You can't speak for this guy on copyright terms - maybe he's more than happy to earn money on a piece of work for 150 years, don't create an opinion on his behalf to make him fit the strawman of the struggling artist who's just one of us trying to make it in the big world, it cheapens your argument. I think the big issue here is that corporations like Disney have made copyright such an abstract thing in the minds of most normal people (I don't have children but there are works being produced today that will likely still be in copyright even after my children's children are dead and buried) that it's hard to see the crime in sharing. Maybe if copyright was for a reasonable period we'd see people who wanted the work now more willing to pay, while people who are just curious or content hoarders willing to wait a few years to get it legitimately (at the moment their "crime" is the same if they get a zero day release or wait 10 years). Of course I can't say for sure, maybe people would still copy as much new stuff as they do now, but I can certainly say that, when there's the threat of huge lawsuits and government legislation being bandied around and people are still sharing in their millions, it's clear that the current system does not work and needs a huge rethink.
Who is the arbiter of what is truly novel? Didn't Wilde once say something along the lines of spending all morning to add a single comma to a work, and spending all afternoon to remove it? In his eyes this one, seemingly insignificant thing changed the whole work to such a degree that he, as an artist, spent all day agonising over it. If he'd published without the comma and I took his work and added the comma, who are you to judge that I've not created something novel? We are potentially preventing new artists producing works of public benefit by having such restrictive and long standing copyright now, which is entirely the opposite of what such laws were meant to achieve.
Just look at Disney, one of the worst coporations for perpetuating eternal copyright and the company basically made its money ripping off stories from the public domain. Do you need any better example of the hypocrisy and inequity of this system - that one company can get filthy rich plundering the treasure trove of public domain then plough all of its earnings into ensuring nobody can ever use its own products in the same way in the future? You could say "but Disney brought those stories to life in a new way that enriched the lives of others", but who is to say they're now not actively preventing someone else adding even more value?
Nor should he get paid by all of society for all of eternity for one piece of work, no matter how skillfully crafted or beautiful it may be, otherwise that puts him in the category of undoubtedly talented but ultimately freeloading rat.
No, what he's saying is that if you can't make enough money to live with a reasonable period of copyright, then you're probably not good at what you're doing. Either find another model to substitute your hobby (patronage, etc) or get a job that you can make pay. Nobody else expects to do one piece of work (even if that piece of work takes a couple of years to finish) and then to be paid for it for the rest of their lives at society's expense, and until very recently in our history, neither did artists. You're buying into some grand fiction that this is either the right way to do things, or that it's the way its always been done, neither is true but they serve the purposes of the people who make the real money on artists' rights (generally not the artists).
We don't need many people to do it, we just need the ones who do to care more about the music than they do about the money. That's how music has survived in society for thousands or years. Are you really so starved of entertainment that you'll happily grant people the rights to enrich themselves and their families for untold years to come just so you can have another Britney album? Besides, apart from a few edge cases, most people are happy for copyright to exist so long as its fair and equitable. Lifelong rights driven by lobbyists with deep pockets that can be transferred to corporations (often at knock down prices that do little to benefit the artist but a lot to enrich the corporation) and suing your fans into oblivion for sharing your music don't tend to rate highly on the fair and equitable scale. I think most people would be happy with a system that went after the true pirates (the ones seeking to make a profit on the work of others by selling it or selling ads based on it), while limiting the length of copyright to a period that allowed the artist to make some money but didn't deprive society of the benefits of the work entering the public domain sooner rather than later. If you can't make enough money from a work within, say, 7 years then maybe you should look at other career options.
Actually the right to life is a prime example of a natural law, one which springs up universally regardless of culture or government. Of course, not everyone respects the right to life of others, but pretty much everyone recognises it, and it's one of the first unwritted rights that gets enshrined in law in almost every culture. As for your last line, your reasoning is a little off - saying 'I have right to life enshrined in the constitution' to someone approaching you with a machete and a very evil grin isn't going to stop them killing you either, but it doesn't make your claim any less true.
If he's a composer, he'd makes his money writing music and selling it to performers. If he's trying to make money by selling books with his music, then surely he's actually an author?
Would 30 people out of 100+ million really be able to sway the App store so much that the targetted apps would account for 40 of the top 50 apps? I don't disagree that the mostly likely explanation is people with infected systems or people subject to phishing attacks, but it's patently a hell of a lot more widespread than you're suggesting.
