I doubt most buyers even understand the different formats, they probably just think 3D TV is all the same. No, it's more likely higher cost plus lack of a real need just yet that's behind this - sales of HDTV were similarly low when sets first started appearing on the consumer market, due to both the high cost and the lack of content. It's way too early to say 3D TV has failed as TFS seems to be suggesting - let's wait until 3D movies are widespread and prices of sets have dropped a little before making blanket statements (although from a geek perspective I'm totally with you - I wouldn't buy into 3D until I knew which format was going to win, I just don't think the average consumer thinks that way, which is why some people got burned by HD-DVD).
You're assuming the mentality of someone who calls in with an idiotic report is going to be disuaded by this. More likely it won't make a dent in the usualy pointless calls, and instead they'll get a new bunch of hoax calls from people who think it's a fun new game trying to get the police to tweet their joke report.
That's a pretty standard pricing model for Google Site Search and certainly not prohibitively expensive. I've worked on some big public sites that use this as their search technology - we're talking sites with millions of hits per month - and their costs were nowhere near "several million dollars a year". $2m would buy them 400,000,000 searches at that rate! Either the **AA is confused about how the technology works (here's a clue, it's per search, not per result!) or they just can't help themselves when it comes to massively over-inflating the figures to try and win sympathy.
That already happens in the form of closed forums for filesharing. The **AAs probably still prefer that as it eliminates a lot of the casual sharing (you have to know the forums and then know people in them to get invites, etc) and it also makes those forums a juicier sitting target than people just throwing up a torrent link on some random site that might not even exist in a week's time.
Unfortunately even the "nice" ones are unqualified to give the advice they're giving. If I go to a "nice" alternative therapist with chronic headaches and she believes it's stress related and prescribes a homeopathic course of lavender to help me sleep because she doesn't have the skills to identify a malignant brain tumour, how exactly is she helping me? Sure the placebo effect works for some people, but the first stop should always be a qualified doctor, and any responsible alternative therapist (cough) ought to insist on only ever seeing referrals from doctors.
That, coupled with the fact that the size of the market today is huge compared to what it was even ten years, and certainly twenty years ago. Not to mention the barrier for entry for the alternatives is so low in comparison to the desktop PC (it used to be a big deal to a family laying down a couple hundred quid on a console, now it's pretty normal for families to own two or even all three of the current generation consoles, and maybe even a portable or two) - the very fact that, in the face of such competition, it can still make up a third of the market is pretty impressive.
An ad has to be pretty intrusive for me to even notice it anymore, so I'm generally happy to browse with ads enabled - I don't object to people making money from their websites, and they're providing me a service effectively free. I've yet to come across any news site that I would miss if I couldn't read it, though, which is why I'm not interested in paying for such content (not to mention I rarely read one site end to end, I'll dip in and out for the odd article so I don't want to pay for the whole thing - if there was a way to pay a few pennies per article I might consider that). I guess the BBC is the only news site I do read on a frequent basis, and I already pay for that - if any other news site wants me to pay real money they'd better figure out a way of either allowing me to pay per article or they'd need to generally raise the quality of most of their articles to such a point that they become my "go to" source for news. Right now I don't see any of them trying to raise quality, they're too busy moaning about the competition.
It sounds like this is cookie based but that the site checks initially that it can write a cookie, to get around people just disabling cookies. I'm thinking a JavaScript scriptlet could easily get around this, set a check on the page's unload event that deletes any cookies pertaining to the current domain - it would be pretty easy to get this working as a Firefox add-on, if anyone is really that keen to see over the paywall.
Exactly, if they can keep the ad revenue at the same level per user and charge a subscription then it might be more viable even with a big drop in users, but the fact is advertisers don't want to show ads to a tiny userbase, they demand high volume. The result is that you'll first see advertisers leaving, and that loss of demand will drive down the price per ad impression, which means (unless you planned the subscription model around having no advertising - in which case stop being greedy and actually have no advertising and people might like the service more) you have to quickly hit the subscribers for more money or find some other way to reduce costs. None of those options end well.
