Nowadays people won't even waste bandwidth on movies that receive bad reviews and this trend disturbs the studios greatly, since it shows that nobody wants to watch some of their crap, even when it is free.
Which explains why Alvin and the Chipmunks did so poorly. Couldn't even break $250 million...
Seriously, though, I had a harder time finding that counterexample than I thought I would. At least when it comes to the blockbusters, it's hard to be poorly reviewed and still do well. I wouldn't be surprised, though, if the difference between $10 million and $100 million for mediocre films is all about marketing.
Somebody should analyze all the box office data and review data (from Metacritic, say), and see if the correlation has become stronger in recent years.
The Mormons "believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly" (Article of Faith 8). The idea of humans corrupting the inspired records of the Bible is basic to our understanding of the last 2000 years of religious history. The Book of Mormon speaks of "plain and precious things which have been taken away."
On the other hand, the fact of the resurrection and many other Christian doctrines is corroborated by other (religious) sources, and is fundamental to our faith. So the absence of these doctrines' mention in a particular source would not lead us to wonder about our doctrinal foundation.
Mormon scholars are actually quite interested in early Christianity. A significant amount of research at BYU (a Church-sponsored school), for example, has involved the Dead Sea Scrolls: CNN article; BYU research summary.
So, nothing to see here unless you're a bleeding-edge Java+Mac fanboi. There are a lot of reasons this is good news, even if it doesn't mean that Java/Mac developers can assume that most of their users have Java 6 installed.
Current users of Java apps can get performance and bug improvements for existing apps. I noticed some Swing GUI improvements.
Developers get compiler improvements (including a lot of type checker bug fixes) even if not targeting Java 6.
Developers can gain experience with new APIs before actually deploying Mac apps that require them a couple of years down the road.
I read that a major impediment for getting Java DTrace support was the lack of Java 6. I'm not sure what the status of DTrace support is now, but it'll be major good news for Mac Java developers when it becomes fully supported.
the fact that the trick wasn't removed from SP1 suggests that Microsoft executives approved the back door as a way to make the price of Vista more appealing to sophisticated buyers And I'm sure my neighbor leaves his front door unlocked because he wants me to come on in and make a sandwich.
I never saw the big deal about not "owning" your music. As long as I get to listen to the music I want to when I want to, I don't care who owns or doesn't own it, so I'm perfectly happy with my unlimited subscription to Napster. If I could afford $150+ a year for unlimited access to Napster's comprehensive library, then, sure, it's not so important that I "own" it (although there are still some long-term drawbacks). But I typically spend more like $30 a year. So I prefer to have unlimited access to a limited library. I can even reduce my budget to $0 a year and still be fairly happy with the selection.
The idea apparently being proposed is that you get to permanently keep a small number of the tracks you download. The claim in the Ars article that you will be able to play *everything* you download indefinitely is ridiculous. There is no way that makes sense for the labels -- it amounts to selling out their entire back-catalog business for a one-time fee.
This is a much better article on the subject: ; also see the linked Financial Times article.
The idea apparently being proposed is that you get to permanently keep a small number of the tracks you download. The claim in the Ars article that you will be able to play *everything* you download indefinitely is ridiculous. There is no way that makes sense for the labels -- it amounts to selling out their entire back-catalog business for a one-time fee.
Yes. This point -- that it may be completely reasonable that districts with Diebold machines would have different voting preferences from those without -- is so obvious that it shouldn't have to be said. But somehow that notion seems lost on a lot of people here. Combine that with the fact that the sample sizes involved are relatively small, and we can probably conclude that there's no statistical significance to the discrepancy.
Who said anything about exit polls? As I read the write-up, they're talking about a discrepancy with telephone polls conducted before the primary. I think we can agree that those polls tend to be all over the place and highly inaccurate (with typical error ranges of +/- 5%).
Your signal quality may be worse than mine, but I was also worried about being able to pick anything up when I stopped my cable subscription -- the neighbors' analog reception was not good. With a $20-$30 antenna from Radio Shack, though, I've been able to easily pick up the digital stations broadcast in inner-city Houston. And of course, because they're digital, channels that are almost unwatchable in analog are perfect in digital (far better, in fact, than the same channels broadcast over digital cable, because the cable provider compresses the video to death). The key is to have a good UHF antenna (rabbit ears, without a loop, only pick up VHF), since almost all digital channels are broadcast in the UHF range.
