depends on one-hit-wonder songs, or that Ashton Kutcher movie from three years ago that looked so horribly stupid. Furthermore, even before the invention of a CD burner, I wouldn't go out and buy a $15 CD with 11 songs, one of which I actually liked... so if I download it and put it on some CD that I want to listen to on the way to work someday, I can't honestly justify this to myself as stealing. The law applies to me, but the moral does not.
Some real examples: I would never go out and purchase Forest for the Trees. But that "Dream" song was mildly catchy and different. When I listen to it, once every two years, it takes me back to where I was in 1998. I wouldn't waste an iTune on it today, and I wouldn't sign up for a flat-fee service to get songs like these (I don't have iTunes or a flat-fee service, I'm just saying).
The last movie I purchased was "Crash"; obviously Internet or not, I would go out and buy it despite that it's probably pirateable. Lord of The Rings is another one; I found the special features alone to be excellent (particularly about the music score) and the whole product was worth buying; although that one I bought used.
Just becaues you personally disagree with a law doesn't mean it doesn't apply to you.
True indeed. I think most go on the argument that a law is meaningless if it can't be enforced; if you're doing the worse thing (sharing your illegal content) you're quite vulnerable; if you're doing the downloading, well... there's not much they can do. That said, doing something illegal isn't necesarily immoral, and being moral is much more important to me than being legal. Laws are the creation of humans; morals are different.
Don't forget, however, that the film on it wasn't free to make.
Absolutely. There was a/. story a day or two ago about concerts costing outrageous amounts of money essentially due to pirating; if they could get the pirates to purchase at 1/5th the former cost (like say, $4 a CD or less) and get an additional five times the people who don't pirate much, if at all, to start buying albums again, they stand to make their money back, and pay the content makers and whatnot as well. Five times the people is ideal and/or optimistic; but I'm partially assuming there's more people willing to buy this content now than there was ten years ago; this would probably be due to the Internet and, arguably, even pirating itself.
Even doubling the consumer base (in addition to getting all the pirates back onto legal ground) would get them further than they are now. Get people back into theaters and concerts again, throw in some not-too-obnoxious advertising schemes, and there's probably a workable formula for sufficient net income there somewhere. But riding on a pricing scheme that's ten+ years old isn't working, and isn't ever going to work, unless they really intend to put all their eggs in the DRM basket.
I've seen several people refer to pirating as "stealing". Keep in mind, it's only stealing when you would have gone out to purchase it in the first place! At least that's how most justify it.
If I clone something (like a nice stereo, for instance - impossible, but for the sake of our conversation), it's not really stealing it. If I make it available to other people (i.e. like sharing my stuff on P2P), that's almost worse than stealing... but if I clone something that I wouldn't have purchased to begin with, that's incredibly easy to justify, because there's no money lost. Again, I wouldn't have gone out to purchase a $25 DVD, whether it could be had for free or not, just like I wouldn't have gone out and purchased a $1200 stereo when my $150 Aiwa that I already bought works great. There's no physical product missing somewhere... I cloned it. Now if I could only clone a Viper...
The ultimate question in my mind is, what is the actual cost of manufacturing and distributing? It's like a $0.03 piece of plastic, the disc that is. Generic packaging like they talk of here can't cost very much. If it gets 15x the people to start buying movies again IN ADDITION to the people who currently pirate them, well... for $3 or $4 per release like some have suggested, I bet they stand to make their money back.
Certainly the music industry won't be far behind in this little "experiment".
It may not be bleeding edge news, but original NES titles like this are worth talking about and appreciating. Shigeru Miyamoto is, IMO, one of the most brilliant game designers ever... obviously, right? I don't remember where I read/heard this, but one of his game design "virtues" is eliminating everything between the player and the game; i.e., there's no controller in your hand, no TV, no console... just you and a game. Some games today do this well; with such sophisticated 3D graphics and surround sound, it seems like it should be easy. But the NES has only a few colors and rinky-dink sound, it's hardly accurate in any regard (simulation or otherwise). But Miyamoto and Nintendo accomplished this virtue amazingly well; they still do as far as I'm concerned. And no, I'm not a Nintendo fanboy, the last Nintendo product I bought was a SNES.