That ignores the fact that newspapers were already in decline before the internet became popular. This has nothing to do with people wanting something for nothing, because before the internet you had to pay for the alternatives or just go without, and people were making that choice even back then. To me this is about the failure of the press to deliver what people want. I don't know what that is, if I did I'd probably be incredibly rich. For me I'd like to see more in-depth journalism instead of a mindless regurgitation of unverified information, less bias and opinion (unless it's clearly an opinion piece), and I would love to see sources cited so I can follow up stories that interest me, or clearly see how lazy the journalist has been in just copying verbatim from another newspaper.
I'd like to see less padding of articles to try and flood the noise to signal ratio so they can claw back more ad revenue per column inch - if you only have ten pages of news, sell me a ten page newspaper, not a 50 page "hunt the facts" game in a newspaper format. And when you screw up, have the honesty to admit it, and I don't mean burying it away on page 37 - if you've given me misinformation by accident in the past, I'd like to see that misinformation corrected, I'd rather know I was getting the truth rather than live in some ignorant bubble where I imagine my news source is somehow infallible (nobody would ever believe that anyway).
Greed started the decline in the newspaper industry, when publishers realised they could pad out their stories by 100% and attract more ad revenue while barely increasing their costs. Lazy, sloppy journalism then picked up where greed left off to leave newspapers in the sorry state they were in back in the 90's. Then along came an alternative that had the magic ingredient of being incredibly cheap/free and, since there was no value proposition in the real world news sources, they just couldn't compete. Start offering quality, it'll hurt in the short run until people come to trust the newspapers again, sure, but the only way you can beat free is to offer something people are happy to pay for.
For now, maybe - but bots demonstrate specific behaviours that the average reader doesn't. It would be trivial to eliminate the majority of what looks like freeloading traffic with a technical solution, the only reason one isn't being employed already is that so few people care enough to trick their way around said paywalls. Besides, that kind of deceptive behaviour tends to get sites blacklisted in Google.
He doesn't necessarily have to have a winning case, he just has to have enough of a case for it to be worthy of a day in court, and Red Bull are saying they're happy to give him his day in court and are putting the project on hold in the meantime - it could be that RB signed some form of NDA, or that some part of this was covered by copyright or IP, or it could just be a case of sour grapes and the guy will get laughed out of court.
I don't think you're being unfair by comparing the game to an established, polished brand at all. It's not like there haven't been plenty of MMORPGs already to make the mistakes and allow others to learn from them, and it's all well and good releasing a game that requires some polish and live development if they developers drop the price to reflect this and only up it to match the competition once they have a game that can compete. Either have extended beta testing and iron out the bugs, or give players a monetary incentive to play (after all, they're the ones helping make the game better, they shouldn't be deoubly punished with high prices and a poor experience). Totally agree on FFXIII, too - it felt like I only had freedom in one area at one specific part of the game, and that came about 60 hours in! And I hate the mechanism of forcing characters on the player - if I've gone to the trouble of honing a certain group of characters into an elite fighting team, let me use them, don't keep switching people out, and definitely don't switch people out without warning me so I can swap equipment around. XIII was my first FF game since VII, and I'd been warned the series had gone downhill badly over the years but I wasn't prepared for how tedious this game was. I'll be avoiding the franchise in the future unless they pull something spectacular out of the bag.
I don't think it's really an argument that genius doesn't exist, or that the two concepts are mutually exclusive. Rather, the people we tend to realise as the great minds were the first to spot certain trends or link up various developments. That doesn't mean the rest of us wouldn't get there eventually, but it doesn't rule out that genius is still important and advances technological development at a quicker pace.
The problem is, what if fifty others were also putting in just as much effort experimenting with filaments? A system that can render all your hard work redundant just because some other guy was the first to cross the finish line (note, first, that doesn't even mean his methods are necessarily the best if his patent is broad enough to cover your work) might be just as stifling to innovation as one where nobody has any protection.