A corrupt market is bad for the security conscious. For everyone else, they're probably willing to accept that they pay a little more for everything to cover the cost of the losses because it means they can jump through fewer security hoops to do anything. It's the people who would gladly jump through those hoops but aren't being given the opportunity that are really losing out so that everyone else can be lax - maybe a two-tier system where you can get some return on being less of a security risk would help (some bonus store credit, for instance), but how to asses the risk is always going to be tricky. You don't know if the guy with the 32-character password that he changes daily has it written on his facebook page just in case he ever forgets it, for instance.
Maybe it's due to our "special relationship" with the US, but certainly here in the UK if you have no history of good credit repayments (store card, credit card, overdraft or loan repayments) it's incredibly difficult to get finance for large purchases, and next to impossible to get something like a mortgage. Ironically, someone with zero debt who has never owned a credit or store card or taken out loans and believes in paying for everything in full, in cash, would have to use the same high interest company to secure a loan as someone who had a known history of missing payments.
However, because many of the apps are free (and even the paid ones you can get a full refund if you uninstall within 24 hours, IIRC) you end up with insane amounts of comment spam, "Great app, for many more visit my site at..." posted on every single app that gets released.
Ratings on the Android market place seem to be even worse than those described above for the Apple app store. I frequently see people giving apps one star because it crashed on their phone, even though their phone is often either not on the supported list (usually because it lacks the resources to handle said app), or even if the developer specifically states that it doesn't work on handset X for reasons a, b and c. Alternately I see spammers everywhere giving five stars but not because they've even used the app, just because they want to post a link to their website in the comments. I'll always use proper app review sites to determine which apps are actually worth using - the reviews on the market place are worse than useless.
In fact, the whole filtering of the market place is one of the few disappointments with my HTC - I don't know if this is because people are expected to go online to search, but there are just too few options. I can either search on top rated (which is split into paid and free, but is rubbish for the reasons I've already stated) or "just in", which I assume is ordered by timestamp, but is a mix of free and paid and seems to be useless anyway because it doesn't order by the original release date of the app, but rather by the last version update - so you end up with the position that apps are being updated several times a week, I don't know if this is a cynical move to stay at the top of the "just in" list or if these apps really are being updated for the better, but either way it has the same result on finding anything.
And don't even get me started on the millions of useless screensaver/wallpaper/soundboard/etc apps. Why release one app which allows users to select from 1,000 different wallpapers using a web service when you can just package them as 1,000 different apps each with only 1 wallpaper and flood the hell out of the market place? Ugh, indeed.
We had an "experienced" contract tester on a site who raised a critical issue that the page templates we'd built were full of "foreign text, looks French". The point still stands though, that it's easier to spend two minutes at the start explaining why you're using lorem ipsum and then have a productive meeting based around the layout that it is to constantly have things disrupted and held up while someone questions what that heading means, or why that image is labelled wrongly. Most people get the concept pretty quickly (especially if you do any amount of agency work, where they've been using this offline forever) and you end up with slightly more productive meetings.
Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal - it wouldn't be the first time we've seen a review site gush over a product that turned out to have real faults (and I won't suggest that there are ulterior motives in terms of receiving review tech or advertising, I'll leave others to draw their own conclusions), having said that I hadn't heard that Apple were allowing people to return the phones for a refund without quibble (presumably the network contracts are also voided as the one is linked to the other), that should at least ensure the consumer gets to make their own mind up on the issue.
You're confusing two issues. The issue here is that the software to display the number of bars was wrong, the issue about calls dropping when the phone is held incorrectly is a separate issue. Of course the first may exaggerate the second (by making you think you have great signal strength when you only have average, and then the hand position issue depletes that further to drop your call). Fixing the first won't, and was never intended to, fix the second, but it might give people a more realistic indication of whether they have a decent signal to begin with or not.
It seems this is exactly the issue - all the people saying "I've never dropped a call" are missing the point. If you're in an area with excellent signal strength, you'll lose some of that but the call won't drop. It's only the people in weaker areas, the edge cases, where the signal degredation causes the call to drop. I don't see the point in people blindly claiming it's not an issue when Apple themselves have admitted it is, they won't do that if there's any room for doubt. For the people who don't have any issues, that's great, but don't suggest like OP that the people who do have their heads up their asses, because that only indicates you have your own head up your own ass.
