Even so, considering that's what tripped up MP3.com (serving copies of the same file to multiple users, even though the file itself might be bit for bit identical to the CD rip of their purchased CD), Amazon would be insane to follow the same model just to save the tiny amount per file in storage costs.
But it's only illegal in that one case because there is a specific law in place that overrides your legal right. That means there would need to be an existing law that says Amazon can't act as paid storage for your own legally purchased content - I'd be surprised if such a law existed.
I guess what he could do is just reprint every story the news site prints from now on, slightly reworded and passed off as his own work. If they're saying that's perfectly acceptable behaviour then surely it works both ways.
If we should take anything from this story, it's that we should be grateful that journalists actually thought to independently validate information they found on a random blog instead of just immediately posting them as fact.
I don't know what the editorial life cycle is for an online news site, but 10 minutes seems like a ridiculously short lead time to go from having no story to having a story approved by the journalist's editor (or whoever is responsible for approving content - I don't believe for a second they would just let journalists upload stuff without at least reading to make sure they won't get sued or the guy isn't publishing an elaborate FU resignation message) and published to live. That could quite easily have been whoever was reviewing his story doing a search on the subject and reading a couple of blogs to make sure it all made sense before hitting "approved".
This is the key thing for me. If they'd just sent him a response saying we understand your point but it's standard practise not to cite sources for pieces like this, even without an official acknowledgement on their page, it'd be fine. The fact that they're acting like they did something wrong and trying to cover it up just makes them look like they either did do something wrong, or that they're just massive idiots.
The font is ridiculously big and it really needs some spacing. Readability on the web is not just about contrast, it's about giving visual hooks and cues that the reader can use to pick up where they were if they get distracted momentarily. A slightly higher line height and some proper spacing between paragraphs helps immensely here - even if you lose where you were it's easy enough then to pick up which paragraph you were at by scanning the first few words. Since this just looks like a huge block of text you lose those helpful tools.
I suspect they did take the "research" from his blog, but it's hardly bullet proof evidence that they accessed his blog before publishing. If two people come up with the same idea at the same time it's still their idea, even if one of them happens to glance over and see that someone else is thinking the same way (and it wouldn't be beyond the realms of belief to have written the article, then notice a similar article is "trending", and go check it out). Regardless of all that, the blog writer is still getting masses of free traffic from this supposed transgression, so I guess in a way it worked out pretty nice for him.
It's nothing to do with efficiency. A company in the West whose primary (pretty much their only) ongoing overhead is never going to compete with one in a developing country, no matter how efficient you make it. Even paying your entire staff minimum wage will make your product ridiculously expensive. Giving tax relief won't necessarily ease the pain much, but the bigger issue is that the government needs to demonstrate that it's behind the industry in order that potential future employees gain the skills necessary to keep the industry in the country. If people think developing games in the UK is a dead end, they'll look for other opportunities and eventually the talent pool will dry up and you're left to compete solely on price.
Not at all - most countries try and offer incentives to foreign companies to produce their goods on home soil. We've done it for years with the car industry (there's been a heavy Japanese manufacturer presence in the UK in the past). Even though it means some money is leaving the country (you'd always obviously prefer that they were your own homegrown companies but there's not always homegrown competition), it still creates jobs and stimulates spending.
It depends how much it costs you to give that industry the breaks it's asking for. If it costs a lot to set up a different taxation mechanism for that business but the returns are low (because the industry employs few people, or because it is mobile enough that someone else can offer better tax breaks and they can relocate in months) then you might not see a return on that investment. Worse, you risk creating a loophole that other businesses can abuse to avoid taxation. I do think the government should be doing everything to encourage the UK gaming industry - it's got a great pedigree and it can potentially be great for the country - but it's not a black and white situation at all.
That's a fine argument when the prices are roughly in line. If you're going to watch the typical poorly scripted, badly acted Hollywood movie then I can see how watching it in 3D for the same price gives slightly better value than watching it in 2D (discounting all the people who gets headaches from 3D and would probably prefer the convenience of 2D). The other big issue of course is that this generally isn't the case, it's often much more expensive to experience 3D (3DS is way more expensive than DS, 3D glasses for the home are stupidly expensive, 3D movies in the cinemas I've been to are generally around 50% more expensive). Then it comes down to a value proposition - are you getting enough added value from 3D to justify the cost. Having watched a handful of 3D movies (including their showcase bit Avatar) for me I'd say no, but it's highly subjective and clearly some people love it.
My everyday reality is still 3D (and not only visually) and hell of a lot more immersive than any movie/game. Yours?