Nintendo in and of itself isn't like any other game company, and I think they're particularly interesting. They're over 100 years old... have been in everything from playing cards, to a taxi service at one point, and minute rice... and are still one of the big three game console manufacturers (the oldest one that remained successful, I might add). To rant a little... this is why when people talk about "gee, Nintendo's all washed up, Sony and MS have way better hardware", you've got to be kidding me - they're not going anywhere! And hardware isn't everything; but "fun" is almost everything. Their game console might drop in and out of popularity, or the state of the art; but it's not like MS is going to come out with the Xbox 720 and Nintendo will just fold up and go home.
(to rant a little more;) Even without an article at all, old game history like this is a lot of fun to talk about, IMO. If you don't think it's interesting, or you already know everything there is to know about classic video games, you don't have to read the article or post a reply.
No, I meant exactly what I said. If I'm at a garage sale & happen to see Monopoly for a dollar, I might buy it. That doesn't mean I would have gone to the store and purchased it had I not seen it at the garage sale; therefore Parker Bros. didn't lose anything - either way, I wouldn't buy it new. Just like when you pirate music that you wouldn't have purchased anyway, record company & friends isn't losing anything; I woudln't have bought it either way. Hence my post.
I can't assume that about all of discount-license.com's customers; I have to assume a few of them would have bought new from MS if they couldn't buy a used license. Perhaps you really believe that not a single one of them would have; that's a silly thing to assume IMO. At least one of them would have shelled out for new, MS software. If it was the customer that saved over $60k, then MS lost at least a $120k sale, more if they got less than a 50% discount on it.
You have to leave the possibility that the company would have decided NOT to buy the new MS licenses if they had to pay the extra $10K.
Nobody's talking about MS losing that one sale; I'm talking about the used license reseller as a whole, meaning their entire customer base. One customer saved over $60,000 (according to TFA). Are you saying MS isn't losing anything to this used license reseller? Are you assuming that every, single company that buys a used license would have gone with Lotus notes or something if there was no cheaper way to get Office? And, if you do, do you think that's how Bill Gates & friends look at it? Since MS (according to TFA) obviously didn't intend for their licenses to be distributed this way.
I realize in the UK, and possibly in the US, there is probably nothing they can do about it. That doesn't mean MS likes it and wouldn't sue the crap out of this reseller if they could. That was my only point.
So where were you going to go to buy bulk licenses for MS' software? eBay? This company was already willing to shell out tens of thousands for a bunch of licenses to a five year old release of Office. I'm guessing if these bulk license resellers weren't starting to turn up (this one started in Nov. 2005), they would have had to go to Microsoft. Therefore, MS lost a sale (and thus money). Everyone keeps saying they didn't lose anything... and, again, I'm sure that's how MS looks at it too. They probably aren't even thinking about it, right? They're not losing anything at all...
Then how come every time customers don't walk in the door where I work my boss tells me he's losing money?
I'll agree to look at it your way, that even though companies have always had to purchase their bulk MS software directly from MS or one of its licensed vendors and now, for the first time ever, they don't, they aren't losing any money because of this. I'm sure that's how MS looks at it as well; "it's no bother, we're not losing anything..."
I wasn't trying to say that this company is stealing money from MS or that somehow existing sales were being revoked... I thought I was being clear, here - MS doesn't like this, and they'd love to stop it if they could, since, like you say, they're losing "sales" (whcih I made the terrible mistake of referring to as "money").
I also wasn't trying to imply that there's some magic, grand business scheme where you don't lose any sales, ever. MS loses sales for lots of reasons all the time; like you say, that's capitalism. This is just a new one; that in it's own right is interesting (and in my case, heart-warming).
Software makers (Microsoft) would have you think that you did indeed rob GM when you bought a used car.
