I don't want to know how fast my (hypothetical) kid is driving 99% of the time. It's not my business, it's really not, unless he gets hurt, hurts someone else, damages MY property or gets in trouble with the police. I don't care what he does until something happens.
Could you e-mail me your address? I want to send your hypothetical kid a hypothetical box of matches.
Don't worry--I'll let you know as soon as he burns your house down.
Or just use cash. You know, the green rectangular pieces of paper and the small round metal things ?
Cash is even worse, because every dollar bill has your picture printed right on it.
...oh, come on. Like I'm the only person here who looks exactly like George Washington.
The "search engine optimization" crowd now has a convention.. It's on, right now, at the San Jose convention center.
If there were any justice in the world, the road to the San Jose would be lined right now with large billboards giving misleading instructions, trapping conventioneers in endless loops to nowhere.
Oh, and just to belabor the whole "Pioneers get eaten, but settlers get rich" analogy...
Hardcore techies (like most Slashdot readers) are the pioneers who thrash boldly into new territory, clearing away all the underbrush but not having the political skills to get an actual town going. Apple is the savvy town booster who recognizes the value of the local natural resources, then organizes the volunteer fire brigade and the library and arranges for a train station to arrive in town (after cleverly buying the soon-to-be-valuable land next to the station-to-be.) And Microsoft is the guy that arrives several generations later and builds the shopping mall.
It's come down to new takes on old ideas; everything that has been toted as a new feature in OSX (and Vista) can be found in some other product or OS. While OSX's great strength is its Unix roots, Unix itself has been around literally my entire life. Not much innovation there.
Actually, although it is heresy for a Mac fan like me to say this: Apple has never really been about innovation.
Now, this fact is usually trotted out by people who want to bash Apple--but I'm actually citing it as proof of Apple's savvy. There's an old saying: "Pioneers get eaten. Settlers get rich." Apple has a real corporate talent for noticing when other people have come up with an intriguing innovation of a good idea, but haven't figured out how to combine that innovation with all the things that make a good end-user experience--interface, design, etc. This goes right back to the very beginnings of the company. Stevens Wozniak and Jobs weren't the first people to sell homebrew computers--they just did it better than anybody else around. Apple didn't invent the idea of whole window-based GUI with a mouse controller, Xerox Parc did. But Xerox didn't recognize how incredibly significant the invention was; Apple did. And, obviously, MP3 players were around before the iPod made them a must-have item
Like any human institution, Apple is imperfect. Sometimes they've gotten to the market too soon (as with the Newton). Other times (perhaps more rarely) they've trailed too far behind, as for example at certain points between System 7 and OSX. But they seem to get it right far more often than most companies.
You are right, it's about the scripts. BUT, screenwriters are not the guilty ones, the producers who pick bad screenwriters are.
I agree, but I'd expand that thought a bit. It's not just a case of picking bad screenwriters. It's a case of managing screenwriters badly. If you hire a good screenwriter, and then fire him, and then hire another good screenwriter to rewrite the first one, the result MIGHT be a good script that benefits from the strengths of both writers... but it could also be an inconsistent, contradictory mess.
For that matter, if you have a brilliant screenwriter write a brilliant script, and then you hire a crappy director who lets the actors improvise crappy lines in place of the brilliant ones, and then edits it in a way that devoids the story of any logic, everybody who sees it is going to think, "That was a crappy script." They have no way of knowing that what was on the screen was not on the page.
Of course, sometimes films go wrong in ways you couldn't possibly imagine. A true story, related to me by one of the screenwriters involved:
Somebody writers a fantastic action script that attracts an A-list director and a pretty big star. It's going to be expensive to make, so several studios collaborate on the process.
Unfortunately, during pre-production, one of the studios goes bankrupt. Only half the necessary sets have been built.
The remaining studios have a choice. They can spend the money to build the rest of the sets--and not have anything left to make the film. Or they can shut down the production and lose all the money they've already sunk into sets, costumes, etc. OR... they can hire a writer to come up with a new script that will use the sets,costumes, etc they DO have.
Needless to say, they choose to hire a writer to come up with a new script. This writer now has the enviable job of weaving a coherent story out of a bunch of sets and costumes, under a tight deadline. He hands in the script, the movie shoots, and... you guessed it... most of the reviews complain about the so-so script. Of course, anybody who knows about the circumstances in which the script was written knows that "so so" is a MAJOR accomplishment under the circumstances.
When I saw the headline, my first thought was, "If people don't like the Writers Guild of America, why would they sue Microsoft?" It can get confusing being a film geek on a website full of computer nerds.
I agree. And best of all, once you let yourself fall far enough behind, it stops feeling like a sacrifice.
I've never owned a game console in my adult life, mainly because I work out of home and I've always been afraid I couldn't resist the temptation to play games all day when I should be working. Having finally decided I'm willing to risk it, I bought a PS2 in January. I now have six years worth of games to play through, and I rarely have to pay more than £3 (about $6) on eBay, including postage. It's not like I'm sitting at home with no games to play waiting for the price of Metal Gear Solid 4 to drop. (Heck, I haven't even started MGS 2. And when I do start MGS2, I'll be starting with MGS2:Substance; I won't have to re-buy the game just to get the extra content.)