Didn't Nokia already try this with the N-Gage? The biggest problem is, for anything other than simple time wasting games, the form factor I want for portable gaming is a long way from what I want for a phone. Even holding the DS for extended periods tends to hurt my hands, so to imagine this magnified with the smaller screen, minimal places to rest your hands and tiny buttons of a phone instantly turns me off the idea. Meanwhile the idea of a phone with a huge screen and lots of space for buttons/grip space resulting in a handset three times the size of the biggest smartphones today seems similarly silly - sure, I could use it as a phone, but would I want to? Aside from form factor, the other issue is portability of phones - if I buy a game console I want it to be around for a few years, I'd say minimum of four for a portable console, whereas most people like to upgrade their phones every 12-18 months. I don't want to be locked into one phone manufacturer for several years just so I can play my back catalogue, nor do I want to throw out all my old games and start from scratch every time I upgrade my phone. For me it makes far more sense, for "serious gamers" to have two distinct devices.
Indeed, the new coalition coming to power might have wished they could undo some of the events set in place by the previous government, getting into a costly war nobody wanted and making us a massive terrorist target into the bargain, for instance. I don't see how giving a country independence would be any different - if the new government wanted to undo that change they'd have to re-conquer said country, not easy but still not exactly binding or impossible.
Generally the police don't publish public reports of the evidence they find during criminal investigations. Any police officer who revealed details they found, that were not relevant to the case, to the suspect's family is probably going to find himself out of a job and with criminal charges. That of course doesn't mean there aren't other genuine reasons - he might have evidence of religious or political affiliations which, while not illegal, he believes would prejudice any trial against him or something similar.
Actually I can see this as being reasonably likely. Not those exact scenarios, but if person A wants person B to go to jail, they just need access to their PC (trivial bit of breaking and entering) and an anonymous tip off to the police. From that point on there is nothing person B can do or say to avoid this law, unless he can prove someone broke into his house and did nothing other than encrypting his hard drive. Maybe it'll take person B being a high profile politician for us to see a rethink of this law. We just need a volunteer to be person A:)
It's a strict liability law, you either comply with the order or you're breaking the law no matter your reason. It's no more a defence to this law to say you forgot your password than it's a defence to speeding to say you didn't notice the speed limit sign. Both may be perfectly true, but you're still guilty. They might choose not to convict if they believe you genuinely have forgotten your password, but they might equally choose to go the other way and convict you, even if there's a good chance you are telling the truth. Now that is a dangerous law.
So long as he's very good at ad libbing a 50 character password and remembering it. Otherwise they can go try the password, when it doesn't work they can wait a few hours/days and go ask him again, tell him they wrote it down wrong or something. Unless he can recite the previous lie it will be obvious that he's playing games. Suddenly it's not just this statutory crime he's guilty of, but also interfering with the course of a criminal investigation.
It's most often used where someone is called to give evidence against another party, but in giving testimony they would implicate themselves in a crime for which they could be prosecuted. For instance, you and I commit a robbery, you're caught red handed with the loot, but I manage to get away. Now, the police might know we are accomplices, they might call me as a witness to give evidence - my only options would be to incriminate myself by saying I was there and saw you rob the place (and since I'm under oath, that's probably enough to get me arrested on the spot), or to commit perjury and lie about my whereabouts. This is meant to be a defence in that situation. It might also be used where we are both on trial and the prosecution want to call us to give evidence against each other, but doing so would prejudice our own trials.
I might not care what they do to him, but as someone who has forgotten passwords before (and let's face it, most people do at one point or another), the implications of a law that can send you to prison for having a bad memory are pretty chilling.
Of course, they need to at least have enough to give them cause to believe a crime has been committed. In that case it's not sufficient to say only someone with something to hide would lock his door, or encrypt his drive. In the case of the door they already have sufficient evidence to convince a judge to issue a warrant, there's nothing to tell us what evidence, other than the computer itself, they had in this case to make them believe the drive contained illegal material. If they received an anonymous tip off, for instance, would that be sufficient to convict someone for not giving up their password, even though the tip off might not be reliable?