Remember also, cars wear out and die; a used software license installs and works perfectly every time. The CD might wear out, of course, but that's not what you paid for (that's why backing up any piece of media should always be legal... you didn't pay $300.00 for a $0.03 piece of plastic, you bought the numbers recorded on it).
You could argue that software goes obsolete; but the company that saved all that money that I was referring to bought older licenses of Office XP, which isn't the newest Office. They would have bought new licenses to Office XP from MS, but instead bought used ones. No matter which way you cut it, MS lost a sale, a potentially high value sale. I don't know of anywhere else you can go to buy used licenses to MS software in bulk.
I don't believe software makers should have the right to this "forced non-resale" licensing; I'm just pointing out that it's costing MS a lot of money, and if they can stop it (which it sounds like they can't, even in the US) they would love to do so.
I see what you're saying... for instance, I have no problem illegally copying music because I wouldn't have bought it to begin with, therefore the record company didn't lose my sales.
Companies are different; they are taking a huge risk by illegally copying the software they use. As in my quote, one company saved £10,000; had the used license reseller not offered them cheaper licenses, they would have had to buy legit first-hand retail versions, and MS would have made the money.
In essence, because of what this used license reseller is doing, MS lost a significant amount of money. Not only did they lose the £10,000 that the company saved; they didn't make anything, as you pointed out.
So MS can't do anything about it? Well, that makes me feel a little warmer inside.:) I live in the US; I wish we could resell OEM licenses... I never thought it would be a problem since I build my own computers, but then I bought a ThinkPad. I kept Windows on it just because it's more power-friendly than Linux is (or was when I bought it) but it still bothers me that I don't have a choice and am stuck with it.
From TFA: "The secondhand resale of a license agreement is not the intended purpose of these provisions."
Apparently, a Microsoft rep said that to the article writer.
Something tells me that Windows Vista and future versions of Office, etc. will probably restrict their licenses somehow to prevent this. Some company had "net saving in the region of £10,000." That means Microsoft probably lost a lot more than that.
Too bad they won't sell to individuals; I might actually purchase a Microsoft product if I could just download it from P2P and go buy a cheap license from these guys. Even better, someone should go start collecting unused Windows licenses and giving them away to those who need them, like college students (okay, just kidding).
True about the Mercury and Pluto. It's a very important distinction, because a planet that's 2 Au from the sun for part of the year and 25 Au for another part is going to be a very different place than a planet that's the same distance year around. Certainly Mercury and Pluto aren't that extreme... but they're still porbably different in some way for it. But the other 7 planets with circular orbits on relatively the same orbit plane (+/- a couple degrees right?) are vastly different from one another in their own right... orbit shape or incline is really just one more characterstic that makes a "planet" unique.
> If we found an earth sized object but at 90 deg to ecliptic would you change your definition? At a Pluto like distance it could be out there - too dark and small to detect.
I'm pretty sure we'd see it, unless it were all black, or something prevented it from reflecting light.
I do agree though, the definition of a 'planet' should work for all uni-star solar systems, and being that Earth does not exist simultaneously in every solar system, making the definition of 'planet' relative to Earth doesn't make sense.
I personally would classify an object with any orbit (and thus Pluto, Xena, etc.) to be a planet. If we really incist on saying that it should be a circular orbit, that's about as precise as you can get, although I don't like that either... as I said in another reply, even our own familiar "planets" are so different from each other that I think a "planet" should either have a very broad definition (e.g. any gravitationally significant object orbiting a sun for a living) or refer to our 8 planets that have been in the telescopes of astronomers for centuries, I guess for historical purposes/kids sake. In essence, a meteor that closely resembles a planet but has a noticeably elliptical orbit at a funny angle should still be a planet and studied as such; along that same line of reasoning, each of our eight planets should be studied with a very "open mind" (e.g. they're all a hell of a lot different from each other, originated via different processes, etc.).
Slashdot Mirror
True, true... but is having multiple handwriting profiles out of the question?