You... you do realise that reality is a world away from 3D movies, right? In my reality I can move around and the 3D effect doesn't get better or worse depending on my perspective to the object I'm viewing, I don't have to wear glasses or carry a device to experience it, I can walk fully around objects and see them from all sides, not just a couple of perspectives. 3D movies are still a lot closer to 2D movies than they are to reality - to say 3D movies must be immersive because reality is immersive is comparing apples and orangutans.
Big oil will find that increasingly hard to do as their product becomes harder to reach and more and more expensive. Why do you think big oil is currently spending so much money trying to become big green? Even they can smell the change on the wind (although I agree they'll block for as long as they feel they can get away with it).
You won't achieve your aim by banning procreation. Sure, you'd eventually end up with only 10% of the population left, but most of them would be too old to work and you're going to struggle to kick start procreation again when most people are too old to have babies. The only other options all allow for some level of procreation, but that won't do anything to reduce the population even if you manage to level off the growth (what would you do, limit couples to one child each? Then you have two old people for every one working age person to support. Limit them to two each and you've reduced nothing). Over population is undoubtedbly a problem but there's no putting that particular genie back in the bottle (well, not way that's both sustainable and humane) - instead of arguing the point we need to focus on ways we can live with it. It's only going to get worse.
The current government is largely made up of a traditionally anti-European, anti-government intervention conservative party. While the minister responsible for the quote is not a conservative (he's Lib Dem - the minority party in the coalition) the quote itself is definitely tailored towards currying favour with the old guard both within and outside the coalition. He reveals as much with his churlish banana comment, a reference to a popular myth about the EU forcing regulations about the shape of our bananas on us - a story spread around by anti-European, right wing "newspaper" the Daily Mail in the 90's.
Agreed - I've always been staunchly pro-European, I think it's in the country's interests to be part of a larger trade group, and I feel we should already have joined the Euro while we still had the chance to benefit (we were late to the party in even joining the EU and missed a lot of the early benefits of that, too) but the one thing that I hear time and again is that EU subsidies are unfair and favour mainland Europe over the UK. After all, most of the subsidies are in agriculture, and most of UK agriculture has gone away so we get little relative benefit. By all means GP feel free to have a dig over the little englander mentality that keeps us from a fuller participation in European projects, but you are badly mis-informed about your reasoning.
I wish there was more of a push for companies to accept home working. Here in the UK you can request home working as an option and, by law, the company has to "seriously consider" it. That just means if there is any single business reason to not allow it, no matter how spurious, they can refuse. I understand for a lot of people being in the office is productive, but for a lot of people in the IT/development sector it's just a massive distraction and a productivity drain. Our household is a two car household purely because I have to be in the office to do work I could more easily do from home (my commute is 7 miles, if I didn't have health difficulties I would cycle and then only my GF would need a car on a daily basis).
It would be more sensible to say a company should offer employees at least a trial period working from home, and if they demonstrate the ability to perform their usual job without hindrance, they should be allowed to continue to do so (monitored at regular intervals). I know for a fact my productivity is much higher when I'm not in the office (I do occasionally work from home once or twice a month and I did so for 15 months in my previous job), plus I'm more than happy to spend the time I would have been commuting getting some extra work done, so it's really in everyone's interests.
Over a long enough timeline - in the initial 6 months expect cardiac departments in accident and emergency hospitals to be woefully over subscribed and under staffed:)
You're assuming this one measure in isolation. More likely this one measure is a guideline to drive the other measures. We're already seeing other government-backed incentives to switch, such as a grant towards the cost of electric vehicles, being able to avoid congestion charges, etc. 2050 is just a marker for the worst case, absolute cut-off point. I'd be surprised if the vast majority of Europeans weren't already driving electric vehicles way before that date.
Indeed, in the 60's the "big idea" was making it easier to go to far flung places, in a way we managed that - no jetpacks or flying cars:( - but cheap air travel, safer road travel, more car ownership, etc. but the internet has also allowed us to take steps to bring "out there" to us. Internet shopping, businesses being able to cheaply buy and sell in different markets around the globe, home working, etc. these are the areas we'll see more fully developed in the next 40 years. If the average worker in 2050 still has to commute to work by car instead of logging in from home I'll be surprised and a little saddened. Even workers who produce physical goods might have some greater degree of flexibility with advancements in 3D printing technology.
Point taken, but then ridiculously cheap air travel available to the masses (expect this to be one of the things that goes away in the future, I guess...)
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Even so, considering that's what tripped up MP3.com (serving copies of the same file to multiple users, even though the file itself might be bit for bit identical to the CD rip of their purchased CD), Amazon would be insane to follow the same model just to save the tiny amount per file in storage costs.
