Come back to me when your movie prices are like they are here in Australia.
We currently have higher-than-parity with the US dollar, but an adult movie ticket is now sitting around the $17 range. For 3D, they usually charge $20... then another few bucks for the 3D glasses. They're also starting to get into the habit of not giving you a choice of 2D or 3D on the big movies, so you have to pay more for an arguably inferior movie format.
They wonder why Australia has one of the highest piracy rates in the world.
Maybe, but having hung out with people with a military background, I can vouch that there is a fairly deep-set appreciation for security that is engendered within the armed forces. Now, consider the fact that all Israeli citizens serve in the military - male and female. I think that this has a big cultural impact.
Now this is a really great point I hadn't considered. If only for mod points.
This is the key point. They will try again when the heat dies down. Spooks and ignorant senators/congressmen can't actually divorce themselves from the mentality of the intelligence community and really understand where most of the pushback is coming from. It's never been about having something to hide or not... It's a community of informed IT enthusiasts who embrace the technology to a point where it becomes a feeling of violation when their digital privacy is threatened.
I'm not a behavioral scientist or a psychologist, and this might even be wrong, but I'm sure I've read before that our brain remaps our "personal space bubble" when we drive a car. I also believe that (beyond the obvious) reasons why we get angry at telemarketers/doorknockers, wear clothes, put locks on our doors and curtains on our windows is because we have a deep-down, hard-wired intellectual personal space that has evolved alongside our physical personal space.
Problem is, every unsolicited knock on the door, phone ring from a stranger or person peeking through the curtains rankles us in our lizard brain because an external force is attempting to wrest some control of our intellectual personal space. It's no different to a perfect stranger standing two inches from our face. It's wrong. Our lower brain connected to our higher brain sees "THREAT!!"
We feel the same way when the government pries into our communications, movements or histories. It's not about being ashamed of anything or having "something to hide", it's about a feeling of an exterior force violating our intellectual idea of personal space. We are being denied the control we desire over what we show the world. That is in my opinion the core issue governments will never be able to understand. That's the answer to the inevitable "Why are they protesting?" question.
This is Israel we're talking about folks... Of course they were going to be able to withstand these attacks. It's an offshoot of Israel's unparalleled second-strike capability mentality. It's all they have.
Can you think of any other country in the world that is so completely and utterly beset by constant regional threats and actually has the resources to do something about it? If there is any country that is going to build proactive and pragmatic redundancy into their national IT infrastructure to protect it from external threats (and do it right), it's Israel. They have a lot more to lose by doing it wrong.
...Of whether or not the user has pirated the software, this kind of name-and-shame digital vigilantism on the part of the software author is just playing with fire. Especially (but not only) when it's shoddily coded and hitting false positives.
I can imagine them sitting around their dev table brainstorming "Ok guys, what's the best possible way we can open the company up to libel and defamation lawsuits? Hey, I know... Let's even give people who use and rely on Twitter as a business tool an opportunity to claim commercial losses against us as a result of an automated piracy accusation going out to their X-million followers!"
Sometimes things just aren't thought through very well...
There is a certain understandable level of expectation from customers for a certain number of years' worth of support when they lay down cash.
14 years for Windows XP? Maybe a little excessive... But Windows 7 is only 3 years old. We shouldn't have to be obligated to follow market-driven, uncomfortable and paradigm-shifting upgrade cycles that are largely unnecessary for our own needs (with all associated unnecessary time and financial costs) on a timetable that short just to get functional upgrades to graphics APIs that only class as a point-release.
...On some of the extra functionality, but this is one reason why I will never, as a blanket-rule, install any peripheral device's shitware on my PC if I can get away with it. I'll either settle for the functionality provided by Windows built-in drivers or if that's not feasible then I'll trawl around support sites and community forums looking for a link to the most cut-drown driver package I can get my hands on. I say this as someone with a Razer DeathAdder and BlackWidow that I use every day and love as devices.