I think a lot of effort has been put into it, but it seems as though it's not average software; it's up there with writing a seriously optimizing compiler in that it's a lot of heuristics (or guesswork). But, having multiple handwriting profiles would be a start... making the software 'adaptive' so that the more you use it (and the more you have to correct it) it gets better and better at recognizing 'your' handwriting.
Also, the issue is different from a tablet or PDA to someting that's already written on paper and scanned, as another poster (that I saw) pointed out; a tablet or PDA can make use of pen pressure, number and direction of strokes, timing, etc.
Even from a PDA to a tablet there are varying issues; a tablet could (and does?) support cursive, whereas that's almost out of the question on a PDA.
At the very least, adapting between your own varying styles would be easier than trying to adapt to the software's, no matter what mood you're in.
Most of the responses seem to be missing the point of the post.
Okay. I'm attacking the point of the post.
There's no reason to reinvent the alphabet any more than there is reinvent the wheel.
If we change the alphabet so machines can read it, other people stop being able to read it. It's the wrong solution for the problem.
If my handwriting is good enough that I can read it two weeks later, and my peers and friends and family can read it perfectly (i've been told I have particularly good handwriting) then why should I have to change it so that my PC can understand it, but nobody else can?
I could memorize a second alphabet, having one for me and one for my PC... but why?
If I could tell the software "This is how I write a 'k' and this is how I write an 'R'", that would improve things a lot IMO. My 'k' might look like someone else's 'R'; but my 'k' and 'R' look absolutely nothing alike. My ampersand kind of looks like a plus sign; but it's totally distinguishable from my plus sign. If I could dawn this on the software...
An alphabet based on entirely straight lines would be easy enough for a computer to read if letters never touched. The software would first detect the line of text, then along the row of letters, find the first black pixel, then find all the lines touching the line containing that pixel. Bonus points if all characters had a single vertical line (making this sort of a barcode of its own).
You took us from having a human-readable, non-machine-readable alphabet to the exact opposite. I don't want to be a barcode scanner!! Hehe.
Graffiti on palms doesn't really work that well. I've tried to get fast at it; but if I'm trying to write down something someone is saying on the phone, I usually resort to the on-screen keyboard. It just doesn't get much faster than that no matter how fast you can write.
Ultimately, handwriting recognition systems need a way to be customized; I should be able to make my own alphabet up from scratch and tell my OCR software about it. Sometimes my palm mistakes a 'k' for an 'R'; when in fact my 'k' and 'R' are all totally different looking.
Having one system that works with every human being's style is unrealistic and just won't work as well as everyone wishes; humans can adapt a little, but even after years of "adapting", my Palm still hiccups on about every 5th word that I try to write.
How is it that we can produce software that can recall your face, but handwritten OCR is still so error-prone? It's 2006 already! 10 years ago I hoped it would be further along by now.
I should note that I've only tried my handwriting on Palm's Graffiti and my scanner's bundled OCR (which is worse). Are tablet PCs or Pocket PC's any better?
You want the heat to leave the case. It doesn't matter how big a fan or heatsink or what method is used to apply the thermal compound if the heat stays in the case. Then everything that isn't actively cooled (the rest of your hardware in your tiny little Macbook Pro or whatever) "takes the heat" so to speak.
My ThinkPad has a vent on the left side that, when obstructed, will nuke anything in its path... the rest of it stays pretty cool unless you're playing a game or something.
Interesting... the story headline says: "Napster Going Back to Free Downloads"
Had it read "Napster to Offer Free Streaming Service" I'd have never read it; particularly after learning of the 5 play limit.
Creative's "What U Hear" recording channel on SoundBlaster Live/Audigy cards would be my first choice to attempt to capture it.
Michael Jackson had front-page articles for a long time. I don't think it helped him sell records.
I realize you're either kidding, or you're an idiot.
If he was in the headlines simply because of his outlandish name change (had he done so), it would indicate that he was already so huge that changing his name to something considerably stupid was headline news; if the music was good, he would then subsequently sell a substantial amount of records just because of all the publicity.