I think the real problem here is being buried in misguided analysis about the meaning of anonymity and associating movie preferences to political affiliation, etc.
Here's what's really been demonstrated: private information about users of some IMDB accounts who have rated movies on both IMDB and Netflix has be made public, despite Netflix's implicit assertion that releasing anonymous data is "safe." The user himself has not really been compromised -- nobody knows his address, phone number, names of family members, etc. -- but people now know more about the IMDB account than was intentionally published. When the user publicly posted his opinions about 5 (say) favorite movies, he did not expect his private opinions about 100 others, as expressed in Netflix, to also be publicly associated with that account.
The practical impact isn't clear. If the private information were conveniently published by IMDB, so that nobody had to work very hard to view it, it might sway how likely readers are to trust a certain reviewer. The impact of that change in trust doesn't seem very meaningful, though, and in any case, the private information *isn't* conveniently published. If, under similar circumstances, there were a correlation between private information and an eBay account, then there could be a real financial impact.
Another concern is that, if other factors have already made it possible to correlate an IMDB account with a real person, then someone can make the jump to associating all this private data with that individual. For example, I might link to my IMDB profile from my blog so all my coworkers can see my public reviews, not realizing that it's now possible for them to determine what movies I've privately watched.
The main problem I have with doing something like that is limited disk space. If my original content uses x bytes, you're talking about requiring a minimum of 9x bytes to follow a scheme like this for 6 months. With Time Machine there's no redundancy (both a strength and a weakness, I suppose), so, depending on how much changes between snapshots, I might be able to get away with 3x bytes. (I have no idea how accurate that number is, since I haven't actually used the thing...)
What you're describing sounds like a definite improvement, but will either of these tools automatically prune the archives based on disk space? That's important to me for two reasons: first (and less important), I don't want to be bothered to devise a cleanup scheme that will make optimal use of my disk space; second, an ideal cleanup scheme would be dynamic: if I make minimal changes to the disk for a few months, I should be able to hold on to more data, and if I suddenly write gobs of data to disk, I'd like to automatically throw away more old backups than usual to make room for the new stuff.
I don't know whether this Linux implementation does something like it, but what I like most about Time Machine isn't the interface. It's the fact that the backup utility takes care of disk management automatically.
My current backup strategy works something like this:
Set up Retrospect nightly backup scripts.
Happily enjoy the security of having backups for a few weeks.
Wake up in the morning to see an "external disk full" error message.
Procrastinate for weeks while I try to decide whether I'd rather trash the entire archive or find someplace to dump my 80 GB of data (which probably involves making space somewhere, which is always a project).
Finally get fed up with having no backups and just discard the archive.
Return to step 1.
If I were smart and vigilant, I would catch when the archive reaches about 30 GB, and create a new one then, so that managing older archives could be done in more tractable chunks. If I were rich, I would just buy a number of external drives that I would rotate as they filled up. But I am apparently neither, so I just get stuck in this cycle in which I only have a current backup 1/3 of the time, and older archives are randomly discarded or distributed wherever I can find the space.
The great thing about Time Machine is that it consistently fills up my disk with the most relevant backup data: current backups at a high frequency, and months-old backups at a low frequency. When space runs out, the oldest data gets thrown away, but the quantum chunk is a diff between backups, not an entire 80 GB archive.
The only way Microsoft can make a truly better offer at this point is to charge Nigeria negative money
Except that they're not offering the same product. Maybe what Microsoft is offering is worth enough to the buyers that they're willing to pay X for the Mandriva contract, plus Y (where Y > 0) for the Microsoft contract. Sure, Microsoft could have made X+Y for the same offering if they'd gotten there first, but if they're happy to charge Y, and the client is happy to pay X+Y, then everything works out.
Doesn't mean there's definitely nothing underhanded going on. But it does mean you can't automatically assume that negative money is being charged.