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And to think, they always said if you watched too much you'd end up wearing glasses. Who knew they'd be 3D!
I doubt most buyers even understand the different formats, they probably just think 3D TV is all the same. No, it's more likely higher cost plus lack of a real need just yet that's behind this - sales of HDTV were similarly low when sets first started appearing on the consumer market, due to both the high cost and the lack of content. It's way too early to say 3D TV has failed as TFS seems to be suggesting - let's wait until 3D movies are widespread and prices of sets have dropped a little before making blanket statements (although from a geek perspective I'm totally with you - I wouldn't buy into 3D until I knew which format was going to win, I just don't think the average consumer thinks that way, which is why some people got burned by HD-DVD).
You're assuming the mentality of someone who calls in with an idiotic report is going to be disuaded by this. More likely it won't make a dent in the usualy pointless calls, and instead they'll get a new bunch of hoax calls from people who think it's a fun new game trying to get the police to tweet their joke report.
That's a pretty standard pricing model for Google Site Search and certainly not prohibitively expensive. I've worked on some big public sites that use this as their search technology - we're talking sites with millions of hits per month - and their costs were nowhere near "several million dollars a year". $2m would buy them 400,000,000 searches at that rate! Either the **AA is confused about how the technology works (here's a clue, it's per search, not per result!) or they just can't help themselves when it comes to massively over-inflating the figures to try and win sympathy.
That already happens in the form of closed forums for filesharing. The **AAs probably still prefer that as it eliminates a lot of the casual sharing (you have to know the forums and then know people in them to get invites, etc) and it also makes those forums a juicier sitting target than people just throwing up a torrent link on some random site that might not even exist in a week's time.
Unfortunately even the "nice" ones are unqualified to give the advice they're giving. If I go to a "nice" alternative therapist with chronic headaches and she believes it's stress related and prescribes a homeopathic course of lavender to help me sleep because she doesn't have the skills to identify a malignant brain tumour, how exactly is she helping me? Sure the placebo effect works for some people, but the first stop should always be a qualified doctor, and any responsible alternative therapist (cough) ought to insist on only ever seeing referrals from doctors.
That, coupled with the fact that the size of the market today is huge compared to what it was even ten years, and certainly twenty years ago. Not to mention the barrier for entry for the alternatives is so low in comparison to the desktop PC (it used to be a big deal to a family laying down a couple hundred quid on a console, now it's pretty normal for families to own two or even all three of the current generation consoles, and maybe even a portable or two) - the very fact that, in the face of such competition, it can still make up a third of the market is pretty impressive.
An ad has to be pretty intrusive for me to even notice it anymore, so I'm generally happy to browse with ads enabled - I don't object to people making money from their websites, and they're providing me a service effectively free. I've yet to come across any news site that I would miss if I couldn't read it, though, which is why I'm not interested in paying for such content (not to mention I rarely read one site end to end, I'll dip in and out for the odd article so I don't want to pay for the whole thing - if there was a way to pay a few pennies per article I might consider that). I guess the BBC is the only news site I do read on a frequent basis, and I already pay for that - if any other news site wants me to pay real money they'd better figure out a way of either allowing me to pay per article or they'd need to generally raise the quality of most of their articles to such a point that they become my "go to" source for news. Right now I don't see any of them trying to raise quality, they're too busy moaning about the competition.
It sounds like this is cookie based but that the site checks initially that it can write a cookie, to get around people just disabling cookies. I'm thinking a JavaScript scriptlet could easily get around this, set a check on the page's unload event that deletes any cookies pertaining to the current domain - it would be pretty easy to get this working as a Firefox add-on, if anyone is really that keen to see over the paywall.
Exactly, if they can keep the ad revenue at the same level per user and charge a subscription then it might be more viable even with a big drop in users, but the fact is advertisers don't want to show ads to a tiny userbase, they demand high volume. The result is that you'll first see advertisers leaving, and that loss of demand will drive down the price per ad impression, which means (unless you planned the subscription model around having no advertising - in which case stop being greedy and actually have no advertising and people might like the service more) you have to quickly hit the subscribers for more money or find some other way to reduce costs. None of those options end well.