If Nintendo was in the headlines because they allegedly molested children, they would undoubtedly never sell another console or game again.
For that matter, Nintendo should have called it "The Entertainment System Formerly Known as Revolution".
Well, if you also turn off SSID broadcasting, people won't see your router from the list of available ones; if some WiFi troll comes along looking for routers that don't broadcast their SSID, 'default' would be a pretty obvious one to try, if not using special tools designed to look for such networks (you may be able to see the SSID in WiFi packets, although I have no idea for sure)
Plus, anyone who has a network profile for a router called 'default' may inadvertantly connect to it if they wander into the same airspace (SSID broadcasting on or not).
Really pretty negligible considering that encryption alone would prevent all of this, although is not bulletproof itself.
Oh and sorry for alternating between the CD example and the DVD example; I see the price thing as being the same problem in both industries.
In most hard goods industries, the manufacturing cost is not the majority of the cost of sale. In the computer peripherals industry, the manufacturing cost is perhaps 10% - 30% of the final sticker price. We -- as do the DVD manufacturers -- must deal with many things that cost real dollars and cannot be ignored.
You're right, I guess my point wasn't clear. If all players in the chain cut their markup (i.e. profit) per item so as to regain a huge part of the lost market (and then some of it which they never had to begin with, even before pirating was so rampant) their profit will go up, by selling more copies.
My question is, how much of the $25 you spend goes to this unadjustable cost that you refer to? My $0.03 DVD manufacturing example was a bad; consider distributing. A truck holds so many units. It costs so much to have a company ship your goods to retailers and warehouses. Obviously, you can't take their cut out of the $25, unless you make the box smaller (which is doable).
The producer, artist, studio and engineer, etc. are who I'm referring to; their product, regardless of how many CDs sell, is a grand total of one unit, so to speak. If more units sell subsequently achieving more profit simply because the price per unit decreased, they get their "lost revenue" back. If they could cut this down such that the end consumer pays $3 or $4 per disk (apparently, if they can survive selling them for $1.50 in China, they probably can) by making just-over-DVD-sized cases, no pretty little inserts, generic disks, etc. then (almost) everybody wins.
Oh and btw, I speak English too.
just because you don't want to pay x amount of money to consume product y, how does this entitle you to pirate it?
It doesn't legally entitle you, most certainly.
The original point of my post was to point out the common justification for pirating. Ultimately, if you really resented the price of buying the product but didn't want to "clone" it for moral reasons, you could send what you thought it was worth to the producer. That's silly! So most people justify this by saying that "well, I didn't take anything from anybody, money or otherwise... I wouldn't have bought it... and I'm not going to redistribute it, so..."
I also think the issue could be minimized if they'd come up with a modern pricing scale for this stuff, that will actually get a lot more people to start buying stuff again, particularly people who download anything and everything (yes, we all know the guy whose entire 256 CD book is entirely White CDs with sharpy writing on every single one... the ones who really cost the industries so much... are there any here now?) and people who wouldn't have gone out to buy this stuff anyway because it's too expensive.
[offtopic]
Movies always have good seasons and bad seasons. But I have found almost no music worth even downloading in the last few years, let alone purchase/go see live. You have your Staind clones, the bands that write music for iPod commercials (Jet, the new U2, etc.), the 12 year old girl music... certainly, this encourages the issue a bit. But what do I know, I'm still waiting for the next Led Zeppelin or Stevie Ray Vaughn or Jimi Hendrix (or even the next Nirvana or Tupac).
[/offtopic]
I'm not sure what you're saying, exactly. Certainly distributing things you copy is out of the moral question - you might well give it to somebody who would go out and buy it.
And, the argument certainly doesn't work for things you depend on. Because you absolutely would go out and buy them if you couldn't copy them. Bread, for instance. But nobody depends on one-hit-wonder songs, or that Ashton Kutcher movie from three years ago that looked so horribly stupid. Furthermore, even before the invention of a CD burner, I wouldn't go out and buy a $15 CD with 11 songs, one of which I actually liked... so if I download it and put it on some CD that I want to listen to on the way to work someday, I can't honestly justify this to myself as stealing. The law applies to me, but the moral does not.