Every printer suite, every Adobe extention, every gamepad, mouse and keyboard driver package, every pile of crapware, even iTunes agents, Bonjour, Java, all of it that we load onto our PC is just one more thing to slow down our user experience, waste bandwidth and throw annoying popups in our faces. Not to mention all the new potential infection vectors and opportunities to have our use-habits aggregated and sent off god-knows-where into the ether.
It's much, much easier to just forgo some macro buttons on the side of a keyboard that is very nice unto itself as a piece of hardware.
I usually don't respond to these kind of comments, but why don't you get your head out of your ass and stop making assumptions about someone's stance on an issue? I hate it when internet strangers make condescending comments like "Let's make a deal... Agree with my counter-point and I will (maybe) deign to give you the most-worthy of token validation from a stranger you'll never meet and who's opinion you'll never personally value."
Ironically enough, for all your self-righteous indignance I actually do agree with you to a point. I'm sure Dotcom was laughing all the way to the bank with what was obviously going on throughout his servers. Just like ISPs count the ceiling tiles when people sign up for terabyte internet plans, and Apple smiles and nods when someone buys an iPod that holds what I'm sure are 60,000 fully legitimate music tracks. Also, Australian internet users are happily willing to wait two years for our local networks to buy American TV shows and show them out of order and re-edited to fit more ads in. We'd also never IP-spoof to buy fully-digital Adobe products 40% cheaper either.
Regardless of what I think of Dotcom's motives or intentions on a personal level, he's still willing to give something back. MPAA-engineered raids cost New Zealand taxpayers money they shouldn't have spent. That's a valid point to consider.
I'd say that regardless of your stance on intellectual property, if you dig below the surface then you can see there was some very grubby, nepotistic and borderline criminal politics at work in the obliteration of Megaupload and the persecution Dotcom. Not to mention all the collateral damage to busineses using Megaupload for legitimate backups (even if we do acknowledge that a huge chunk of that data was probably pirated...).
I'm doubtful of how successful any court action will be directly against the US government, but if he's willing to funnel it back into the kind of altruistic endeavour he's proposing, I say power to him. I'm sure that LOTR-notwithstanding, It's more than Hollywood's ever done for New Zealand's economy.
You found this pearl of wisdom out of your ass ?
I find it very funny how people tend to generalize with no proof whatsoever so they can push their agenda.
You'd be shocked and amazed, but some of us, even who work in IT and are surrounded by computing in every facet of our lives, can actually believe this.
Most people I know who have interested largely outside computing will generally take the path of least resistance.
This is a really good point, but to be honest I always felt Voyager did something better than any other Star Trek series: You can just pick up any random episode, sit down and enjoy it after a long day at work. No thinking required. It's a rare and really fun style of show that's completely missing from modern television.
DS9 On the other hand, is my favourite show to this day. It did the whole arc-building thing and it did it really well.
They're different sides of the same coin, and both fun in their own way. Nothing wrong with that.
Step 1: Avoid any and all circumstances where you have to modify shell scripts that dynamically build batch-processing scripts run through Peoplesoft SQR.
Why remain silent on this? Noise is the only way anything will change.
A vast, vast majority of EULAs are crammed full of effectively unenforceable lop-sided bullshit that would never hold up in court.
Like most morally-bankrupt companies with a back-pocket Army Of Lawyers, right here Paypal is banking on the fact that of the the small number of the 1% who read it that actually have a problem of some kind, requiring legal intervention, won't know their rights and settle through loaded arbitration instead of going to trial. This is par for the course.
When I said "grass" was demand and hunger, all I was doing was continuing with the clumsy metaphor you used and put it in a real-world context. I also quickly moved away from it because it's not really a good metaphor.
Everything exists in a circulatory system. You're right in saying that some risk taking and ingenuity is necessary to build a marketable product. I never denied that; but where your logic is falling over is that you are fundamentally disconnecting the reality that it was consumer demand for the iPhone following its release that created jobs (admittedly in China...).
If you bring a bad product or service to market that nobody wants, you lose money. Jobs are not created. By comparison, if you bring a well-marketed product to market that generates desire, that product unto itself nor your efforts are creating the jobs. You've been successful at generating interest in your product, but it is the opening of the wallets by consumers that cause your inventory to move off shelves to a point where more people need to be hired to meet demand. It is the consumer and the consumption of the product that is the business driver for new jobs.