Of course, it's much easier to give this kind of advice when you're in your mid 30s and don't have a ton of time to play games to begin with. When you're in high school, college, or even your early 20s, the value of a game isn't just in playing it; it's in hanging out with your buddies while you play it, and swapping tips, and competing for bragging rights, and so on. Paying extra for a game when it's first released gives you a social advantage, and that's something people are always willing to pay for. It's the nerd equivalent of buying a Prada jacket (or whatever it is the cool people do to impress their friends. I wouldn't know.)
D3 is a masterpiece of level design, or at least of a certain highly-detailed future-industrial style. And that's all anyone takes away from it: how it looked. Having stood in line to get a copy the day it came out, I'm still trying to forget how mind-numbingly poorly it played.
Bottom line: level design is vastly overrated.
You're using level design in a different way than I understand it. (I am a pretty casual gamer, so there's a good chance my definition is wrong, BTW. Also I couldn't get the video to play, so I wouldn't know if you were using it the same way as Romero.)
To me, "level design" doesn't mean "designing the visual look of a level." That's an aspect of it, but not the most important part. More importantly is designing the layout of the level--where various paths lead, and where various obstacles occur, and where enemies lurk. This obviously has a major impact on how well a game plays, and having a good level designer makes a huge difference.
In this respect, I think the original Doom levels were incredibly well designed, especially given that they didn't really have the technology for true 3D play. It really created the feeling of not knowing what was around the next corner, and resulted in the famous Doom Lean, where you find yourself tilting your real-world head, as if that was going to let you peer around a corner in the game...
(I think we agree in substance, actually, but your use of the phrase "level design" was different enough that it made me wonder if I'm the only one who defines it as I do.)
You raise a fair point.The levy system on VHS tapes has a certain logic to it; you may have bought blank VHS tapes to record nocturnal rodent activity (and I may have tapes them to dub short films that I wrote and directed)--but you and I are the exceptions. The vast majority of VHS sales is to tape stuff off TV, and you can make a strong case that it is fair to share part of VHS profits with the creators of the stuff that is broadcast on TV.
But as you point out, blank DVDs and CDs are purchased for a much greater diversity of reasons, and transferring the levy system to DVDs and CDs raises a whole host of questions. I glossed over these questions in my previous post with a little bit of handwaving, and it's entirely fair of you to call me on it.
Basically, I'm trying to make it clear that the issue is not as black-and-white as 99.9% of Slashdot posters seem to think. In doing so, I should be careful not to make it seem black-and-white in the other direction. But let me state something that I think IS black and white: Historically, a large amount of the money collected by these levies HAS gone to individual artists who can actually use it. That's a fact. It has been divvied up based on what shows and movies have actually aired on TV. That's also a fact. (Obviously, it would be ideal if you could measure which shows are actually being RECORDED, but given that it is impossible to measure that, basing it on the shows that air is probably the best available proxy.)
Now, on to the gray areas...
Don't say that that I, or people like me, "deserve" that punishment because other people have done something wrong.
I didn't say that. I've never heard anybody else say it, either.Frankly, anybody who does say it is an idiot.
Personally, I don't view these taxes as "punishment" any more than I view property tax or sales tax as a punishment. In the US, property taxes usually go to fund local schools--but you have to pay property tax whether or not you have children. Is that fair? Are you being punished? Or is it just that your democratically elected officials have determined that having well-educated children is good for everybody--and since there is some correlation between local schools and property values, a property tax is as good a method as any for funding that social good?
You might respond that educating children is a clear social good, while subsidizing artists isn't... and I would I actually agree with you. I have very mixed feelings about government funding of art. But many countries feel strongly that there is a societal benefit to a thriving art and media scene. Many countries in the world have government committees charged with developing the local film industry, and many countries in the world have an official government broadcasting arm funded out of taxes. Some countries even give special tax breaks to writers and artists that they don't give to people in other professions.
Like I said, I have very mixed feelings about this kind of thing--but if a country has such a policy, and then decides to add a "copyright tax" to blank media, they are being logically consistent with their previous democratically determined policies. (As a side note, I think this is a reason that a government-mandated "copyright tax" is less likely to take hold in the US, a country that has never really been enthusiastic about government funding of the arts.)
And SGAE, of course, will use the money not to pay the authors, but to spread the word through adoctrination lectures, or to pay for lobbies to bully Brussels, or to cry louder about how bad people is and how poor authors are getting (despite SGAE's doubling benefits every year...).
Do you have any evidence for this, or are you just leaping to conclusions?
The fact is that previous levies on blank media actually have gone to artists. Here's how it works:
In the US, it's possible for artists to sign away all rights to their work. Screenwriters (and, I think directors, although I'm not sure) sign a "Work for hire" contract, which basically says that the studio is the author of the script and gets all the rights. In Europe, however, artists have certain inherent rights that they can't sign away. As a result, some huge chunk (I think 50%) of the European levies on blank videotapes and video tape recorders have gone to the "authors" of films and TV shows; that authors' money has been split between screenwriters and directors. This has been a huge source of income for writers and directors. In fact, it has been enough money that the Writers Guild of America had to set up a specific department to deal with disbursing it, and it is still having problems getting the money out fast enough.