Weirdly my GF always seems to have more "bars" showing on her iPhone than me, yet her signal strength seems to be pretty atrocious - I even changed network and got a new handset because we thought it was my phone/network causing the issues (actually it turns out it was, since changing I have much better connections to everyone else but the issues are still there when she calls me or vice versa), I wonder if this is the root cause, that she always had a much worse signal than was being reported in the first place (3GS).
Well that's good to hear, although it being pushed as a required update doesn't necessarily follow that people will switch to it if they're used to their IE while ever there's a choice (and I'm loathe to say that there shouldn't be a choice because that's what got us into a mess in the first place, but I hope they do enough internally to make it an informed choice).
The mainstream media don't sell copies by saying "everything's great" - nor by giving an in-depth analysis of a mission like this (not unless they can dumb down the importance enough, in which case we might get a three bullet point list with a picture of Bruce Willis in an astronaught costume). They sell copies by being doomsayers. At least there are people here who appreciate the significance of this mission.
The key thing is being able to reliably land the thing and get it back to earth for study - everything else will come with time, once we know a bit more about the stresses and strains of this kind of mission. If I had to guess I'd think they didn't hold out much hope for the other things this time around anyway, but were of the attitude that, hell, since we're going to be up there anyway may as well give it a try.
Also assuming there is a large enough pool of people who are experienced at building technology to land on and collect samples from comets to replace the current crop with, otherwise you've no guarantee the replacements won't be as bad but without the benefit of real experience.
And specifically saying something that you have next to zero knowledge of is not art is the wrong answer. You would think anyone of standing in the field of criticising the arts would at least venture to learn a little about a subject before venturing a blanket opinion. I probably know a thousand times more about movies than Ebert knows about games, but if I were to say movies are not art, somehow I doubt he'd give my opinion credence.
And yet some people will claim to see the art in sport. I think the main thing we can take out of this is that nobody can categorically say what is or is not art until we define what art means.
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You can't speak for this guy on copyright terms - maybe he's more than happy to earn money on a piece of work for 150 years, don't create an opinion on his behalf to make him fit the strawman of the struggling artist who's just one of us trying to make it in the big world, it cheapens your argument. I think the big issue here is that corporations like Disney have made copyright such an abstract thing in the minds of most normal people (I don't have children but there are works being produced today that will likely still be in copyright even after my children's children are dead and buried) that it's hard to see the crime in sharing. Maybe if copyright was for a reasonable period we'd see people who wanted the work now more willing to pay, while people who are just curious or content hoarders willing to wait a few years to get it legitimately (at the moment their "crime" is the same if they get a zero day release or wait 10 years). Of course I can't say for sure, maybe people would still copy as much new stuff as they do now, but I can certainly say that, when there's the threat of huge lawsuits and government legislation being bandied around and people are still sharing in their millions, it's clear that the current system does not work and needs a huge rethink.
Who is the arbiter of what is truly novel? Didn't Wilde once say something along the lines of spending all morning to add a single comma to a work, and spending all afternoon to remove it? In his eyes this one, seemingly insignificant thing changed the whole work to such a degree that he, as an artist, spent all day agonising over it. If he'd published without the comma and I took his work and added the comma, who are you to judge that I've not created something novel? We are potentially preventing new artists producing works of public benefit by having such restrictive and long standing copyright now, which is entirely the opposite of what such laws were meant to achieve.
Just look at Disney, one of the worst coporations for perpetuating eternal copyright and the company basically made its money ripping off stories from the public domain. Do you need any better example of the hypocrisy and inequity of this system - that one company can get filthy rich plundering the treasure trove of public domain then plough all of its earnings into ensuring nobody can ever use its own products in the same way in the future? You could say "but Disney brought those stories to life in a new way that enriched the lives of others", but who is to say they're now not actively preventing someone else adding even more value?
Nor should he get paid by all of society for all of eternity for one piece of work, no matter how skillfully crafted or beautiful it may be, otherwise that puts him in the category of undoubtedly talented but ultimately freeloading rat.