The causal relationship with is not between jobs and your idea or even your initial investment. It's between jobs and the demand for the product you have created. You might be creditable with a good idea, but it is still the consumer dictating that growth. There are numerous extant factors in the consumers' lives and budgets beyond your control as an innovator/ideas person that dictate your product''s success in the market. An iPhone is not on someone's priority list when they live on food stamps, no matter how cool it is.
As for your comments regarding job offshoring, this is one area I do actually believe government needs to get involved with a regulatory framework. Free markets only work when everyone is on a level playing field. When you have countries in a globalised economy that artificially deflate their currency, control an end-to-end component supply chain and have virtually non-existent labour laws, maybe it is in the realm of common good for the government to step in. The US government does have ultimate control over the American import market, and to an extent the taxation of American companies. If those companies aren't prepared to be good corporate citizens and employ American workers where possible, maybe it's time for the stick more than the carrot in the vein of import duties. You can't just get a free pass for bastardry forever...
I'll strive for brevity here and continue with the Grass,Zebra,Lion analogy: The big lie you're adhering to is that the grass is production, when in fact the grass is actually a combination of the zebra's hunger or demand (what it wants) and the zebra's fundamental ability to actually walk over to the grass (i.e. the consumer isn't so crippled with debt that it can't afford to actually buy what it wants).
I had in my head a quite long allegory about zebras and companies producing grass and then hoarding it or setting fire to it or hoarding it, but it's a waste of time continuing that line. I'll be blunt and very pragmatic in my final reply here: Entrepreneurship doesn't count for anything if your brilliant new idea doesn't have a block of consumers who have the disposable income. It doesn't matter how much someone wants something if they can't afford it.
The greatest intellectual dishonesty you can perpetuate is when you actually believe that you can keep actively sabotaging the prosperity of the largest block of your population that want to work and want to spend earned wealth within their own economy. Then funneling that wealth back to people more concerned with cutting costs by moving jobs overseas and topping up their offshore bank accounts is even more insane. It's that cut-and-dry.
Firstly, Hanauer doesn't claim that consumers create businesses. He rightly points out however that consumers actually need disposable income if they're going to contribute to growth by supporting new and existing businesses. If you continually tax the middle class to the nines while throwing billions at people who basically don't have anything to spend it on, that's just crazy.
The other thing you're also ignoring is the very fundamental point of Hanauer's talak where he says quite plainly that he is only person with the material needs of one person. A good capitalist is not reinvesting their wealth back into the prosperity of others. Basically the better a person can get away with not adding more staff and keeping/growing existing revenues then the better capitalist they are.
Quoth the great Perry Cox: "People are bastard-coated bastards with bastard filling".
I've love to see someone challenge Romney on the concept of tax cuts for the rich leading to Job creation.
A great example was this banned TED talk released by venture capitalist Nick Hanauer where he put in really simple, easy-to-understand terms the concept that giving money back to middle class families means they will buy more stuff leading to more job creation than giving tax breaks to a millionaire. This comes from the first non-family investor in Amazon by the way.
Considering this is Romney's whole ideology, I'd love to see an audience member nail him and get an on-record comment on the subject.
This is a nice idea in theory... But never underestimate the audacity of politicians. In the late 1990s Australian prime-minister re-negged on about half his election promises within a few months of taking office and quite glibly coined the phrase "That was a non-core promise."
Not true. Why do you think filling your car up hasn't gotten any cheaper?
Actual demand's been down over the last few years and the prices have stayed high because your good old friends Goldman Sachs et al. managed to get previously non-classified commodoties such as crude oil made tradeable as futures.
A barrel of oil changes hands something like 20 times before it even exists these days... And that's not an exageration.
Slashdot Mirror
Come back to me when your movie prices are like they are here in Australia.
We currently have higher-than-parity with the US dollar, but an adult movie ticket is now sitting around the $17 range. For 3D, they usually charge $20... then another few bucks for the 3D glasses. They're also starting to get into the habit of not giving you a choice of 2D or 3D on the big movies, so you have to pay more for an arguably inferior movie format.