So--you ask--how do you determine who gets the money? The assumption has been that people use VHS tapes to record what is broadcast on TV. So, if a German network airs "Serenity," then you'd divide the film's 119 minute runtime by the total number of minutes aired on all of German TV that month, and then pro-rate Joss Whedon's share of that month's levies accordingly. Now, it's fairly easy for the Writers' and Directors' Guilds to figure out who wrote and directed "Serenity" but it's trickier with TV shows. Often, a foreign network will just report that they aired an episode of,say, The Simpsons, and the WGA will have to figure out exactly which episode aired in Monaco last Tuesday at 4AM before they can pass the money on to the writer...
Ironically, if you buy a movie on DVD, the writer gets a tiny fraction of your purchase price, but when you buy a blank VHS tape, writers and directors actually get a sizable chunk of the levy! I've heard a lot of people justify copying of digital media by saying "The artists don't actually get the money--it just goes to some big corporation." Well, in taxing blank media, the governments of Europe have listened to you, the copyer. I'm sure now that everybody knows the artists are getting their money, we'll all stop complaining.
Oh, and by the way--it's not just millionaire writers and directors who are benefitting from this. Take a look at your local TV grid, and you'll notice a hefty chunk of old stuff being aired. If some classic movie from 1940 airs on late-night TV in France, it's going to result in what is probably the first payment the elderly writer (or his widow or children) made from that movie in decades. These sums aren't going to be huge--I read that Preston Sturges'widow is owed something like $250--but they are there. In a sense, the levies result in a long tail kind of thing, where writers and directors who didn't necessarily write the latest big blockbuster still get money when their work is viewed.
There are a few issues in transferring this system from VHS levies to levies on digital media. It's a safe assumption that most VHS tapes are used to record stuff off TV, so it's fair to distribute the levies based on what is being aired on TV. However, I'm guessing most blank DVDs and CD-Rs are used to burn stuff that was obtained over the Internet. I have no idea how you measure that, and I suspect there is going to be some lively debate within the WGA, the DGA, and whoever ends up distributing money to musicians. But it seems likely that this money will indeed end up in the hands of creative people rather than suits.
I completely understand where you're coming from, but there's another way of looking at it:
Supposing you could save one life today or two lives next week. Which is the more moral choice?
I actually don't think there's an easy answer to that, and I'd respect either choice.
: I have to completely disagree with the "DVD is an endangered species" noise mentioned for NetFlix. While I'm not a NetFlix subscriber physical media like DVD is certainly nowhere near its endlife. I just don't know what people think is going to replace the physical aspect of DVD media in the near future.
Indeed. A statistician friend of mine has calculated that, since each DVD can hold about 5GB, and Netflix can turn DVDs around in 48 hours... then with only 3 Netflix DVDs out at a time, you're getting the equivalent of a 90 KB/second transfer rate, and if you get the maximum Netflix subscription of 8 DVDs at a time, that's 240 KB/second.
In short, DVDs can currently compete very well with the average data transfer rate people are getting, and it will be easy to scale up the Netflix model to compete with improved bandwidth just by letting people have more DVDs out at a time... In the long term, sure, DVDs will become obsolete (like pretty much any technology)--but that day may be farther off than people think.
But donating to the Bill and Melinda show puts rather a lot of financial muscle in one place; with that kind of money he could have established his own foundation, for an independent view of things.
As Buffett says in TFA, one of the reasons he is doing this is that Bill and Melinda Gates had already gone "through the real grind of getting [their foundation] to a megasize," thereby sparing him the effort of doing the same thing.
Actually, when you think about it, Buffett's business model has always been to find an intelligently-run company with a good product, buy into them, and then use his business expertise to help them do more of what they've already been doing. That's exactly what he's done here, only with a charity instead of a business. Or, as Buffett puts it in TFA:
I'm getting two people enormously successful at something, where I've had a chance to see what they've done, where I know they will keep doing it - where they've done it with their own money, so they're not living in some fantasy world - and where in general I agree with their reasoning. If I've found the right vehicle for my goal, there's no reason to wait.
Compare what I'm doing with them to my situation at Berkshire, where I have talented and proven people in charge of our businesses. They do a much better job than I could in running their operations.
Also, it's not like Buffett is just putting a check in an envelope and mailing it off to Bill & Melinda to use as they see fit. His donation buys him a seat on the board of the Gates foundation. I'm sure he'll have a big impact on their decision making, even if he downplays it in typical Buffettian style:
Q: What is the significance of your going on the board of the Gates foundation?
A: Not much. The biggest reason for my doing that is if they were ever to go down on an airplane together. Beyond that, I hope to have a constructive thought now and then. But I don't think I'm as well cut out to be a philanthropist as Bill and Melinda are. The feedback on philanthropy is very slow, and that would bother me. I'd have to be too involved with a lot of people I wouldn't want to be involved with and have to listen to more opinions than I would enjoy.
In philanthropy also, you have to make some big mistakes. I know that. But it would bother me more to make the mistakes myself, rather than having someone else make them whom I trust overall to do a good job. In general, Bill and Melinda will have a better batting average than I would.