Agreed. I went straight to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CEA. Apparently CEA is a very popular TLA. "Consumer Electronics Association" is a good pick, but how about "Council of Economic Advisors," "Christian Evangelistic Assemblies," or "China Eastern Airlines"? China is all about copyright infringement, so it wouldn't surprise me them getting behind those Slingbox pirates. A bunch of rabble, the lot of them.
And they will cling to their moral rules even after those rules have lost their basis. . . . Them: "Promiscuous behavior is immoral because it creates unintentional babies." Why says that this is the basis? Unintentional babies are certainly one reason to object to promiscuity on moral grounds, but there is much more to it than that.
Let's say I make a sand sculpture on the beach. That's an artwork, covered by copyright. But I've got a feeling my sculpture isn't going to last long enough to enter the public domain.
Fair use means that if you happen to do something that would otherwise violate copyright, you're okay. It doesn't mean that the creator of a work has some sort of responsibility to guarantee your ability to do so.
What is interesting to me is the fact that the whole world (more or less) thinks your products are so pricey that copyright infringement is a better option.
If you want to sell CDs and you can get away with doing so without paying royalties, then, yes, infringement is a better option.
When you're looking to buy a CD and you can get a pirated copy for practically nothing then, yes, infringement is a better option.
It doesn't matter what the official price is, in the absense of meaningful enforcement, a pirated copy is going to be cheaper. Unless there is enforcement, producers of IP have no chance of competing. If you want to argue that IP is a lost cause, okay, but don't argue that content producers could somehow win the masses over from unchecked piracy with a different pricing scheme.
I wonder if anyone realizes that having an economy that is increasingly dependent on "intellectual property" is a bad thing. Worth wondering, but are you ready to quit your job as a computer programmer and start working in the coal mines? Me, I'm hoping diplomacy will help me keep my job.
Nowhere in that constitution does it state the congress has the right to restrict the freedom of citizens of other countries the same way.
Article II, Section 2: "[The President] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur."
The U.S. made treaties regarding copyright with other countries. Those countries are violating these treaties. The U.S. is rightfully unhappy.
The only way to beat piracy is to include fair use in copyright - assuming copyright needs to exist at all. Fair use? You think the rampant copyright infringement that goes in in these countries is simply "fair use"? The infringement in these countries consists of pirates making a bunch of money by ripping off the producers of the content. It's big black-market business, not just burning a few CDs for friends.
Nobody outside the US gives a damn about US laws. In fact, we find attempts like this to assert themselves legally, to be rather lame and sad. The U.S. has treaties with these countries, it trades with them in good faith, and they aren't keeping up their end of the bargain. As a result, the value of U.S. IP goods is deflated. They are completely within their rights to put pressure on these countries to change their policies.
Anyway, in the highly improbable event that any of these countries paid any attention the the US on piracy and actually stopped it, there's still be many other countries to which pirates could easily and successfully move to. 20% of the world's population lives in China. If China can reign in rampant piracy, that's a big win for the U.S., regardless of what happens in other countries.
There's also plenty of piracy from within US borders too. You don't find sidewalk vendors hawking CDs for $1 all over the U.S.
At 1.29 (last I heard) for the DRM free version, it's even more worth it to just buy the CD if you want DRM free music. At least for now, album prices are not changing for DRM-free albums. So it's just as "worth it" as it ever was. The price for single tracks is irrelevant, since you can't buy single tracks on CD.
I don't doubt that people do this, but it makes little sense to me. Unless Grandma has a dial-up connection, it's got to be a lot faster and easier for everyone involved to transfer the data over the Internet. Sure, making this work is *way* harder than it needs to be (email servers reject large attachments, and IM file transfer is flaky; one "straightforward" approach is to set up a Web server, get a domain name via DynDNS, configure firewalls appropriately, and email a link for downloading), but for the cost of a BluRay burner, you'd think it would be worth it to people to figure it out.
Slashdot Mirror
Nowadays people won't even waste bandwidth on movies that receive bad reviews and this trend disturbs the studios greatly, since it shows that nobody wants to watch some of their crap, even when it is free.
Which explains why Alvin and the Chipmunks did so poorly. Couldn't even break $250 million...
