I run a pirated XP on one of my desktops. I get all of the security updates. It's the optional stuff and extra programs I don't get.
Microsoft has a vested interest in keeping even illegitimate computers safe. Every Windows box is a potential window, pun unintended, into OTHER Windows boxes.
This rep needs to get his facts straight. All Windows everywhere are equally safe. Unless he's talking about Windows Defender in Vista. My Vista copy is legit, so I'm unsure if everyone gets Defender stuff.
Well, not totally. But I've been disappointed in the Economist with every strategic step it takes.
Basically, the magazine is leveraging its status as a respected source of information, which is a shrinking asset as free sources online gain readers and recognition.
The Economist is not a research organization, nor is it a journal. It is a magazine. It needs to treat itself as such or it will be passed by. Its history may keep it alive longer than other publications, but that won't last.
Re: Re: Re: This discussion is demagogy in its best
I completely disagree. The true goal is very important. You quite literally just argued that the ends justify the means.
If you force prisoners to work for profits, that DOES mean that prison is bad. Perhaps not from the perspective of those not in the prison, but certainly from the perspective of the prisoners and from the grander perspective of justice.
You concentrate on only the perspective of those outside the prison, which limits the power of your argument, in my opinion, to the point of irrelevance.
As others have said, I don't understand what you mean by saying yellow lights are like $100. You really have to explain that one better.
The study you cited doesn't study accidents, only violations. The article itself states it in the first paragraph. There are numerous studies cited frequently by this site that show that, regardless of the number of violations, the number of accidents goes up.
Also, "do their job more efficiently." That requires the question of what their job is. Is their job to simply catch people breaking the law? I thought it was to serve and protect. If that's the case, stopping speeders is protecting non-speeders. But that would require the argument that speed is in itself dangerous, and that's incorrect. Along with studies, common sense arguments can be made showing that fewer accidents occur on the highway, and that autobahn in Germany, with no speed limit in large sections, has a significantly lower number of accidents per miles driven.
I do not consider cameras an impingement on my privacy, per se. I see them as an impingement to freely live my life without constant monitoring. You liken cameras to legitimate officers, so shall I. If I was being followed and watched by a cop of every minute of my shopping trip (a la London), or drove past a cop every mile and a half (a la speed cameras), I'd start to get nervous and weirded out.
It's because systems like that are by their very nature accusatory. The argument "if I'm doing nothing wrong, I have nothing to worry about" is patently absurd. We all do something wrong. If I just drift over the speed limit one day, I don't want seas of cameras just waiting and salivating to nab me.
If the government is set up in such a way as to make us act differently than we would, we are not truly free.
"even Mr Noz admits that his host "Bluehost somehow misinterpreted this line of the email". When you look at the email that he posted, it is clear it refers to a single URL (which is listed)."
You misinterpreted his misinterpretation. He was being sarcastic. Go back and read it again.
I disagree. I think digital can be very good for them. The album publishing is no longer needed, but the record labels did a lot more than that. I always saw the record labels as the first, major arbiter of taste.
As the internet has proven for us, there is SO MUCH music out there, it's actually rather overwhelming to try and find what you want. For a person incredibly into music, they can check Pitchfork every day, download ten albums per week and buy a bunch more. Listen to music on YouTube, and STILL miss the stuff they might like most.
That job as arbiter became a bit perverted in the drive to produce ultra-stars like N'Sync, but perhaps without the need to produce one or two multi-plats, then simply moving onto who's new, the record companies will again become the first filter for the consumers in the face of literally thousands of musicians and bands.
This guy's way off. I have found more random stuff thanks to the internet than I ever did.
The internet gives us control over our serendipity. We know we want music, so we go and randomly hit up band pages on MySpace. We want movies, we randomly watch trailers on YouTube. Serendipity is alive and better than ever.
I agree. Those unwritten promises can be SWEEPING. My friend went to North Eastern for computer science. During the courting process (Back in the days of the tech boom) they told all of them that would have jobs before they even graduated and be driving Porsche's by 25. My friend's 29, now, and he's driving a Kia. He also regrets going to N. Eastern and being saddled with $95,000 in loans.
I actually disagree with the criticisms of the woman. I don't know much about it, yet, but I'll give her the benefit of the doubt.
To me, this particular case isn't necessarily about entitlement culture. I think it's about the business agreement many people make with their chosen university. Yes, what you learn in college will be with you for your entire life, but most people don't go in for such philosophical reasons. They go in to get a good job.
