Indeed. They faced a drop in CD sales at the same time as the dot-com bubble bust and a leveling a year prior. Isolating the effects of piracy from an economic downturn would have been considerably difficult, especially when many of those that would do the pirating were also the ones with no money to spend (i.e., laid off dot-com workers).
To their credit, they did take a lesson from the digital age and started distributing via the Internet when, without Napster et. al., they would never have realized the medium existed. To their discredit, they failed to see the benefits of allowing users to try out an album and instead worked their mighty legal muscles against p2p services.
The way their business model works is a cross between firing off a shotgun and Social Security. They hire all these artists, most of which are obscure and awful, and subsidize their losses with the profits of the highly successful, and usually also awful, artists. The Britney Spears and Fallout Boys of the world pay for the Menudos. This only happens in the major record labels. If you get down to the indie labels, the label is concerned with their artists actually turning a profit, less of which is taken, although less of which is made, too.
If you take away the cash cows by giving the Many access to their music free, then the majors' business model will fail, because suddenly nobody's making a profit. It's not that the record labels take most of the money out of greed, it's that they take most of the money to pay for their craptastic and obscure bands, only a few of which will actually break even.
Three things wrong with the dorm room and party mode:
CRT monitors on the desk use up all the space on there - no sit-down makeouts.
Beds are raised, dramatically increasing the odds of hitting one's head while dancing to "thumpin'" beat.
Only enough space for roughly 3 people down the aisle.
Dorms, though, ARE convertable - I've held one in my dorm before. We just turned the whole hall into a room and synched our computers to the same techno internet station.
So, it isn't SONY "ready to self-destruct", it's SONY reaping the rewards of what it's sown. It's too bad, they've shown they're capable of creating sophisticated and innovative new technologies.
So... it's in the process of destructing because of its own actions.
Rather off-topic, but BART was indeed originally intended to go to Marin. However, Marin residents voted it down, fearing an influx of riff-raff from Oakland or SF, and also concerns about development. This was before Prop. 13 passed, before which towns had a major financial incentive to build massive housing tracts, much moreso than today. Marin didn't want the crime (yeah, like someone's going to steal a TV in Marin and take it home on BART), and they didn't want the development. It had nothing to do with elites protecting the percieved interests of the public over practicality - it was the public preferring to take the bus and drive than take the 'risks' of BART.
The question that came to my mind was how damaging such a pod is to one's spirit or creativity, but I suppose it's not too much different than how things have always been. The difference is we watch movies rather than read pulp magazines and $0.10 novels. It'll be interesting to see how the phenomenon evolves.
I never said the US was perfect - I'm strongly considering avoiding the other Telcoms for Qwest, which itself won't be perfect but at least I know it thinks independently. And, as was said, morality is not geographic, even if it is impossible to attain.
There is a huge difference between business and parental filtering and legal filtering. The role of a business is to do business, the role of a family is to perpetuate the genes and ideology of the family, but the role of law in the modern tradition is to balance the social good with the familial and individual good, with a strong emphasis towards the belief in rights and powers of the people (liberalism). Western government is based upon the accepted absolute truth of that principle, which means it's as applicable to China as the US. If a company nursed within this liberal framework shuns that framework, it shocks those that see the ideology of rights as absolutely true. Given that the medium the company works with is strongly influenced by or is emblematic of those that embrace an even more individualistic rights-based ideology (libertarianism), it shocks them as well. Government simply has a different role than businesses or families and is expected to act differently.
The internet does need to grow up, but it must do so ethically, and Yahoo's actions are anything but ethical, even if they are legal.
The thing is, Yahoo isn't just abiding by the laws of China - it's acquiescing to their non-binding requests. Also, the Internet isn't just a technology - it's the result of users taking advantage of this medium to create their own content, whether corporate or personal. As such, the Internet has it's own cultural ideals, etc. People are angered by Yahoo! because it is going against the libertarian Internet cultural ideals, as well as going against the American ideology that says liberty and freedom are universally good and the opposite (censorship) is universally bad. Aiding the bad while running counter to the Internet's culture makes those that hold those ideals as true upset.