They wonder why Australia has one of the highest piracy rates in the world.
Maybe, but having hung out with people with a military background, I can vouch that there is a fairly deep-set appreciation for security that is engendered within the armed forces. Now, consider the fact that all Israeli citizens serve in the military - male and female. I think that this has a big cultural impact.
Now this is a really great point I hadn't considered. If only for mod points.
This is the key point. They will try again when the heat dies down. Spooks and ignorant senators/congressmen can't actually divorce themselves from the mentality of the intelligence community and really understand where most of the pushback is coming from. It's never been about having something to hide or not... It's a community of informed IT enthusiasts who embrace the technology to a point where it becomes a feeling of violation when their digital privacy is threatened.
I'm not a behavioral scientist or a psychologist, and this might even be wrong, but I'm sure I've read before that our brain remaps our "personal space bubble" when we drive a car. I also believe that (beyond the obvious) reasons why we get angry at telemarketers/doorknockers, wear clothes, put locks on our doors and curtains on our windows is because we have a deep-down, hard-wired intellectual personal space that has evolved alongside our physical personal space.
Problem is, every unsolicited knock on the door, phone ring from a stranger or person peeking through the curtains rankles us in our lizard brain because an external force is attempting to wrest some control of our intellectual personal space. It's no different to a perfect stranger standing two inches from our face. It's wrong. Our lower brain connected to our higher brain sees "THREAT!!"
We feel the same way when the government pries into our communications, movements or histories. It's not about being ashamed of anything or having "something to hide", it's about a feeling of an exterior force violating our intellectual idea of personal space. We are being denied the control we desire over what we show the world. That is in my opinion the core issue governments will never be able to understand. That's the answer to the inevitable "Why are they protesting?" question.
This is Israel we're talking about folks... Of course they were going to be able to withstand these attacks. It's an offshoot of Israel's unparalleled second-strike capability mentality. It's all they have.
Can you think of any other country in the world that is so completely and utterly beset by constant regional threats and actually has the resources to do something about it? If there is any country that is going to build proactive and pragmatic redundancy into their national IT infrastructure to protect it from external threats (and do it right), it's Israel. They have a lot more to lose by doing it wrong.
...Of whether or not the user has pirated the software, this kind of name-and-shame digital vigilantism on the part of the software author is just playing with fire. Especially (but not only) when it's shoddily coded and hitting false positives.
I can imagine them sitting around their dev table brainstorming "Ok guys, what's the best possible way we can open the company up to libel and defamation lawsuits? Hey, I know... Let's even give people who use and rely on Twitter as a business tool an opportunity to claim commercial losses against us as a result of an automated piracy accusation going out to their X-million followers!"
Sometimes things just aren't thought through very well...
There is a certain understandable level of expectation from customers for a certain number of years' worth of support when they lay down cash.
14 years for Windows XP? Maybe a little excessive... But Windows 7 is only 3 years old. We shouldn't have to be obligated to follow market-driven, uncomfortable and paradigm-shifting upgrade cycles that are largely unnecessary for our own needs (with all associated unnecessary time and financial costs) on a timetable that short just to get functional upgrades to graphics APIs that only class as a point-release.
The whole thing just seems a little grubby to me.
...On some of the extra functionality, but this is one reason why I will never, as a blanket-rule, install any peripheral device's shitware on my PC if I can get away with it. I'll either settle for the functionality provided by Windows built-in drivers or if that's not feasible then I'll trawl around support sites and community forums looking for a link to the most cut-drown driver package I can get my hands on. I say this as someone with a Razer DeathAdder and BlackWidow that I use every day and love as devices.
Every printer suite, every Adobe extention, every gamepad, mouse and keyboard driver package, every pile of crapware, even iTunes agents, Bonjour, Java, all of it that we load onto our PC is just one more thing to slow down our user experience, waste bandwidth and throw annoying popups in our faces. Not to mention all the new potential infection vectors and opportunities to have our use-habits aggregated and sent off god-knows-where into the ether.