And universities advertise the hell out of that. Why go to Harvard? Why go to Brown? I've gone to both the Community College of Rhode Island and Brown. University of Rhode Island and Rhode Island college. My best experiences? The community college.
You pay a premium for the connections the prestigious university gives you. Those universities use those connections as selling points to explain their comical tuition fees. If they fail at giving you value, they are not holding up their end of the "contract."
So she may truly be a self-entitled idiot, but it's not necessary that she is.
And to the few who are keeping track of this, Mattel's reputation has taken a dive off of a cliff. That's some pretty long-lasting damage.
And what I think is really important is that Mattel will not release a Bratz doll, themselves, since they don't want to compete with Barbie.
As such, there will be a massive vacuum in the market for sexualized, "mature" girl dolls that will be damn-near-instantly filled with yet another competitor. Good job Mattel.
I wonder if Playboy will get around to doing this instead of desperately putting itself on the block for too much.
My friend and I spent ten minutes, TEN, brainstorming about ways to generate money out of the Playboy brand, because, man, is it a strong brand. We came up with a baker's dozen of ideas, easy.
More clothing, accessories, computer services for the upwardly mobile male, clubs (like a meet for people who own BMW's), nightclubs (of which they had many once), or start a custom Amazon store that caters to the Playboy image. You want to sell magazines, include something valuable with each issue. Pins, CD's, black books, an iPhone skin, I dunno', a freakin' condom, try SOMETHING!
Playboy just continues to lurch along with the same business model, magazines and porn, which are both deader than dead.
I like Playboy. It's a pivotal moment in American history. I don't want it to die. I haven't gotten it in many years, but that's because I got used to its "voice," in a similar way I got used to Time or Rolling Stone. If they kept it mixed up to hold my interest, and then gave the double-whammy of added value, I'd subscribe again.
So, @AnonCo: I think "normal magazines" can do a lot to add value. Car & Driver? Magazine sponsored test drives at various points across the country. A subscriber store where branded clothing (Porsche, BMW, etc.) can be purchased at a discount. Special hardcover books available only to subscribers about whatever car about which they're passionate.
Wired? Special order editions of the magazine that are actually made OUT of electronics, and have a selection of the reader's favorite articles (e.g. every article that George Lucas has ever appeared in). Wired-made applications for smart phones that aggregate news and provide an advertising venue. Monthly give-away's like a cell phone dongle that has the Wired logo and the subscriber's name and address. I think these ideas are easily implemented.
"This was a natural monopoly...nothing artificial or conspiratorial about it."
I agree, but your original wording was,
"The dynamics of content replication and distribution on the Internet destroys this artificial constraint of distribution and re-aligns advertising (and subscription) prices back down to competitive open market rates."
I added the emphasis on your comment about the artificiality of that constraint and, in my reading, the nature of the market at the time. I further read this interpretation to be correct with your statement about prices coming back down, after being held up from their natural level. This made me think your argument was that the old market was somehow incorrect, only to be corrected now with this new market.
I fully agree with your general assertion that online advertising will never match paper (with the current model, anyways), I just felt you were disregarding the validity of the old market vis a vis the new market.
I don't really agree with Harrison that the previous price of advertising was artificially held high by monopoly.
Back then, there was a fundamental limitation on the dissemination of information, as such the machinery and infrastructure to distribute that information was incredibly valuable.
Instead, I see it as simply a change in the market that resulted in a change in the value of a service or good. Or to be more specific, back then, information was NOT an infinite good, it was very much finite.
I also disagree that newspapers had a monopoly. Yes, the business model of the newspaper had a monopoly on information dissemination, but no single entity had a monopoly, even in small markets. I live in Rhode Island, where our population has been less than one million for most of history. We had two big dailies, the Journal and the Bulletin, and a good baker's dozen worth of smaller local papers. We also had the NY Times, Boston Globe, LA Times, and some other nationals available at most news stands. That's no monopoly.
As such, I find his comment about revenue being above market rates inconsistent. Market rates are defined by what people are willing to pay. If everyone is willing to pay a price for newspaper advertising, that is the market rate. Yes, it is above-market in the market of easy, infinite distribution. But at the time, that market didn't exist.
It was not an artificial restraint. That's like saying that there was an artificial restraint on information distribution in pre-historic times because we didn't have the "true" market of the internet, and all we could do was grunt at each other.
This was merely the market at the time. That market had inherent channels through which information could be disseminated. An artificial restriction requires the possibility that the market could be another way, and a powerful force preventing it. This wasn't the case. There was as much competition as the dynamics of the market allowed at the time, advertising rates were true market rates, and the new market of the internet does not negate the validity of the old market.