Some real examples:
I would never go out and purchase Forest for the Trees. But that "Dream" song was mildly catchy and different. When I listen to it, once every two years, it takes me back to where I was in 1998. I wouldn't waste an iTune on it today, and I wouldn't sign up for a flat-fee service to get songs like these (I don't have iTunes or a flat-fee service, I'm just saying).
The last movie I purchased was "Crash"; obviously Internet or not, I would go out and buy it despite that it's probably pirateable. Lord of The Rings is another one; I found the special features alone to be excellent (particularly about the music score) and the whole product was worth buying; although that one I bought used.
Just becaues you personally disagree with a law doesn't mean it doesn't apply to you.
/. story a day or two ago about concerts costing outrageous amounts of money essentially due to pirating; if they could get the pirates to purchase at 1/5th the former cost (like say, $4 a CD or less) and get an additional five times the people who don't pirate much, if at all, to start buying albums again, they stand to make their money back, and pay the content makers and whatnot as well. Five times the people is ideal and/or optimistic; but I'm partially assuming there's more people willing to buy this content now than there was ten years ago; this would probably be due to the Internet and, arguably, even pirating itself.
True indeed. I think most go on the argument that a law is meaningless if it can't be enforced; if you're doing the worse thing (sharing your illegal content) you're quite vulnerable; if you're doing the downloading, well... there's not much they can do. That said, doing something illegal isn't necesarily immoral, and being moral is much more important to me than being legal. Laws are the creation of humans; morals are different.
Don't forget, however, that the film on it wasn't free to make.
Absolutely. There was a
Even doubling the consumer base (in addition to getting all the pirates back onto legal ground) would get them further than they are now. Get people back into theaters and concerts again, throw in some not-too-obnoxious advertising schemes, and there's probably a workable formula for sufficient net income there somewhere. But riding on a pricing scheme that's ten+ years old isn't working, and isn't ever going to work, unless they really intend to put all their eggs in the DRM basket.
I've seen several people refer to pirating as "stealing". Keep in mind, it's only stealing when you would have gone out to purchase it in the first place! At least that's how most justify it.
If I clone something (like a nice stereo, for instance - impossible, but for the sake of our conversation), it's not really stealing it. If I make it available to other people (i.e. like sharing my stuff on P2P), that's almost worse than stealing... but if I clone something that I wouldn't have purchased to begin with, that's incredibly easy to justify, because there's no money lost. Again, I wouldn't have gone out to purchase a $25 DVD, whether it could be had for free or not, just like I wouldn't have gone out and purchased a $1200 stereo when my $150 Aiwa that I already bought works great. There's no physical product missing somewhere... I cloned it. Now if I could only clone a Viper...
The ultimate question in my mind is, what is the actual cost of manufacturing and distributing? It's like a $0.03 piece of plastic, the disc that is. Generic packaging like they talk of here can't cost very much. If it gets 15x the people to start buying movies again IN ADDITION to the people who currently pirate them, well... for $3 or $4 per release like some have suggested, I bet they stand to make their money back.
Certainly the music industry won't be far behind in this little "experiment".
His pants should be low and there should be a crack.
:-)
Mario's butt crack? Hmm... I think too much realism can draw away from the "fun" aspect of a game; this is one such instance.
It may not be bleeding edge news, but original NES titles like this are worth talking about and appreciating. Shigeru Miyamoto is, IMO, one of the most brilliant game designers ever... obviously, right? I don't remember where I read/heard this, but one of his game design "virtues" is eliminating everything between the player and the game; i.e., there's no controller in your hand, no TV, no console... just you and a game. Some games today do this well; with such sophisticated 3D graphics and surround sound, it seems like it should be easy. But the NES has only a few colors and rinky-dink sound, it's hardly accurate in any regard (simulation or otherwise). But Miyamoto and Nintendo accomplished this virtue amazingly well; they still do as far as I'm concerned. And no, I'm not a Nintendo fanboy, the last Nintendo product I bought was a SNES.