It's much, much easier to just forgo some macro buttons on the side of a keyboard that is very nice unto itself as a piece of hardware.
To which one could reply "I'm just getting into politics by participating in the circle-jerk that is Congress dear."
I usually don't respond to these kind of comments, but why don't you get your head out of your ass and stop making assumptions about someone's stance on an issue? I hate it when internet strangers make condescending comments like "Let's make a deal... Agree with my counter-point and I will (maybe) deign to give you the most-worthy of token validation from a stranger you'll never meet and who's opinion you'll never personally value."
Ironically enough, for all your self-righteous indignance I actually do agree with you to a point. I'm sure Dotcom was laughing all the way to the bank with what was obviously going on throughout his servers. Just like ISPs count the ceiling tiles when people sign up for terabyte internet plans, and Apple smiles and nods when someone buys an iPod that holds what I'm sure are 60,000 fully legitimate music tracks. Also, Australian internet users are happily willing to wait two years for our local networks to buy American TV shows and show them out of order and re-edited to fit more ads in. We'd also never IP-spoof to buy fully-digital Adobe products 40% cheaper either.
Regardless of what I think of Dotcom's motives or intentions on a personal level, he's still willing to give something back. MPAA-engineered raids cost New Zealand taxpayers money they shouldn't have spent. That's a valid point to consider.
I'd say that regardless of your stance on intellectual property, if you dig below the surface then you can see there was some very grubby, nepotistic and borderline criminal politics at work in the obliteration of Megaupload and the persecution Dotcom. Not to mention all the collateral damage to busineses using Megaupload for legitimate backups (even if we do acknowledge that a huge chunk of that data was probably pirated...).
I'm doubtful of how successful any court action will be directly against the US government, but if he's willing to funnel it back into the kind of altruistic endeavour he's proposing, I say power to him. I'm sure that LOTR-notwithstanding, It's more than Hollywood's ever done for New Zealand's economy.
Bugger.
You found this pearl of wisdom out of your ass ? I find it very funny how people tend to generalize with no proof whatsoever so they can push their agenda.
You'd be shocked and amazed, but some of us, even who work in IT and are surrounded by computing in every facet of our lives, can actually believe this.
Most people I know who have interested largely outside computing will generally take the path of least resistance.
This is a really good point, but to be honest I always felt Voyager did something better than any other Star Trek series: You can just pick up any random episode, sit down and enjoy it after a long day at work. No thinking required. It's a rare and really fun style of show that's completely missing from modern television.
DS9 On the other hand, is my favourite show to this day. It did the whole arc-building thing and it did it really well.
They're different sides of the same coin, and both fun in their own way. Nothing wrong with that.
Step 1: Avoid any and all circumstances where you have to modify shell scripts that dynamically build batch-processing scripts run through Peoplesoft SQR.
Step 2: There is no step 2.
Why remain silent on this? Noise is the only way anything will change.
A vast, vast majority of EULAs are crammed full of effectively unenforceable lop-sided bullshit that would never hold up in court.
Like most morally-bankrupt companies with a back-pocket Army Of Lawyers, right here Paypal is banking on the fact that of the the small number of the 1% who read it that actually have a problem of some kind, requiring legal intervention, won't know their rights and settle through loaded arbitration instead of going to trial. This is par for the course.
When I said "grass" was demand and hunger, all I was doing was continuing with the clumsy metaphor you used and put it in a real-world context. I also quickly moved away from it because it's not really a good metaphor.
Everything exists in a circulatory system. You're right in saying that some risk taking and ingenuity is necessary to build a marketable product. I never denied that; but where your logic is falling over is that you are fundamentally disconnecting the reality that it was consumer demand for the iPhone following its release that created jobs (admittedly in China...).
If you bring a bad product or service to market that nobody wants, you lose money. Jobs are not created. By comparison, if you bring a well-marketed product to market that generates desire, that product unto itself nor your efforts are creating the jobs. You've been successful at generating interest in your product, but it is the opening of the wallets by consumers that cause your inventory to move off shelves to a point where more people need to be hired to meet demand. It is the consumer and the consumption of the product that is the business driver for new jobs.