But it's only illegal in that one case because there is a specific law in place that overrides your legal right. That means there would need to be an existing law that says Amazon can't act as paid storage for your own legally purchased content - I'd be surprised if such a law existed.
In that case the least he could have done was go back and warn people.
The correct spelling of this word is in the title of the fucking story.... you really have no excuse here.
Unless he didn't want to be accused of copying?
I guess what he could do is just reprint every story the news site prints from now on, slightly reworded and passed off as his own work. If they're saying that's perfectly acceptable behaviour then surely it works both ways.
If we should take anything from this story, it's that we should be grateful that journalists actually thought to independently validate information they found on a random blog instead of just immediately posting them as fact.
I don't know what the editorial life cycle is for an online news site, but 10 minutes seems like a ridiculously short lead time to go from having no story to having a story approved by the journalist's editor (or whoever is responsible for approving content - I don't believe for a second they would just let journalists upload stuff without at least reading to make sure they won't get sued or the guy isn't publishing an elaborate FU resignation message) and published to live. That could quite easily have been whoever was reviewing his story doing a search on the subject and reading a couple of blogs to make sure it all made sense before hitting "approved".
This is the key thing for me. If they'd just sent him a response saying we understand your point but it's standard practise not to cite sources for pieces like this, even without an official acknowledgement on their page, it'd be fine. The fact that they're acting like they did something wrong and trying to cover it up just makes them look like they either did do something wrong, or that they're just massive idiots.
The font is ridiculously big and it really needs some spacing. Readability on the web is not just about contrast, it's about giving visual hooks and cues that the reader can use to pick up where they were if they get distracted momentarily. A slightly higher line height and some proper spacing between paragraphs helps immensely here - even if you lose where you were it's easy enough then to pick up which paragraph you were at by scanning the first few words. Since this just looks like a huge block of text you lose those helpful tools.
I suspect they did take the "research" from his blog, but it's hardly bullet proof evidence that they accessed his blog before publishing. If two people come up with the same idea at the same time it's still their idea, even if one of them happens to glance over and see that someone else is thinking the same way (and it wouldn't be beyond the realms of belief to have written the article, then notice a similar article is "trending", and go check it out). Regardless of all that, the blog writer is still getting masses of free traffic from this supposed transgression, so I guess in a way it worked out pretty nice for him.
It's nothing to do with efficiency. A company in the West whose primary (pretty much their only) ongoing overhead is never going to compete with one in a developing country, no matter how efficient you make it. Even paying your entire staff minimum wage will make your product ridiculously expensive. Giving tax relief won't necessarily ease the pain much, but the bigger issue is that the government needs to demonstrate that it's behind the industry in order that potential future employees gain the skills necessary to keep the industry in the country. If people think developing games in the UK is a dead end, they'll look for other opportunities and eventually the talent pool will dry up and you're left to compete solely on price.
Not at all - most countries try and offer incentives to foreign companies to produce their goods on home soil. We've done it for years with the car industry (there's been a heavy Japanese manufacturer presence in the UK in the past). Even though it means some money is leaving the country (you'd always obviously prefer that they were your own homegrown companies but there's not always homegrown competition), it still creates jobs and stimulates spending.
It depends how much it costs you to give that industry the breaks it's asking for. If it costs a lot to set up a different taxation mechanism for that business but the returns are low (because the industry employs few people, or because it is mobile enough that someone else can offer better tax breaks and they can relocate in months) then you might not see a return on that investment. Worse, you risk creating a loophole that other businesses can abuse to avoid taxation. I do think the government should be doing everything to encourage the UK gaming industry - it's got a great pedigree and it can potentially be great for the country - but it's not a black and white situation at all.
That's a fine argument when the prices are roughly in line. If you're going to watch the typical poorly scripted, badly acted Hollywood movie then I can see how watching it in 3D for the same price gives slightly better value than watching it in 2D (discounting all the people who gets headaches from 3D and would probably prefer the convenience of 2D). The other big issue of course is that this generally isn't the case, it's often much more expensive to experience 3D (3DS is way more expensive than DS, 3D glasses for the home are stupidly expensive, 3D movies in the cinemas I've been to are generally around 50% more expensive). Then it comes down to a value proposition - are you getting enough added value from 3D to justify the cost. Having watched a handful of 3D movies (including their showcase bit Avatar) for me I'd say no, but it's highly subjective and clearly some people love it.
You make it sound almost bad. It just needs marketing to give it a catchy name or TLA and people will eat it up.