Seriously, though, I had a harder time finding that counterexample than I thought I would. At least when it comes to the blockbusters, it's hard to be poorly reviewed and still do well. I wouldn't be surprised, though, if the difference between $10 million and $100 million for mediocre films is all about marketing.
Somebody should analyze all the box office data and review data (from Metacritic, say), and see if the correlation has become stronger in recent years.
The Mormons will....
The Mormons "believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly" (Article of Faith 8). The idea of humans corrupting the inspired records of the Bible is basic to our understanding of the last 2000 years of religious history. The Book of Mormon speaks of "plain and precious things which have been taken away."
On the other hand, the fact of the resurrection and many other Christian doctrines is corroborated by other (religious) sources, and is fundamental to our faith. So the absence of these doctrines' mention in a particular source would not lead us to wonder about our doctrinal foundation.
Mormon scholars are actually quite interested in early Christianity. A significant amount of research at BYU (a Church-sponsored school), for example, has involved the Dead Sea Scrolls: CNN article; BYU research summary.
Repeating myself, because Slashdot ate my URL.
This is a much better article on the subject: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/19/apple-will-listen-to-universals-music-subscription-pitch/?ref=technology; also see the linked Financial Times article.
The idea apparently being proposed is that you get to permanently keep a small number of the tracks you download. The claim in the Ars article that you will be able to play *everything* you download indefinitely is ridiculous. There is no way that makes sense for the labels -- it amounts to selling out their entire back-catalog business for a one-time fee.
This is a much better article on the subject: ; also see the linked Financial Times article.
The idea apparently being proposed is that you get to permanently keep a small number of the tracks you download. The claim in the Ars article that you will be able to play *everything* you download indefinitely is ridiculous. There is no way that makes sense for the labels -- it amounts to selling out their entire back-catalog business for a one-time fee.
By that standard, Mike Huckabee is irrelevant, too.
Yes. This point -- that it may be completely reasonable that districts with Diebold machines would have different voting preferences from those without -- is so obvious that it shouldn't have to be said. But somehow that notion seems lost on a lot of people here. Combine that with the fact that the sample sizes involved are relatively small, and we can probably conclude that there's no statistical significance to the discrepancy.
Who said anything about exit polls? As I read the write-up, they're talking about a discrepancy with telephone polls conducted before the primary. I think we can agree that those polls tend to be all over the place and highly inaccurate (with typical error ranges of +/- 5%).
Your signal quality may be worse than mine, but I was also worried about being able to pick anything up when I stopped my cable subscription -- the neighbors' analog reception was not good. With a $20-$30 antenna from Radio Shack, though, I've been able to easily pick up the digital stations broadcast in inner-city Houston. And of course, because they're digital, channels that are almost unwatchable in analog are perfect in digital (far better, in fact, than the same channels broadcast over digital cable, because the cable provider compresses the video to death). The key is to have a good UHF antenna (rabbit ears, without a loop, only pick up VHF), since almost all digital channels are broadcast in the UHF range.
I think the real problem here is being buried in misguided analysis about the meaning of anonymity and associating movie preferences to political affiliation, etc.
Here's what's really been demonstrated: private information about users of some IMDB accounts who have rated movies on both IMDB and Netflix has be made public, despite Netflix's implicit assertion that releasing anonymous data is "safe." The user himself has not really been compromised -- nobody knows his address, phone number, names of family members, etc. -- but people now know more about the IMDB account than was intentionally published. When the user publicly posted his opinions about 5 (say) favorite movies, he did not expect his private opinions about 100 others, as expressed in Netflix, to also be publicly associated with that account.
The practical impact isn't clear. If the private information were conveniently published by IMDB, so that nobody had to work very hard to view it, it might sway how likely readers are to trust a certain reviewer. The impact of that change in trust doesn't seem very meaningful, though, and in any case, the private information *isn't* conveniently published. If, under similar circumstances, there were a correlation between private information and an eBay account, then there could be a real financial impact.