Sadly this sums up why a lot of the rich Barons give away their wealth when they get old. They know that they have screwed over people to get where they are. They know they can't take it with them. They try to pay penance before they die. Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Vanderbilt all did the same thing. Now add Buffet and Gates to the list.
Whatever you think of Gates' business practices, I don't think you can add Buffett to the list of "barons [who] screwed over people to get where they are." Buffett's business model for decades has been to look for a well-run company that was underpriced in the market; offer the owners enough money to make them happy to sell; and (usually) keep the management and employees in place. It's very different from the whole 80's leveraged buyout model, where you fire off half the company and sell the rest for parts. He's certainly doing no harm, and you could argue that, by taking good-but-underpriced companies off the marketplace, he is protecting them from being captured by the sort of predatory raider that he is not.
Also, Buffett owns Sees Candy. That alone makes him a force for good in the world.
My comment to the ultra-wealthy who wait until they are about to die before they put their excess to good use is... "You've had 10 billion dollars for 30 years and NOW you decide to put the excess to good use?!?!?! Where the hell were you last year?"
Over the years, Warren Buffet has been asked repeatedly in interviews why he doesn't give more to charity. His answer has always been a variation on the following, from TFA:
As for me, I always had the idea that philanthropy was important today, but would be equally important in one year, ten years, 20 years, and the future generally.
And someone who was compounding money at a high rate, I thought, was the better party to be taking care of the philanthropy that was to be done 20 years out, while the people compounding at a lower rate should logically take care of the current philanthropy.
Or, to put it another way, Buffett's job for the past several decades has been to manage other people's money in ways that were far more profitable than they could manage it themselves. In his mind, every dollar that he had was actually a dollar he was managing on behalf of the charity that would get his fortune when he died.
He acknowledges that there was self-interest in this analysis; as he puts it, he was having a great time managing Berkshire Hathaway, and didn't want to go through the "grind" of setting up a foundation that could effectively distribute his megawealth. The fact that Bill Gates had already gone through that "grind" on his behalf was part of Buffett's incentive to give away his money now.
Another part, according to TFA, was the death of his wife Susan. Buffet says that he always figured he'd die before her, and he could trust her to give away all their wealth in an effective way. The fact that she predeceased him forced him to rethink his plan.
As in pretty much every other area in the world, a high quality product is neither necessary nor sufficient to generate profit.
On the other hand, wings are neither necessary nor sufficient for evolutionary success, yet species evolve them.
In any ecology--whether a literal one or a metaphorical one like the marketplace--the key to success is finding an underexploited niche, and then exploiting it.
As long as there are people willing to pay more for quality, there will always be a market for high-quality games. And as long as there are people willing to buy crap from the bargain bin in order to save money, there will always be a market for crappy games.
Will a "smart beancounter" try to produce a quality game? That depends on the market niche the beancounter's company is trying to fill. If you run Joe's House of $5 Walmart CD-Roms, and some game designer tells you he wants to delay a launch for a week in order to polish up a game, you'll fire him. If you run EA and Will Wright tells you he wants to delay a launch for six months, you'll let him.
I can believe that. I also gather that, early on, they had some trouble getting first-run Hollywood movies, since the studios weren't keen on taking a share of a 50p admission price when other theatres were offering them a share of a £10 ticket price. It's not clear to me if they ever ironed that out.
Unfortunately, while I view the failure of easyCinema as a failure of just one particular implementation of an alternate pricing scheme, I fear it is going to taint the alternate pricing idea for at least a little while. People will just say, "Well, easyCinema tried it and it didn't work."
There was actually a theatre chain in the UK that introduced a variable-pricing model: Easy Cinema. They avoided having to make subjective choices about which tickets are worth more by a simple, objective pricing model.
Basically, for any given screening, the first ten tickets they sold cost 40 cents. The next ten cost 95 cents. The next ten cost $1.50. (I'm completely making the numbers up off the top of my head here, just to give you an idea of the pricing mechanism.) And so on up until it topped out at whatever the maximum ticket price is.
Of course, if they did this in person, it would be a recipe for madness at the ticket window. So all sales were online. You bought a ticket from your computer, print it out, and then when you got to the theatre, you scanned it into a bar code reader. The place was virtually unstaffed--they didn't even sell refreshments, and you are encouraged to bring your own popcorn.
You will notice that the above is entirely in the past tense. EasyCinema opened in May 2003 and closed in May 2006, although the website survives as a DVD rental site. Apparently they just couldn't make enough to justify the rent on the building.
You can read more in this article, written when the cinema first opened. (The article is, unnecessarily and somewhat annoyingly, spread across 6 pages, but it's worth clicking all the way through if you're interested in this subject.)
Most of the responses above seem based on the assumption (implicit or explicit) that these drones will be used as a sort of ongoing, non-stop random search of every backyard in Los Angeles. I don't see anything in TFA to support this assumption. I think the problem is the use of the word "patrol" in the Slashdot summary--a word that implies a sort of ongoing, somewhat random approach. This word doesn't appear anywhere in the article.
From TFA:
The drone comes equipped with low-light and infrared capabilities and can fly at speeds up to 30 miles (48 kilometers) per hour for 70 minutes.