The problem as I see it is that newspapers were being paid not for the content, but for the service of organizing, arranging, and distributing content. At the time, this was very valuable. In this perspective, the content never had value, only the access to it did. So to clarify my earlier point, the information was always infinite, it was the access that was finite.
Now access is easy, and the service provided by papers is no longer needed. Newspapers need to find some service associated with the content that they can provide that is of value.
Yep, Apple. It's doing fine now, as is IBM, but in the past, both of them were against the ropes because management had driven the company into the dirt.
Suits and ties and no skills whatsoever. It doesn't matter from whence they came, be it Harvard or Antigua, they're so frequently idiots.
What happens is that, sometime in the past, someone with great talent and insight creates a company. They design the machine that is the company very well, such that after they are gone, the machine continues to operate perfectly.
Most executives are barely needed. They sit in their big offices, thinking that they're important, until they're 65 and the next bozo moves in. As long as the world stays the same, the machine continues to function.
Only when the world changes are the idiots separated from the talent. Just look at all the cataclysmic failures in history when the market changed. IBM, American steel and railroad, GM, the current financial crisis, Apple, the music industry, Pan Am, and any other of a number of companies.
These useless piles of human waste piss and moan, scream and sue, and generally make a noise because they've been revealed to be idiots, and suddenly the world doesn't work the way it used to. They don't know what to do, so they blame anything handy.
They don't see opportunity because they're clueless. They don't want opportunity. They want things to stay the same so they can sit behind their big desk and feel like they're doing something.
Stunned. I'm stunned. That's the only word for it. This exceeds all bounds of abject stupidity that I thought the industry capable.
Any industry that would espouse something like this is so, SO far behind the times that the only option is death. Death. Kill it. Drag the whole thing out back and shoot it. There is no hope. The disease is terminal. Just put the fucking thing out of its misery.
On the post: Microsoft Exec: Piracy No Longer A Threat To Us, Because Pirates Will Get Destroyed By Malware
Re:
Microsoft has a vested interest in keeping even illegitimate computers safe. Every Windows box is a potential window, pun unintended, into OTHER Windows boxes.
This rep needs to get his facts straight. All Windows everywhere are equally safe. Unless he's talking about Windows Defender in Vista. My Vista copy is legit, so I'm unsure if everyone gets Defender stuff.
On the post: Liberian Laws Are A Secret Due To Copyright; Even The Gov't Doesn't Have Them
Re:
On the post: The Economist Brings Back Its Paywall... Perhaps It Should Hire An Economist
The Economist Sucks
Basically, the magazine is leveraging its status as a respected source of information, which is a shrinking asset as free sources online gain readers and recognition.
The Economist is not a research organization, nor is it a journal. It is a magazine. It needs to treat itself as such or it will be passed by. Its history may keep it alive longer than other publications, but that won't last.
And remember, these people endorsed Bush in 2000.
On the post: Arizona Dumping Redflex Cameras... But Giving Redflex An Award For Innovation?
Re: Re: Re: This discussion is demagogy in its best
If you force prisoners to work for profits, that DOES mean that prison is bad. Perhaps not from the perspective of those not in the prison, but certainly from the perspective of the prisoners and from the grander perspective of justice.
You concentrate on only the perspective of those outside the prison, which limits the power of your argument, in my opinion, to the point of irrelevance.
As others have said, I don't understand what you mean by saying yellow lights are like $100. You really have to explain that one better.
On the post: Arizona Dumping Redflex Cameras... But Giving Redflex An Award For Innovation?
Re: Article is Wrong! (Continued)
Also, "do their job more efficiently." That requires the question of what their job is. Is their job to simply catch people breaking the law? I thought it was to serve and protect. If that's the case, stopping speeders is protecting non-speeders. But that would require the argument that speed is in itself dangerous, and that's incorrect. Along with studies, common sense arguments can be made showing that fewer accidents occur on the highway, and that autobahn in Germany, with no speed limit in large sections, has a significantly lower number of accidents per miles driven.
I do not consider cameras an impingement on my privacy, per se. I see them as an impingement to freely live my life without constant monitoring. You liken cameras to legitimate officers, so shall I. If I was being followed and watched by a cop of every minute of my shopping trip (a la London), or drove past a cop every mile and a half (a la speed cameras), I'd start to get nervous and weirded out.
It's because systems like that are by their very nature accusatory. The argument "if I'm doing nothing wrong, I have nothing to worry about" is patently absurd. We all do something wrong. If I just drift over the speed limit one day, I don't want seas of cameras just waiting and salivating to nab me.