;) Even without an article at all, old game history like this is a lot of fun to talk about, IMO. If you don't think it's interesting, or you already know everything there is to know about classic video games, you don't have to read the article or post a reply.
Nintendo in and of itself isn't like any other game company, and I think they're particularly interesting. They're over 100 years old... have been in everything from playing cards, to a taxi service at one point, and minute rice... and are still one of the big three game console manufacturers (the oldest one that remained successful, I might add). To rant a little... this is why when people talk about "gee, Nintendo's all washed up, Sony and MS have way better hardware", you've got to be kidding me - they're not going anywhere! And hardware isn't everything; but "fun" is almost everything. Their game console might drop in and out of popularity, or the state of the art; but it's not like MS is going to come out with the Xbox 720 and Nintendo will just fold up and go home.
(to rant a little more
Hooray for fun games and game history!
No, I meant exactly what I said. If I'm at a garage sale & happen to see Monopoly for a dollar, I might buy it. That doesn't mean I would have gone to the store and purchased it had I not seen it at the garage sale; therefore Parker Bros. didn't lose anything - either way, I wouldn't buy it new. Just like when you pirate music that you wouldn't have purchased anyway, record company & friends isn't losing anything; I woudln't have bought it either way. Hence my post.
I can't assume that about all of discount-license.com's customers; I have to assume a few of them would have bought new from MS if they couldn't buy a used license. Perhaps you really believe that not a single one of them would have; that's a silly thing to assume IMO. At least one of them would have shelled out for new, MS software. If it was the customer that saved over $60k, then MS lost at least a $120k sale, more if they got less than a 50% discount on it.
You have to leave the possibility that the company would have decided NOT to buy the new MS licenses if they had to pay the extra $10K.
Nobody's talking about MS losing that one sale; I'm talking about the used license reseller as a whole, meaning their entire customer base. One customer saved over $60,000 (according to TFA). Are you saying MS isn't losing anything to this used license reseller? Are you assuming that every, single company that buys a used license would have gone with Lotus notes or something if there was no cheaper way to get Office? And, if you do, do you think that's how Bill Gates & friends look at it? Since MS (according to TFA) obviously didn't intend for their licenses to be distributed this way.
I realize in the UK, and possibly in the US, there is probably nothing they can do about it. That doesn't mean MS likes it and wouldn't sue the crap out of this reseller if they could. That was my only point.
So where were you going to go to buy bulk licenses for MS' software? eBay? This company was already willing to shell out tens of thousands for a bunch of licenses to a five year old release of Office. I'm guessing if these bulk license resellers weren't starting to turn up (this one started in Nov. 2005), they would have had to go to Microsoft. Therefore, MS lost a sale (and thus money). Everyone keeps saying they didn't lose anything... and, again, I'm sure that's how MS looks at it too. They probably aren't even thinking about it, right? They're not losing anything at all...
...right?
Then how come every time customers don't walk in the door where I work my boss tells me he's losing money?
I'll agree to look at it your way, that even though companies have always had to purchase their bulk MS software directly from MS or one of its licensed vendors and now, for the first time ever, they don't, they aren't losing any money because of this. I'm sure that's how MS looks at it as well; "it's no bother, we're not losing anything..."
I wasn't trying to say that this company is stealing money from MS or that somehow existing sales were being revoked... I thought I was being clear, here - MS doesn't like this, and they'd love to stop it if they could, since, like you say, they're losing "sales" (whcih I made the terrible mistake of referring to as "money").
I also wasn't trying to imply that there's some magic, grand business scheme where you don't lose any sales, ever. MS loses sales for lots of reasons all the time; like you say, that's capitalism. This is just a new one; that in it's own right is interesting (and in my case, heart-warming).