My everyday reality is still 3D (and not only visually) and hell of a lot more immersive than any movie/game. Yours?
You... you do realise that reality is a world away from 3D movies, right? In my reality I can move around and the 3D effect doesn't get better or worse depending on my perspective to the object I'm viewing, I don't have to wear glasses or carry a device to experience it, I can walk fully around objects and see them from all sides, not just a couple of perspectives. 3D movies are still a lot closer to 2D movies than they are to reality - to say 3D movies must be immersive because reality is immersive is comparing apples and orangutans.
Big oil will find that increasingly hard to do as their product becomes harder to reach and more and more expensive. Why do you think big oil is currently spending so much money trying to become big green? Even they can smell the change on the wind (although I agree they'll block for as long as they feel they can get away with it).
You won't achieve your aim by banning procreation. Sure, you'd eventually end up with only 10% of the population left, but most of them would be too old to work and you're going to struggle to kick start procreation again when most people are too old to have babies. The only other options all allow for some level of procreation, but that won't do anything to reduce the population even if you manage to level off the growth (what would you do, limit couples to one child each? Then you have two old people for every one working age person to support. Limit them to two each and you've reduced nothing). Over population is undoubtedbly a problem but there's no putting that particular genie back in the bottle (well, not way that's both sustainable and humane) - instead of arguing the point we need to focus on ways we can live with it. It's only going to get worse.
The current government is largely made up of a traditionally anti-European, anti-government intervention conservative party. While the minister responsible for the quote is not a conservative (he's Lib Dem - the minority party in the coalition) the quote itself is definitely tailored towards currying favour with the old guard both within and outside the coalition. He reveals as much with his churlish banana comment, a reference to a popular myth about the EU forcing regulations about the shape of our bananas on us - a story spread around by anti-European, right wing "newspaper" the Daily Mail in the 90's.
Agreed - I've always been staunchly pro-European, I think it's in the country's interests to be part of a larger trade group, and I feel we should already have joined the Euro while we still had the chance to benefit (we were late to the party in even joining the EU and missed a lot of the early benefits of that, too) but the one thing that I hear time and again is that EU subsidies are unfair and favour mainland Europe over the UK. After all, most of the subsidies are in agriculture, and most of UK agriculture has gone away so we get little relative benefit. By all means GP feel free to have a dig over the little englander mentality that keeps us from a fuller participation in European projects, but you are badly mis-informed about your reasoning.
I wish there was more of a push for companies to accept home working. Here in the UK you can request home working as an option and, by law, the company has to "seriously consider" it. That just means if there is any single business reason to not allow it, no matter how spurious, they can refuse. I understand for a lot of people being in the office is productive, but for a lot of people in the IT/development sector it's just a massive distraction and a productivity drain. Our household is a two car household purely because I have to be in the office to do work I could more easily do from home (my commute is 7 miles, if I didn't have health difficulties I would cycle and then only my GF would need a car on a daily basis).
It would be more sensible to say a company should offer employees at least a trial period working from home, and if they demonstrate the ability to perform their usual job without hindrance, they should be allowed to continue to do so (monitored at regular intervals). I know for a fact my productivity is much higher when I'm not in the office (I do occasionally work from home once or twice a month and I did so for 15 months in my previous job), plus I'm more than happy to spend the time I would have been commuting getting some extra work done, so it's really in everyone's interests.
Over a long enough timeline - in the initial 6 months expect cardiac departments in accident and emergency hospitals to be woefully over subscribed and under staffed :)
You're assuming this one measure in isolation. More likely this one measure is a guideline to drive the other measures. We're already seeing other government-backed incentives to switch, such as a grant towards the cost of electric vehicles, being able to avoid congestion charges, etc. 2050 is just a marker for the worst case, absolute cut-off point. I'd be surprised if the vast majority of Europeans weren't already driving electric vehicles way before that date.
Indeed, in the 60's the "big idea" was making it easier to go to far flung places, in a way we managed that - no jetpacks or flying cars :( - but cheap air travel, safer road travel, more car ownership, etc. but the internet has also allowed us to take steps to bring "out there" to us. Internet shopping, businesses being able to cheaply buy and sell in different markets around the globe, home working, etc. these are the areas we'll see more fully developed in the next 40 years. If the average worker in 2050 still has to commute to work by car instead of logging in from home I'll be surprised and a little saddened. Even workers who produce physical goods might have some greater degree of flexibility with advancements in 3D printing technology.
Point taken, but then ridiculously cheap air travel available to the masses (expect this to be one of the things that goes away in the future, I guess...)