A police state is one which actively controls dissent through active and open repression of civil rights. Last I heard, Noam Chomsky's still running about, as are folks like you. If this were a police state, do you think you could even post that diatribe in English?
Or a military dictatorship! Y'know, a country whose government has been taken over by a coup and has a military officer, rather than a civilian, in charge, who is actively seeking to stay in power over the rule of law, i.e., those made before he came into power.
And us Californians? We made were the ones that passed a law that directly contradicted the federal law, which the state did agree subordinate itself to when it joined the union. Part of being in a club is following the rules, and any federal prosecution that comes from the DoJ is legit. That's not to say, of course, that California shouldn't necessarily be able to make its own drug laws in contradiction to the federal ones, only that at the moment, it frankly can't within boundaries of the Constitution.
Calling the US to a military dictatorial police state is to have about as clear a picture of the rest of the world as a hick that thinks British Columbia is in South America.
I was just wondering about the threat of monopolizing ideas. The old adage, "Great minds think alike" would soon become legally suspect. That example of eBay being sued for their "buy now!" feature seems like complete hogwash. It's a good idea, and I'd be surprised if they didn't just come up with the concept in the first place. I could see IV becoming sort of an idea monopoly, where any business idea first needs to be bought as a "patent portfolio" from them.
Really, though, one can only blame Disney for screwing up the system. Each time their characters come up for release into public domain, they lobby to extend the patents, and each time they win. Something needs to change.
Well, the footprints may have already been erased by a sort of wind that disturbs dust along the day/night line on the Moon. Voyager 2, Pioneer 10? Indeed, those will, in all probability, outlive the Earth.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. They faced a drop in CD sales at the same time as the dot-com bubble bust and a leveling a year prior. Isolating the effects of piracy from an economic downturn would have been considerably difficult, especially when many of those that would do the pirating were also the ones with no money to spend (i.e., laid off dot-com workers).
To their credit, they did take a lesson from the digital age and started distributing via the Internet when, without Napster et. al., they would never have realized the medium existed. To their discredit, they failed to see the benefits of allowing users to try out an album and instead worked their mighty legal muscles against p2p services.
The way their business model works is a cross between firing off a shotgun and Social Security. They hire all these artists, most of which are obscure and awful, and subsidize their losses with the profits of the highly successful, and usually also awful, artists. The Britney Spears and Fallout Boys of the world pay for the Menudos. This only happens in the major record labels. If you get down to the indie labels, the label is concerned with their artists actually turning a profit, less of which is taken, although less of which is made, too.
If you take away the cash cows by giving the Many access to their music free, then the majors' business model will fail, because suddenly nobody's making a profit. It's not that the record labels take most of the money out of greed, it's that they take most of the money to pay for their craptastic and obscure bands, only a few of which will actually break even.
Three things wrong with the dorm room and party mode:
CRT monitors on the desk use up all the space on there - no sit-down makeouts.
Beds are raised, dramatically increasing the odds of hitting one's head while dancing to "thumpin'" beat.
Only enough space for roughly 3 people down the aisle.
Dorms, though, ARE convertable - I've held one in my dorm before. We just turned the whole hall into a room and synched our computers to the same techno internet station.
And yet, they're still better than the geocities and angelfire pages of yore.
My NAV is using a total of 9Mb RAM on my system as I type. It's always been more reliable in catching viruses than AVG, too.
So, it isn't SONY "ready to self-destruct", it's SONY reaping the rewards of what it's sown. It's too bad, they've shown they're capable of creating sophisticated and innovative new technologies. So... it's in the process of destructing because of its own actions.