The plane collapses and can fit into a shoulder pack smaller than a golf bag. Its portability and ease of assembly could be a big advantage for law enforcement.
"It's basically a high-tech kite that field officers could set up in a matter of minutes," said Heal.
Given the current state of technology, it sounds much more useful for specific, targeted surveillance than some sort of 24-hour-a-day let's-see-what-everybody-in-LA-is-doing kind of thing.
Personally, my own attitude towards technology in police work is that it's fine as long as the police are only using it to do something they would be allowed to do without it. There would be no problem with an individual cop standing on a public street corner and radioing back to HQ to describe what is going on, so I have no problem with putting up a video camera to do the same. But it would be unconstitutional for a cop to search my house without a warrant, and I would therefore have a problem with him using some sort of high-tech x-ray machine to peer through my walls without a warrant. But if a cop has a properly obtained warrant, I don't really care whether he searches the house via the latest technology or by hand.
In this case, it sounds as though the plan is to use the drone for targeted surveillance work from outdoor spaces, which the police are already allowed to do. If the police use it to improperly obtain evidence against a suspect (by, say, flying it inside a private space without a warrant), a halfway smart lawyer will challenge the evidence in court and it will likely be thrown out.
Given the genuinely disturbing rollback of civil liberties in the US over the past few years, I completely understand why people are paranoid about this kind of thing. These rollbacks have occurred because people have panicked about terrorism. Those of us who care about civil liberties have a responsibility not to panic in the other direction. We should focus our concerns on the many actual abuses going on, instead of getting into a tizzy about abuses that don't exist.
While it's nice to see to see tech companies behind such legislation, it would seem there's some pots calling the kettle black, so to speak.
Dear Slashdot,
Your recent article ("Amazon Asks Congress to Curb Patent Abusers") is in clear violation of Patent #1805-J-9, "A Method For Comparing Hypocritical Actions Performed By Humans To Hypothetical Actions Performed By Articulate, Similarly Colored Kitchenware," which was recently awarded to Jacobw Incorporated. Please cease and desist your use of our patented metaphors, similes, and other rhetorical tropes.
Shhhh! I'm pretty sure the Green Goblin has a slashdot account. He's gotta keep up with the latest developments in hoverboard and pumpking-shaped-bomb technology, you know.
You might as well argue that we should all go back to speaking Old English -- it's simply not going to happen.
Ða wæs on burgum! Leof leodcyning, Los Alamos longe rage folcum gefræge (fæder ellor hwearf, Win Ho Li of earde). George W. Bush oæt him eft onwoc heah Healfdene; heold enden lifde, gamol ond guðreouw, glæde Slashdotters.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't want to know how fast my (hypothetical) kid is driving 99% of the time. It's not my business, it's really not, unless he gets hurt, hurts someone else, damages MY property or gets in trouble with the police. I don't care what he does until something happens.
Could you e-mail me your address? I want to send your hypothetical kid a hypothetical box of matches.
Don't worry--I'll let you know as soon as he burns your house down.
Or just use cash. You know, the green rectangular pieces of paper and the small round metal things ?
...oh, come on. Like I'm the only person here who looks exactly like George Washington.
Cash is even worse, because every dollar bill has your picture printed right on it.
The "search engine optimization" crowd now has a convention.. It's on, right now, at the San Jose convention center.
If there were any justice in the world, the road to the San Jose would be lined right now with large billboards giving misleading instructions, trapping conventioneers in endless loops to nowhere.
Ah, well. A man can dream.
Oh, and just to belabor the whole "Pioneers get eaten, but settlers get rich" analogy...
Hardcore techies (like most Slashdot readers) are the pioneers who thrash boldly into new territory, clearing away all the underbrush but not having the political skills to get an actual town going. Apple is the savvy town booster who recognizes the value of the local natural resources, then organizes the volunteer fire brigade and the library and arranges for a train station to arrive in town (after cleverly buying the soon-to-be-valuable land next to the station-to-be.) And Microsoft is the guy that arrives several generations later and builds the shopping mall.
It's come down to new takes on old ideas; everything that has been toted as a new feature in OSX (and Vista) can be found in some other product or OS. While OSX's great strength is its Unix roots, Unix itself has been around literally my entire life. Not much innovation there.
Actually, although it is heresy for a Mac fan like me to say this: Apple has never really been about innovation.
Now, this fact is usually trotted out by people who want to bash Apple--but I'm actually citing it as proof of Apple's savvy. There's an old saying: "Pioneers get eaten. Settlers get rich." Apple has a real corporate talent for noticing when other people have come up with an intriguing innovation of a good idea, but haven't figured out how to combine that innovation with all the things that make a good end-user experience--interface, design, etc. This goes right back to the very beginnings of the company. Stevens Wozniak and Jobs weren't the first people to sell homebrew computers--they just did it better than anybody else around. Apple didn't invent the idea of whole window-based GUI with a mouse controller, Xerox Parc did. But Xerox didn't recognize how incredibly significant the invention was; Apple did. And, obviously, MP3 players were around before the iPod made them a must-have item
Like any human institution, Apple is imperfect. Sometimes they've gotten to the market too soon (as with the Newton). Other times (perhaps more rarely) they've trailed too far behind, as for example at certain points between System 7 and OSX. But they seem to get it right far more often than most companies.