?!
Software makers (Microsoft) would have you think that you did indeed rob GM when you bought a used car.
Remember also, cars wear out and die; a used software license installs and works perfectly every time. The CD might wear out, of course, but that's not what you paid for (that's why backing up any piece of media should always be legal... you didn't pay $300.00 for a $0.03 piece of plastic, you bought the numbers recorded on it).
You could argue that software goes obsolete; but the company that saved all that money that I was referring to bought older licenses of Office XP, which isn't the newest Office. They would have bought new licenses to Office XP from MS, but instead bought used ones. No matter which way you cut it, MS lost a sale, a potentially high value sale. I don't know of anywhere else you can go to buy used licenses to MS software in bulk.
I don't believe software makers should have the right to this "forced non-resale" licensing; I'm just pointing out that it's costing MS a lot of money, and if they can stop it (which it sounds like they can't, even in the US) they would love to do so.
I see what you're saying... for instance, I have no problem illegally copying music because I wouldn't have bought it to begin with, therefore the record company didn't lose my sales.
Companies are different; they are taking a huge risk by illegally copying the software they use. As in my quote, one company saved £10,000; had the used license reseller not offered them cheaper licenses, they would have had to buy legit first-hand retail versions, and MS would have made the money.
In essence, because of what this used license reseller is doing, MS lost a significant amount of money. Not only did they lose the £10,000 that the company saved; they didn't make anything, as you pointed out.
So MS can't do anything about it? Well, that makes me feel a little warmer inside. :) I live in the US; I wish we could resell OEM licenses... I never thought it would be a problem since I build my own computers, but then I bought a ThinkPad. I kept Windows on it just because it's more power-friendly than Linux is (or was when I bought it) but it still bothers me that I don't have a choice and am stuck with it.
From TFA: "The secondhand resale of a license agreement is not the intended purpose of these provisions."
Apparently, a Microsoft rep said that to the article writer.
Something tells me that Windows Vista and future versions of Office, etc. will probably restrict their licenses somehow to prevent this. Some company had "net saving in the region of £10,000." That means Microsoft probably lost a lot more than that.
Too bad they won't sell to individuals; I might actually purchase a Microsoft product if I could just download it from P2P and go buy a cheap license from these guys. Even better, someone should go start collecting unused Windows licenses and giving them away to those who need them, like college students (okay, just kidding).
True about the Mercury and Pluto. It's a very important distinction, because a planet that's 2 Au from the sun for part of the year and 25 Au for another part is going to be a very different place than a planet that's the same distance year around. Certainly Mercury and Pluto aren't that extreme... but they're still porbably different in some way for it. But the other 7 planets with circular orbits on relatively the same orbit plane (+/- a couple degrees right?) are vastly different from one another in their own right... orbit shape or incline is really just one more characterstic that makes a "planet" unique.
> If we found an earth sized object but at 90 deg to ecliptic would you change your definition? At a Pluto like distance it could be out there - too dark and small to detect.
I'm pretty sure we'd see it, unless it were all black, or something prevented it from reflecting light.
I do agree though, the definition of a 'planet' should work for all uni-star solar systems, and being that Earth does not exist simultaneously in every solar system, making the definition of 'planet' relative to Earth doesn't make sense.
I personally would classify an object with any orbit (and thus Pluto, Xena, etc.) to be a planet. If we really incist on saying that it should be a circular orbit, that's about as precise as you can get, although I don't like that either... as I said in another reply, even our own familiar "planets" are so different from each other that I think a "planet" should either have a very broad definition (e.g. any gravitationally significant object orbiting a sun for a living) or refer to our 8 planets that have been in the telescopes of astronomers for centuries, I guess for historical purposes/kids sake. In essence, a meteor that closely resembles a planet but has a noticeably elliptical orbit at a funny angle should still be a planet and studied as such; along that same line of reasoning, each of our eight planets should be studied with a very "open mind" (e.g. they're all a hell of a lot different from each other, originated via different processes, etc.).