That ignores the fact that newspapers were already in decline before the internet became popular. This has nothing to do with people wanting something for nothing, because before the internet you had to pay for the alternatives or just go without, and people were making that choice even back then. To me this is about the failure of the press to deliver what people want. I don't know what that is, if I did I'd probably be incredibly rich. For me I'd like to see more in-depth journalism instead of a mindless regurgitation of unverified information, less bias and opinion (unless it's clearly an opinion piece), and I would love to see sources cited so I can follow up stories that interest me, or clearly see how lazy the journalist has been in just copying verbatim from another newspaper.
I'd like to see less padding of articles to try and flood the noise to signal ratio so they can claw back more ad revenue per column inch - if you only have ten pages of news, sell me a ten page newspaper, not a 50 page "hunt the facts" game in a newspaper format. And when you screw up, have the honesty to admit it, and I don't mean burying it away on page 37 - if you've given me misinformation by accident in the past, I'd like to see that misinformation corrected, I'd rather know I was getting the truth rather than live in some ignorant bubble where I imagine my news source is somehow infallible (nobody would ever believe that anyway).
Greed started the decline in the newspaper industry, when publishers realised they could pad out their stories by 100% and attract more ad revenue while barely increasing their costs. Lazy, sloppy journalism then picked up where greed left off to leave newspapers in the sorry state they were in back in the 90's. Then along came an alternative that had the magic ingredient of being incredibly cheap/free and, since there was no value proposition in the real world news sources, they just couldn't compete. Start offering quality, it'll hurt in the short run until people come to trust the newspapers again, sure, but the only way you can beat free is to offer something people are happy to pay for.
For now, maybe - but bots demonstrate specific behaviours that the average reader doesn't. It would be trivial to eliminate the majority of what looks like freeloading traffic with a technical solution, the only reason one isn't being employed already is that so few people care enough to trick their way around said paywalls. Besides, that kind of deceptive behaviour tends to get sites blacklisted in Google.
He doesn't necessarily have to have a winning case, he just has to have enough of a case for it to be worthy of a day in court, and Red Bull are saying they're happy to give him his day in court and are putting the project on hold in the meantime - it could be that RB signed some form of NDA, or that some part of this was covered by copyright or IP, or it could just be a case of sour grapes and the guy will get laughed out of court.
I don't think you're being unfair by comparing the game to an established, polished brand at all. It's not like there haven't been plenty of MMORPGs already to make the mistakes and allow others to learn from them, and it's all well and good releasing a game that requires some polish and live development if they developers drop the price to reflect this and only up it to match the competition once they have a game that can compete. Either have extended beta testing and iron out the bugs, or give players a monetary incentive to play (after all, they're the ones helping make the game better, they shouldn't be deoubly punished with high prices and a poor experience). Totally agree on FFXIII, too - it felt like I only had freedom in one area at one specific part of the game, and that came about 60 hours in! And I hate the mechanism of forcing characters on the player - if I've gone to the trouble of honing a certain group of characters into an elite fighting team, let me use them, don't keep switching people out, and definitely don't switch people out without warning me so I can swap equipment around. XIII was my first FF game since VII, and I'd been warned the series had gone downhill badly over the years but I wasn't prepared for how tedious this game was. I'll be avoiding the franchise in the future unless they pull something spectacular out of the bag.
I don't think it's really an argument that genius doesn't exist, or that the two concepts are mutually exclusive. Rather, the people we tend to realise as the great minds were the first to spot certain trends or link up various developments. That doesn't mean the rest of us wouldn't get there eventually, but it doesn't rule out that genius is still important and advances technological development at a quicker pace.
The problem is, what if fifty others were also putting in just as much effort experimenting with filaments? A system that can render all your hard work redundant just because some other guy was the first to cross the finish line (note, first, that doesn't even mean his methods are necessarily the best if his patent is broad enough to cover your work) might be just as stifling to innovation as one where nobody has any protection.