Another concern is that, if other factors have already made it possible to correlate an IMDB account with a real person, then someone can make the jump to associating all this private data with that individual. For example, I might link to my IMDB profile from my blog so all my coworkers can see my public reviews, not realizing that it's now possible for them to determine what movies I've privately watched.
The main problem I have with doing something like that is limited disk space. If my original content uses x bytes, you're talking about requiring a minimum of 9x bytes to follow a scheme like this for 6 months. With Time Machine there's no redundancy (both a strength and a weakness, I suppose), so, depending on how much changes between snapshots, I might be able to get away with 3x bytes. (I have no idea how accurate that number is, since I haven't actually used the thing...)
What you're describing sounds like a definite improvement, but will either of these tools automatically prune the archives based on disk space? That's important to me for two reasons: first (and less important), I don't want to be bothered to devise a cleanup scheme that will make optimal use of my disk space; second, an ideal cleanup scheme would be dynamic: if I make minimal changes to the disk for a few months, I should be able to hold on to more data, and if I suddenly write gobs of data to disk, I'd like to automatically throw away more old backups than usual to make room for the new stuff.
I don't know whether this Linux implementation does something like it, but what I like most about Time Machine isn't the interface. It's the fact that the backup utility takes care of disk management automatically.
My current backup strategy works something like this:
If I were smart and vigilant, I would catch when the archive reaches about 30 GB, and create a new one then, so that managing older archives could be done in more tractable chunks. If I were rich, I would just buy a number of external drives that I would rotate as they filled up. But I am apparently neither, so I just get stuck in this cycle in which I only have a current backup 1/3 of the time, and older archives are randomly discarded or distributed wherever I can find the space.
The great thing about Time Machine is that it consistently fills up my disk with the most relevant backup data: current backups at a high frequency, and months-old backups at a low frequency. When space runs out, the oldest data gets thrown away, but the quantum chunk is a diff between backups, not an entire 80 GB archive.
Except that they're not offering the same product. Maybe what Microsoft is offering is worth enough to the buyers that they're willing to pay X for the Mandriva contract, plus Y (where Y > 0) for the Microsoft contract. Sure, Microsoft could have made X+Y for the same offering if they'd gotten there first, but if they're happy to charge Y, and the client is happy to pay X+Y, then everything works out.
Doesn't mean there's definitely nothing underhanded going on. But it does mean you can't automatically assume that negative money is being charged.
Agreed. I went straight to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CEA. Apparently CEA is a very popular TLA. "Consumer Electronics Association" is a good pick, but how about "Council of Economic Advisors," "Christian Evangelistic Assemblies," or "China Eastern Airlines"? China is all about copyright infringement, so it wouldn't surprise me them getting behind those Slingbox pirates. A bunch of rabble, the lot of them.
Let's say I make a sand sculpture on the beach. That's an artwork, covered by copyright. But I've got a feeling my sculpture isn't going to last long enough to enter the public domain.
Fair use means that if you happen to do something that would otherwise violate copyright, you're okay. It doesn't mean that the creator of a work has some sort of responsibility to guarantee your ability to do so.
If you want to sell CDs and you can get away with doing so without paying royalties, then, yes, infringement is a better option.
When you're looking to buy a CD and you can get a pirated copy for practically nothing then, yes, infringement is a better option.
It doesn't matter what the official price is, in the absense of meaningful enforcement, a pirated copy is going to be cheaper. Unless there is enforcement, producers of IP have no chance of competing. If you want to argue that IP is a lost cause, okay, but don't argue that content producers could somehow win the masses over from unchecked piracy with a different pricing scheme.
Article II, Section 2: "[The President] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur."
The U.S. made treaties regarding copyright with other countries. Those countries are violating these treaties. The U.S. is rightfully unhappy.
I don't doubt that people do this, but it makes little sense to me. Unless Grandma has a dial-up connection, it's got to be a lot faster and easier for everyone involved to transfer the data over the Internet. Sure, making this work is *way* harder than it needs to be (email servers reject large attachments, and IM file transfer is flaky; one "straightforward" approach is to set up a Web server, get a domain name via DynDNS, configure firewalls appropriately, and email a link for downloading), but for the cost of a BluRay burner, you'd think it would be worth it to people to figure it out.