The causal relationship with is not between jobs and your idea or even your initial investment. It's between jobs and the demand for the product you have created. You might be creditable with a good idea, but it is still the consumer dictating that growth. There are numerous extant factors in the consumers' lives and budgets beyond your control as an innovator/ideas person that dictate your product''s success in the market. An iPhone is not on someone's priority list when they live on food stamps, no matter how cool it is.
As for your comments regarding job offshoring, this is one area I do actually believe government needs to get involved with a regulatory framework. Free markets only work when everyone is on a level playing field. When you have countries in a globalised economy that artificially deflate their currency, control an end-to-end component supply chain and have virtually non-existent labour laws, maybe it is in the realm of common good for the government to step in. The US government does have ultimate control over the American import market, and to an extent the taxation of American companies. If those companies aren't prepared to be good corporate citizens and employ American workers where possible, maybe it's time for the stick more than the carrot in the vein of import duties. You can't just get a free pass for bastardry forever...
:
I'll strive for brevity here and continue with the Grass,Zebra,Lion analogy: The big lie you're adhering to is that the grass is production, when in fact the grass is actually a combination of the zebra's hunger or demand (what it wants) and the zebra's fundamental ability to actually walk over to the grass (i.e. the consumer isn't so crippled with debt that it can't afford to actually buy what it wants).
I had in my head a quite long allegory about zebras and companies producing grass and then hoarding it or setting fire to it or hoarding it, but it's a waste of time continuing that line. I'll be blunt and very pragmatic in my final reply here: Entrepreneurship doesn't count for anything if your brilliant new idea doesn't have a block of consumers who have the disposable income. It doesn't matter how much someone wants something if they can't afford it.
The greatest intellectual dishonesty you can perpetuate is when you actually believe that you can keep actively sabotaging the prosperity of the largest block of your population that want to work and want to spend earned wealth within their own economy. Then funneling that wealth back to people more concerned with cutting costs by moving jobs overseas and topping up their offshore bank accounts is even more insane. It's that cut-and-dry.
Firstly, Hanauer doesn't claim that consumers create businesses. He rightly points out however that consumers actually need disposable income if they're going to contribute to growth by supporting new and existing businesses. If you continually tax the middle class to the nines while throwing billions at people who basically don't have anything to spend it on, that's just crazy.
The other thing you're also ignoring is the very fundamental point of Hanauer's talak where he says quite plainly that he is only person with the material needs of one person. A good capitalist is not reinvesting their wealth back into the prosperity of others. Basically the better a person can get away with not adding more staff and keeping/growing existing revenues then the better capitalist they are.
Quoth the great Perry Cox: "People are bastard-coated bastards with bastard filling".
Absolutely brilliant.
Just as I appreciate the effort required to make pointless and condescending posts anonymously :-)
I've love to see someone challenge Romney on the concept of tax cuts for the rich leading to Job creation.
A great example was this banned TED talk released by venture capitalist Nick Hanauer where he put in really simple, easy-to-understand terms the concept that giving money back to middle class families means they will buy more stuff leading to more job creation than giving tax breaks to a millionaire. This comes from the first non-family investor in Amazon by the way.
Considering this is Romney's whole ideology, I'd love to see an audience member nail him and get an on-record comment on the subject.
This is a nice idea in theory... But never underestimate the audacity of politicians. In the late 1990s Australian prime-minister re-negged on about half his election promises within a few months of taking office and quite glibly coined the phrase "That was a non-core promise."
Clearly Foxconn has none. This is going to put a lot of poor chinese factory workers out of a job.
Where's the supposed "people's" Communist party during all of this?
That's Ok... The way it's all going we're only a couple of years away from having our own mandatory tracking chips.
Not true. Why do you think filling your car up hasn't gotten any cheaper?
Actual demand's been down over the last few years and the prices have stayed high because your good old friends Goldman Sachs et al. managed to get previously non-classified commodoties such as crude oil made tradeable as futures.
A barrel of oil changes hands something like 20 times before it even exists these days... And that's not an exageration.