No, what he's saying is that if you can't make enough money to live with a reasonable period of copyright, then you're probably not good at what you're doing. Either find another model to substitute your hobby (patronage, etc) or get a job that you can make pay. Nobody else expects to do one piece of work (even if that piece of work takes a couple of years to finish) and then to be paid for it for the rest of their lives at society's expense, and until very recently in our history, neither did artists. You're buying into some grand fiction that this is either the right way to do things, or that it's the way its always been done, neither is true but they serve the purposes of the people who make the real money on artists' rights (generally not the artists).
We don't need many people to do it, we just need the ones who do to care more about the music than they do about the money. That's how music has survived in society for thousands or years. Are you really so starved of entertainment that you'll happily grant people the rights to enrich themselves and their families for untold years to come just so you can have another Britney album? Besides, apart from a few edge cases, most people are happy for copyright to exist so long as its fair and equitable. Lifelong rights driven by lobbyists with deep pockets that can be transferred to corporations (often at knock down prices that do little to benefit the artist but a lot to enrich the corporation) and suing your fans into oblivion for sharing your music don't tend to rate highly on the fair and equitable scale. I think most people would be happy with a system that went after the true pirates (the ones seeking to make a profit on the work of others by selling it or selling ads based on it), while limiting the length of copyright to a period that allowed the artist to make some money but didn't deprive society of the benefits of the work entering the public domain sooner rather than later. If you can't make enough money from a work within, say, 7 years then maybe you should look at other career options.
Actually the right to life is a prime example of a natural law, one which springs up universally regardless of culture or government. Of course, not everyone respects the right to life of others, but pretty much everyone recognises it, and it's one of the first unwritted rights that gets enshrined in law in almost every culture. As for your last line, your reasoning is a little off - saying 'I have right to life enshrined in the constitution' to someone approaching you with a machete and a very evil grin isn't going to stop them killing you either, but it doesn't make your claim any less true.
If he's a composer, he'd makes his money writing music and selling it to performers. If he's trying to make money by selling books with his music, then surely he's actually an author?
Would 30 people out of 100+ million really be able to sway the App store so much that the targetted apps would account for 40 of the top 50 apps? I don't disagree that the mostly likely explanation is people with infected systems or people subject to phishing attacks, but it's patently a hell of a lot more widespread than you're suggesting.
A corrupt market is bad for the security conscious. For everyone else, they're probably willing to accept that they pay a little more for everything to cover the cost of the losses because it means they can jump through fewer security hoops to do anything. It's the people who would gladly jump through those hoops but aren't being given the opportunity that are really losing out so that everyone else can be lax - maybe a two-tier system where you can get some return on being less of a security risk would help (some bonus store credit, for instance), but how to asses the risk is always going to be tricky. You don't know if the guy with the 32-character password that he changes daily has it written on his facebook page just in case he ever forgets it, for instance.
Maybe it's due to our "special relationship" with the US, but certainly here in the UK if you have no history of good credit repayments (store card, credit card, overdraft or loan repayments) it's incredibly difficult to get finance for large purchases, and next to impossible to get something like a mortgage. Ironically, someone with zero debt who has never owned a credit or store card or taken out loans and believes in paying for everything in full, in cash, would have to use the same high interest company to secure a loan as someone who had a known history of missing payments.
However, because many of the apps are free (and even the paid ones you can get a full refund if you uninstall within 24 hours, IIRC) you end up with insane amounts of comment spam, "Great app, for many more visit my site at ..." posted on every single app that gets released.
Ratings on the Android market place seem to be even worse than those described above for the Apple app store. I frequently see people giving apps one star because it crashed on their phone, even though their phone is often either not on the supported list (usually because it lacks the resources to handle said app), or even if the developer specifically states that it doesn't work on handset X for reasons a, b and c. Alternately I see spammers everywhere giving five stars but not because they've even used the app, just because they want to post a link to their website in the comments. I'll always use proper app review sites to determine which apps are actually worth using - the reviews on the market place are worse than useless.
In fact, the whole filtering of the market place is one of the few disappointments with my HTC - I don't know if this is because people are expected to go online to search, but there are just too few options. I can either search on top rated (which is split into paid and free, but is rubbish for the reasons I've already stated) or "just in", which I assume is ordered by timestamp, but is a mix of free and paid and seems to be useless anyway because it doesn't order by the original release date of the app, but rather by the last version update - so you end up with the position that apps are being updated several times a week, I don't know if this is a cynical move to stay at the top of the "just in" list or if these apps really are being updated for the better, but either way it has the same result on finding anything.