If the government is set up in such a way as to make us act differently than we would, we are not truly free.
On the post: Music Reviewer's Blog Suspended For Promoting Music
Re: Re: Re: Re:
You misinterpreted his misinterpretation. He was being sarcastic. Go back and read it again.
On the post: EMI Loses Its Other Silicon Valley Wiz
Re: Douglas, not Doug
As the internet has proven for us, there is SO MUCH music out there, it's actually rather overwhelming to try and find what you want. For a person incredibly into music, they can check Pitchfork every day, download ten albums per week and buy a bunch more. Listen to music on YouTube, and STILL miss the stuff they might like most.
That job as arbiter became a bit perverted in the drive to produce ultra-stars like N'Sync, but perhaps without the need to produce one or two multi-plats, then simply moving onto who's new, the record companies will again become the first filter for the consumers in the face of literally thousands of musicians and bands.
On the post: Is Serendipity Lost Online?
Totally wrong.
The internet gives us control over our serendipity. We know we want music, so we go and randomly hit up band pages on MySpace. We want movies, we randomly watch trailers on YouTube. Serendipity is alive and better than ever.
On the post: Entitlement Society: Grad Can't Find Job, Sues Her College For Tuition Back
Re: What AC #8 said
On the post: Entitlement Society: Grad Can't Find Job, Sues Her College For Tuition Back
Give her a chance
To me, this particular case isn't necessarily about entitlement culture. I think it's about the business agreement many people make with their chosen university. Yes, what you learn in college will be with you for your entire life, but most people don't go in for such philosophical reasons. They go in to get a good job.
And universities advertise the hell out of that. Why go to Harvard? Why go to Brown? I've gone to both the Community College of Rhode Island and Brown. University of Rhode Island and Rhode Island college. My best experiences? The community college.
You pay a premium for the connections the prestigious university gives you. Those universities use those connections as selling points to explain their comical tuition fees. If they fail at giving you value, they are not holding up their end of the "contract."
So she may truly be a self-entitled idiot, but it's not necessary that she is.
On the post: Why Should Mattel Get Future Plans For New Bratz Dolls?
PR
And what I think is really important is that Mattel will not release a Bratz doll, themselves, since they don't want to compete with Barbie.
As such, there will be a massive vacuum in the market for sexualized, "mature" girl dolls that will be damn-near-instantly filled with yet another competitor. Good job Mattel.
On the post: Magazines Giving Readers A Real Reason To Buy
Re: Re:
He means the president of his company, not of the country, you douche.
On the post: Magazines Giving Readers A Real Reason To Buy
Playboy
I wonder if Playboy will get around to doing this instead of desperately putting itself on the block for too much.
My friend and I spent ten minutes, TEN, brainstorming about ways to generate money out of the Playboy brand, because, man, is it a strong brand. We came up with a baker's dozen of ideas, easy.
More clothing, accessories, computer services for the upwardly mobile male, clubs (like a meet for people who own BMW's), nightclubs (of which they had many once), or start a custom Amazon store that caters to the Playboy image. You want to sell magazines, include something valuable with each issue. Pins, CD's, black books, an iPhone skin, I dunno', a freakin' condom, try SOMETHING!
Playboy just continues to lurch along with the same business model, magazines and porn, which are both deader than dead.
I like Playboy. It's a pivotal moment in American history. I don't want it to die. I haven't gotten it in many years, but that's because I got used to its "voice," in a similar way I got used to Time or Rolling Stone. If they kept it mixed up to hold my interest, and then gave the double-whammy of added value, I'd subscribe again.
So, @AnonCo: I think "normal magazines" can do a lot to add value. Car & Driver? Magazine sponsored test drives at various points across the country. A subscriber store where branded clothing (Porsche, BMW, etc.) can be purchased at a discount. Special hardcover books available only to subscribers about whatever car about which they're passionate.
Wired? Special order editions of the magazine that are actually made OUT of electronics, and have a selection of the reader's favorite articles (e.g. every article that George Lucas has ever appeared in). Wired-made applications for smart phones that aggregate news and provide an advertising venue. Monthly give-away's like a cell phone dongle that has the Wired logo and the subscriber's name and address. I think these ideas are easily implemented.
On the post: Lawyers: To Save Newspapers, Let's Destroy Pretty Much Everything Else Good
Re: Re: Comment
"This was a natural monopoly...nothing artificial or conspiratorial about it."
I agree, but your original wording was,
"The dynamics of content replication and distribution on the Internet destroys this artificial constraint of distribution and re-aligns advertising (and subscription) prices back down to competitive open market rates."