You are right, it's about the scripts. BUT, screenwriters are not the guilty ones, the producers who pick bad screenwriters are.
I agree, but I'd expand that thought a bit. It's not just a case of picking bad screenwriters. It's a case of managing screenwriters badly. If you hire a good screenwriter, and then fire him, and then hire another good screenwriter to rewrite the first one, the result MIGHT be a good script that benefits from the strengths of both writers... but it could also be an inconsistent, contradictory mess.
For that matter, if you have a brilliant screenwriter write a brilliant script, and then you hire a crappy director who lets the actors improvise crappy lines in place of the brilliant ones, and then edits it in a way that devoids the story of any logic, everybody who sees it is going to think, "That was a crappy script." They have no way of knowing that what was on the screen was not on the page.
Of course, sometimes films go wrong in ways you couldn't possibly imagine. A true story, related to me by one of the screenwriters involved:
Somebody writers a fantastic action script that attracts an A-list director and a pretty big star. It's going to be expensive to make, so several studios collaborate on the process.
Unfortunately, during pre-production, one of the studios goes bankrupt. Only half the necessary sets have been built.
The remaining studios have a choice. They can spend the money to build the rest of the sets--and not have anything left to make the film. Or they can shut down the production and lose all the money they've already sunk into sets, costumes, etc. OR... they can hire a writer to come up with a new script that will use the sets,costumes, etc they DO have.
Needless to say, they choose to hire a writer to come up with a new script. This writer now has the enviable job of weaving a coherent story out of a bunch of sets and costumes, under a tight deadline. He hands in the script, the movie shoots, and... you guessed it... most of the reviews complain about the so-so script. Of course, anybody who knows about the circumstances in which the script was written knows that "so so" is a MAJOR accomplishment under the circumstances.
When I saw the headline, my first thought was, "If people don't like the Writers Guild of America, why would they sue Microsoft?" It can get confusing being a film geek on a website full of computer nerds.
I agree. And best of all, once you let yourself fall far enough behind, it stops feeling like a sacrifice.
I've never owned a game console in my adult life, mainly because I work out of home and I've always been afraid I couldn't resist the temptation to play games all day when I should be working. Having finally decided I'm willing to risk it, I bought a PS2 in January. I now have six years worth of games to play through, and I rarely have to pay more than £3 (about $6) on eBay, including postage. It's not like I'm sitting at home with no games to play waiting for the price of Metal Gear Solid 4 to drop. (Heck, I haven't even started MGS 2. And when I do start MGS2, I'll be starting with MGS2:Substance; I won't have to re-buy the game just to get the extra content.)
Of course, it's much easier to give this kind of advice when you're in your mid 30s and don't have a ton of time to play games to begin with. When you're in high school, college, or even your early 20s, the value of a game isn't just in playing it; it's in hanging out with your buddies while you play it, and swapping tips, and competing for bragging rights, and so on. Paying extra for a game when it's first released gives you a social advantage, and that's something people are always willing to pay for. It's the nerd equivalent of buying a Prada jacket (or whatever it is the cool people do to impress their friends. I wouldn't know.)
You're using level design in a different way than I understand it. (I am a pretty casual gamer, so there's a good chance my definition is wrong, BTW. Also I couldn't get the video to play, so I wouldn't know if you were using it the same way as Romero.)
To me, "level design" doesn't mean "designing the visual look of a level." That's an aspect of it, but not the most important part. More importantly is designing the layout of the level--where various paths lead, and where various obstacles occur, and where enemies lurk. This obviously has a major impact on how well a game plays, and having a good level designer makes a huge difference.
In this respect, I think the original Doom levels were incredibly well designed, especially given that they didn't really have the technology for true 3D play. It really created the feeling of not knowing what was around the next corner, and resulted in the famous Doom Lean, where you find yourself tilting your real-world head, as if that was going to let you peer around a corner in the game...
(I think we agree in substance, actually, but your use of the phrase "level design" was different enough that it made me wonder if I'm the only one who defines it as I do.)
But as you point out, blank DVDs and CDs are purchased for a much greater diversity of reasons, and transferring the levy system to DVDs and CDs raises a whole host of questions. I glossed over these questions in my previous post with a little bit of handwaving, and it's entirely fair of you to call me on it.
Basically, I'm trying to make it clear that the issue is not as black-and-white as 99.9% of Slashdot posters seem to think. In doing so, I should be careful not to make it seem black-and-white in the other direction. But let me state something that I think IS black and white: Historically, a large amount of the money collected by these levies HAS gone to individual artists who can actually use it. That's a fact. It has been divvied up based on what shows and movies have actually aired on TV. That's also a fact. (Obviously, it would be ideal if you could measure which shows are actually being RECORDED, but given that it is impossible to measure that, basing it on the shows that air is probably the best available proxy.)
Now, on to the gray areas... I didn't say that. I've never heard anybody else say it, either.Frankly, anybody who does say it is an idiot.