And don't even get me started on the millions of useless screensaver/wallpaper/soundboard/etc apps. Why release one app which allows users to select from 1,000 different wallpapers using a web service when you can just package them as 1,000 different apps each with only 1 wallpaper and flood the hell out of the market place? Ugh, indeed.
We had an "experienced" contract tester on a site who raised a critical issue that the page templates we'd built were full of "foreign text, looks French". The point still stands though, that it's easier to spend two minutes at the start explaining why you're using lorem ipsum and then have a productive meeting based around the layout that it is to constantly have things disrupted and held up while someone questions what that heading means, or why that image is labelled wrongly. Most people get the concept pretty quickly (especially if you do any amount of agency work, where they've been using this offline forever) and you end up with slightly more productive meetings.
Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal - it wouldn't be the first time we've seen a review site gush over a product that turned out to have real faults (and I won't suggest that there are ulterior motives in terms of receiving review tech or advertising, I'll leave others to draw their own conclusions), having said that I hadn't heard that Apple were allowing people to return the phones for a refund without quibble (presumably the network contracts are also voided as the one is linked to the other), that should at least ensure the consumer gets to make their own mind up on the issue.
And preview. Preview is your friend.
You're confusing two issues. The issue here is that the software to display the number of bars was wrong, the issue about calls dropping when the phone is held incorrectly is a separate issue. Of course the first may exaggerate the second (by making you think you have great signal strength when you only have average, and then the hand position issue depletes that further to drop your call). Fixing the first won't, and was never intended to, fix the second, but it might give people a more realistic indication of whether they have a decent signal to begin with or not.
It seems this is exactly the issue - all the people saying "I've never dropped a call" are missing the point. If you're in an area with excellent signal strength, you'll lose some of that but the call won't drop. It's only the people in weaker areas, the edge cases, where the signal degredation causes the call to drop. I don't see the point in people blindly claiming it's not an issue when Apple themselves have admitted it is, they won't do that if there's any room for doubt. For the people who don't have any issues, that's great, but don't suggest like OP that the people who do have their heads up their asses, because that only indicates you have your own head up your own ass.
Weirdly my GF always seems to have more "bars" showing on her iPhone than me, yet her signal strength seems to be pretty atrocious - I even changed network and got a new handset because we thought it was my phone/network causing the issues (actually it turns out it was, since changing I have much better connections to everyone else but the issues are still there when she calls me or vice versa), I wonder if this is the root cause, that she always had a much worse signal than was being reported in the first place (3GS).
Well that's good to hear, although it being pushed as a required update doesn't necessarily follow that people will switch to it if they're used to their IE while ever there's a choice (and I'm loathe to say that there shouldn't be a choice because that's what got us into a mess in the first place, but I hope they do enough internally to make it an informed choice).
The mainstream media don't sell copies by saying "everything's great" - nor by giving an in-depth analysis of a mission like this (not unless they can dumb down the importance enough, in which case we might get a three bullet point list with a picture of Bruce Willis in an astronaught costume). They sell copies by being doomsayers. At least there are people here who appreciate the significance of this mission.
The key thing is being able to reliably land the thing and get it back to earth for study - everything else will come with time, once we know a bit more about the stresses and strains of this kind of mission. If I had to guess I'd think they didn't hold out much hope for the other things this time around anyway, but were of the attitude that, hell, since we're going to be up there anyway may as well give it a try.
Also assuming there is a large enough pool of people who are experienced at building technology to land on and collect samples from comets to replace the current crop with, otherwise you've no guarantee the replacements won't be as bad but without the benefit of real experience.
And specifically saying something that you have next to zero knowledge of is not art is the wrong answer. You would think anyone of standing in the field of criticising the arts would at least venture to learn a little about a subject before venturing a blanket opinion. I probably know a thousand times more about movies than Ebert knows about games, but if I were to say movies are not art, somehow I doubt he'd give my opinion credence.
And yet some people will claim to see the art in sport. I think the main thing we can take out of this is that nobody can categorically say what is or is not art until we define what art means.