I added the emphasis on your comment about the artificiality of that constraint and, in my reading, the nature of the market at the time. I further read this interpretation to be correct with your statement about prices coming back down, after being held up from their natural level. This made me think your argument was that the old market was somehow incorrect, only to be corrected now with this new market.
I fully agree with your general assertion that online advertising will never match paper (with the current model, anyways), I just felt you were disregarding the validity of the old market vis a vis the new market.
On the post: Apparently, Providing Derrida's Works For Free 'Harms The Diffusion Of His Thoughts'
Derridon't
Regardless, Derrida being nonsensical garbage could have something to do with problems of diffusion. ANY diffusion. What a worthless philosopher.
On the post: Lawyers: To Save Newspapers, Let's Destroy Pretty Much Everything Else Good
Comment
Back then, there was a fundamental limitation on the dissemination of information, as such the machinery and infrastructure to distribute that information was incredibly valuable.
Instead, I see it as simply a change in the market that resulted in a change in the value of a service or good. Or to be more specific, back then, information was NOT an infinite good, it was very much finite.
I also disagree that newspapers had a monopoly. Yes, the business model of the newspaper had a monopoly on information dissemination, but no single entity had a monopoly, even in small markets. I live in Rhode Island, where our population has been less than one million for most of history. We had two big dailies, the Journal and the Bulletin, and a good baker's dozen worth of smaller local papers. We also had the NY Times, Boston Globe, LA Times, and some other nationals available at most news stands. That's no monopoly.
As such, I find his comment about revenue being above market rates inconsistent. Market rates are defined by what people are willing to pay. If everyone is willing to pay a price for newspaper advertising, that is the market rate. Yes, it is above-market in the market of easy, infinite distribution. But at the time, that market didn't exist.
It was not an artificial restraint. That's like saying that there was an artificial restraint on information distribution in pre-historic times because we didn't have the "true" market of the internet, and all we could do was grunt at each other.
This was merely the market at the time. That market had inherent channels through which information could be disseminated. An artificial restriction requires the possibility that the market could be another way, and a powerful force preventing it. This wasn't the case. There was as much competition as the dynamics of the market allowed at the time, advertising rates were true market rates, and the new market of the internet does not negate the validity of the old market.
The problem as I see it is that newspapers were being paid not for the content, but for the service of organizing, arranging, and distributing content. At the time, this was very valuable. In this perspective, the content never had value, only the access to it did. So to clarify my earlier point, the information was always infinite, it was the access that was finite.
Now access is easy, and the service provided by papers is no longer needed. Newspapers need to find some service associated with the content that they can provide that is of value.
On the post: Sony Pictures CEO: Nothing Good Has Come From The Internet
Re:
Yep, Apple. It's doing fine now, as is IBM, but in the past, both of them were against the ropes because management had driven the company into the dirt.
On the post: Sony Pictures CEO: Nothing Good Has Come From The Internet
Executives
Suits and ties and no skills whatsoever. It doesn't matter from whence they came, be it Harvard or Antigua, they're so frequently idiots.
What happens is that, sometime in the past, someone with great talent and insight creates a company. They design the machine that is the company very well, such that after they are gone, the machine continues to operate perfectly.
Most executives are barely needed. They sit in their big offices, thinking that they're important, until they're 65 and the next bozo moves in. As long as the world stays the same, the machine continues to function.
Only when the world changes are the idiots separated from the talent. Just look at all the cataclysmic failures in history when the market changed. IBM, American steel and railroad, GM, the current financial crisis, Apple, the music industry, Pan Am, and any other of a number of companies.
These useless piles of human waste piss and moan, scream and sue, and generally make a noise because they've been revealed to be idiots, and suddenly the world doesn't work the way it used to. They don't know what to do, so they blame anything handy.
They don't see opportunity because they're clueless. They don't want opportunity. They want things to stay the same so they can sit behind their big desk and feel like they're doing something.
On the post: MPAA Shows How Teachers Should Record Movies By Camcording Their TVs
Stunned
Any industry that would espouse something like this is so, SO far behind the times that the only option is death. Death. Kill it. Drag the whole thing out back and shoot it. There is no hope. The disease is terminal. Just put the fucking thing out of its misery.
On the post: Labels Losing Money With iTunes Variable Pricing
Value
It's been well-known that Jobs and the record companies have been butting heads for years. Maybe he finally just said "fine, let's see what happens."
With revenue dropping this quickly, they may be forced into Jobs' arms yet again, and maybe we'll now see an increase in value.
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