Rather off-topic, but BART was indeed originally intended to go to Marin. However, Marin residents voted it down, fearing an influx of riff-raff from Oakland or SF, and also concerns about development. This was before Prop. 13 passed, before which towns had a major financial incentive to build massive housing tracts, much moreso than today. Marin didn't want the crime (yeah, like someone's going to steal a TV in Marin and take it home on BART), and they didn't want the development. It had nothing to do with elites protecting the percieved interests of the public over practicality - it was the public preferring to take the bus and drive than take the 'risks' of BART.
The question that came to my mind was how damaging such a pod is to one's spirit or creativity, but I suppose it's not too much different than how things have always been. The difference is we watch movies rather than read pulp magazines and $0.10 novels. It'll be interesting to see how the phenomenon evolves.
In Soviet Russia, joke's laughs at you!
I never said the US was perfect - I'm strongly considering avoiding the other Telcoms for Qwest, which itself won't be perfect but at least I know it thinks independently. And, as was said, morality is not geographic, even if it is impossible to attain.
There is a huge difference between business and parental filtering and legal filtering. The role of a business is to do business, the role of a family is to perpetuate the genes and ideology of the family, but the role of law in the modern tradition is to balance the social good with the familial and individual good, with a strong emphasis towards the belief in rights and powers of the people (liberalism). Western government is based upon the accepted absolute truth of that principle, which means it's as applicable to China as the US. If a company nursed within this liberal framework shuns that framework, it shocks those that see the ideology of rights as absolutely true. Given that the medium the company works with is strongly influenced by or is emblematic of those that embrace an even more individualistic rights-based ideology (libertarianism), it shocks them as well. Government simply has a different role than businesses or families and is expected to act differently.
The internet does need to grow up, but it must do so ethically, and Yahoo's actions are anything but ethical, even if they are legal.
The thing is, Yahoo isn't just abiding by the laws of China - it's acquiescing to their non-binding requests. Also, the Internet isn't just a technology - it's the result of users taking advantage of this medium to create their own content, whether corporate or personal. As such, the Internet has it's own cultural ideals, etc. People are angered by Yahoo! because it is going against the libertarian Internet cultural ideals, as well as going against the American ideology that says liberty and freedom are universally good and the opposite (censorship) is universally bad. Aiding the bad while running counter to the Internet's culture makes those that hold those ideals as true upset.
And by loonies, you mean Canadian dollars?
A police state is one which actively controls dissent through active and open repression of civil rights. Last I heard, Noam Chomsky's still running about, as are folks like you. If this were a police state, do you think you could even post that diatribe in English?
Or a military dictatorship! Y'know, a country whose government has been taken over by a coup and has a military officer, rather than a civilian, in charge, who is actively seeking to stay in power over the rule of law, i.e., those made before he came into power.
And us Californians? We made were the ones that passed a law that directly contradicted the federal law, which the state did agree subordinate itself to when it joined the union. Part of being in a club is following the rules, and any federal prosecution that comes from the DoJ is legit. That's not to say, of course, that California shouldn't necessarily be able to make its own drug laws in contradiction to the federal ones, only that at the moment, it frankly can't within boundaries of the Constitution.
Calling the US to a military dictatorial police state is to have about as clear a picture of the rest of the world as a hick that thinks British Columbia is in South America.
I was just wondering about the threat of monopolizing ideas. The old adage, "Great minds think alike" would soon become legally suspect. That example of eBay being sued for their "buy now!" feature seems like complete hogwash. It's a good idea, and I'd be surprised if they didn't just come up with the concept in the first place. I could see IV becoming sort of an idea monopoly, where any business idea first needs to be bought as a "patent portfolio" from them. Really, though, one can only blame Disney for screwing up the system. Each time their characters come up for release into public domain, they lobby to extend the patents, and each time they win. Something needs to change.
Well, the footprints may have already been erased by a sort of wind that disturbs dust along the day/night line on the Moon. Voyager 2, Pioneer 10? Indeed, those will, in all probability, outlive the Earth.
Don't forget, this little sonuvabitch bill still has to pass.