Personally, I don't view these taxes as "punishment" any more than I view property tax or sales tax as a punishment. In the US, property taxes usually go to fund local schools--but you have to pay property tax whether or not you have children. Is that fair? Are you being punished? Or is it just that your democratically elected officials have determined that having well-educated children is good for everybody--and since there is some correlation between local schools and property values, a property tax is as good a method as any for funding that social good?
You might respond that educating children is a clear social good, while subsidizing artists isn't... and I would I actually agree with you. I have very mixed feelings about government funding of art. But many countries feel strongly that there is a societal benefit to a thriving art and media scene. Many countries in the world have government committees charged with developing the local film industry, and many countries in the world have an official government broadcasting arm funded out of taxes. Some countries even give special tax breaks to writers and artists that they don't give to people in other professions.
Like I said, I have very mixed feelings about this kind of thing--but if a country has such a policy, and then decides to add a "copyright tax" to blank media, they are being logically consistent with their previous democratically determined policies. (As a side note, I think this is a reason that a government-mandated "copyright tax" is less likely to take hold in the US, a country that has never really been enthusiastic about government funding of the arts.)
The fact is that previous levies on blank media actually have gone to artists. Here's how it works:
In the US, it's possible for artists to sign away all rights to their work. Screenwriters (and, I think directors, although I'm not sure) sign a "Work for hire" contract, which basically says that the studio is the author of the script and gets all the rights. In Europe, however, artists have certain inherent rights that they can't sign away. As a result, some huge chunk (I think 50%) of the European levies on blank videotapes and video tape recorders have gone to the "authors" of films and TV shows; that authors' money has been split between screenwriters and directors. This has been a huge source of income for writers and directors. In fact, it has been enough money that the Writers Guild of America had to set up a specific department to deal with disbursing it, and it is still having problems getting the money out fast enough.
So--you ask--how do you determine who gets the money? The assumption has been that people use VHS tapes to record what is broadcast on TV. So, if a German network airs "Serenity," then you'd divide the film's 119 minute runtime by the total number of minutes aired on all of German TV that month, and then pro-rate Joss Whedon's share of that month's levies accordingly. Now, it's fairly easy for the Writers' and Directors' Guilds to figure out who wrote and directed "Serenity" but it's trickier with TV shows. Often, a foreign network will just report that they aired an episode of,say, The Simpsons, and the WGA will have to figure out exactly which episode aired in Monaco last Tuesday at 4AM before they can pass the money on to the writer...
Ironically, if you buy a movie on DVD, the writer gets a tiny fraction of your purchase price, but when you buy a blank VHS tape, writers and directors actually get a sizable chunk of the levy! I've heard a lot of people justify copying of digital media by saying "The artists don't actually get the money--it just goes to some big corporation." Well, in taxing blank media, the governments of Europe have listened to you, the copyer. I'm sure now that everybody knows the artists are getting their money, we'll all stop complaining.
Oh, and by the way--it's not just millionaire writers and directors who are benefitting from this. Take a look at your local TV grid, and you'll notice a hefty chunk of old stuff being aired. If some classic movie from 1940 airs on late-night TV in France, it's going to result in what is probably the first payment the elderly writer (or his widow or children) made from that movie in decades. These sums aren't going to be huge--I read that Preston Sturges'widow is owed something like $250--but they are there. In a sense, the levies result in a long tail kind of thing, where writers and directors who didn't necessarily write the latest big blockbuster still get money when their work is viewed.
There are a few issues in transferring this system from VHS levies to levies on digital media. It's a safe assumption that most VHS tapes are used to record stuff off TV, so it's fair to distribute the levies based on what is being aired on TV. However, I'm guessing most blank DVDs and CD-Rs are used to burn stuff that was obtained over the Internet. I have no idea how you measure that, and I suspect there is going to be some lively debate within the WGA, the DGA, and whoever ends up distributing money to musicians. But it seems likely that this money will indeed end up in the hands of creative people rather than suits.
I completely understand where you're coming from, but there's another way of looking at it: Supposing you could save one life today or two lives next week. Which is the more moral choice? I actually don't think there's an easy answer to that, and I'd respect either choice.
In short, DVDs can currently compete very well with the average data transfer rate people are getting, and it will be easy to scale up the Netflix model to compete with improved bandwidth just by letting people have more DVDs out at a time... In the long term, sure, DVDs will become obsolete (like pretty much any technology)--but that day may be farther off than people think.
Actually, when you think about it, Buffett's business model has always been to find an intelligently-run company with a good product, buy into them, and then use his business expertise to help them do more of what they've already been doing. That's exactly what he's done here, only with a charity instead of a business. Or, as Buffett puts it in TFA:
Also, it's not like Buffett is just putting a check in an envelope and mailing it off to Bill & Melinda to use as they see fit. His donation buys him a seat on the board of the Gates foundation. I'm sure he'll have a big impact on their decision making, even if he downplays it in typical Buffettian style:
Also, Buffett owns Sees Candy. That alone makes him a force for good in the world.
Over the years, Warren Buffet has been asked repeatedly in interviews why he doesn't give more to charity. His answer has always been a variation on the following, from TFA:
Or, to put it another way, Buffett's job for the past several decades has been to manage other people's money in ways that were far more profitable than they could manage it themselves. In his mind, every dollar that he had was actually a dollar he was managing on behalf of the charity that would get his fortune when he died.