Didn't Nokia already try this with the N-Gage? The biggest problem is, for anything other than simple time wasting games, the form factor I want for portable gaming is a long way from what I want for a phone. Even holding the DS for extended periods tends to hurt my hands, so to imagine this magnified with the smaller screen, minimal places to rest your hands and tiny buttons of a phone instantly turns me off the idea. Meanwhile the idea of a phone with a huge screen and lots of space for buttons/grip space resulting in a handset three times the size of the biggest smartphones today seems similarly silly - sure, I could use it as a phone, but would I want to? Aside from form factor, the other issue is portability of phones - if I buy a game console I want it to be around for a few years, I'd say minimum of four for a portable console, whereas most people like to upgrade their phones every 12-18 months. I don't want to be locked into one phone manufacturer for several years just so I can play my back catalogue, nor do I want to throw out all my old games and start from scratch every time I upgrade my phone. For me it makes far more sense, for "serious gamers" to have two distinct devices.
Indeed, the new coalition coming to power might have wished they could undo some of the events set in place by the previous government, getting into a costly war nobody wanted and making us a massive terrorist target into the bargain, for instance. I don't see how giving a country independence would be any different - if the new government wanted to undo that change they'd have to re-conquer said country, not easy but still not exactly binding or impossible.
Generally the police don't publish public reports of the evidence they find during criminal investigations. Any police officer who revealed details they found, that were not relevant to the case, to the suspect's family is probably going to find himself out of a job and with criminal charges. That of course doesn't mean there aren't other genuine reasons - he might have evidence of religious or political affiliations which, while not illegal, he believes would prejudice any trial against him or something similar.
Actually I can see this as being reasonably likely. Not those exact scenarios, but if person A wants person B to go to jail, they just need access to their PC (trivial bit of breaking and entering) and an anonymous tip off to the police. From that point on there is nothing person B can do or say to avoid this law, unless he can prove someone broke into his house and did nothing other than encrypting his hard drive. Maybe it'll take person B being a high profile politician for us to see a rethink of this law. We just need a volunteer to be person A :)
It's a strict liability law, you either comply with the order or you're breaking the law no matter your reason. It's no more a defence to this law to say you forgot your password than it's a defence to speeding to say you didn't notice the speed limit sign. Both may be perfectly true, but you're still guilty. They might choose not to convict if they believe you genuinely have forgotten your password, but they might equally choose to go the other way and convict you, even if there's a good chance you are telling the truth. Now that is a dangerous law.
So long as he's very good at ad libbing a 50 character password and remembering it. Otherwise they can go try the password, when it doesn't work they can wait a few hours/days and go ask him again, tell him they wrote it down wrong or something. Unless he can recite the previous lie it will be obvious that he's playing games. Suddenly it's not just this statutory crime he's guilty of, but also interfering with the course of a criminal investigation.
It's most often used where someone is called to give evidence against another party, but in giving testimony they would implicate themselves in a crime for which they could be prosecuted. For instance, you and I commit a robbery, you're caught red handed with the loot, but I manage to get away. Now, the police might know we are accomplices, they might call me as a witness to give evidence - my only options would be to incriminate myself by saying I was there and saw you rob the place (and since I'm under oath, that's probably enough to get me arrested on the spot), or to commit perjury and lie about my whereabouts. This is meant to be a defence in that situation. It might also be used where we are both on trial and the prosecution want to call us to give evidence against each other, but doing so would prejudice our own trials.
I might not care what they do to him, but as someone who has forgotten passwords before (and let's face it, most people do at one point or another), the implications of a law that can send you to prison for having a bad memory are pretty chilling.
Of course, they need to at least have enough to give them cause to believe a crime has been committed. In that case it's not sufficient to say only someone with something to hide would lock his door, or encrypt his drive. In the case of the door they already have sufficient evidence to convince a judge to issue a warrant, there's nothing to tell us what evidence, other than the computer itself, they had in this case to make them believe the drive contained illegal material. If they received an anonymous tip off, for instance, would that be sufficient to convict someone for not giving up their password, even though the tip off might not be reliable?