He acknowledges that there was self-interest in this analysis; as he puts it, he was having a great time managing Berkshire Hathaway, and didn't want to go through the "grind" of setting up a foundation that could effectively distribute his megawealth. The fact that Bill Gates had already gone through that "grind" on his behalf was part of Buffett's incentive to give away his money now.
Another part, according to TFA, was the death of his wife Susan. Buffet says that he always figured he'd die before her, and he could trust her to give away all their wealth in an effective way. The fact that she predeceased him forced him to rethink his plan.
On the other hand, wings are neither necessary nor sufficient for evolutionary success, yet species evolve them.
In any ecology--whether a literal one or a metaphorical one like the marketplace--the key to success is finding an underexploited niche, and then exploiting it.
As long as there are people willing to pay more for quality, there will always be a market for high-quality games. And as long as there are people willing to buy crap from the bargain bin in order to save money, there will always be a market for crappy games.
Will a "smart beancounter" try to produce a quality game? That depends on the market niche the beancounter's company is trying to fill. If you run Joe's House of $5 Walmart CD-Roms, and some game designer tells you he wants to delay a launch for a week in order to polish up a game, you'll fire him. If you run EA and Will Wright tells you he wants to delay a launch for six months, you'll let him.
I can believe that. I also gather that, early on, they had some trouble getting first-run Hollywood movies, since the studios weren't keen on taking a share of a 50p admission price when other theatres were offering them a share of a £10 ticket price. It's not clear to me if they ever ironed that out.
Unfortunately, while I view the failure of easyCinema as a failure of just one particular implementation of an alternate pricing scheme, I fear it is going to taint the alternate pricing idea for at least a little while. People will just say, "Well, easyCinema tried it and it didn't work."
Something about this sentence caught my eye, but it took me a few moments to figure out what:
It says "poses" the question, not "begs." Perhaps the efforts of anal-retentive grammar fascists like me are finally paying off.
Oops-- I mean, "Perhaps the efforts of anal-retentive grammar fascists like me are finally things off of which is paid."
There was actually a theatre chain in the UK that introduced a variable-pricing model: Easy Cinema. They avoided having to make subjective choices about which tickets are worth more by a simple, objective pricing model.
Basically, for any given screening, the first ten tickets they sold cost 40 cents. The next ten cost 95 cents. The next ten cost $1.50. (I'm completely making the numbers up off the top of my head here, just to give you an idea of the pricing mechanism.) And so on up until it topped out at whatever the maximum ticket price is.
Of course, if they did this in person, it would be a recipe for madness at the ticket window. So all sales were online. You bought a ticket from your computer, print it out, and then when you got to the theatre, you scanned it into a bar code reader. The place was virtually unstaffed--they didn't even sell refreshments, and you are encouraged to bring your own popcorn.
You will notice that the above is entirely in the past tense. EasyCinema opened in May 2003 and closed in May 2006, although the website survives as a DVD rental site. Apparently they just couldn't make enough to justify the rent on the building.
You can read more in this article, written when the cinema first opened. (The article is, unnecessarily and somewhat annoyingly, spread across 6 pages, but it's worth clicking all the way through if you're interested in this subject.)
From TFA:
Given the current state of technology, it sounds much more useful for specific, targeted surveillance than some sort of 24-hour-a-day let's-see-what-everybody-in-LA-is-doing kind of thing.
Personally, my own attitude towards technology in police work is that it's fine as long as the police are only using it to do something they would be allowed to do without it. There would be no problem with an individual cop standing on a public street corner and radioing back to HQ to describe what is going on, so I have no problem with putting up a video camera to do the same. But it would be unconstitutional for a cop to search my house without a warrant, and I would therefore have a problem with him using some sort of high-tech x-ray machine to peer through my walls without a warrant. But if a cop has a properly obtained warrant, I don't really care whether he searches the house via the latest technology or by hand.
In this case, it sounds as though the plan is to use the drone for targeted surveillance work from outdoor spaces, which the police are already allowed to do. If the police use it to improperly obtain evidence against a suspect (by, say, flying it inside a private space without a warrant), a halfway smart lawyer will challenge the evidence in court and it will likely be thrown out.
Given the genuinely disturbing rollback of civil liberties in the US over the past few years, I completely understand why people are paranoid about this kind of thing. These rollbacks have occurred because people have panicked about terrorism. Those of us who care about civil liberties have a responsibility not to panic in the other direction. We should focus our concerns on the many actual abuses going on, instead of getting into a tizzy about abuses that don't exist.
Your recent article ("Amazon Asks Congress to Curb Patent Abusers") is in clear violation of Patent #1805-J-9, "A Method For Comparing Hypocritical Actions Performed By Humans To Hypothetical Actions Performed By Articulate, Similarly Colored Kitchenware," which was recently awarded to Jacobw Incorporated. Please cease and desist your use of our patented metaphors, similes, and other rhetorical tropes.
Sincerely,
Jacobw Incorporated
Shhhh! I'm pretty sure the Green Goblin has a slashdot account. He's gotta keep up with the latest developments in hoverboard and pumpking-shaped-bomb technology, you know.